Colombia and Our Fate 

    Extracts from - Against The Grain, an interview with former Ambassador
White; and, from a Washington Post article: 

      "Colombian coca cultivation [increased] with new areas developing 
       more rapidly than massive fumigation could destroy existing fields." 

      "There's just no way, the Amazon Basin is the lungs of the world 
       and if you bring poisons down on that...This is an outrage, we 
       are planning to poison thousands of miles of the Amazon Basin." 

   An E-mail Comment: 

       "It looks like more death, more destruction, as we kill off 
        civilian populations in the name of fighting drug dealers...
        I pray for sanity and the end of these murderous games." 

                        Shades of Vietnam 
               
   The $1.6 billion the U.S. wants to fight coca production in Colombia 
is intervention in another country's civil war. The rationale is that 
the FARC--the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--are not an authentic 
insurgency but an armed drug cartel -- "narco-guerrillas."

   The largest component of the military assistance, is $600 million to 
train two additional special counternarcotics battalions with 30 Blackhawk
helicopters and 33 Huey helicopters so the army "can access this remote 
and undeveloped region of Colombia."  The [other] emphasis is on aerial 
spraying of herbicides to destroy the coca leaf. A counterinsurgency 
strategy packaged as a counternarcotics program.

   Does it really not matter that to declare war on the FARC puts us in 
league with a Colombian military that has long-standing ties to the 
drug-dealing, barbaric paramilitaries that commit more than 75 percent 
of the human rights violations afflicting that violence-torn country?

   The FARC-controlled territory is roughly the size of California. The 
What will happen when FARC troops, at home in jungle and savanna, repel 
the army and shoot down our helicopters? Will we then swallow the bitter
pill. Not if Vietnam and Central America are any guide. Far more likely
we will plunge deeper into the quagmire.    

   Edited from an op-ed by Robert E. White a former ambassador to 
El Salvador and Paraguay, who now is president of the Center for 
International Policy. The op-ed appeared in the 2/8/00 issue of the 
Washington Post on 2/8/00 Page A23. 

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            Colombia, Just A Few Advisors 

    The U.S. campaign for approval for massive aid for Colombia, issued
new estimates saying cultivation of coca, increased 140 percent over
the past five years. In hearings on the $1.6 billion aid package,
drug Czar McCaffrey says CIA compiled the new statistics from CIA
satellite imagery and data collected on the ground.

    Comment: Last year, a similar explosion was reported and I'm sure 
    we'll get the same shocking story about an explosion in drug production
    or usage every year.... Last year the Colombian National Police 
    disputed the CIA estimates  claiming the CIA was counting areas 
    that had been eradicated and that the CIA couldn't distinguish 
    living coca plants from dead ones.

    Most of the nearly $1 billion aid package, is for intel and military
equipment including 30 Black Hawk helicopters for three 1,000-man rapid
deployment forces being trained by the U.S. military. [Plan is aimed at]
two states in southern Colombia, Putamayo and Caqueta, to seize the area
from the guerrillas, and to eradicate crops and destroy drug labs.

    Congress worries about another Vietnam-like quagmire. Human rights,
religious and union groups criticize the Colombian military's human rights
and  disapprove the aid program. It includes nothing to combat right-wing
paramilitaries allied with the military who are heavily involved in
drug trafficking, and, atrocities against civilians.

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    CIA estimates shows an increase in Colombian cocaine production.
Drug Czar McCaffrey said about three-fourths of the U.S. aid package
would pay for the 63 helicopters and training for two new army counter-drug
battalions. The units will "retake" rebel-held southern jungles. While
dismissing the ``terrible quagmire issue,'' we recognize leftist rebel
units would be legitimate ``objectives'' of U.S. assisted Colombian troops...
Armed resistance is expected from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
and violent protests from tens of thousands of peasants...operations to
displace thousands.  Edited from a recent Associated Press release:
 
 
Ralph McGehee
http://come.to/CIABASE