Veterans
to
McCaffrey:
Stay
Out
of
Colombia
4/28/00
A group of 75 retired and former veterans sent a letter to retired General Barry McCaffrey this week, urging the "drug czar" to abandon his plans to escalate US military involvement in the Colombian civil war. The group, calling itself Veterans for More Effective Drug Strategies or VETSforMEDS, sent the letter on April 27 and launched a web site to publicize their opposition to an increasingly militarized international drug enforcement policy. "Entering the Colombian civil war would once again involve US military personnel in a civil war against a well armed, well financed and motivated indigenous army that blends easily with the surrounding population," reads the letter in part. "The Andes jungle plateau is several times larger than South Vietnam, which we were, for ten years, unable to control effectively with 500,000 armed American combatants, hundreds of helicopters and total air superiority, compared to the handful of 'advisors' and less than a hundred helicopters in Colombia. The planning is painfully unrealistic." McCaffrey has asked Congress for $1.7 billion dollars to train and arm the Colombian army in the 40th year of its war against the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC), whom the Clinton administration says finance their insurgency by drug trafficking. The letter cites a lack of clearly defined goals, an inadequate definition of victory and lack of exit plan, and the difficulty of distinguishing between drug traffickers and rebels as fatal flaws in McCaffrey's proposal. "The US is embarking on a very dangerous course that will trap us in a foreign entanglement due to fundamental miscalculations being made by advocates of the drug war," one of the letter's organizers, retired US Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander Sylvester Salcedo said in a press release on Tuesday. Salcedo, who served as an intelligence officer for the Navy on drug enforcement operations, recently returned a medal of honor to President Clinton in a gesture of protest against the administration's Colombia initiative. VETSforMEDS sent the letter in hopes of establishing a dialogue with McCaffrey about what it calls "more effective approaches to reducing drug problems and controlling the drug market." As of today, McCaffrey had not acknowledged receiving the letter, whose signatories include two colonels, one commander, eight lieutenant colonels, seven lieutenant commanders, six majors, four captains, ten lieutenants and 37 enlisted veterans. But VETSforMEDS spokesman Jerry Epstein, a former First Lieutenant, hopes that the military connection they share will encourage McCaffrey to respond. "As fellow veterans who have come to understand, as General McCaffrey himself has noted, that drug abuse is primarily a health problem, we appeal to him to acknowledge the inappropriateness of military solutions applied to the drug problem," Epstein told The Week Online. For more information, please visit http://www.vetsformeds.org.
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