Urgent! Talk It Up

Jean Grossholtz is a political scientist and activist who lives in Western Massachusetts. <jgrossho@mtholyoke.edu>

In January President Clinton announced a billion dollar aid package to Columbia. Early last year Colombia became the third largest recipient of US military aid (after Israel and Egypt) bordering on $300 million. Now that aid has increased to nearly a billion, most of it for military use.

This increasing amount of military aid has ostensibly been used to fight the drug trade. The US and Colombian governments last year agreed to create a thousand-man anti-drug battalion, equipped and trained by the United States. But it appears more likely that the US is increasingly getting involved in counterinsurgency in Colombia.

The main protagonists appear to be the government (President Andres Pastrana), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Army of National Liberation (ELN) and the Self Defense Forces of Colombia which is a right wing paramilitary group. This later group, said to be made up of police and military personnel, was responsible for a number of massacres last year, including at the time the Government opened peace talks with the FARC.

All of these groups have been accused of being involved in the drug trade and relying on drug money to support their activities. It is quite obviously a domestic civil war which has been killing large numbers of Colombians since the early 1970s. And there is no question that foreign intervention and the drug trade have kept this dispute alive.

American intervention has taken some interesting turns. Earlier the US attempted to convince other South American states to intervene in a sort of South American NATO arrangement. Colombia's neighbors, although concerned about border incursions from the various factions, were unwilling to join in. Now American direct intervention seems possible and it is imperative that progressive people in the US as well as the rest of the world do not confuse that intervention with humanitarian considerations.

Of particular interest to the United States are the security of the Panama Canal, the enforcement of privatization of the natural resources of Colombia, the threat to the right wing pro-US government raised by the fighting which allows space for indigenous and socially responsive groups to emerge--a condition that the US artfully rejects as undemocratic.

With respect to the Canal, the coalition of right-wing congressmen and military men who fought the return of the canal to Panama lost their battle this year. They see political unrest in Colombia as a threat to this ocean-linking ditch that they regard as the product of American ingenuity and smart foreign policy. Last November Republicans in Congress introduced their own $1.6 billion three-year aid proposal alloting the bulk of this money to police and military operations. A number of military men and government officials, notably General Charles Wilhelm, head of the US Southern Command, now name Colombia as the principle threat to the security of the Western hemisphere, replacing Cuba.

A major part of the conflict now boiling up is the resistance of the U'wa people of Los Secoya.

On September 21, 1999, the Colombian government granted a permit for the Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corporation to begin exploratory drilling for oil in the Secoya region. This area in the Sierra Nevada de Cocuy mountains near the Venezuelan border is said to be one of the most delicate, endangered ecosystems on the planet. The drilling would take place in the ancestral homelands of the U'wa people. U'wa leaders immediately asked for an explanation of this "progress" that goes against life; they threatened mass suicide rather than see the earth desecrated in this way. They had been fighting this project for several years, arguing that it would only lead to an increase in violence as has been the case in other oil regions of Colombia. The struggle to preserve the homeland of the approximately 5000 U'wa has already led to violence--three indigenous rights activists have been murdered. In other oil areas violence has been common. Another Occidental oil pipeline just north of the U'wa region has been attacked by leftist guerillas 600 times in the last 13 years and resulted in the spilling of 1.7 million barrels of crude oil into the soil and rivers.

If the U'wa people and environmental groups can stop this oil drilling scheme, it puts at risk the enforcement of World Trade Organization rulings that require the privatization of natural resources--a thought that must certainly put fear into the hearts of mining and forestry as well as oil companies world-wide.

Another reason for intervention is of course what is called in the United States human rights violations, but is in fact the government's fight with those struggling for social justice. Widespread poverty and lack of public services along with the unmitigated theft of public funds and resources by corrupt politicians often backed by the military men the United States supports give rise to protests and violence which is in turn answered by police and military. As the state drifts closer to anarchy and bankruptcy, the only answer the United States has seemed able to imagine is military intervention.

The drug traffic is a real issue but the traffic depends on demand. And the fact is that all sorts of people in the United states will pay amazing money for something to shoot in their arms, stuff up their noses, or generally to displace their natural brains. The end of the drug trade will come with the end of this extraordinary human behavior, not by killing people.

President Clinton's announcement of increased aid to Colombia, despite all its easy talk of development and human rights, is in fact the onset of public military intervention. Progressive people in the United States should recognize this for what it is and give their support to those in Colombia fighting for justice.

References: The Washington Post, January 8, 2000, p A1; NACLA: Report on the Americas. Sep/Oct 1999; The Times of London January 12, 1999; "Resistencia a la Explotacion Petrolera: Mensaje de los U'wa a los Secoya," publication of Accion Ecologica y Oilwatch, Printed in Abya -Yala, August 1999; U'wa Defense working group Action Alert (Members: Amazon Watch, Action Resource Center, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, Earthways Foundation, International Law Project for Human Environmental and Economic Defense, Project Underground, Rainforest Action Network, Sol Communications.) See also: "U.S. Plans Big Aid Package to Rally a Reeling Colombia," Tim Golden and Steven Lee Myers, The New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999.