PLAN COLOMBIA: THE HIDDEN FRONT IN THE U.S. DRUG WAR

YOU would never guess you are entering one of the most dangerous
countries in the world when you step off a plane at El Dorado Airport
in Bogota, Colombia. Walking down the softly lit hallway in the
international arrival terminal, your first impression is one of
culture, beauty, and peace. Artfully arranged hieroglyphics grace the
passage walls, and lightboxes depict golden artifacts from Bogota's
Museo de Oro. After a friendly greeting by an efficient immigration
official, your luggage appears promptly on the baggage carousel. You
spot no armed guards.

But then, traveling into the city, a curious sight appears over and
over. You notice that every motorcycle rider wears a bright yellow
vest and black helmet clearly inscribed, front and back, with the
license plate number of the motorcycle. Even passengers seated behind
drivers wear numbered vests and helmets.

"There are many accidents," a taxi driver explains. Taking his right
hand off the steering wheel, he pantomimes shooting a revolver. "And
other problems."

Colombia's problems include ten kidnappings for ransom every day-half
the world's kidnappings last year. The problems include thousands of
unsolved murders, massacres, and acts of terror committed annually. In
the cities, an estimated 80 percent of the violence is street crime,
the rest political. In the countryside, these statistics are reversed.
The survivors are also a problem-about two million displaced people
throughout Colombia, driven from their homes by violence and poverty.

It Is March 2001 and I have traveled from the United States to
Colombia with a human rights delegation sponsored by the
faith-and-conscience based organization Witness for Peace. We are 100
grassroots people, aged twenty to eighty, including college students,
retirees, and actively employed people in a wide variety of
professions. Eighteen of us claim no religious affiliation; I am the
only one who publicly identifies myself as a humanist and atheist,
although others later tell me they have like convictions.

All of us delegates have one thing in common: a compelling belief in
nonviolence and social justice. Many of us remember U.S. foreign
policy in Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s, when our
country supported brutal Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments and
their surrogate death squads, waging dirty wars against their own
people to "save" them from communism.

Our Witness for Peace delegation is in Colombia to see how the current
U.S. foreign aid package called Plan Colombia is affecting the
Colombian people.

In July 2000-a U.S. presidential election year-Congress authorized
spending $1.3 billion for Plan Colombia as the latest front in the
U.S. drug war. About 35 percent of that amount is for anti-drug
operations in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Colombia's portion is mostly
military aid: $642 million for sixty Blackhawk and Huey attack
helicopters, and up to 500 U.S. military advisors and 300 civilian
personnel to train three counternarcotics battalions of Colombian
soldiers. The remaining $218 million is for alternative development,
assistance for displaced persons, and human rights and judicial reform.

The European Union, asked to match U.S. funds for Plan Colombia,
vigorously opposed the military aspects of the plan, predicting
increased violence as a result. Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch, and the National Council of Churches also strongly protested.
Colombia's neighboring countries feared a spillover of
narcotrafficking, violence, and refugees.

There was little debate in Congress before passing Plan Colombia.
Congress heard testimony mainly from governmental and military
sources. A vice-president of Occidental Petroleum, operating in
Colombia for over thirty years, also lobbied for Plan Colombia.
"Colombian oil," he said, "is of vital strategic importance to the
United States because it reduces our dependence on oil imports from
the volatile Middle East."

The stated goal of Plan Colombia is to help the Colombian police
aerially fumigate the country's thousands of acres of coca and poppy
farms. These illicit crops are the base ingredients for 90 percent of
the cocaine and most of the heroin used illegally in the United States.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. assistance helped reduce coca
production in Peru and Bolivia. Undeterred, however, the coca growers
moved to Colombia, where the narcotraffickers were already in place.
There they surpassed the growth of coca and poppies previously grown
in Peru and Bolivia-despite U.S. counter-narcotics aid to Colombia
ranging from $37 million in 1996, when fumigation of Colombian coca
began, to $325 million in 1999.

The cocaine and heroin currently fuel a multifronted war within
Colombia. The war's "armed actors," as they are commonly called,
include drug lords, insurgent guerrillas, paramilitary death squads,
and a government army well known for colluding with the
paramilitaries.

