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A year ago, I spoke with a medical missionary pilot in the airport in Lima, Peru. He was trying to make sense of why and how 2 Peruvian fighter jets aided by American spotters in an American AWAC’s observation airplane had shot down a small private float plane, killing a mother and her infant daughter.

In 1972, as a United States Peace Corps volunteer, I lived in Amazonia, the jungle of the amazon basin. This basin is located along the borders of Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru. The choice of footwear by the folks of the jungle were rubber boots. While there I met perhaps the most beautiful woman to float in and out of my life. She was a Columbian college student and a member of a revolutionary movement protesting for civil rights for the indigenous people of Columbia. Before floating out she told me of the violence and that she did not know each day if she would be killed. Columbia, the second-oldest democracy in Latin America, is a strategically important country that lies adjacent to Venezuela’s oilfields, the Panama Canal, and the Caribbean basin. For forty years now, Columbia has been fighting a civil war, ravaging the country economically, displacing millions of people, and by now, killing at least 35,000 people. The revolutionary movement was started by the campesinos (poor, small farmers) demanding a part in the national life, ownership of land, representation in the government. They called themselves the “fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de Columbia” or FARC. In the beginning they financed their struggle by kidnapping persons and collecting ransoms. In the 1980’s, the guerillas (FARC) determined that narcodollars would provide them with resources to intensify their war and they began to tax the growers of the coca plant, the source of cocaine.
Another armed faction in the civil war is the death squads. These are groups of right-wing paramilitary squads, funded by wealthy landowners and narcodollars. As Columbia’s production of marijuana and cocaine increased in the 1970’s, narcodollars in the Columbian system dramatically increased and made the traffickers targets for kidnapping. These traffickers were also wanted for extradition to the United States. Private self-defense groups arose to provide protection against kidnappers and the United States. These groups eventually moved from protecting drug traffickers to usurping the judicial functions of the central authorities. The self-defense groups of the 1980’s became the paramilitary groups, galvanized into broader political action due to resentment over an amnesty granted to former guerillas in the mid-80’s. These death squads are active in many parts of the country and cooperate with the federal Columbian armed forces and police. It is believed the fear of these death squads is responsible for two-thirds of all refugees, roughly 2 million Columbians, about 5% of the population.

The Columbian army and police are the government’s contribution to the civil war. Since 1996, they have been unable to control the guerillas (the government granted them a sanctuary in 1998 the size of Switzerland) and have been the willing ally of the death squads. Seventy percent of the army is draftees who come from the lower class sectors of society and serve 12-18 months. Under Columbian law, any high school graduate is exempt from combat duty. These draftees are ill-trained to fight in the areas to which they are assigned and, really, are only trying to survive their terms and return home alive. Military service is seen as something to be avoided and not a duty. The government armed forces are the only faction, at least visibly, not benefitting from narcodollars. Human rights groups have documented abundant, detailed, and consistent evidence showing that the federal forces work with, support, and tolerate the paramilitary groups, treating them as a force allied and compatible with their own.

In 1996, during President Clinton’s term, America gave $65 million dollars in military aid to Columbia. Labor Day weekend, 2000, President Clinton blew into Cartagena with his armada of air transporters and security personnel and presented Plan Columbia to the local government. After smoking a couple of Cuban cigars, he donated $1.3 billion to the cause. Plan Columbia aimed to destroy the Columbian drug market-the world’s leading supplier of cocaine. The president stated, “We are not going to get into a shooting war. This is not Vietnam. Neither is it yankee imperialism.” Speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert added, “for the sake of our children and our grandchildren, we can’t afford to let this fail.” President Pastrana of Columbia contributed, “I don’t think there is any chance that the (American) military advisors are going to be involved in the real war in Columbia. And they never will be.” The polls showed that most Columbians welcomed the president’s visit, but they also feared that American military aid would expand their civil war. The Columbian press was cordial toward the president, but stated that the drug problem in the United States was one of consumption not of production. With American aid pouring into Columbia, peace talks stalled and the violence increased on all sides. In the first year of Plan Columbia, the number of massacres increased by 40%, most thru the work of the paramilitaries, who continued to enjoy the tolerance and cooperation of the federal military; an estimated 319,000 people were made refugees, the highest number of displaced persons recorded in any single year; and human rights defenders, trade unionists, journalists, and community leaders continued to lead the lists of people killed because of their work.

In 2002, the current administration of Pesident George W. Bush, has asked Congress to allow the Columbian government to use past anti-drug contributions of helicopters, planes, gunboats, and other equipment in its expanding campaign against the guerilla (FARC) groups. The administration is requesting that an additional $470 million be used for “counter-terrorism” activities as well as for the anti-drug effort. These actions by our current President and the words that he is using suggest the new policies toward Columbia will be to label the guerilla groups (FARC) as terrorist so more money can be sent to suppress the flow of drugs to the United States. This new policy appears to be supporting the very people who are responsible for the human rights abuses. The rationale for all of this is done under the veil of “new terrorism” and to stop the flow of drugs to the consumptive hungry United States.

The carnage the death squads have invoked on the Columbian people has been a huge human rights atrocity. Law prohibits the United States from providing aid to countries considered to have committed human rights violations. President Clinton waived this prohibition when he brought Plan Columbia to Columbia. In February of this year, the United States Department of State presented its annual “Country Reports on Human Rights for 2001”, “You are no doubt aware of the certification requirements we’re under in terms of the military-paramilitary cooperation. There are a number of great abuses on the guerrilla-paramilitary side, beginning with kidnapping, beginning with death and torture, and working your way all the way through child labor…So, it’s a situation where the country is democratic and holds democratic elections, but because of the war there are a lot of human rights problems ongoing in Columbia.” Further, as required by law, the State Department held a consultative meeting with various groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Washington Office on Latin American and all concluded that Columbia’s government had not satisfied the specific human rights conditions for military assistance.

So, President Bush added the guerillas and paramilitary death squads to his list of terrorist groups. As late as the year 2000, the United States Department of Defense stated that the civil war in Columbia was an internal conflict. What was once a civil war has now become a hemispheric battle against terrorism.

Throughout the civil war, the government and the guerillas have conducted peace talks. President Pastrana flew into the guerilla’s jungle sanctuary last year. When the guerillas appeared, they were wearing the rubber boots that I remember from my days in the jungle. On February 2, President Pastrana broke off peace talks and ordered the military to reoccupy the 16,000 sq. mile area he had granted to the guerrillas in 1998. The offensive is named “Thanatos,” the Greek word for death. In an interview, a guerilla who gave his name as Willington stated, “It means nothing if the military arrives here or not.” Willington patrols wearing his rubber peasant boots and an untucked sport shirt that conceals a pistol, “We don’t confront them, but we never leave.” The killing accelerates with the offensive falling hardest on the innocent. Maybe we can defoliate the jungle, kill all the people that live there, but short of that, my bet is that the guerillas own the jungle. The problem is the kids that are killed, the communities that are robbed of their leaders, the economy whose resources are bent to supplying the war by growing drugs to supply the seemingly insatiable demand of foreign countries. For the guerilla, the struggle continues to be one for civil rights. If history is a teacher, I am concerned we will only bring more violence to Columbia by bringing more military resources and choosing sides with the death squads. It is too easy to justify our military incursion to label these jungle folks as terrorists in their civil war. Law enforcement officials have told me that one can purchase illegal drugs on any street corner, in any community, in any region in our country and that has not changed in the last 25 years. While that may be an exaggeration, the consumption of marijuana, cocaine and other controlled substances is well documented in the caseloads of our courts and prisons.

I have friends in jail because of drugs; I have lost friends to drug abuse. The supply of drugs in the United States has not changed one iota no matter how many people are in jail or die from the disease of addiction; no matter how many people are killed in whatever country. This issue alone has an enormous impact on the health and well being of our children of Southwest Neraska. Columbia and the policies of the United States towards that country seem far away from us in Southwest Nebraska, but their impact is significant.

When I was living in the jungle in 1972, the rubber boots didn’t seem very important to a young Peace Corps volunteer just out of college. The mother and her child are dead, the Columbian college kid is probably dead, and maybe you have a son who’s in jail or who has died from the disease of addiction. Albert Einstein said, “Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion.” Vietnam started in this same way, that is, starting with military advisers, then increasing military aid through different administrations, and finally an all out invasion. It’s not the cold war you say; its different somehow you say. Maybe. It is interesting to note that now that a few years have passed, the Vietnamese want to do business with us. If you would like more information, you can go to a search engine on the web (I used www.google.com) and type in key words such as FARC; if you would like to know how we treated drug addiction in the past, a study of the Harrison Drug Act of 1915 and why it was passed might be interesting. Southwest Nebraska is a great place to live, and I suspect that there are many stories like mine that local residents living in this part of Nebraska have hidden away like secret treasures.