Whither the U.S.-funded war in Colombia? In late July, a Senate committee cut $164 million from the Bush Administrations $731 million proposed Andean drug war budget and the House voted against allowing unlimited use of U.S. military personnel and contract employees in Colombia. The good news is that these actions, if backed up by future Congressional votes, could put the brakes on George W. Bushs Rambo-like proclivities in the Andes.
The bad news is that the war is already well underway and, under the current plans, will grind on: Hundreds of U.S. military and contract employees will continue to take part in activities at least nominally related to the Andean drug war. Helicopters, paid for by the United States, will continue to arrive in Colombia, where they will be used to give the military rapid mobility capability against guerrillas as well as to accelerate drug plant fumigation. Powerful herbicides will continue to rain down on the Colombian countryside, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.
Congress, at best, is ambivalent about this war. During the July debate, many members of Congress made sure to go on record with concerns about the environmental and health implications of massive herbicide use and widespread human rights violations by Colombian security forces. In the House, Representative John Conyers put forward an amendment to cut out funding for the fumigation programbut withdrew it when it became clear that the amendment had no chance of passage. The Senate bill would make further aid to the Colombian forces contingent on human rights improvements; it would also require several U.S. agencies to certify that the herbicides present no threat to human health before funding authorized by the bill can be used to buy the chemicals. But this kind of conditionality is routinely circumvented, as the Clinton Administration did by simply waiving the human rights conditions in last years aid bill.
Why is this war so difficult to stop? Whatever the deeper reasons behind U.S. involvement in Colombiaand these were explored at length in our last issue, Widening Destruction: Drug War in the Americasits role there has been sold to the U.S. public as a key component of the war on drugs. Until very recently, any U.S. politician who showed skepticism about the ever-escalating drug war left him- or herself open to charges of being soft on drugs and vulnerable in the next election. In the last year or so, it has become acceptable to point out the obvious failure of the drug war, but the notion that illegal drugs can and should be stamped out at the source still has widespread appeal. In large part this is because few U.S. citizens have much of an idea how this policy is actually carried out in drug-producing countries like Colombia.
U.S. officials would like to keep it this way, and the use of civilian contractors to carry out what are usually military functions has helped maintain the programs low profile. The U.S. public knew very little about the role of civilian contractors in the Andes until last April when it was reported that U.S. contract pilots were working with the Peruvian military aircraft that mistakenly shot down a suspected drug plane actually carrying a U.S. missionary family. Because a U.S. citizen and her infant daughter died in that incident, the contractor program was briefly in the spotlight. By August, when a State Department investigation concluded that faulty procedures and poor communication between the Peruvian and U.S. pilots were the cause of the shootdown, public attention was elsewhere.
On those rare occasions when information does begin to circulate about how the U.S. funded-war is actually being conducted on the ground, officials dont shy from using bluster, bluff and threats as a counter force. When a Colombian court recently ruled that the coca fumigation program must be halted pending investigation of reports that it was causing widespread environmental and social damage, for example, U.S. Embassy officials made it plain that aid to Colombia would be cut if the program didnt continue.
During the July congressional debates, the Washington Post described legislators as hedg[ing] their bets against escalating U.S. involvement. Indeed, like gamblers or investors unwilling to put all their money on a single position, some members of Congress seem to be trying to have it all ways: calling for an unwinnable drug war to be stepped up in the Andean region as a whole while imposing what are likely to be all-too elastic caps and restrictions on U.S. participation in Colombia. Unless a skeptical U.S. citizenry can persuade more of its elected representatives that they will lose elections if they continue to ignore or downplay evidence of the serious damage already wrought with U.S. drug war dollars in Colombia and other countries of the Andean region, the Bush Administration will find it possible to make haste, though more slowly than it hoped, to ever deepening military involvement there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JoAnn Kawell is the editor of NACLA Report on the Americas.