For nearly forty years the Colombian government has been fighting
guerrilla armies known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia) with an estimated 17,000 troops, and the ELN (National
Liberation Army) estimated at 5,000 members. The guerrillas bomb oil
pipelines, kidnap for ransom, and murder both civilians and security
forces. They extort protection money from coca and poppy growers and
might be narcotraffickers.

The illegal paramilitary death squads, known as the AUC (United
Self-Defense Groups of Colombia), claim 11,000 members. The squads
also admittedly traffic in drugs. The paramilitaries invade villages
and cities under the pretext of looking for civilians who support the
guerrillas. They torture, murder, massacre, and disappear their
victims, particularly labor leaders, mayors, human rights workers,
teachers, and community leaders no matter how nonpolitical. Human
Rights Watch credits nearly 80 percent of last year's human rights
violations to the paramilitaries, who are financed by large
landowners, drug lords, and, some believe, the multinational oil firms
trying to do business in Colombia.

Plan Colombia's attack helicopters and military training are gifts to
the Colombian army and police. The Colombian army, with about 120,000
members, has one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere
and its own reported ties to drug trafficking. The army's reputation
is further sullied by active or tacit collaboration with the
paramilitary death squads. The Colombian police force, also with about
120,000 members, has a cleaner record.

And then there are the civilian Colombians. More than 50 percent of
Colombia's 40 million people live in absolute poverty, earning less
than $500 per year. In rural areas that figure is 80 percent. The
official unemployment rate is only 20 percent; however, in reality
only one of four holds a full-time job.

While industrial-sized coca farms do exist, up to 75 percent
(estimates vary) of Colombian coca and poppies are grown by
subsistence farmers on as little as half an acre, with the average
family farm just 2.2 acres. Legal crops bring little or no return, and
few roads exist to take them to market. On the other hand, a farmer
can harvest coca four or five times a year without replanting. The
farmer can process 2.5 acres of coca into about two kilograms of coca
paste and easily carry the paste on foot or horseback to a middle
person, who pays about $1,000 per kilo. However, after subtracting
farming expenses and the "tax" for the guerrillas or paramilitaries
who control the given area, the farmer barely nets more than
Colombia's legal minimum wage of $150 per month.

This is the complex picture our Witness for Peace delegation intended
to observe for eleven days.

We begin our journey in Miami, Florida, with two days of training on
Colombian political issues, and we split into four groups of
twenty-five, spending time getting acquainted with each other. The
last thing we do before leaving Miami is write a letter to our loved
ones in the event we don't return. Witness for Peace will keep our
letters for us, just in case. I notice that I am not the only one
weeping as we write our letters. At this point the trip organizers ask
each of us to confirm that we really want to go to Colombia. Everyone
does, and early the next morning we fly to Bogota.

Throughout our stay in Colombia, we take extraordinary security
precautions, knowing there will be military, guerrilla, and
paramilitary presence everywhere. Our strategy is to have a high
profile. The Witness for Peace team living in Colombia has notified
the U.S. Embassy, the national and local Colombian governments, and
the Colombian media that our delegation is coming. As a result,
newspapers and television stations have widely reported our visit.
Nonetheless, when we arrive, the Colombian Defense Ministry and the
U.S. Embassy make a point of telling our team leaders that our safety
cannot be guaranteed.

For security reasons, we go outdoors only in pairs or groups. We are
careful not to discuss our mission in public or with strangers, and we
guard our notes and photos closely. In the country we always wear
bright blue T-shirts emblazoned front and back with the Witness for
Peace logo in English and Spanish.

During our first week in Bogota we meet daily at the local Mennonite
Church, where we question a wide variety of visiting Colombian
experts, some of whom support Plan Colombia and others who don't. The
experts include human rights activists, members of indigenous tribes,
economists, businesspeople, clergy, and union leaders. Some are under
death threats and dare not sleep two successive nights in the same
bed, but they insist that meeting with us is worth any ensuing danger
to them, because telling their stories is so urgent.

After a week in Bogota, we separate into groups of twentyfive and
fly-because it is too dangerous to travel by road-to various parts of
the country. My group goes to the departamento (state) of Cauca.

