Plan Colombia: --sends $1.5 billion from the U.S. government to Colombia for the first two years of a six year plan; --is the largest foreign aid package ever sent to a Latin American government, signed in July 2000; --makes Colombia the third largest recipient of US aid in the world (only Israel and Egypt surpass this amount) and the #1 recipient of military aid ($2 million per day); --is publicly justified under the War on Drugs; --is actually a response to "a long, drawn out struggle [50+ years] between large land owners and small peasants, between cattle ranching and subsistence agriculture, between members of a privileged class who own most of the land and campesinos who lack any influence, resources or access to credit," according to A. Reyes of National University; --allocates $600 million to train 3,000 new soldiers who (by law) have no prior massacres on their records and have no high school diplomas, to push into rebel held areas of Southern Colombia with 60 Blackhawk and Huey helicopters that shoot 20 rounds per second and spray herbicides on coca crops, food crops and forests; --plans to displace 10,000 rural, mostly Afro-Colombians and Indigenous people in a country which already has the third largest refugee population worldwide. The Paramilitary Armies in Colombia: --were responsible for 400+ massacres last year; --formed in 1981 to protect narcotics cartels; --were organized in depth by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1990; --train with, travel with and telephone the official Colombian military; --torture and kill suspected supporters of the rebels (1,500 killed between August 1999 and march 2001); --are currently funded by drug growers, narcotics traffickers and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (stated publicly by paramilitary leader and former CIA operative Carlos Castano); --engage in "social cleansing" of homeless, addicts, and prostitutes; --publicly target human rights workers and assassinate political candidates; --were named by the United States Congress as the #1 group the Colombian military must sever ties with in order to receive US aid (President Clinton waived this requirement two days before he left office). Eighty percent of all labor union members killed worldwide in 1998 were killed by Colombian paramilitaries. Crop Fumigation: Coca requires little labor and can be harvested several times a year, enabling many women with children to be financially independent. Growing industrial annual crops (such as tomatoes or soy) or giving up land and working in the city increases woman's dependence on men. --destroys coca fields (now mostly operated by small farmers, since the large cartels have split up) as well as food crops and "alternative development crops" for transition into the legal economy; --is done primarily by private US military contractors; --causes serious respirator and skin problems; --destroys fragile ecosystems in the world's second most biodiverse country; --has increased every year from 1995 to 1999, while coca yield has increased nearly threefold, according to US government statistics; --generated $24 million for Monsanto between 1992 and 1998; --targets the 72 indigenous groups who remain alive. "The government knows that it cannot negotiate with the indigenous to gain access to the natural resources on our lands, so it is waging a war that is intended to kill us or drive us off our territory." --National Organization of Indigenous Colombians   US Interests in Colombia: Why Is This Happening? --Colombia sells the US as much oil now as Kuwait did when the Gulf War started. --Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela sell the US more oil than all the Mid East countries combined. --Only 20% of the probable oil fields in Colombia have been explored; rebels protect the rest. --Forty percent of foreign investment in Colombia comes from the US --When Clinton visited Colombia in August 2000, the top executives of 20 corporations went with him, from oil and coal companies to America Online to Liz Claiborne (urbanized refugees = cheap labor). --A 1999 International Monetary Fund loan to bail out the Colombian economy demanded that all public utilities be sold to private owners. --The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) aims to take NAFTA hemisphere-wide, annexing another 650 million people and $9 trillion in capital. --Plan Colombia's purpose is "defending the operations of Occidental Petroleum, British Petroleum, Texas Petroleum and securing control of future Colombian fields," according to a former US Special Forces Intelligence Sergeant who trained Colombian troops.   The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC): --formed between 1948 and 1958 by peasants to protect themselves from the government crackdown after nationwide riots; --now fight paramilitaries and crop fumigation; --control the southernmost 40% of the country; --are the best funded and most capable guerrilla army, some say, in Latin American history; --receive approximately 20% of funding from the narcotics trade, with the rest of the money coming from other crops and ransom for 1,600 yuppies kidnapped each year; --can defeat Colombian military battalions in face-to-face combat in several locations at once; --tried to go "above-ground" in the 1980s; 3,000 were assassinated; --is now made up of 16,000 men and women (approximately 30% of FARC guerrillas are women); --bombed oil pipelines 31 times in September 2000; --allegedly engage in forced recruiting, "limited" massacres and are not anti-industrial, even though they are fighting for control of the second most biodiverse country in the world; --have been granted a Switzerland-sized territory by Colombian President Andres Pastrana; --are widely supported in rural areas.   The Army of National Liberation (ELN): --was formed by college students in 1964; --is now between 3,000 and 10,000 strong; --focus almost entirely on attacking the oil industry in the North, especially Occidental Petroleum in Los Angeles, a company which is destroying the U'Wa tribe and their land (Al Gore's father was president of Occidental, and Al owns stock); --bombed Oxy pipelines 98 times last year, pressuring Oxy on February 28, 2001, to halt its largest operation in Colombia indefinitely; --are funded largely through extortion and hijackings; --unfortunately, are Marxists.   Indigenous Culture --Colombia is home to the largest number of distinct bird species and possibly the largest number of psychoactive plants of any nation on earth. All are being destroyed by Plan Colombia, as are the cultures based around them. --Beyond their inherent worth and valuable knowledge, these cultures may play a key role in any continued existence of the biosphere and thus humanity, because they are deeply biocentric. They offer an alternative to the death culture of the industrial world.   Dyncorp is the largest US private military contractor, doing Colombian crop fumigation under a $600 million secret contract with the US State Department. Citigroup is the world's largest bank, and the world's largest money launderer. According to the United States Senate, much of this money comes from drug corrupted South American rulers. Enron, "the world's leading energy company," sent its vice president with Clinton to Colombia and was George W. Bush's #1 campaign contributor. Eli Lilly makes Prozac -- and if you don't like it, you can shut up and eat your pills!   Good web sites not connected to this project: Narconews www.narconews.com War on Drugs reporting Colombia Report www.colombiareport.org Center for International Policy www.ciponline.org/newnote.htm Daily news Infoshop www.infoshop.org CrimethInc www.crimethinc.com This report compiled by: Anarchist Action Collective aaceugene P.O. Box 11331, Eugene, Oregon 97440 Working towards alternatives to and REVOLT against industrial civilization! > Back to Cascadia Media Collective Home Page .