For Your Information

Plan Columbia and U.S. Military Intervention

For the past 30 years, the revolutionary forces of Colombia, have been fighting to liberate their homeland from the yoke of U.S. imperialism and the anti-democratic regimes propped up by the United States. The revolutionary forces under the leadership of FARC-ELN today control much of the countryside. The insurgency in Colombia represents a serious threat to the U.S. policy of annexation of Latin America and successive U.S. administrations have been seeking to crush it, to no avail.

During the last days of the Clinton Administration, Plan Columbia was approved after several years of negotiations. A cornerstone of the War on Drugs policy, Plan Columbia is in effect a model for U.S. military intervention in the countries of the Americas in the post-Cold War period.

During the Cold War, military intervention, arming and funding right-wing dictatorships and training paramilitary squads was de rigeur for the Americans and was done in the name of containing communism. Plan Columbia is being implemented in the name of stemming the flow of cocaine out of Columbia, as well as preserving democracy and ensuring stability.

Under the plan, the United States is providing $1.3 billion in funds to fight drug trafficking. Of that, 84 per cent, or over $1 billion, will flow back into the United States, as it is earmarked for the purchase of military aid, primarily Huey and Black Hawk helicopters. The plan makes Columbia the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt. It also guarantees that the Columbian military, which has been found guilty of major human rights violations including mass murder and torture by every human rights group operating in the country, will be the best-armed in Latin America.

Plan Columbia is officially designed to destroy drug-trafficking at the source, with the destruction of the nearly 340,000 acres in Columbia under coca (the raw material for cocaine) cultivation. The means to this end is the mass spraying of chemicals over huge swaths of agricultural land, particularly in areas controlled by the guerilla movements. However, dozens of independent commissions, funded by groups including the Catholic Church, international aid agencies and independent judiciary bodies, have repeatedly confirmed the guerillas are not responsible in any significant way for the drug trade. The vast bulk of drug trafficking, as well as killings, tortures and disappearances that have occurred in Columbia's 30-year civil war, have been carried out by the very military and right-wing paramilitary groups that the Americans have been arming.

Accusations that the U.S. military itself is involved in drug running are commonplace in Columbia and were given more credibility when the wife of the head of the U.S. counter-narcotics Special Forces operation in Columbia was caught smuggling cocaine two years ago.

In the meantime, lethal herbicides continue to be sprayed by Columbians directly employed by the U.S. State Department, resulting in the destruction of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land belonging to Indigenous peoples or small cooperatives of peasants. And the flow of cocaine out of Columbia continues unabated, with street prices for the drug at an all-time low.