HIDDEN COST OF DRUG WAR

From her modest and immaculate light-filled home overlooking a cove of
the New Meadows River, Leighton, 77, rails against the grasp for profits
and natural resources in a global economy she views as dominated by
trans-national corporations.

From March 11-23, Leighton and Jim Harney, a Bangor photographer who
remains in the country, were members of a 100-person Witness for Peace
church delegation that spent two weeks in Colombia. There, the mission
separated into four groups visiting various parts of the nation to meet
the people and investigate human rights violations, which they believe
can be traced to U.S. funding and multinational investors who value
Colombia's oil, coffee and geographic position straddling the Caribbean
and Pacific.

While many could argue that all nations throughout history have sought
the wealth of others, Leighton wants to stop U.S. policies she believes
are displacing people in Latin American nations such as Colombia. There,
the United States has pledged $1.3 billion to support the government and
end production of cocaine and heroin, in what is known as "Plan
Colombia." The money will pay for military trainers for two Colombian
counter-narcotics battalions and more than 60 Black Hawk and Huey
transport helicopters.

"We're sending a tremendous amount of money to Colombia to fight the
guerillas and drugs, but the result has been the displacement of
thousands of people and the acquisition of land for projects such as oil
fields and hydroelectric dams and a Pacific-Atlantic canal," she said.

Leighton believes that because of ceding the Panama Canal, the United
States wants to build another waterway across the northwest part of the
Colombia, bordering Panama, to control shipping. Eradicating fields that
produce coca leaves and opium poppies, she said, has ruined the cropland
of small farmers.

"We came in and fumigated the land owned by Manuel, a 71-year-old
farmer, presumably for coca," Leighton said. "Now the ground is
contaminated and he has no food to live by. He asked me, 'Why is the
U.S. doing this to us? What have we done?'

"We have to stop the fumigation," Leighton went on. "There is a
tremendous health destructiveness. The State Department maintains it is
not damaging, but I've seen the people with the sores who are sick. One
Afro-Colombian said to me he was very leery of meeting us. He felt all
the people of the United States were his enemies."

Leighton plans to meet with 1st District U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine,
in early May to share her observations of Colombia. "He'll be voting on
money for Plan Colombia," she said.

Raging Grannies

Her friend, Betty King of Woolwich, calls Leighton a "happy warrior."

A mother of three and grandmother of two, Leighton was born and raised
in New York City. She retired in the early 1990s from the state
Department of Human Services after moving to Maine in 1980. As a state
worker, she counseled welfare recipients.

The same ideals of helping people that drew Leighton into social work
after earning a master's degree from Mount Holyoke College in
Massachusetts, now propel her about the Americas at an age when many are
content to watch life drift by.

In November and December 1999, as a member of the "Raging Grannies,"
Leighton joined activists in Seattle protesting the World Trade
Organization's international trade agreements. In 1996, she traveled
with a women's delegation through the Peace and Inter-American Community
Action group to Carascue, a small village in El Salvador. Last weekend,
she joined protesters at The Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, in
which international leaders discussed removing trade barriers.

While she receives some assistance with travel expenses, for the most
part Leighton pays her own way.

She says she likes the feeling of solidarity and the unpredictable
street theater of demonstrations. According to Leighton, the news media
misrepresented what became known as "The Battle in Seattle," where
protesters clashed with police in a fog of tear gas. "There was all this
positive energy," she said, "50,000 people marched peacefully."

Leighton and others believe the elimination of trade barriers creates
poverty, with mega-corporations and free market policies fostered by the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank exploiting workers and human
rights.

"I've been concerned about Central America and globalization's effect on
the poor," Leighton said. "I come from a faith-based perspective. The
United Church of Christ has a strong commitment to economic and social
justice and a concern for women and children."

Why does she do this at age 77? "What better time to do it?" Leighton
erupted, brown eyes crinkling. "I don't have anything to lose, no job to
lose, anyone to get upset. I believe we are called to make our world a
better place. We don't have to have all this injustice and oppression."

Leighton and the delegation to Colombia demonstrated outside the U.S.
embassy in Bogota, carrying white paper doves which they used to cover a
poster of a Black Hawk helicopter. Leighton called their reception by
embassy officials chilly. U.S. Ambassador Ann Patterson did not meet
with them. "My sense was they had no interest in our having come,"
Leighton said.

"What is the United States doing in Colombia?" she asked. "We are
intervening with the military and it's my perspective, as it was in
Nicaragua and El Salvador, that it's to take land for multinational
corporations."

Murky Political Jungle

Leighton and Bangor photographer Jim Harney joined the Witness for Peace
group to visit a nation where a violent civil war is raging between the
government, two major leftist guerilla groups, a privately funded
paramilitary force and well-heeled drug cartels.

The State Department warns U.S. citizens not to travel to Colombia
because of the widespread danger of kidnapping, hijackings and murders
by drug traffickers, guerillas, paramilitary groups and criminal
elements. The murder rate is more than eight times that of the United
States. "There is a greater risk of being kidnapped in Colombia than in
any other country in the world," according to a State Department
consular information sheet. In-country travel by U.S. embassy employees
is restricted severely because of threats.

Some people fear the Colombian civil war may pull the United States into
another Vietnam-type situation. The war is being fought against leftist
guerilla armies, notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or
FARC, an 18,000-member force; and the Marxist National Liberation Army,
or ELN, which claims 5,000 members.

On the other side are the Colombian army, which cooperates with the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, an 8,000-person paramilitary
force -- which pays more than the national military -- funded by large
ranchers, wealthy businessmen and an increasingly worried middle class.

