Recently, the US. Senate approved over $1 billion in aid to shore up the current regime in Colombia. Next in the legislative process is some kind of joint House-Senate bill that will be sent to the White House. Although it is taking longer than the White House had hoped, all sources point to a done deal soon. Despite the claims of drug czar General McCafferty, this money has very little to do with fighting drugs and everything to do with shoring up the government in that country. Indeed, the United States let it be known during the week of July 26, 1999, that it has a couple hundred troops in Colombia training elite battalions whose job will be to sever the ties between the coca and opium farmers and the revolutionary forces. Of course, as any one with a basic knowledge of prior Pentagon training missions in other parts of the world is aware, these trainers often participate in military missions and may even denote an even greater U.S. involvement in the future.
In order to understand what exactly the Pentagon means in describing these battalions' mission, it is essential to examine the relationship between the peasant coca and opium farmers and the revolutionary organizations. lo understand this relationship, it is first necessary to understand the role drug production plays in the economy of Colombia. The peasants have two basic choices in today's Colombia--to go to the big cities for work and risk ending up as beggars and prostitutes or the land. If they choose the latter, they till the land and usually plant crops such as corn or plantains. Since these areas were never developed, there are no transportation routes. Only by using the rivers and crossing hundreds of miles overland can the crop reach Bogota or other markets. By the time it gets there, the crop is often unsaleable or has become so costly that the profit is practically lost. There is only one alternative open to the peasant farmer who wishes to subsist: growing coca leaves and, more recently, opium plants. Transportation costs for these crops is provided by the drug lords, who move incredible amounts of these products with the consent of high placed government leaders and the armed protection of the Colombian military and paramilitary forces funded by large landowners and drug lords.
The FARC and ELN guerrilla forces operate in the coca and opium growing regions. Indeed, they literally administer these regions. Like various parts of southern Vietnam that were in the control of the NLF, the residents of the region consider the revolutionary forces as their government and support their administration. In order to pay the cost of running schools, health care centers, police forces, and other such infrastructural apparatus, the FARC and ELN forces tax the drug trafficking operations-- farmers and those involved in the product's transportation and refinement. Although it is their preference not to do support the dependency of the farming population on drug production, the reality is that this is where the money is in rural Colombia.
This is where the United States comes in, once again. Most of these drugs are shipped to the streets of our country. This does not happen without the complicity of government and law enforcement officials. In some cases, this means turning the other way when a shipment from a trafficker who has paid off the right people comes through. In other cases, the complicity is much more involved. Even those of us with rather short memories can remember operation run by Ollie North and his cohorts that supplied the contra forces fighting the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. This operation (not the first of its kind, by the way-- see Alfred McCoy's 1991 book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Trade) can be considered a model of how U. S. government agencies cynically manipulate modem society's desire for pharmaceutically induced escape to finance their dirty operations in the service of various corporate interests.
Speaking of corporate interests, if we follow the trail this leads us down we may discover the most fundamental reason of them all for the U. S. interest in Colombia: oil. Oil is the most important commodity in Colombia. It represented over one-fourth of the country's exports in 1996 and close to 5% of its Gross National Product (GNP). In comparison, coffee represented 15.2 % and 3.4 %, respectively. Interestingly, few private Colombian citizens have any significant investment in the oil industry. Instead, the majority of the exploration and refinement interests are controlled by a state company known as Ecopetrol, which serves as a conduit for foreign oil companies, primarily British Petroleum (recently merged with Amoco to form the world largest oil company and may help to explain the increased desire for a greater U.S. military role in the country) and Occidental Petroleum (which is heavily invested in by Al Gore's family and is currently attempting to drill on lands considered sacred by the indigenous U'wa peoples).
Over the course of the thirty-year war, support for the revolutionary forces has expanded into the cities. This is due to the ever-widening disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the Colombian population and the miliatry's harsh repression of those who organize the workers and the unemployed. Literally hundreds of labor organizers, social justice workers (clerics and laypersons) and student activists have been murdered and disappeared since the late 1980s. In fact, in 1990, when the revolutionary groups put down their arms and formed political parties, they were murdered wholesale by the military and their paramilitary allies. Such murderous actions push both activists and their supporters to a conclusion that armed struggle is the only workable strategy for the kind of social change they seek.
In terms of the region, the recent re-election of and continuing mandate for President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his policies makes the United States awfully nervous. As leftist webmaster and history professor Jay Moore of Vermont stated in a July 1999 letter to various email groups formed during the 1999 NATO adventure in Yugoslavia, Venezuela is next door to Colombia and provides more oil to the U. S. than any other country. Should Chavez withstand the certain opposition he will face from internal and external reactionary forces and pm his democratic and sociaiist-oriented policies in place in his country, the United States will have to deal with a popularly elected left-leaning government in its "backyard" for the first time since the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. As history tells us, this means those U.S. citizens who support true democracy and oppose the neo-liberal agenda of the corporation and their cohorts in our government must do every thing in their power to oppose any attempts to destroy the Chavez government. As for Colombia, we must oppose any and all U.S. miliatary intervention in that country--whether this intervention comes in the forms of drug war aid, trainers, advisers, or troops of any kind.
-rjacobs for the Instant Antiwar Action Group, Burlington, VT