Thantos -The Greek God of Death (GW Bush)
“Have I got a plan for Colombia!” words 3050
By Marcel Idels, EcoSolidaridad-Andes Libre

“The US Terror War against the Ecology and the poor people of Colombia is caused by the middle class and the elites in the US who are addicted to oil, coal, cocaine, heroin and political apathy. - Or is it the Colombian Elite addicted to drug profits, US dollars and Miami trips?”— Cristo Dahlman, EcoSolidaridad-Andes correspondent in Quito, Ecuador.

Plan Colombia:
1.Sends $2 billion from the US government to Colombia for the first two years of a six year plan.
2. Is the largest foreign aid package ever sent to a Latin American government.
3. Colombia is the largest recipient of US military aid – at $2 million per day.
4. Plan Colombia is publicly justified under the failed War on Drugs.
5. The goal of the plan is actually to drive peasants off the land so that large land owners (also known as Coca and opium dealers and growers) can seize lands for cattle ranching, palm oil plantations and corporate extraction of coal, oil, minerals and hydro potentials.
This is a 50 year struggle between small farmers and the privileged class who already own most of the land and wealth of Colombia.
6. Three years ago the US drafted this plan as a way to attack the peasant-based guerrillas of the FARC-EP and the ELN through a push into rebel held areas of Southern Colombia.
7. The US subsidized United Technology’s Sikorsky (Connecticut) and Textron’s Bell Helicopter (Texas) to give 60 Blackhawk and Huey helicopters to the war effort. They are used to spray herbicides on coca crops, food crops, peasants and forests. When the Colombian government decided to go to war against the FARC-EP the US knew this equipment would be used by the most brutal and corrupt military in Latin American history.
8. US planners know that 10-20,000 rural people—mostly Afro-Colombians and Indigenous people—are being displaced and endangered by the militarization– this in a country which already has the third largest refugee population worldwide.
9. What the US promised would “win” the War on Drugs, has now become a War for Thugs – The Colombian government allows their armed forces to collaborate with the Drug Trafficking, rightwing, death squad paramilitaries of the AUC.
10. The citizens of the US are spending billions of dollars for “A War for Thugs with Drugs” that will kill 8 to 12 thousand poor people in the next two years.
11. Corruption and drug payoffs are nearly universal in Colombian politics. Few people believe in democracy and less than 20 percent of eligible voters will “elect” the next president in late May, 2002. This president will likely be
Alvaro Uribe – The candidate of the Drug Cartels, the Death Squads and the Narco-Bourgoisie.

The Rightist Paramilitary Armies in Colombia
“People are brought forward and murdered in front of their fellow villagers. Sometimes they are shot, sometimes they have their heads bashed in with rocks, and sometimes the
paramilitaries utilize hatchets and chainsaws.
In El Tigre US-backed death squads gathered people into a building, doused it with gasoline, set it aflame, and burned the people alive. But that was not a sufficient level of terror and intimidation. They then took people to the bridge over the Putumayo River, beheaded them and dumped their remains in the river. The bodies washed up a day or two later as a reminder that the paramilitaries can erase El Tigre from the map anytime they want to. It is a brutal lesson.
There is a law in Colombia, unwritten, but everybody knows it. It is the "law of silence." In essence, "A closed mouth captures no bullets." Evidence of its power was witnessed everywhere we went in Putumayo. Rarely would anyone talk about human rights abuses other than the fumigation. The dumping of poisons by the United States displaces people, destroys food crops, causes respiratory problems and rashes, is suspected of causing brain damage in young children, poisons water supplies, and kills fish, farm animals, trees, bugs, etc.”—Doug Morris of the Brattleboro Area Peace and Justice Group, December 28, 2001.

