The deployment followed the capture of three "civilian contractors" near Florencia. The men, who were on board a Pentagon-owned light plane that crashed, were seized by soldiers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest antigovernment guerrilla organization. The Cessna had been flying over coca fields 240 miles south of Bogotá, in rebel-held territory.

Two others on board--a fourth U.S. citizen and an intelligence official in the Colombian military--were killed. Bush told the TV network Telemundo on February 19 that one death was "clearly an execution" at the hands of "cold-blooded killers." U.S. officials later said, however, that "initial autopsy reports indicated they had been shot while fighting or ‘trying to bolt,’" reported the Washington Post. The "troops’ mission is to provide additional intelligence and guidance to Colombian military forces" in pursuit of the prisoners and their FARC captors, officials told the big-business daily. They have "the capacity" to carry out a rescue operation on their own, said one.

The dispatch of the 150 troops brings U.S. military personnel in Colombia to 411, operating alongside some 300 more "contract workers." While Congress is supposed to review the stationing of more than 400 troops in Colombia, the president can waive such restrictions by claiming that they are needed in a search and rescue operation involving U.S citizens.

Plan Colombia is the centerpiece of U.S. imperialism’s growing military presence in the Andean region. Passed under President Clinton, the $1.3 billion package of military assistance made Colombia the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, after Israel and Egypt. The Bush administration has announced that an additional $1 billion in military assistance will be sent over the next two years.

The military links were first bolstered under the banner of combating Colombia’s trade in illegal drugs. Last year Washington explicitly expanded the brief of its military mission there to include assistance to the government in its battles against the guerrilla forces, presenting this step as part of its "war on terrorism." The 18,000-member FARC and the National Liberation Army, a smaller guerrilla group, were designated as "terrorists," along with right-wing paramilitary forces.

In 2002 Washington also allocated $94 million to help finance a Colombian army brigade charged with guarding Occidental Petroleum’s 500-mile pipeline in the northeast of the country. Nearly half the oil imported into the United States comes from the Americas, with Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador accounting for more than 2 million barrels per day, about 20 percent of total U.S. imports.

In the same year Congress approved Plan Colombia’s expansion into the Andean Regional Initiative, under which U.S. troops are to train some 4,000 Colombian soldiers in "counter-insurgency operations."

The initiative includes funding for Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, with Colombia still receiving about half the billion-dollar package.

The big majority of funds provided under both Plan Colombia and the Andean Initiative are earmarked for transport helicopters and other military equipment and training. Spending priorities are set in Washington, stated Luis Alberto Moreno, the country’s ambassador to the United States. "This package still operates on the golden rule--he who puts in the gold makes the rules," he said.

"Civilian contractors" like the ones captured near Florencia form a sizable part of Washington’s intervention in Colombia. Thomas Janis, one of the U.S. citizens on the downed flight, was an employee of DynCorp, a subsidiary of military hardware producer Northrup Grumman that "has 355 U.S. and third-country contractors working in a State Department–financed counterdrug program" there, reported the March 7 Miami Herald.  
 
‘Civilian warriors’
Washington uses 4,000 to 6,000 of these "corporate warriors" in Kuwait today, stated the Herald, assigning them to plan and monitor the drilling of troops, and maintain planes and weapons systems.

The sweeps against coca-growing areas--carried out under Plan Colombia and other militarization programs--that masquerade as antidrug initiatives have frequently worsened the already dire conditions facing the country’s peasants.

The regime of Alvaro Uribe "has been pursuing the U.S. crop eradication program with enthusiasm," noted the Washington Post on March 9. In the three months after his inauguration last August, 115,000 acres of coca were sprayed in Putumayo province alone--more than half the national total of the previous year. Farmers complain that the herbicides used also kill food crops.

The program "has pushed thousands of farmers out of the province, strangled the local economy, and encouraged new coca cultivation in the Amazon jungle," reported the Post.

Uribe’s predecessor, Andres Pastrana, voiced an occasional reluctance to follow Washington’s dictates, according to the big-business daily. His national security advisor complained that U.S. officials "applied constant pressure to accelerate the pace of coca spraying, viewing it as cheaper than ‘alternative development’ and crop substitution."

For many peasants coca is the only crop that can provide the possibility of a living income. The price of the country’s former principal crop of coffee has plummeted from an average of $1.20 per pound during the 1980s to 60 cents per pound today, reported Reuters. "In the 1980s, coffee accounted for half of Colombia’s exports," while last year coffee exports made up just 6 percent of the total, the dispatch noted.

This "coffee meltdown" brings "hunger, migration and debt" to vast stretches of the Colombian countryside, the report added. The same impact is felt in other coffee growing areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Meanwhile, "huge profits" are being raked in by coffee companies such as Folgers, Nestlé, Sara Lee, and Philip Morris’s Maxwell House.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home