COLD WAR IN COLOMBIA?

I spent much of the 70s filming for television in Latin America, and
witnessed first-hand the mayhem that the United States-supported
dictatorships wreaked on the countries of that continent. Those regimes
killed tens of thousands of people, and tortured and traumatised many more,
all in the name of the fight against communism.

Duncan Campbell's article on Colombia and the guerrilla struggle there is a
vital reminder of what is at stake (Colombia's rebel republic, June 29). The
US is using its war on drugs as a fig leaf for its war against a peasant
army that craves peace and an end to the rampages of the death squads.

The CIA in the Reagan years, under the direction of Oliver North, used Costa
Rica as a transit camp for drug shipments to the US. The proceeds went to
fund its clandestine war against the Sandinistas.

Its then protege, General Manuel Noriega of Panama, was one of its middle
men. Without a ready US market for drugs there would be no production in
Latin America, but in a world of so-called free markets these poor people
are simply showing the capitalist enterprise and initiative so lauded by
their big brother in the north.

The European Union must unequivocally reject any support for US machinations
in Colombia if an ethical foreign policy is to have any meaning at all.

John Green, London