BUSH'S DIRTY WAR

Colombia's Peasant Farmers Are Being Driven Off Their Land. And We Are Helping

George Bush has made no secret of the primary mission of his presidency: to
remunerate the companies which supported his bid for power. To the oil
industry he has given the Arctic wildlife reserve and the abandonment of
American action on climate change.

To the tobacco industry he has granted an end to the federal lawsuits on
behalf of the victims of smoking. To the mining firms he has pledged to
remove the laws restricting arsenic in drinking water.

But what do you give to the industry which has everything? Which already
receives some Dollars 200bn a year from the US taxpayer?

You give America's arms companies what they most desire.

You give them war.

To this end, and in the name of national security, Mr Bush has been seeking
to revive the hostility and suspicion which proved so lucrative until the
disastrous events of 1989. He hopes to scrap the anti-ballistic missile
treaty, destabilising the world's nuclear equilibrium. He is determined to
extend Nato to all of Russia's western borders, causing the moribund but
dangerous old bear to feel more threatened than it has done for a decade.

Welcome as these incipient crises are, however, the war industry also
requires immediate conflict.

So the US has been seeking opportunities all over the world.

None has so far proved as fruitful as its support for a scheme devised by
the government of Colombia.

The purpose of Plan Colombia, according to President Andres Pastrana, is to
help eliminate the production of drugs, generate employment, boost trade
and bring peace to a country which has been mauled by civil war for more
than 50 years.

The Clinton and Bush administrations have generously supplied this worthy
scheme with Dollars 1.3bn, promising the American people that the money
will be spent to assist the war on drugs. Eighty-four per cent of the
funding will take the form of military aid.

To control drugs, the US insists, first it must control the country. To
this end, it has supplied 104 combat helicopters and trained three
Colombian army battalions. But the army is not exactly the instrument of
peace that Mr Pastrana has claimed.

As Amnesty International has recorded: Colombian army personnel, trained by
US special forces, have been implicated in serious human rights violations,
including the massacre of civilians."

The army works alongside Colombia's ultra-right paramilitaries, who are
responsible for the assassination of thousands of trades union and peasant
leaders and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their
homes. As one of Colombia's official human rights ombudsmen has noted: The
paramilitary phenomenon is the spearhead of Plan Colombia: to create
territorial control and to control the civilian population. This is a
terror tactic." The US, with the help of the Colombian government, is
waging yet another dirty war in Latin America.

Far from eliminating drugs production, this war will only make it worse.
Plan Colombia funds the aerial spraying of coca and opium fields with
Roundup, the broad-spectrum herbicide patented by Monsanto. Roundup
destroys almost everything it touches, wiping out legal crops alongside
illegal ones, poisoning rivers, shattering one of the most fragile and
biodiverse forest ecosystems on Earth, precipitating both acute and chronic
human diseases.

It is the Agent Orange of America's new Vietnam. (Agent Orange,
interestingly, was also a Monsanto product.) Now the US administration
wants to take this ecocide a step further, by spraying the jungle with a
genetically engineered fungus which produces deadly toxins.

When their livelihood has been destroyed, the peasant farmers and
indigenous people have no means of survival but to flee further into the
jungle and start growing drugs.

Since the aerial spraying programme began, the area devoted to drugs
cultivation in Colombia has tripled.

But Plan Colombia is not a war against drugs: it is a war against people.
Its ultimate purpose, as several international observers have pointed out,
is to eliminate both leftwing guerrillas and grassroots democratic
movements, in order to facilitate the seizure of the country's most
valuable land. The US envisages a new inter-oceanic canal through the north
of the country, to bypass the congested Panama canal.

Its companies have identified billions of dollars' worth of oil and mineral
deposits. So, for the past five months, soldiers and paramilitaries have
been murdering community leaders and expelling local people.

The places identified for economic development by Plan Colombia are the
places now being savaged by the paramilitaries.

The European Union is well aware of these atrocities and of their
coordination by President Pastrana's plan. At first sight, it appears to be
contesting them. At a meeting on April 30, the EU resolved to spend 330m
euros on political support" for the peace process" in Colombia. The money
will be used to establish peace laboratories", contest human rights
violations and relieve the social impact of conflict". The package looks
uncontroversial and it received no significant coverage.

But the public statements issued by the EU, the European commission and
Chris Patten, the British commissioner who brokered the agreement, contain
a number of curious omissions.

Plan Colombia" is mentioned nowhere. Nor is the US government. Nor are the
atrocities committed by the army and coordinated by the state.

The killings in the country are blamed solely upon paramilitaries and
guerrillas.

Only when you read an account of the same meeting by the Inter-American
Development Bank do you stumble across several interesting features missing
from the European statements. The first is that the funding package is not
a European initiative, but was provided at the request of the Colombian
government. The second is that it will be supplemented by extra money from
the US. The third is that Marc Grossman, a US under secretary of state, was
sitting in the meeting.

Trawl the European commission's archive, and you discover a further
interesting feature: that the peace process" to which the EU was referring
is none other than Plan Colombia. The new funding represents the plan's
social component", attached to the US invasion in the hope of making it
look like something rather different.

Spain is prepared to go further still, and help the US to finance the
Colombian army.

The new European funding, in other words, provides the political
credibility which President Pastrana and the US administration have
desperately been seeking ever since they initiated their plan. Wittingly or
otherwise, the European Union has helped the two governments to disguise a
programme of state terror as humanitarian aid.

Mass killings, ecocide and the seizure of resources do not have a financial
solution, but a political one. You cannot buy human rights, least of all
from a scheme that's responsible for their abuse. The only help foreign
intervention can offer the Colombian people is intense diplomatic pressure,
exposing the atrocities of their government and army, denouncing the scheme
which coordinates them and isolating its supporters. Instead, we have
chosen to collaborate.

At its best, the EU's funding is a waste of money.

At its worst, it amounts to complicity in crimes against humanity.

How many of us would have agreed that our money should be used like this?