cannabisnews.com: U.S. Steps Up Drug War in Colombia





U.S. Steps Up Drug War in Colombia
Posted by FoM on November 13, 1999 at 11:59:43 PT
By Karl Penhaul
Source: Reuters
The United States is due to begin training two new Colombian army anti-drug battalions next spring in a move political analysts said on Saturday could give Washington a more direct role in the long-running war against drugs and Marxist rebels.
Gen. Keith Huber, operations director of the U.S. Army's Miami-based Southern Command, said on Friday that each of the elite units would comprise some 950 men -- similar to the Colombian army's first anti-drug battalion set up earlier this year with U.S. know-how at an estimated cost of some $70 million.Plans to create the units were outlined months ago but Huber gave the first firm timetable. He said all three units, together with a joint U.S.-Colombian military intelligence center would be based in southern Colombia, a region rife with illegal drug plantations and a stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's largest surviving 1960s rebel army.Despite some $289 million in U.S. aid last fiscal year, cocaine and heroin production has spiraled in Colombia. Human rights groups and some political analysts argue Washington is looking to reverse that setback by setting up the battalions that will be subject to heavy U.S. influence and thereby give the Pentagon a much greater say in how Colombia's three-decade-old war is fought.``We have been told to get prepared to train (two new anti-drug battalions) and that will begin next spring. There is no funding as yet,'' Huber, who served as a Special Forces adviser during the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, told reporters on the sidelines of a two-day conference about Colombia at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.``This is a war, a conflict that we must win collectively. (Drugs) is a chemical and a weapon of mass destruction that kills our children one at a time,'' he added.Officials in Washington and Bogota accuse Colombia's 20,000 guerrillas of fueling a two-fold increase in cocaine production and a 20 percent rise in heroin output over the last four years. They say the rebels earn some $600 million a year in drug profits to bankroll an uprising that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in just 10 years -- a charge the guerrillas deny.``The enemy in Colombia is a business enterprise and if you want to look at how to defeat that you must look at how they grow (the drugs) process it and transport it,'' Huber said.Despite on-going wrangles in the U.S. Congress that have blocked a planned $1.5 billion, three-year aid package to Colombia, the creation of the new units seems unlikely to be delayed. The necessary funding could be drawn from U.S. Department of Defense coffers with little or no accountability to Congress.Rights groups see the creation of the battalions as the start of a much more significant U.S. role in Colombia. Washington already has some 220 U.S. personnel, including soldiers and advisers, in Colombia at any one time.``This represents a quantitative and a qualitative shift. This creates from scratch U.S.-trained units and they (the United States) will be maintaining contacts through the joint intelligence command,'' said George Vickers, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), who also attended the conference.``It's a mechanism that could give Southern Command not necessarily a determining role but certainly a strong influence over what will be done,'' he said.Gen. Ernesto Gilibert, sub-director of Colombia's National Police, however, believed the issue was simply one of the army giving greater operational support to the police, which until now has taken a lead role in drug interdiction efforts.But many political analysts continue to warn that under the pretext of fighting drugs Washington will be sucked into the quagmire of Colombia's guerrilla war.``Some people are making the same mistakes they made with Vietnam in 1963,'' said Cynthia Watson, associate dean of the National War College in Washington, D.C. ``Colombia is not the first place where the potential for mission creep is great.'' Published: November 13, 1999Copyright © 1996-1999 Reuters Limited.Related Articles:Who's Against The Us Drug War? - 11/13/99 http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread3656.shtmlClinton Vows To Get More Anti-Drug Aid to Colombia-11/10/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread3632.shtml34 Nations To Coordinate Drug War - 11/05/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread3575.shtml
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Comment #3 posted by kaptinemo on November 14, 1999 at 18:05:27 PT
Policy wonks...with room temp IQ's
When I was a grunt in the Army, we used to sing a marching song that went: "Here we go again. Same old s--- again." And the Army ought to know about this particular kind of s---.The signs are as plain as the noses on their faces. Unwanted intervention in someone elses civil war. Excuses such as "combatting Communism in our hemisphere" (*Our* hemisphere? Who sold *that* bill of goods?) The 'scourge of drugs' now being portrayed as a chemical weapon of mass destruction to be dealt with in a military fashion. And of course, we can't forget we are 'saving the children'.Spin, spin, spin. They are , as someone put it, running this up the flagpole to see who salutes it. If everyone gives this bilge the reaction it deserves, then we may yet avoid the spectacle of the bodybags arriving at Dover AFB care of Bogata.
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Comment #2 posted by Doctor Dave on November 13, 1999 at 20:34:06 PT
Military Intelligence: the ultimate oxymoron
Our warfare-trained Huber notes, "(Drugs) is a chemical and a weapon of mass destruction that kills our children one at a time".Excuse me? I'm no military expert, but the last time I checked, weapons of mass destruction kill a lot of people at a time. And the people are never willing participants.--------------------If the federal government really wanted to end the drug war, legalization would stop pouring money into the escalating armies of both factions. Putting additional funding into failed policy doesn't make it work any better. Duh.Doctor Dave"A nation that makes war on huge numbers of its own people can never truly be free."
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Comment #1 posted by Scott on November 13, 1999 at 19:58:15 PT:
Oh god...
Oh god, I hope that the world ends in 2000 (which I don't believe it will), just so this entire fiasco can be over with. I wish Amerika wasn't so full of power and money hungry bastards who don't give a shit about the society who pays their salary.
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