COLOMBIAN ACTIVIST CALLS FOR A PEACEFUL SOLUTION

Nine days after hundreds gathered at the State House to oppose war with
Iraq, 40 people heard another plea for peace at Central Falls High School.

The US should cease all military aid to Colombia, farm worker leader Marylen
Serna Salinas told an audience dominated by Colombian immigrants on Friday,
October 4. US-sponsored drug eradication efforts are worsening conditions in
southwestern Colombia, she says, and US military aid encourages human rights
violations.

Sponsored by the peace organization Witness for Peace, Salinas's month-long
New England tour hopes to influence upcoming congressional debate on
Colombia. In 2000, the US committed $1.3 billion to Plan Colombia, an effort
to eliminate coca production, but 80 percent of the money went to the
military, including $374 million to buy Huey helicopters made by
Providence-based Textron and Black Hawk helicopters manufactured by
Connecticut-based Sikorsky. An average of 20 people are killed each day in
the 40-year-old civil war, according to Amnesty International USA, and,
"Paramilitary groups acting with the active or tacit support of the
[government] security forces were responsible for the vast majority of
extra-judicial executions and 'disappearances.' "

Salinas, who fled rural southwestern Colombia for Bogota after she and her
husband received death threats, calls Plan Colombia a failure. Aerial
spraying of coca crops forces many farmers to move to the cities, she notes,
because the herbicide also kills legitimate crops.

The Colombian woman blames poverty for causing the drug trade and civil war.
She backs a manual eradication program that would leave some of the coca
crop intact until farmers are able to survive economically without it.
Current monthly subsidies of $5 or $6 to grow non-drug crops are inadequate,
Salinas says, so displaced farmers sometimes move to another area of the
forest and replant. She calls for renewed negotiations with rebels to chart
a non-violent future for Colombia, saying, "We want a future without so much
blood." Despite fears of violence, a major peace demonstration is planned
for Colombia in November.

Colombian emigrants in the audience questioned how negotiations could work
after they failed under former president Andres Pastrana. Salinas says those
talks were not real negotiations, but merely a forum on the country's
problems, and she calls for community organizations to be included in the
talks. Colombia's new president, Alvaro Uribe, was elected this year,
however, by promising a continued military response to the civil war.

Salinas asks Rhode Islanders to contact their congressional representatives
concerning Colombia. The Bush administration plans to include Colombia
rebels as targets in the global war on terrorism, leading some Colombians to
fear the US may bomb their country, she says. Bush also wants to spend $98
million to train a Colombian military unit to protect an oil pipeline owned
by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum.