EU collaborates with Plan Columbia

[jenyan1 <jenyan1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

George Monbiot
Monday May 21 2001
The Guardian

The purpose of Plan Colombia, according to President Andres Pastrana, is
to help eliminate the production of drugs, generate employment, boost
trade and bring peace to a country which has been mauled by civil war for
more than 50 years. The Clinton and Bush administrations have generously
supplied this worthy scheme with $1.3bn, promising the American people
that the money will be spent to assist the war on drugs. Eighty-four per
cent of the funding will take the form of military aid.

To control drugs, the US insists, first it must control the country. To
this end, it has supplied 104 combat helicopters and trained three
Colombian army battalions. But the army is not exactly the instrument of
peace that Mr Pastrana has claimed. As Amnesty International has recorded:
"Colombian army personnel, trained by US special forces, have been
implicated... in serious human rights violations, including the massacre
of civilians."

The army works alongside Colombia's ultra-right paramilitaries, who are
responsible for the assassination of thousands of trades union and peasant
leaders and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their
homes. As one of Colombia's official human rights ombudsmen has noted:
"The paramilitary phenomenon... is the spearhead of Plan Colombia: to
create territorial control and to control the civilian population. This is
a terror tactic." The US, with the help of the Colombian government, is
waging yet another dirty war in Latin America.

Far from eliminating drugs production, this war will only make it worse.
Plan Colombia funds the aerial spraying of coca and opium fields with
Roundup, the broad-spectrum herbicide patented by Monsanto. Roundup
destroys almost everything it touches, wiping out legal crops alongside
illegal ones, poisoning rivers, shattering one of the most fragile and
biodiverse forest ecosystems on Earth, precipitating both acute and
chronic human diseases. It is the Agent Orange of America's new Vietnam.
(Agent Orange, interestingly, was also a Monsanto product.) Now the US
administration wants to take this ecocide a step further, by spraying the
jungle with a genetically engineered fungus which produces deadly toxins.

When their livelihood has been destroyed, the peasant farmers and
indigenous people have no means of survival but to flee further into the
jungle and start growing drugs. Since the aerial spraying programme began,
the area devoted to drugs cultivation in Colombia has tripled.

But Plan Colombia is not a war against drugs: it is a war against people.
Its ultimate purpose, as several international observers have pointed out,
is to eliminate both leftwing guerrillas and grassroots democratic
movements, in order to facilitate the seizure of the country's most
valuable land. The US envisages a new inter-oceanic canal through the
north of the country, to bypass the congested Panama canal. Its companies
have identified billions of dollars' worth of oil and mineral deposits.
So, for the past five months, soldiers and paramilitaries have been
murdering community leaders and expelling local people. The places
identified for economic development by Plan Colombia are the places now
being savaged by the paramilitaries.

The European Union is well aware of these atrocities and of their
coordination by President Pastrana's plan. At first sight, it appears to
be contesting them. At a meeting on April 30, the EU resolved to spend
330m euros on "political support" for the "peace process" in Colombia. The
money will be used to establish "peace laboratories", contest human rights
violations and "relieve the social impact of conflict". The package looks
uncontroversial and it received no significant coverage.

But the public statements issued by the EU, the European commission and
Chris Patten, the British commissioner who brokered the agreement, contain
a number of curious omissions. "Plan Colombia" is mentioned nowhere. Nor
is the US government. Nor are the atrocities committed by the army and
coordinated by the state. The killings in the country are blamed solely
upon paramilitaries and guerrillas.

Only when you read an account of the same meeting by the Inter-American
Development Bank do you stumble across several interesting features
missing from the European statements. The   first is that the funding
package is not a European initiative, but was provided at the request of
the Colombian government. The second is that it will be supplemented by
extra money from the US. The third is that Marc Grossman, a US under
secretary of state, was sitting in the meeting.

Trawl the European commission's archive, and you discover a further
interesting feature: that the "peace process" to which the EU was
referring is none other than Plan Colombia. The new funding represents the
plan's "social component", attached to the US invasion in the hope of
making it look like something rather different. Spain is prepared to go
further still, and help the US to finance the Colombian army.

The new European funding, in other words, provides the political
credibility which President Pastrana and the US administration have
desperately been seeking ever since they initiated their plan. Wittingly
or otherwise, the European Union has helped the two governments to
disguise a programme of state terror as humanitarian aid.

Mass killings, ecocide and the seizure of resources do not have a
financial solution, but a political one. You cannot buy human rights,
least of all from a scheme that's responsible for their abuse. The only
help foreign intervention can offer the Colombian people is intense
diplomatic pressure, exposing the atrocities of their government and army,
denouncing the scheme which coordinates them and isolating its supporters.
Instead, we have chosen to collaborate.

Extracted from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,494448,00.html