Myths and truths about Plan Colombia Manuel Salgado Tamayo Quito 1. The origin and contents of the plan, according to official rhetoric The official discourse around the so-called Plan Columbia is contained in a 46-page document in both English and Spanish, in which it is stated: “Colombia, at the threshold of the 21st century, is proud but threatened, and faces the historic challenge of establishing and consolidating a society in which the State can exercise its true authority and accomplish its fundamental obligations... set out in the Constitution: to promote general prosperity, to guarantee the effectiveness of principles, rights and duties... to facilitate the participation of all in decisions that affect them... to defend national independence,... and to ensure peaceful conviviality and enforcement of a just order”. (*) This document, or its authors, hold that “the crucial challenges have their origin in the proliferation of drug trafficking and in the economic, political and social impact of globalization.” They recognize that Colombia has assumed the leadership in the global fight against drugs, but say that “on the road to success” various strategic reforms are necessary: 1. An economic reform which will generate employment, strengthen the State, and offer an economic force to counteract the drug trade. 2. A fiscal and financial strategy which will adopt severe austerity and adjustment measures... to restore Colombia’s standing in the international financial markets. 3. A strategy for peace with the guerrillas, which will strengthen a state based on law and the fight against drugs. 4. A strategy to restructure the armed forces and the police and promote human rights. 5. A judicial /human rights strategy, to assure an egalitarian and impartial justice for all. 6. An anti-narcotics strategy... to combat all components of the cycle of illicit drugs. 7. An alternative development strategy, promoting farming projects and other economically profitable activities for villagers and their families... which will also include environmental protection activities... 8. A social participation strategy. 9. A human development strategy which guarantees health and education services. 10. An international orientation which confirms the principles of shared responsibility... for the drug problem. At the center of this proposal, as Strategic Objective #1, is: “Strengthen the fight against drug trafficking and dismantle the drug dealers’ organizations via integrated efforts directed by the Armed Forces, 1) combat illicit cultivation through continual and systematic action by the Army and Police, especially in the Putumayo region and in the south of the country...” 2) “establish military control over the south of the country with the aim of eradication”... 3) reestablish governmental control over the key drug production areas”. So far we have summarized the Plan’s content. Who devised it and who are its authors? It is difficult to redeem the misfortunes of the text. What is certain is that in 1998 Andrés Pastrana seemed convinced of the possibility of peace and conceived of a Marshall Plan for Colombia. Upon being submitted to the consideration of the powerful United States, this plan would change its character and its aims. (1). The Plan circulated in Washington, in September of 1999, was first discussed by the US Congress, and the first to make it public were the American media. In short: it was unknown to the Colombian Congress or to the Commission on Foreign Affairs, unknown to the National Peace Council, created by the Law of the Republic, and the theme was not on the agenda of the Negotiation and Dialogue Table between the Government and the FARC. A great start for a national project of participatory democracy! we could say, echoing statements that appear elsewhere in the Plan. 2. The origin of the current problems in Colombia To attribute the principal challenges in Colombia, at the present time, to the proliferation of drug trafficking, as the Plan does, implies not only the adoption of a reductionist vision - unilateral and therefore false - but also, and more importantly, entails evading the huge responsibility which other problems and actors have in the genesis of this dramatic history. Gabriel García Márquez constructed a colossal fable around this reality, but we could say that even his mythical fiction falls short of the terrifying truth. The nation was born incomplete, due to the bastardized ambitions of regional caudillos, who neither understood nor supported the liberators headed by Bolívar. At the end of the 19th century the liberal reform was thwarted by the combination of landowners and clergy. The century of full integration into global capitalism was, in Colombia, the prelude to permanent violence, confirmed by 52 armed civilian uprisings. Agrarian reform has been an impossibility which has pushed the campesinos into the arms of liberal and Marxist guerrillas, as their only hope of redemption. Democracy, more than in any other country in Latin America, is an incestuous relationship between liberals and conservatives which they have turned into an exercise of power like that of foremen on an estate. The rivalries between these two factions of the dominant class, from the 