It is 3:00 AM in the mud-floored kitchen of a squatters' shack in the
colonia of Juan XXIII. Two compatriots from the United States and I
try to sleep in a corner of the kitchen on platform beds borrowed from
neighbors, as our hostess, Elsa, rises to prepare 200 arepas,
traditional Colombian fare shaped like English muffins. Hours later
her husband, Pablo, will strap a box of arepas onto a rickety bicycle
and wheel it through a maze of mud paths to sell to neighbors.

A few feet away in the kitchen is the double bed that serves Elsa,
Pablo, and their two children. The baby is sick with lever and there
is no money for a doctor. The voices of neighbors standing guard
behind the shack murmur through the night, as the men protect us from
potential invaders who could be police, paramilitaries, guerrillas, or
just common criminals preying on the poor.

Our Witness for Peace group is spending the night in a community of
destechados-"people without roofs." In reality, they do have
corrugated metal roofs on their split-bamboo shacks, but little else.
They are among hundreds of thousands of families living precariously
in squatters' communities because they have nowhere else to live, no
money, no education, and no jobs other than what they can create with
their own hands. The land the colonia is built on belongs to the
railroad. It floods with each rainstorm.

The next morning everyone gathers at a makeshift community shed to
serve breakfast to us visiting Americans. They tell us how they became
squatters when guerrillas or paramilitaries or poverty drove them from
their earlier homes. They tell us how the police using sticks and
spray cans of gas now try to drive them out of their shacks, how the
police destroy their food and few belongings, and how the squatters
fight back and refuse to leave. Where else could they go? They have
organized themselves for protection and to look out for each other's
needs. They have named their colonia after former Pope John XXIII,
thinking it will gain them more respect from the Colombian
authorities, but so far it hasn't helped.

Later in the day, we travel on an open-sided bus up a mountain road to
a village of poor coffee farmers in the municipality of Cajibio. About
100 people have gathered at the elementary school to hear speeches by
representatives of community organizations. Each speaker matter of
factly refers to the violence, killing, and massacres. They all know
about Plan Colombia and call it a war plan against the Colombian
people. Our hosts stage a lively skit dramatizing how they are
attacked by the Colombian army, police, and paramilitaries, forcing
people to become refugees from their own farmland and homes.

While I am taking photos, a young farmworker takes me aside and asks
in a low voice if we can help his village, invaded two days earlier by
paramilitaries. He says no one can enter or leave the village,
eighteen miles from where we are going to sleep that night in the
homes of the coffee farmers. He escaped capture because he was working
in a field outside of town when the paramilitaries arrived, but his
family is trapped inside.

Soon we learn that paramilitaries have invaded and sealed off six
other villages in the same area, killing at least two people, and that
the Colombian military has abandoned the municipality. When our
Witness for Peace leader telephones the general in charge of the area,
the general is annoyed. He says that he has already received calls of
concern from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on
Human Rights, from Amnesty International, and from many others. He
says he won't risk his men's lives just because a bunch of
internationals asks him to do it.

When night falls, the village leaders tell us they have a sentry
committee who stay awake all night watching for intruders, with an
alarm system to warn each household of danger. The leaders tell us to
sleep with our clothes on in case we have to flee to the mountains
during the night. They ask us to turn our Witness for Peace T-shirts
inside out so the white logo cannot reflect the glow from a flashlight.

The night passes quietly. When we leave the next morning, the
villagers thank us for coming. One says that until she met us she
thought all Americans were hard, like former presidents Bill Clinton
and George Bush.

We travel on to the capital city of Popayan in Cauca to meet its
indigenous governor, Floro Tunubala. He shares our concern about the
invaded villages, but he has no authority over the military. He has
just returned from visiting the United States to propose an
alternative Plan Colombia-one that would effectively fund voluntary
eradication of the coca farms instead of aerial fumigation. Existing
funds in Plan Colombia for alternative crops are reaching few farmers.

That night at our hotel, a high government official, whose name and
office I can't reveal because his life is in such danger, urgently
requests a meeting with our group. He begs us, as U.S. citizens, to do
everything possible to urge the military to rescue the people of
Cajibio. He tells us the paramilitaries are only seven kilometers from
the county seat and that the army is nearby but has had no contact
with the people. He has no way of knowing how many villagers have been
killed so far.

The next day we attend a previously scheduled meeting with Colombian
Lieutenant, Colonel Ricardo Velandia, battalion commander of the army
near Cajibio. He confirms to us that his soldiers did leave the
invaded area because no one would identify the occupying
paramilitaries. He says his few resources are severely limited by a
priority to protect the Pan American Highway but that he has recently
sent some troops back to Cajibio. While we are meeting, he takes a
phone call reporting that the International Red Cross is on its way to
Cajibio.

After three days in the country, we return to Bogota to share
observations with our companion groups which have been in other parts
of the country

The delegates who went to the departamento of Putumayo tell us what
happened after Colombian police in crop-dusting airplanes, guarded by
U.S.-supplied attack helicopters, sprayed an estimated 62,000 acres of
coca earlier this year with Roundup Ultra herbicide. Half the coca in
Colombia grows in Putumayo. The delegates have seen massive fields of
withered coca, along with many acres of essential food crops killed as
well. They have seen an empty chicken coop and a former fishpond
poisoned by the fumigation-two replacement projects established
previously by farmers who had voluntarily removed their coca. Farmers
have testified that the herbicide, composed of glyphosate and
surfactants, has poisoned water supplies and farm animals. They have
described medical problems that appeared after the spraying, and our
delegates have seen children whose bodies were covered with sores
attributed by doctors to the herbicide.

That afternoon, an executive contingent of U.S. Embassy officials
visits our delegation to talk things over. We aren't allowed to
identify any of them by name or function. We tell them what we have
seen and heard over the past few days.

One official responds that farmers deliberately plant food crops amid
the coca to fool the crop-dusters. He agrees that some legal farms on
the edge of the coca fields are unavoidably sprayed. He insists that
Roundup Ultra is perfectly safe. He doesn't mention that the Roundup
Ultra used in Colombia contains a combination of ingredients some
opponents claim have never been tested for safety in combination, nor
does he mention the 1999 Swedish medical study suggesting a possible
link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He also doesn't
mention that just a few days earlier, four Colombian governors,
including the governors of Putumayo and Cauca, visited Washington,
D.C., to protest Plan Colombia. The governors said that Plan Colombia
had not been discussed with the Colombian people, and that the
fumigation of coca since 1996 has caused economic and environmental
destruction and illnesses that include birth defects.

Another U.S. Embassy official defends the U.S. involvement in Colombia
by saying that the United States is only doing in Colombia what it did
in the past for the government of El Salvador, where "their focus was
our focus, their problems our concerns as well." And he doesn't blush
as he says this.

When the meeting ends, I ask one of the U.S. Embassy officials
privately what is being done to help the people trapped by the
paramilitaries in Cajibio municipality. "What would you like us to
do?" he asks. "Urge President Pastrana to send enough military to
protect the people," I answer. "Don't you think this is happening
elsewhere in the country?" he asks. "Of course I do," I reply. "Well,
that's your answer," he says. "It's a big country and there are not
enough troops to go around."

I never learned if the paramilitary invasion of Cajibio ended, since
we had to leave Colombia a few days later. This story happens so often
that even the international news media seldom reports it.

While in Colombia, I heard many opinions about the drug war, the coca,
and Plan Colombia. There is a wide disconnection between the Colombian
upper classes, government, military, and the poor. However, everyone
charged that the government of Colombia is corrupt. Everyone said the
guerrillas and coca will never be stopped by military force but only
through massive financial aid to address social and economic
inequities. Many people told us the coca growers are simply moving
deeper into the Amazon jungle to escape the crop-dusters. Many also
agreed that, by supporting the Colombian military through Plan
Colombia, the United States also supports the paramilitary death
squads who serve as the vanguard of the Colombian army.

And almost everyone asked the same question: why does the United
States blame Colombia for the U.S. drug problem, rather than seriously
address the demand?

Recent News About Colombia:

When all funding channels are considered, the Bush administration's
proposed 2002 "Andean Initiative" would fund Colombia and its
neighbors at nearly $1.1 billion-54 percent of its military and police
assistance.

George W. Bush nominated Otto J. Reich for the post of Assistant
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Reich ran the State
Department's now defunct Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America
and the Caribbean from 1983-1986. A General Accounting Office report
in 1987 said Reich's department carried out an illegal propaganda
operation by secretly planting news stories and opinion articles in
U.S. media designed to rally support for the Reagan administration
policy in Central America.