These US Narco-Death Squads:
were responsible for 400+ massacres and 3000 deaths last year (about 90 percent of civilian casualties) ;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; engage in "social cleansing" of homeless, addicts, and prostitutes; publicly target human rights workers and assassinate political candidates; were named by the US 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:
destroys coca fields 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 respiratory 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; generated $24 million for Monsanto corporation 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?
1. Colombia sells the US as much oil now as Kuwait did when the Gulf War started.
2. Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela sell the US more oil than all the Mid East countries combined.
3. Only 20% of the probable oil fields in Colombia have been explored; rebels protect the rest.
4. Forty percent of foreign investment in Colombia comes from the US. The US imports 55 percent of Colombia’s legal exports and most of its illegal exports.
5. 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).
6. A 1999 International Monetary Fund loan to bail out the Colombian economy demanded that all public utilities be sold to private owners.
7. 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.
8. DynCorp is the largest US private military contractor, doing Colombian crop fumigation under a $600 million secret contract with the US State Department.
9. 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.
10. Enron, "the world's leading energy company," sent its vice president with Clinton to Colombia and was George W. Bush's#1 campaign contributor.
11. Eli Lilly makes Prozac -- and if you don't like it, you can shut up and eat your pills!
12. Citigroup, Enron, DynCorp and Eli Lilly have interlocking directorates (Common Boards of Directors) and work together with BP, Texas and Occidental petroleum corporations (and Drummond Coal (Georgia) and Coca Cola) to push their profit agenda and security needs on the US and Colombian governments.

Narconews has this summary: 1. The US and Colombian militaries are fighting side by side with, and protecting, the brutal and illegal paramilitary death squads, despite the rhetorical admission by the US State Department that the paramilitaries are "terrorists" and profit-driven narco-kingpins.

2. We reject the cowardly and ignorant statements from some "moderate" quarters that seek to create a moral equivalence between the rebel guerrillas and the paramilitary troops. That view reflects official propaganda, not reality. The rebels oppose the rule of the large landowners, foreign capital, and the Colombian oligarchy. The paramilitaries seek to maintain that status quo. The governments and the paramilitaries, together, wish to enforce a brutal and undemocratic regime to violently prevent every aspect of an open society; they seek to keep the impoverished majority from participating in elections, in unions, and in civil organizations. By assassinating and repressing all social movements, they have made violent revolution inevitable.
3. One of the most ignored differences between the FARC and its opponents in government and paramilitary forces is that the FARC openly calls for legalization of drugs as part of the program it hopes to bring with its revolution (so has President Fox of Mexico; former Ambassador and Attorney General of Colombia, Gustavo de Greiff; Father Gregorio Iriarte of Bolivia; Peruvian author and journalist, Ricardo Rumrril; and the US Republican governor of New Mexico).
We have often repeated that when a government calls a policy a "war," as with the war on drugs, things will eventually go "boom!"
We expect that this will be a protracted conflict. It's also clear that, every day, the United States government wades deeper into this Big Muddy war.
América is a whole made up of many lands and peoples. It cannot, journalistically speaking, be pulled apart. Efforts by the US government to stage a coup in Venezuela, to poison Ecuador's peasants with herbicide, to prop up a puppet narco-regime in Bolivia, to provide cover for a new model of narco-regime in Perú, and to bolster sagging public opinion in the United States for a drug prohibition that causes all the ills that Washington
claims to be combating in our América, are all pieces of the same story.
Zero Hour in Colombia means Zero Hour for América.

The revolution will be reported… (report…report.)

More info on Colombia:
Narconews,
www, narconews.com
Colombia Report, www.colombiareport.org
Center for International Policy, www.ciponline.org/newnote.htm
News Agency for a New Colombia, www.ANNCOL.com
Infoshop, www.infoshop.org,
CMC, www.Cascadiamediacollective.org
Working towards alternatives to and REVOLT against industrial civilization!


COLOMBIA FACT SHEET

“The people of the US are grossly misinformed about the War on Drugs and the depth of corruption in Colombia. If we don't create some democratic outrage quickly, a human and ecological tragedy will ignite in South America.”
—Jason Marti of Ecosolidarity-Colombia and Julia Hill of Circle of Life Foundation

Incredible Ecological Diversity
The Continental US has 800 species of birds, Colombia has 1800 species. There are more species of all kinds in Colombia and the areas near its borders than in all of Brazil or any other country? There may be more species in Colombia than in all of North America.
The war and the herbicide spraying by the US endangers the most biologically diverse region on Earth. Fifty percent of all species live in tropical rainforests. Five to ten percent of all tropical species disappear each decade: 100 species a day. Half of all the land based species on Earth live in the Amazon basin, according to the Audubon website (www.audubon.org). There are more species of fish in the Amazon than in the entire Atlantic Ocean.
The only country in the world with more species than Colombia is Brazil, which is seven times larger. Ten percent of all the species on the planet live in Colombia and many live nowhere else. This wildly diverse country, with coasts on both oceans and several mountain ranges, ranks second in the world in the number of plant species and amphibians, third in reptiles.
Amid the battle zones grow half the world's orchids and a dazzling variety of jaguars, giant otters, primates, spectacled bears, agoutis, kinkajus and dolphins. There are more species of birds in Colombia (1800) than any other country and 75 percent are threatened. Manatees, tapirs and macaws are only a fraction of the species that are on the verge of extinction in Colombia. And now there is war in paradise.