30s to the 50s, ended with 300,000 people dead. Afterwards came the National Front accord, in which the two parties agreed to divide power in an alternative form. The ideological differences between them dissolved in the embrace of vote-buying and corruption. “Since the 60s every form of civil or democratic opposition has been co-opted, bought out, or assassinated, forcing it to take to the mountains.” (2). The military, which began as a liberation army, has become a praetorian force at the service of the worst interests of the dominant groups, or, what is worse, of their own privileges. Alfredo Vásquez Carrizosa rightly said of the old Colombia democracy that it is “the facade of a constitutional regimen which conceals a militarized society”. The enormous military apparatus of more than 400,000 men consumes more than 5% of the GDP, and its members enjoy immunity which fully armors with impunity. (3) The paramilitary, an invention of the military, do the dirty work which the official State organisms are occasionally unable to. Human rights defenders have singled them out in a number of studies as being responsible for between 70 and 80 percent of basic human rights violations. Colombia’s social and political problems are related to the destiny of a large and powerful State, with more than a million square kilometers of territory, strategically located between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific, with immense natural resources and some of the most inspiring and beautiful cultural diversity on the continent, which, nonetheless, at the end of the 20th century, has condemned between 18 to 40 million of its inhabitants to live below the absolute poverty index. As in other parts of Latin America, the voraciousness of the Colombian oligarchy has relegated the vast majority of its own people to unemployment, low wages, malnutrition, homelessness, insufficient education, lack of basic health services, lack of potable water in the outskirts of cities, environmental destruction due to overexploitation of natural resources, abandonment and neglect of children and old people, a permanent environment of violence and insecurity, and institutionalized corruption. These problems are similar to those in many other Latin American countries, it’s true, but in Colombia the dictatorship of capitalism has historically been so cynical and brutal that it has left no other course of survival but that of violence, in both its negative and creative versions. In the environment just described, the cultivation of marijuana, coca, and most recently poppies has flourished in recent years. For the dominant groups it was an expeditious path to easy wealth; for the poor, the magical advent of the solution to their endemic poverty. The guerrillas, with a strong socialist ideology, thought, at one time, that drugs were an imperial trick to rob them of rural grassroots. What’s clear is that the Colombia of coffee became non-viable through the perversion of the state and that in its replacement, the international Mafia found all the social conditions to create a narcotics paradise: very poor peasants, corrupt government officials, and a dominant class used to abundant wealth and little work. (4). The 50,000 million dollars which have flowed into Colombia in the last 20 years permitted the emergence of the nouveau riche and sustained an economy which allowed the luxury of accommodating neoliberal adjustment policies without major traumas. Who have been the fundamental beneficiaries of drug trafficking? The dominant class, as a whole, includes various high- ranking officials of past governments. The list includes not only Ernesto Samper, whose electoral campaign was financed by druglords, but also the current Secretary General of the Organization of American States, César Gaviria, whose co-governance with the cartels was denounced by General Gustavo Pardo Ariza. (5). The military and paramilitary, too, are up to their noses in drug trafficking, as the American linguist and social scientist Noam Chomsky has said, but the war is not directed at them. The violence in Colombia is a Gorgon with many heads, but the dominant class, the military, and the powerful elite of North America see only two adversaries: the peasants, who make their living from the plantations, and the guerrillas who supposedly benefit from the taxes they charge them, although the greatest extremists lump the two together and talk to us about the “narcoguerrilla”. 3. A plan for war on Colombia The fundamental component of the Plan, which an attentive reader of the document cannot deny, is to channel resources toward the reinforcement of the Armed Forces and the police with the aim of pressuring insurgency groups into signing a peace accord that will be convenient for the dominant class. The mechanism of pressure is not only the war, with conventional and biological weapons, but also to striking against the social and political bases which are the recruitment pool for combatants, and to destroy the fundamental mechanisms of finance, which are supposedly in the cultivation zones. In the current conditions of revolutionary struggle in Colombia this approach will put the brakes on the peace process and accelerate the war, and all the more so because, as Thomas Hobbes warned, “For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known...” (6) In these circumstances, the insurgent forces are left no option but to take up the gauntlet, as the FARC and ELN spokesmen have declared with complete transparency. The Plan envisages an investment of $7.5 billion over the next six years. $4 billion will come from the Colombian government itself, and the remaining $3.5 billion will be aid from the international community. This paradoxical circumstance, in which a society in crisis, Colombia, uses its own budget to supply the majority of the resources to finance the revival of civil war and a growing international intervention, evidences the incredible contradiction of a government which is prepared to put up money and casualties in order to serve the interests of the superpower and its local associates. The North American war against coca growers began many years ago. Its results in the Andean region have been considerable. For example, Bolivia in 1986 was calculated to have 66,148 hectares under cultivation, which decreased to 21,800 hectares in 1999. The recent mobilizations by the peasants of that country, which forced the government of ex-dictator Hugo Banzer to negotiate a halt to the destruction of these plantations, demonstrated that farmers have not found alternative crops and that their miserable situation is aggravated by neoliberal policies. In Peru, under the civil dictatorship of Fujimori and Montesinos, the cultivated area was 150,400 hectares in 1986 and shrank to 38,700 hectares in 1999. The intensification of poverty levels in Peru goes a long way to explain the explosive growth of the opposition, which is about to topple Fujimori. In contrast, in Colombia, over the same time period, the cultivated area which was 24,240 hectares grew to 122,500 in 1999. But in Colombia, additionally, poppy growing, which was virtually unknown in 1985, occupied 7,500 hectares in 1999, and the cultivated area of marijuana grew from 2,000 to 5,000 hectares in the same period. (7). It’s important to emphasize that the campesinos who dedicate themselves to these crops are not drug dealers; they obtain higher incomes than they could with traditional crops, but they don’t amass the huge fortunes which become possible after processing with chemicals which come from the US and Europe and, above all, after the sale of finalized drugs in the consumer markets, of which 80% are in the opulent North. The so-called aid from North America to combat drug trafficking in Colombia will only bring this brethren people an intensification of its ancestral problems and of the war, with its quota of bloodshed and suffering. In a recent Manifesto for Peace, Nobel Prizewinner José Saramago, among other personalities, has rightly said “that the antidrug policy which affects the small farmers of coca, poppies, and marijuana, completely ignores the profound social problem behind this activity, and militarizes a social problem.” Paradoxically, nothing has been said or done against the powerful, deeply entrenched in the State, among them the military and paramilitaries who “have concentrated in their hands millions of hectares of the best land” on the basis of the violence, black-mail and corruption originating in drug trafficking. But Saramago, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, and Danielle Miterrand say, in the same document, something even worse and more serious: “it is no exaggeration to say that drug profits feed into the North’s financial system on a grand scale.” (8) As of this date, the American Congress and President Clinton have promised aid to Colombia of 1,360 million. As they well know that their local business partners are corrupt, we must suppose that these resources will arrive by droplets.” The distribution of resources, according to the Act Law, as Plan Colombia is known in the archives of the U.S. Congress, will be as follows: $705 million for the Colombian army $205 million for the police and the naval forces. $410 million for security measures in bordering countries. $180 million for illicit crop substitution in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. $100 million for judicial system reform, human rights, and the achievement of peace. The destinations of these broad economic categories is a denial of the version of peace and development which Bill Clinton tried to put across in his visit to Cartagena de Indias on Wednesday the 30th of August, and which Pastrana repeated in Quito on Thursday the 28th and Saturday the 30th of October, in an evident failure of originality. The national daily “El Colombiano” concluded that for every thousand dollars of aid, 700 are for military purposes. The strange thing is that a high percentage of the generous US aid will remain in the US itself. This is the case with the purchase of 30 Blackhawk and 33 Huey helicopters from United Technologies of Connecticut, which makes the Blackhawks, and Textron of Texas, which produces the Bell Huey. Both companies, according to Newsweek magazine, gave $1.25 million to the Democratic and Republican parties, leading the reporters to ask if Plan Colombia is an elegant policy, a dirty policy, or just good business. (9) Furthermore, a good part of the resources destined for military and police preparation will be paid to American experts and Rangers. That this Plan of war against Colombia could be interpreted as a peace Plan will provide lovers of black humor with many opportunities for sarcasm, for whom peace can also be found in the cemetery, but in Colombia a negotiated peace can only come as a result of a profound transformation of the prevailing unjust economic, political, and social structures, or of the total and definitive victory of the insurgent forces, which will open the way to a new era of productive revolutionary changes. Despite what the disciples of neoliberal globalization write, true revolutions, in the last two centuries, have always happened by the second route. 4. Is it a Plan to destroy drug trafficking? From what we have maintained, a fumigation campaign against coca, marijuana, and poppy plantations, even if successful, as in Bolivia and Peru, will only have the effect of displacing cultivation to other regions and countries. This is what happened in the last fifteen years, when Colombia became the new center of cultivation in the Andean region. Even worse, the cultivation areas have multiplied in the last few years, despite the fact that the government and the DEA initiated Glifosato fumigation in 1992 to eradicate illicit crops. Eight years of disaster in this area has resulted in a doubling of the area under cultivation. (10) And history demonstrates that the criminalization of drug use only brings an explosive growth in the market as a consequence. This is what happened in the past when tobacco, alcohol, and opium were prohibited. The history of capitalism, too, shows that as long as there is demand for a product, the supply will grow, legally or illegally. The capitalist drug business is too powerful and important to destroy by turning the campesinos that cultivate the precursory plants into their scapegoats. $400 to $500 billion dollars annually move around the world through this business, in whose sullied orbit the “liberated” Eastern European countries entered forcefully a decade ago from the so-called Marxist totalitarianism, which did not have this problem in its current magnitude. The United States and Europe have the serious responsibility of being enormous consumer markets for drugs, but additionally, they know that without the additives an substances that come from their laboratories, the chemical process necessary for making cocaine would be impossible. “And so, what are we talking about?” asked a prestigious Argentinean journalist. (11) It would warrant more extensive research to remind our peoples of the complete history of the drugs which are being demonized today. The English launched the two Opium Wars, 1839-42 and 1856-50, to force the Chinese people to consume the opium produced in India and commercialized by the Europeans. In the first Opium War alone, the British lion obtained Hong Kong, a part of Shanghai, and access to five ports. The American Puritanism which prohibited alcohol made possible the rise of the Mafia at the start of the 20th century, in the very heart of US society. In Colombia itself the growth of marijuana cultivation appears to be tied to the increase in demand created by the Vietnam War. What’s more, the state legislatures have legalized growing and consuming marijuana for personal use in 11 US states, with the greatest discretion and without making waves in the puritanical and ultraconservative public opinion. This confirms that in the policies of capitalist powers there is no morality, only rates of profit. Coca, which is a basic element of Andean cultures, was an important nutritional substitute and it was praised for its medical possibilities up until the end of the 19th century. For the reasons given, we believe that the war which Plan Colombia entails will only succeed in stimulating this powerful business in other parts of the world; it’s not strange that some researchers consider the whole mess to be nothing more than a collision between the cartels of North and South. The position of the Colombian insurgency on the issue is much clearer and more definitive: the ELN, for instance, insists that “we need to find our own, sovereign way to resolve the problem of drugs in Colombia”. They warn that it is necessary “to create international tools to overcome this problem, with a strategy that takes into account the distinct situation of the growers in relation to those who process and commercialize the drugs and to the financiers, consumers, and money launderers.” In regards to the insurgency’s links to drug trafficking they seek the development of a common position, in terms of “categorical distinction from drug trafficking”. The FARC maintains, in one of its most recent documents: “We reject drug trafficking. But since the American government is using the existence of drug trafficking as a pretext for its criminal actions against the Colombia people, we urge the legalization of drug consumption. That way, the high prices which the illegality of the business produces will be destroyed at the root, consumption will be controlled, the drug addicts will receive clinical attention, and this cancer will be definitively eradicated.” They conclude, “great remedies for great problems”. (12) As any well-informed student knows, the idea of legalization has gained ground in the academic and scientific media in recent years. 5. Is it a strategy to defeat the insurgency? When the socialist camp toppled, many hastened to proclaim the victory of capital and the end of ideology; what’s more, pessimistic voices emerged even from the ranks of the supposed revolutionaries. In the world of globalization the guerrilla struggle seemed unfeasible. In Latin America, at least, we have had the stubborn Zapatistas in Mexico and the FARC and the ELN in Colombia, which have demonstrated with their actions the falsity of these prophecies. Alfredo Rangel, a Colombian analyst whom nobody could call sympathetic to the insurgency, says with respect to this theme: “It’s now common place among many analysts to say that a guerrilla movement which has existed for forty years in the mountains has run out of time”... He adds: “the problem is not that the guerrilla has existed for forty years in the mountains; the problem is that in the last ten years they have grown more than in the previous 32, in terms of territory and of armed men.” The FARC, for example, grew from around 3,600 men and 32 fronts in 1986 to approximately 7,000 men and 60 fronts in 1995; the ELN, for its part, grew from 800 men and 11 fronts to 3,000 men and 32 fronts over the same period.” (13) Five years later it is calculated that the FARC has 300 fronts and a little more than 18,000 armed men, distributed throughout every Department and region of Colombia except San Andrés. If they can continue the rate of growth of the last decade and find a way to unify, the FARC and the ELN will have enormous possibilities of fulfilling their strategic objectives. Reversing these possibilities must be one of the central objectives of Plan Colombia. According to Eduardo Pizarro, in the last two years alone there have been three high-level military meetings to plan actions which will keep the Colombian insurgency from becoming a serious factor in the destabilization of regional security. (14). Furthermore, the ever obliging OAS, in reelecting Gaviria as Secretary General in 1999 in Guatemala, may have opened up a dialogue to plan the possible and necessary interventions in defense of democracy and against subversion. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the Andean subregion has become a powder keg, through the effects of neoliberal policies. Bolivia, once held up as a model, has shattered. Fujimori and Montesino’s Peru is falling apart. In Ecuador the patriotic elements of the military and the indigenous people are a time bomb waiting to explode. In Venezuela, Colonel Hugo Chavez has seriously decided to revive Bolivarian traditions. All of this is very damaging to monopolistic capital, above all Americans, who need Venezuelan oil and feeds off the enormous resources of Colombia (oil, copper, coal, uranium, bauxite, molybdenum, manganese, water, and biodiversity), and who have initiated the dismantling of the Ecuadorian state in order to transform it into a simple territory for voracity and plunder. The war against Colombia will not be easy, and therefore the empire is working with the carrot and the stick. On the one hand, they assist with the peace dialogues; on the other, they accelerate preparations for a war of enormous proportions. But the American-Colombian military-police coalition faces “Guerrillas who have an accumulated tactical experience in irregular warfare which is now probably unmatched in the world; with Manuel Marulanda as a leader, who in these matters has the dimensions of a Vo Nguyen Giap, the strategist of the Vietnamese guerrillas.” (15) 6. The geostrategic contents of Plan Colombia Heinz Dieterich has pointed out, with a vast number of arguments, that Plan Colombia is an attempt to consolidate the hegemony of the United States in a new world order. But this hegemony does not mean the unipolar world which the neoimperialists and their disciples dream of. He believes, with Kissinger, that: “In the post-Cold War world, the United States is the only superpower which still has the ability to intervene in any part of the world. And nevertheless, power has become more diffused and the number of questions to which military force can be applied has decreased.” In this sense, “The United States, although they are a military superpower, can no longer impose their will, because neither their force nor their ideology lends itself to imperial ambitions.” (16) The limits of an open war against the insurgent forces of Colombia are the same as those which, in their time, the Vietnamese people imposed: the possibility of defeating the aggressors. The US, then, seeks to soften the insurgent forces, above all the FARC, in order to force them to sign a peace accord convenient for the Colombian oligarchy. The second major objective of the US is to achieve social control over the nationalist movements that resist neoliberal policies in the Andean region, in order to prevent the probable collapse of democracies teleguided by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The third major objective is to pacify the region in order to reactivate the American Common Market, which would make the continent an undisputed and indisputable zone of American influence. Finally, and encompassing all these aspects, Plan Colombia seeks to better compact the concrete of the support columns that hold up finance capital: revive the arms race, accelerate the dynamics of the industry, above all the chemical sector, and relaunch the drug business itself. As of the writing of this article, the Plan’s implementation continues to encounter voices of resistance in South America. This was the case in the Summit of Chiefs of State held in Brasilia, where, despite the insistence of the US and Colombian delegates, the final resolution did not contain any explicit support for Plan Colombia. Apparently, according to preliminary information, something similar has occurred in the Fourth Meeting of Defense Ministers of the Americas, which ended in Manaos on Thursday, October 19th, and in which the lack of support for the war Plan has supposedly caused the US to warn that “the Plan will be carried out with or without your support”, referring to the militaries. These minimal gestures of dignity and independence must be astounding to a power that assumes everyone must subscribe to the colonial logic. (17) 7. The Manta base and Plan Colombia Between August and December of 1999 I wrote a short book in which I recounted the history of how Yamil Mahuad, Benjamín Ortiz Brennan and Heinz Moeller brought the Manta base elephant into the delicate national china shop. (18) The book fulfilled the mission of denouncing what has been one of the most submissive and infamous international accords in the recent diplomatic history of Ecuador. (19) It would be tragicomic to recapitulate the efforts which the imperial emissaries have made and continue to make, and which are echoed by Ecuador’s government functionaries and absent-minded right wing in an attempt to deny the existing ties between the obsequious gift of the Manta base to the American warmongers and Plan Colombia. Although the declarations of Colombia’s Defense Minister, Luis Fernando Ramírez, in recognizing that the Manta base will provide information to Colombia, (20) confirm our charge that sophisticated electronic satellite spy equipment has been installed in Manta which was previously in Howard Base in Panama; the facts, which are always stubborn, have spoken in our favor. Manta is an advanced strategic location not only for fighting against drug trafficking, as the Yankee military chiefs have publicly recognized, but also an espionage center and air operations base, which will play a number of crucial roles in the evolution of the project of aggression toward Colombia. If there had been a minimum of dignity in current Ecuadorian government and in the Ecuadorian National Congress, the November 2nd accord which handed over the Manta base for a 10-year period would have been denounced and annulled, because it was the Americans themselves who broke the rules of the document they signed. The Accord, which was signed “for the unique and exclusive purpose” of fighting against drugs, was violated when the United States, from its installations in Manta, several times detained boats leaving Ecuadorian ports and carrying migrants to the United States. The Accord has nothing to do with immigration problems, and therefore, the American interference in these matters - from within our own territory – is an open violation of what was signed! The attitude of Chancellor Heinz Moeller has been one of unprecedented submissiveness and cynicism. First he maneuvered in the Special Commission on International Affairs and National Defense to get the infamous accord processed and signed without the knowledge of the Consultant Board on External Relations - a body which has an important moral weight in important decisions -, of the Congress plenary or the Constitutional Tribunal, which should have ruled on it as a matter of course, since this is the procedure established in the reigning State Constitution. He next dedicated himself full-time to trying to implicate the FARC in a series of delinquent acts, or open provocation, surely set up by the CIA, in the provinces of the Amazon. This was the case in the incident that took place in Conoaco on Saturday May, 13, in the province of Orellana, that Moeller, without any basis, attributed to FARC. Later his version was contradicted by the police and army of Ecuador. With his counseling, double talk has also been a conduct characteristic of President Gustavo Noboa. During his visit to Bogota he spoke of peace, giving the impression he was going to take his distance from Plan Colombia. At the Brazilian Summit, Friday the first of September, he went further, emphasizing: "It is time to attack drug use in all countries". “He revealed, reports a press release, how an Ecuadorian family affected by drug problems in a neighborhood of Los Angeles, United States was not considered worthy of police protection for the sole reason of being Latin American”. (22) But this discourse, as it seems, was left hanging in Brazil, for in Pastrana´s visit to Ecuador the 29th and 30th of September, it became evident that President Noboa and Congress President Hugo Quevedo, were firm and convinced partners of Plan Colombia in the Andean Region. The early results of this infamous and fratricidal association have been negative for our people, confirming the warnings of Monsignor Luis Alberto Luna Tobar, that: "It is evident that the country is part of Plan Colombia through its collaboration at the Manta Base." He also pointed out, with the equanimity and maturity that are characteristic of him: "This is a very serious moment for Ecuador. I do not believe that the country should directly intervene in the problems of Colombia; it is not prudent to take part, nor favor or oppose any of the groups involved in the conflict." Christian reasoning that I understand perfectly. Bishop Gonzalo López de Sucumbios has reported that bilateral trade with Colombia in that province has been reduced by 65% as a result of the first incidents, adding that some 8,000 Ecuadorians workers will lose their jobs in Colombia as a result of the fumigation. The Prefect of Carchi, General René Yandún, has declared himself in the same sense. In a forum which took place the 8th of September in Sucumbios, which the main elected authorities of Esmeraldas Carchi and Sucumbios attended, the participants requested that the National Government declare the northern provinces of the country a neutral zone in the face of the Colombian conflict. This demonstrates that among the people and some of their democratic authorities there exists common sense and realism. The United States Ambassador and Heinz Moeller, worried by the continuing growth of opposition voices to the participation of Ecuador in Plan Colombia, have tried to calm the protests of these sectors, designing on paper a contingency plan for development of the northern part of the country, to be financed with a contribution of 15 million dollars offered by the United States Secretary of State. The Colombian refugees continue their movement towards Ecuador However, the largest wave will be produced when the fungus Fusarium Oxisporum, a mutating and migrating herbicide that has been labeled by critics as a chemical weapon, developed in the laboratories of the Agricultural Research Service of the United States begins to be dispersed in the Amazon, and the gun shots of the war of real aggression sound, as will those of the resistance. The united insurgency and the people of Colombia will rise up against the traffickers of death. If the fungus is utilized, ignoring the growing condemnation of world wide public opinion, not only will we be faced with the danger of a terrible destruction of biodiversity, but also the problems of hunger and ill-health, which affect the majority of our people, could be heightened, since it has been proved that the fungus destroys basic crops and has grave affects on the health of humans and animals. It is unfortunate to say that there exists multiple evidence that this multiplied tragedy will be the gift the Empire and its allies have prepared for our people for the next Christmas and New Year. 8. Should we allow ourselves to board the war wagon like cattle to the slaughter house? The kidnapping of the ten foreign petroleum technicians carried out in the early morning of Thursday, October 12, in Pompeya, on the boundary between Sucumbios and Orellana, at 100 kilometers as the crow flies from the Colombian border, proves that the dirty war has been established in Ecuador, along with its unforeseeable and tragic consequences. The Armed Forces of Ecuador, in a press release, and the Vice President of the Republic hurriedly attributed the act to FARC. The insurgents, once again, have contradicted that version, denouncing the deed, "as a maneuver of the CIA as an attempt to unify all the countries of the border in Plan Colombia [24]". FARC has taken advantage of the opportunity to ratify its politics of principle, adopted in the National Guerrilla Conference of the 2nd of April, 1993 that converts in a obligatory norm for all its combatants the "decision to not militarily intervene against the armies of bordering countries in their territory." On the other hand, it would not be the first time in which the apparatus of North American espionage multiply provocation of this kind in an attempt to justify a situation which, until today, does not have any justification or explanation. What is Ecuador doing, involved as an ally in this war, if we are not cultivators, nor processors, nor great consumers of drugs? What dark interests moved first Jamil Mahuad and later Gustavo Noboa to compromise our Armed Forces and Ecuadorian people in a war in which we do not belong? With what arguments can the mobilization of more than 4,500 men of our Army to the provinces of the northern border be justified in the midst of the profound economic crisis that has hit all of us and at a unsustainable cost [25]? What is the content of the secret commitments that the Government of Gustavo Noboa has made with the United States Government to support Plan Colombia? Hopefully, these questions can be clarified before the fungus rains down on us and the brutal language of war begins to impose its inexorable and painful logic. In this terrible circumstance, what is the duty of Ecuadorians? First, to demand the immediate suspension of the Manta Agreements that transform us into a base of espionage and aggression against the