> Published on Thursday, June 1, 2000 in the http://www.sunspot.net/
> Baltimore Sun
>
> US Stuck In Colombia
>
> by James Bovard
>
> THE SENATE will soon consider President Clinton's proposed $1.6 billion
> package to bankroll the government of Colombia's war against leftist
> guerillas.
>
> The aid windfall purports to help staunch the flow of drugs from Colombia.
> But there is no reason to expect further U.S. anti-drug aid to be anymore
> effective than past aid. Even worse, there is a growing danger that the
> United States will be bumbling into a civil war.
>
> The Clinton administration is hitting the panic buttons on the aid package;
> one administration official whined to the Washington Post on Tuesday,
> "Every week we are losing ground" in the fight against drugs.
>
> While past U.S. aid has had little or no positive effect, Americans are
> supposed to believe that any delay in new spending means catastrophic
> damage.
>
> Colombia has received nearly $1 billion in anti-narcotics aid since 1990.
> U.S. tax dollars are magnificent fertilizer: coca production is
> skyrocketing -- doubling since 1996 and forecast to increase another 50
> percent in the next two years. Colombia now supplies roughly three-quarters
> of the heroin and almost all the cocaine consumed in the United States.
>
> Most U.S. anti-drug aid has paid for chemical warfare: blanketing
> coca-growing areas with herbicides from crop-duster planes and helicopter
> gunships, a policy the Colombian minister of health strongly opposed in
> 1992. Yet after continual escalation in the amount of spraying, the amount
> of land in coca production is four times greater than what it was in 1994
> and now exceeds 300 square miles.
>
> "Close enough for government work" seems to be the motto of some anti-drug
> pilots. The New York Times reported allegations on May 1 that U.S.-financed
> planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren in a Colombian
> village. Many children reportedly became ill; the spraying also killed
> crops, chickens and 25,000 fish in fish farms.
>
> The Clinton administration intensely pressured the Colombian government to
> allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be
> dumped across the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher
> altitudes, Kosovo-style.
>
> Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and
> permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton
> administration decreed clean-air standards severely curtailing Americans'
> exposure to chemicals that pose little or no health threat, it sought to
> deluge a foreign land with a toxic chemical in a way that would be
> forbidden in the United States.
>
> The United States is foisting itself deeper into a civil war that has raged
> in Colombia for decades. There are about 200 U.S. military advisers already
> on site, and U.S. personnel are now actively training the Colombian
> military.
>
> The Dallas Morning News recently noted reports that "tens of millions of
> taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia
> employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf war
> veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in
> Central America during the 1980s." The United States is providing key
> intelligence to the Colombian military from U.S. intercepts of guerrilla
> radio messages.
>
> Increased U.S. aid will not enable the Colombian government to win a
> decisive victory over the guerrillas anytime soon. The Colombian military
> is renown for losing almost all of the major engagements it fights with the
> guerrillas.
>
> Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, recently warned that if Clinton's
> $1.6 billion aid plan is approved, the United States will be locked into "a
> five- to 10-year commitment, which will cost U.S. taxpayers in excess of $5
> billion."
>
> And even if the guerrillas are defeated, it's ludicrous to pretend that
> Colombians will no longer have an incentive to grow coca, as long as U.S.
> laws make that crop 20 times more profitable than any other.
>
> American-funded drug suppression efforts have resulted in a "push down, pop
> up" effect: the harder the United States works to repress coca production
> in one area, the more likely production is to start up in another. It is
> time to recognize the futility of trying to micromanage what foreign
> farmers grow.