COLOMBIA 'DRUG WAR' A SHAM

Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world.

As U.S. military aid has escalated so have the civilian casualties of
Colombia's 38-year-old civil war. Human rights groups estimate that more
than 70 percent of the political killings in Colombia, about 3,500 per
year, can be attributed to the paramilitary groups and their military
allies. The other 30 percent is done by the guerrillas and drug
traffickers. Another 2 million Colombians are refugees of the violence.

With the recent election of President Alvaro Uribe and his pledge to double
the size of the army and police forces, this violence will only get worse.
What is the U.S. stake in this conflict?

The official reason given for the massive U.S. support for Colombia's war
against the guerrillas is to stop the drug traffic in cocaine and heroin.
But the so-called drug war has not targeted the drug kingpins who use drug
profits to finance the paramilitaries. Instead, it is directed to only one
of the coca-producing regions in Colombia, the southern Putumayo region,
which is the stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or
the FARC.

Much of the $1.8 billion worth of American military aid since 2000 has
provided for the training, weapons and attack helicopters for the Army's
anti-drug battalions operating in this Amazon jungle area on the frontier
with Ecuador.

When I arrived in the Putumayo in July 2002 as part of a Colombia Support
Network delegation, the Colombian army was preparing to enter guerrilla
territory in advance of the low-flying planes spraying herbicides on coca
plantations as well as legal crops nearby.

The herbicide is a Monsanto-made mixture containing glyphosate. While the
glyphosate mixture is a variety of the weed killer known by the trade name
Roundup, the concentrations of glyphosate used in Colombia have never been
approved for use in the United States by the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency.

This escalation of the drug war has fallen disproportionately upon the
indigenous peoples of the Putumayo. We spoke to indigenous leaders who told
us that previous rounds of spraying had devastated their small subsistence
farms and gardens and polluted the rivers. The U.S. Embassy officials we
spoke to said that people who complain about the drug spraying are the ones
who benefit from the coca trade.

The results of this latest round of spraying, according to the indigenous
leaders, will be a further escalation of the war and a huge number of
people who will be driven from their homes. This becomes a vicious circle.

As more weapons are brought in by the military and the paramilitaries, the
guerrillas rearm themselves by simply increasing the area under coca
cultivation and available for taxation, pushing further into the Amazon
jungle, invading the lands of yet more indigenous communities.

Despite widespread spraying last year, the amount of coca under cultivation
rose by nearly 25 percent, according to a recent State Department report.
If the anti-drug program is so ineffective, why is the U.S. pouring even
more money into these programs?

From the perspective of the indigenous leaders, the hidden agenda behind
the drug war is the elimination of obstacles to massive U.S. and
international investment in mega-projects including mines, dams, roads and
canals that will allow the efficient exploitation of Colombia's rich
natural resources.

About a quarter of Colombian territory is legally recognized indigenous
territory, and a significant part of the country's oil reserves are on
indigenous land. Indigenous land rights and decision-making authority
regarding natural resources threaten access to resources, which is
fundamental to multinational mining and energy corporations.

In August 2002 Canada's Petrobank and the U.S. firm Argosy Energy signed
contracts with Colombia's state-owned oil company to explore the Putumayo
basin with its potential reserves of 2.4 billion barrels.

President Bush's most recent military aid package provides $98 million to
help train the Colombian army in oil pipeline protection.

This is not a war to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. It is a
war against the people who stand in the way of the domination of Colombia
by multinational corporations and multilateral development banks.

Al Gedicks is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La
Crosse and the author of "Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and
Oil Corporations."