Ten
Million
March
for
Peace
in
Colombia,
Activists
Decry
US
Counternarcotics
Aid
to
Military
10/29/99
A looming military aid package that would dramatically increase direct U.S. assistance to Colombia's armed forces has become more controversial in the wake of a massive peace demonstration last Monday involving more than ten million Colombians throughout the violence-torn nation. The peace campaign, known as "No Mas!" ("No More"), mobilized two million Colombians in the capital city of Bogota alone, and called on negotiators from the government and the FARC guerrillas to enact a swift resolution to the decades-long civil conflict. US drug warriors, including Republicans like Dan Burton, Ben Gilman and Bob Barr, and administration officials like drug czar Barry McCaffrey, a former Army General who commanded the SOUTHCOM division that operates in Latin America, have called for dramatic, multi-billion dollar aid increases in counternarcotics aid, much of it directly to the Colombian military, arguing that the illicit drug trade is financing the FARC guerrilla forces. At a conference in Washington on October 15, however, sponsored by the US/Colombia Coordinating Office and the Colombia Human Rights Committee, peace activists, legislators and human rights advocates denounced the aid proposal. Carlos Salinas, Advocacy Director for Latin America at Amnesty International USA, warned "This escalation of aid... could well be the final gush of gasoline into the Colombian conflagration to create one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of this hemisphere." Salinas also pointed out that the left-wing "narco-guerrillas" of which U.S. drug warriors warn have counterparts in the form of right-wing "narco-paramilitaries" with close ties to the armed forces. Yet, entire Congressional drug hearings are often held without the word "paramilitaries" even being spoken. Salinas explained that doing so "would mean the collapse of credibility in proposing aid to the Army," and said the "paramilitaries are responsible for the overwhelming number of civilian deaths, sometimes as in the cases of a few weeks ago in Valle del Cauca, with machetes and chainsaws," and that when you talk about the paramilitaries, "then you talk about the Colombian Army." Peace activists at the conference uniformly opposed the aid package. Agustin Jimenez, President of the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners (CSPP), noted that after 40 years of civil war, ten persons are killed daily on average, 70% civilians uninvolved in the conflict. Jesus Antonio Gonzalez, Director of the Human Rights Division of the Central Union of Workers, said that 3,000 labor leaders from his organization have been killed in the past 13 years, with the killers escaping justice 99.9 percent of the time. Senator Piedad Cordoba Ruiz, the highest-ranking Afro-Colombian congressperson, attended after having recently been released by kidnappers. Cordoba said she was moved around the Medellín area for several days, with the cooperation and involvement of the armed forces. Cordoba explained that armed combatants often forget that civilians have rights, and bomb non-combatants under the pretext of counterinsurgency, and said the drug issue should not be falsely imposed on the peace process. (Read Adam Smith's editorial on the peace process, "No Mas!," below. Read David Borden's editorial on Congress' recent Colombia hearings, "Those Helicopters," http://www.drcnet.org/wol/108.html#editorial. The Colombia Human Rights Committee is online at http://www.igc.org/colhrnet/. Find Amnesty International's Colombia human rights reports online at http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/colombia/. Last but not least, read about our upcoming PROTEST IN WASHINGTON, next item.)
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