Last summer, my aunt, who is from Medellin, Colombia, visited the U.S. One day, she told us about the time she was listening to the radio and heard that the coffee shop that her son frequents was destroyed by explosives within a parked car. When she got home she found out that her son hadn’t been there, but his friend sadly was.
The ongoing violence in Colombia raises many questions. This 50 year old civil war between two rebel groups and the government is very complicated and very violent; 40,000 people have died and two million have become displaced.
U.S. involvement in the war includes two billion dollars in funding for “Plan Colombia,” which has gone to weapons, military training, the purchase of Blackhawk helicopters, and the fumigation of cocoa fields, which have had horrible health and environmental effects.
The U.S. is supportive, presumably, because it hopes to win the war on drugs. While this seems to be a worthy cause, it is difficult to ignore the discrepancies.
Colombia was the leading Latin American recipient of U.S. military aid in the 90’s and also has acquired the world’s worst record of human rights violations. And since the plan’s inception, cocoa production has actually increased by 25 percent, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
The rates of civilian killings are also up. The Colombian Committee of Jurists reported that 75 percent of these political killings are done by paramilitaries, which are dangerous and vicious organizations. Yet half of these paramilitaries actually have ties with the Colombian military.
Many of Colombia’s military personnel are trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, in Ft. Benning, Ga. The school is funded by the U.S specializes in training Latin American military personnel.
The problem with WHISC is that many of its graduates are violent, law-breaking human rights violators. Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama, is a WHISC grad. So are the assassins of Archbishop Romero, who was killed while giving mass, in 1990. Also, there is no system in place to monitor the activities of the graduates.
A movement to shut down the school began in 1990. In 1996, WHISC finally released its training manuals, of which, the New York Times reported on. “Americans can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States Army taught thousands of Latin Americans. [The SOA manuals] recommended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned.”
Statistics show that only a small percentage of Colombian students actually attend counter-narcotics classes. In 1999, only 5 percent of the 141 Colombian students took counter-narcotics courses.
Controversy also exists surrounding the passage of Plan Colombia. Companies like Lockheed Martin Corp. who are now profiting because of the war lobbied heavily for congressional support back in 2000.
Oil is also related to this debacle. Colombia is an oil-rich nation with $70 billion worth of reserves. A recent White House request for Congress to allocate $100 million to train and equip troops to guard the Occidental Pipeline, located in the area of conflict raised many eyebrows.
It seems problematic that U.S. tax payer money is being used to fund both WHISC and a war that has been linked to increasing the number of human rights abuses in Colombia, a country where unemployment is high and 2/3 of its population live in poverty. The underlying factor is that Colombians want, need and deserve a lasting peace… now.
Anna Roy, a senior international studies major, is editorial director of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at roya@ulv.edu.