insurgent and democratic forces of Colombia. Second, prevent the soldiers and officers of our Armed Forces from being compromised through acts of provocation, and utilized as cannon fodder in a war of aggression against a people that is united to ours through historic links of blood from the battles of Pichincha and the Portete of Tarqui. Third, demand that the government of Ecuador declare neutrality towards the Colombian conflict, so that from the diplomatic field it can develop all the actions necessary to support the search for a negotiated and peaceful solution to this long and painful problem but without any type of foreign intervention. To remain impassive and silent in the face of the North American operations, and the submissive government conduct, would mean to let ourselves be hauled on board the war wagon like cattle to the slaughter house, an inadmissible attitude in the people of Píntag and Rumiñahui, Manuela Saénz and Eloy Alfaro. (*) Translators note: The quotes from the Plan Columbia document are a free translation from the Spanish version. Notes: [1] Alfredo Molano Bravo, in an article titled, El Plan Colombia y el conflicto armado" maintains that: Presented in Washington, a team of the Department of State, National Planning of Colombia - and a NOXY technician - re-elaborated the project, defining its object as the war against drug trafficking. [2] Alfredo Molano Bravo. Cited article, p. 3. [3] While reviewing the text, from Bogotá´s El Tiempo, the news arrives that the Colombian Ministry of Defense has dismissed 388 uniformed persons(89 officers and 299 sub-officers) in an attempt to purge those implicated in human rights violations. El Comercio of Quito, Wednesday April 18, A6. [4] Carlos Trujillo Restrepo has written a revealing book, "Del café a la coca", that moves between novel and testimonial account, in which he describes this transit. Editor CAR TRES, Calí, Colombia, lst Edition, l996. [5] General Gustavo Pardo Ariza, Cogobierno desde la Catedral, Editorial Grijalbo, Santa Fé de Bogotá, lst Edition, l997. The book denounces the political power acquired by Pablo Escobar, his influence during 17 years in national politics and his connivance with President César Gaviria, who was later promoted, by the empire, to Secretary General of the OAS. [6] Thomas Hobbes, Leviatán, Tecnos, Madrid, l987, Chp. 13. [7] This modest growth in marijuana cultivation explains why the United States has become self-sufficient in production of the plant, according to the Embassador in Bogotá. [8] anifesto for peace and human rights in Colombia, circulated by the Agencia Latinoamericana de Información, ALAI, in Ecuador. [9] Plan Colombia, document circulated by ALAI, p. 10. [10] Juan Carranza Coronado, Cuando lluevan hongos, Enfoque Internacional, Diario El Comercio, Quito, Sunday August 6, 2000, A5. [11] Carlos O. Suárez, Globalización y mafias en América Latina, Dirple ediciones, Buenos Aires, l997, p. 75. [12] Boletín Informativo del Pleno del Estado Mayor Central de las FARC- EP, March 21-25, 2000, p. 14 [13] Alfredo Rangel Suárez, Colombia: Guerra en el fin de siglo, Editores Tercer Mundo S.A. Bogotá, Third reprint, June l999, p. 11-12. [14] Eduardo Pizarro León Gómez, Colombia en el ojo del huracán, Revista Nueva Sociedad No. 163, p. 5. [15] Alfredo Rangel Suárez, cited work, p. 85. [16] Henry Kissinger, La diplomacia, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, Third reprint, l996, p. 802-833. [17] According to the AFP wire, the Ecuadorian Minister of Defense, Admiral Hugo Unda Aguirre, is in favor of a regional solution to the problem of drug trafficking and guerilla warfare in Colombia. Finally, the real position of Ecuador shows its head! The quote of the Minister implies total support for North American military alliance with Pastrana! [18] This image was taken from an editorial by Juan Fernando Salazar, titled El Plan Manta, Sunday, August 6, A4 [19] Manuel Salgado Tamayo, ¿Guerra sucia en Ecuador? Los documentos secretos de Manta, Ediciones La Tierra, Quito, April 2000. [20] Interview by Dimitri Barreto, special correspondent in Bogotá, Diario El Comercio, Tuesday August 29, 2000, A2. [21] Diario El Comercio, Saturday July 1, 2000, states that since February 1999, on six distinct occasions, Ecuadorian boats have been detained by U.S. coast guards in international waters, that were detected from Manta. p. A3. [22] El Comercio, Sunday September 3, A3. [23] As wars, above all revolutionary wars, are like earthquakes, they come without prior warning, Friday October 20, in the departments of Antioquia, Chocó and Putumayo, the FARC unleashed a violent offensive against the army, leaving 102 dead. [24] The FARC suspicion appears to be confirmed, since U.S. staff did not hesitate to contribute the deeds to the FARC, but the Director of the Andean Area in Washington, Philip Chicola, has declared that "this kidnapping has nothing to do with Colombia". El Comercio, Wednesday October 18, 2000, A2. [25] This is the figure given by El Comercio of Quito, Tuesday October 17, 2000, Primera Plana, A6. * Manuel Salgado Tamayo is a professor at the Central University of Ecuador and the Catholic University of Quito and former Vice President of the National Congress of Ecuador.