DEMOCRACY AND PLAN COLOMBIA

[Say_What]

<clips>


President george w. bush has asked the American people to “be patient” so that Iraq can become like Colombia—so that the Iraqis can defeat terrorism and establish a stable democracy like the one Washington has nurtured in Colombia. I would like to comment on this nightmare.

Plan Colombia, a “pro-democracy” aid package provided by the United States to Colombia, was established in 1999. Its primary stated objective was to end drug trafficking in Colombia. Later on, it was discovered that the plan had the further objective of defeating the guerrilla movement, though that component of the plan was never acknowledged by Washington while Bill Clinton was in office. It was, however, made explicit in subsequent versions of the plan devised by George W. Bush’s administration, which identified its principal objective as combating “narco-terrorism,” thus conflating the drug war with the anti-guerrilla struggle. Furthermore, the Bush government has proposed that the plan combat any other threat to the security of the Colombian state, a proposal that has since been repeated in a State Department document. Obviously, these “other threats” to Colombian security do not refer to extraterrestrials, but to forces like the Chávez government in Venezuela and the indigenous mobilizations in Ecuador—forces that represent anti-neoliberal, anti-imperial changes in South America by way of democratic elections and popular mobilization.

Washington has now spent $4.7 billion on Plan Colombia, and if you include the expenditures of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in that total, it reaches $7.7 billion. But despite this investment, the U.S.-supported government of Alvaro Uribe has defeated neither the drug traffickers nor the guerrilla movement. To the contrary, the plan’s only success has been to guarantee a majority to the parties that supported Uribe in the Congressional elections of March 2006, and to guarantee Uribe’s own re-election last May.

When Uribe was first elected, his primary campaign promise had been to defeat the guerrillas, and to accomplish this, he instituted a one-time war tax. In his campaign for re-election, he proposed a second “one-time” war tax. The reality is that, far from being defeated, the guerrilla movement in Colombia is today much stronger than when Uribe began his presidency. The guerrillas had been hard hit in the last year of the Pastrana government and during Uribe’s first year, in part thanks to U.S. technical assistance to the Colombian air force that allowed it to engage in effective anti-guerrilla bombing campaigns. The guerrillas had also suffered setbacks due to their own political and strategic errors, many of which negatively—and gravely—affected the civil population.

http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=2685

[Jcrowley]

1. K&R n/t

[Judi Lynn]

2. The article answers a qiestion I've had for ages about Bush's plan for

Colombia, in reference to OTHER S.A. countries:

This is the reality of U.S. intervention in Colombia. Colombia is becoming an eternal battleground, in order to secure the country as a base of operations for controlling Ecuador, Venezuela and possibly even Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. They say, “Have patience with Colombia; we’re heading to Venezuela and Ecuador! Be patient with Iraq; we’re on our way to Iran.”

In Colombia we are used to the fabrication of news that prevents us from seeing the reality that Uribe’s government reaps a harvest of terror; of 60 years of violence; of the killing of 4,000 trade unionists; of the destruction of workers’ rights; of the displacement of three million peasants from their land—and of transnational capital, which finds abundant cheap labor now that its trade unions have been violently destroyed.
(snip)

I really thought as much.

So sad.

If you read the earlier part of the article, it's easy to see this Presidency is heading for some really huge problems which might precipitate a crisis _Bush can't cover and manage for his little buddy!

Colombia news is probably going to be very interesting in the months to come.

Thanks for posting this article.

[Say_What]

3. Like Israel in the Middle East,

Colombia is the US watch-dog for SA. It is no surprise that Colombia is the world's third recipient of US military funding after Egypt and Israel. All beacons of democracy :sarcasm: