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News :: Miscellaneous |
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The Columbia Deception Your Tax $ at Work |
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by Fred P
(No verified email address) |
04 May 2001
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Paramilitary death squads are terrorizing the Columbian countryside, killing community leaders. Texaco and BP are hiring paramilitary troops to defend oil pipelines. In the Putamayo region, Monsanto herbicide is being sprayed from the air, sickening thousands and destroying food crops. President Bush is asking for an increase in U.S. funding for the war, up from 1.3 billion dollars last year. |
I attended a disturbing lecture last night. A human rights worker came to speak about her visit to Columbia. She works with Columbia Support Network. She traveled with a high level delegation that included U.N. representatives and people trying to stop School of the Americas. They visited several villages in war torn areas, as well as meeting top officials in Bogota.
She showed us pictures she had taken of devastated crop fields where banana trees were lying dead, and plantains rotting. Monsanto Roundup is being sprayed indiscriminately on everything. Four planes fly overhead, spraying the herbicide, flanked by fighter jets or black hawk helicopters. They spray very high and the spray drifts everywhere. They spray Roundup at a strength five times what Monsanto recommends for U.S. crop spraying.
In one village, three hundred people were hospitalized after they were sprayed. Children are suffering nausea and dying of diarrhea. But that is not the worst of it.
Paramilitary death squads are gaining strength. They travel from town to small city in the coca and oil producing regions, terrorizing the inhabitants and forcing them off their farms and out of their homes. They kill human rights leaders and farming leaders. Our presenter described how she had to meet with many human rights leaders in secret because if they talk to Americans they can be killed. During one meeting, the leader of a woman\'s shelter that takes in refugee women and children, received a telephone threat from the paramilitary death squad while the American delegation was meeting with her.
We saw pictures of the homeless encampments in Bogota where the refugees forced from their villages take refuge in the lower levels of parking structures and under bridges. Many are women with children whose husbands were killed by the paras.
The area where paramilitary activity is highest is near the center of Columbia. Strangely enough this is not a big coca producing area. Rather it is where the majority of Columbia\'s oil is produced for U.S. companies. The paramilitary comes in to town, driving in jeeps and announcing they will kill everyone. Then they come back and chop up the town leaders in front of everyone. They say they will return in one week. Mostly everyone leaves town. Property is then available for drilling, at no cost. Texaco and BP have hired local paramilitary groups for \"security,\" as the left-wing guerillas from the FARC often target the oil pipelines.
The whole thing is very disturbing. We saw pictures of one small town in the Putamayo region where the mayor is constantly surrounded by bodyguards carrying Uzis. He has been in office one year and is proud that he has lasted longer than any mayor in recent years. The others were killed by the paramilitary groups.
A local refugee from Columbia spoke about how he and his family were forced to flee because of his father\'s connections with the FARC. His father was a farmer and social activist, and received death threats. The man had been a policeman and described how the police were paid to go to refugee encampments in villages and kick over their cooking pots and throw away their food. He was crying as he spoke, but so happy that people here are learning about the problems.
Poverty is intense in Columbia. The land is very rich, and farming could be very profitable, but food distribution is not set up. Many farmers do not have trucks and even if they do the roads are bad. So they grow a lot of food, but they cannot get it to market. They grow great chocolate, but none of it goes direct to the U.S. market. The distribution channels are not set up, so they cannot make very much money off their crops.
When FARC rebels offer to help them grow cocaine and pay them one hundred times what they make off food crops it is very enticing. They can send their children to be educated. They can buy different foods for their family.
Then the FARC says they will pay more if they will fight with the guerillas. Then the paramilitary groups come in and offer even higher pay if they will fight with the paras. The paramilitary even offers health insurance - and how can they do that without total state complicity.
The woman named Kate, who presented the slides an photographs showed pictures of the delegation\'s meeting with Columbia\'s attorney general. The attorney general showed copies of warrants for the leader of the paramilitary (AUG) forces, and many of his top killers, but neither the military nor the state police will take action on the warrants. These military and police received 1.3 billion in aid from the U.S. this year.
President Bush, Dick Cheney and their friends are heavily invested in companies that do business in Columbian oil and military supply. Bush is asking for an increase in the military aid we are providing to Columbia. An increase from the current 1.3 billion dollars.
Please try to write to your Congresspersons and tell them to oppose military aid. Out of the 1.3 billion dollars, 80% goes to the military. 20 % is designated for social programs, but these social programs have not materiliazed. We should demand that any aid package be designated for social programs, not military activity.
The fumigation program is sickening thousands at the profit of Monsanto corporation. You might want to divest from investment funds that own Monsanto, and write an e-mail to Monsanto describing why you have done so. Or write CEO Hendrik A. Verfaille at 800 N. Lindberg Blvd., Creve Coeur, MO 63167.
Thousands have disappeared in Columbia, similar to past situations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It is time that we act to stop these atrocities. Families are being torn apart and poverty is increasing as Columbians are forced off their family farms and out of their villages. Strangely enough, cocaine acreage has increased over the last five years by five times! The paramilitary leader, in an interview on national television, said that the paramilitary gets seventy percent of its money from cocaine. So are we winning the war on drugs?
We are being deceived.
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