My campaign demands that the U.S. government stop its massive military aid to the Colombian government, withdraw all U.S. military advisors from Colombia, and stop meddling in that Latin American nation's political affairs. The $1.3 billion military funding package recently adopted by the Clinton administration and Congress is a flagrant violation of Colombia's national sovereignty and another step in U.S. military intervention in South America, such as the U.S. air base in neighboring Ecuador.

Washington is sending military helicopters, spying equipment, and U.S. troops to train Colombian army batallions--all in the name of "fighting drug traffickers." That is one of the pretexts the U.S. government uses, along with fighting "terrorism," to justify its policies of aggression abroad, and increasingly against the rights of working people at home.

In this case it is a thinly disguised cover for stepping up Washington's military presence in Colombia and through the northwest region of South America, where the U.S. capitalists have big stakes. Their concern is not with drugs, peace, or pressing social problems. It is with controlling the vast natural resources, protecting the profits from their lucrative investments, and maintaining imperialist domination over the entire region, which the U.S. billionaire families view as part of their "back yard."

Under the banner of backing the Colombian regime's "anti-narcotics" campaign, the Clinton administration is arming, financing, and training battalions of the Colombian army to fight the guerrillas who have been engaged in a 40-year-long conflict with the government. Army officials collaborate with right-wing death squads, tied to wealthy drug capitalists, in waging terror against Colombian peasants and workers.

The source of the social crisis and violence wracking Colombia is not the guerrillas but the capitalist system itself--which has generated record unemployment, the dispossession of small farmers, and the sucking of massive wealth out of that country through the debt squeeze by U.S. and other international banks. The drug business itself is a multibillion-dollar enterprise that enriches the ruling families.

The U.S. big-business press smears working people in Colombia as drug smugglers or at best as helpless victims needing Washington's intervention. That's a lie. Workers and peasants in Colombia are the only force that can confront the social catastrophe, as they are doing with their resistance today to the government's austerity measures. Resolving the crisis and bringing real peace will only come through working people, as they gain political experience and leadership, organizing a mass revolutionary movement that ultimately takes political power from the capitalist minority.