Both the guerillas and paramilitary groups control drug-producing areas
and apparently profit from them. Three-quarters of the world's cocaine
is produced in Colombia, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, and most is shipped to the United States.

"There have been two U.S. policies toward Colombia," said Alfred Padula,
a Latin American expert, former State Department analyst and retired
professor of history at the University of Southern Maine. "The first is
the fight against the narcotics trade, which has been a complete
failure.

"The second is the recent decision to put a lot of money into a new
program to support the Colombian government and to once again fight
narcotics. Segueing into that are the guerillas. The real question is,
'Will we be sucked into a conflict?' Colombia is the worst place in the
world to have a war. It's mountainous and jungly with difficult terrain.
That's why the guerillas and narco-traffickers have survived."

Paramilitary groups and guerillas provide protection to drug cartels for
a price. While the national army controls urban areas, guerillas control
much of the countryside -- including a Switzerland-sized safe haven held
by FARC, granted by Colombian President Andres Pastrana to keep the
group involved in peace negotiations. FARC has used the territory to
increase drug cultivation.

"The paramilitary is fighting back using brutal methods, massacring
people who are assumed to be with the guerillas," Padula said. "Are we
stepping up this problem by putting our money into this? We're forcing
the guerillas into Venezuela and Ecuador. The problem is murky, just
like the jungle.

"The real question is whether we can do any real good down there with
the counter-narcotics program. When we spray defoliants, we're killing
the livelihood of peasants. What are they likely to do? They'll join one
of the games going on, the guerillas or the right-wing groups."

Debbie Leighton also is skeptical. "Violence has been a part of their
history, but it's not what they want," she said. During the last decade,
about 35,000 people have been killed in the nation's civil war,
according to the April 3 Washington Post. The State Department's fact
sheet on Colombia reported that in 1998, a total of 300,000 persons were
driven from the rural countryside by violence. Global Ministries, which
sponsored Leighton's March visit, estimated there are 1.6 million
displaced Colombians.

Delegation to Colombia

Leighton's group in the Witness for Peace delegation traveled to the
northern part of Colombia, to the state of Norte de Santander, along the
spine of the Andes mountains. The oil- and cattle-rich region, she said,
is contested by paramilitary forces and guerilla groups, with few visits
by the standing army.

The night before they left Miami, each member of the delegation was told
to write a letter to relatives in case they did not return alive.
Leighton said she was afraid, as were her grown children.

Leighton's group accompanied two truckloads of about 70 people returning
home. They had been forced to flee their ridgetop village, Filo Gringo,
the year before by paramilitary troops who killed 30 villagers and
burned 16 houses. About 90 people remained behind.

She said most of the people who left did so to keep their sons from
being forced into the paramilitary. "We thought it was important that
this group have an international presence to accompany them in case
anything happened," she said.

"They met us with welcoming banners and a mariachi band," Leighton
recalled of the villagers. "We all got out of the bus and walked through
town, and people and kids came up to me to touch my hair. They don't
have many old women whose hair turns white."

The group stayed together in a house that had been attacked, sleeping on
mattresses and protected by an outside guard. "It was full of bullet
holes and had grenade blasts, and the roof was full of holes," Leighton
said.

In another village, La Union, she met survivors of a recent guerilla
attack. "The ELN had been there the week before and killed nine men and
four women," Leighton went on. "I talked to one woman whose husband had
been taken, and had not been seen since. She believed he was dead, and
went to the authorities to help find his body. They would not assist her
because they thought the ELN might target them."

The woman was left with three children.

Leighton met the mayor of Oceana, a larger metropolis of about 110,000,
whose predecessor had been killed the month before. "Whenever a
leadership arises among the campesinos, or peasants, they are killed,"
Leighton said. In Oceana, she also saw what happens to people forced off
small farms. There, refugees moved onto muddy, uninhabited ridges in
what was called the "land invasion."

They built small towns with scrap, eventually improving their homes with
cement blocks. One small town had been there about six years, and had a
community center. A school was created out of a former chicken coop.

"Then I looked across to another hill that was just mud," Leighton said.
"There were just shacks with the more recently displaced. It's a country
of the elite and the poor." Meeting with about 70 refugees in an
open-air auditorium, Leighton said she was struck by a frightened boy
clinging to his mother.

"A few soldiers were standing there with their fingers on the triggers
of their AK-47s," she recalled. "The little boy had obviously had a bad
experience. He couldn't tell the difference with government soldiers.
His mother said he wakes up crying."

Wants Policy Shift

"When we come in there with the military and plans to fumigate the
cocoa, we're just adding more problems," Leighton said. Just before her
visit, a six-week spraying campaign over 60,000 acres was conducted by
DynCorp, a Pentagon contractor from the United States, concentrating on
the southern portion of Colombia, according to the March 6 Washington
Post.

"I would stop the fumigation," she said. "I would pay for the farmers to
eradicate the cocoa plants by hand so they would not lose their land. I
would provide social investment to enable communities to have job
training and economic development and help education and health care."

That may be impossible in a divided nation where cocaine has replaced
coffee as the biggest, if illegal, cash crop.

"Americans are financing both sides of this struggle," said Padula, who
remains on USM's specialist list. "Billions are flowing to Colombia one
way or another, and through America's consumption of drugs. The
government is financing the army in cahoots with the right wing. As long
as the flow of drug money goes down there to the guerillas there will be
no stopping this fighting. Endless amounts of money are coming from
American drug users, and the guerillas protect the narco-traffickers in
exchange for it.

"For the United States to go down there and think we can do something is
an act of faith; it's just a disaster. It's a very cloudy situation in
which our prestige has been committed."