Myths and truths about Plan Colombia
01/11/2000
- Opinión
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.
https://www.alainet.org/es/node/105161?language=en
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