Geography:
Colombia is 53 times bigger than El Salvador, three times the size of California, and twice the size of France. It is the only country in South America with coasts on both oceans. Three major rivers start in Colombia: the Amazon, Magdalena and the Orinoco.
The Andes is the main mountain range and it splits into several cordilleras creating large separated valleys and diverse habitats. Forty one million people live in Colombia and about five million Colombians have fled the country over the last ten years. One and a half times as many people live in Colombia as in all of the Central American countries combined.
To the south lie Peru and Brazil, east is Venezuela and west Ecuador. To the north is Panama—historically a part of Colombia until the US supported a coup in Panama so it could build the canal and more easily control it.
The FARC-EP and many Colombians still claim Panama as their territory. The spirit of Manuel Noriega lives on in Panama where anti-US sentiment runs deep. In spirit, at least, the Panamanians have already joined the FARC and the other Bolivarian forces.

The Politics of US Intervention
Many groups don't want to sound like they are against the whole structure of international trade and finance so they promote fair trade and modest reforms. The real problem in Latin America is land ownership, income distribution and the continuous interventions of the US against progressive governments and new ideas.
The war on terrorism is like the war on drugs: they are designed to fail or to create even bigger problems. These wars serve as camouflage for the hidden purpose of killing people who won’t play the corporate game the way they are told to. Through these wars the US can reward those who do play-those who are loyal and useful. Brutal dictators, drug lords and future terrorists can join the club of patriots if they know their script well.
In Afghanistan, the US bombed the Taliban just months after they had won awards for destroying opium crops because they became terrorists against the US and wouldn’t follow the script. They were supposed to destabilize Russia through terrorism in the countries surrounding Russia. These “Stans” are the same drug-dealing brutal dictatorships that are now US allies against the Taliban: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The Northern Alliance who the US used to overthrow the Taliban is just as brutal and undemocratic, but they play the game obediently - at least for now.
In Colombia the US uses death squads working with the US funded Colombian army to attack the small-time drug growing guerrilla “terrorist” who won’t play the game the way the US wants. The Death squads and Colombian government control 80 percent of the drug trade, most of the drug trafficking and they commit most of the atrocities against civilians (that’s real terror as a strategic weapon). This is a strategy the US perfected in El Salvador and Guatemala – Social Terrorism.
The US is adept at creating a milieu in which it can toss out lies that people will swallow with satisfaction. We are told that the Afghans dislike the Taliban when in fact they ended a five-year civil war and brought more stability and law and order to Afghanistan than had ever existed. We are told that (telephone) polls show that Colombians reject the FARC-EP, when most poor people do not have telephones in Colombia and people are so terrorized by the US backed death squads that they would never feel safe to say how they really feel. Throughout Latin America the US has helped to destroy the whole concept of Democracy.
These “Wars” as policy are in truth a war against common sense. The drums of patriotism and “just say No” blind and confuse so that people think issues are more complicated than they really are–common sense alternatives become unimaginable..
In addition the military industrial complex always needs an “enemy” and so propaganda is employed to create one if none is readily available.

Beating The Bush: Victory in the Air
Colombian people need our unity, our solidarity and our outrage to overcome the economic violence, military violence and fumigation violence, as well as the resulting emotional and psychological violence. Campesinos cannot come to the US to change US policy. It is the world’s responsibility to do something. People in Putumayo tell anyone who will listen, "We will die if they fumigate again.”
The US is like a giant octopus, with its tentacles everywhere. It exports more arms than the next 14 countries combined, controlling about 50 percent of global weapons sales. There were 426 massacres last year in Colombia, while 319,000 people were displaced--an average of almost 1,000 per day in 2001--constituting the largest displaced population in the hemisphere.
Most of the displaced are women--many of the men were killed or disappeared by the paramilitary death squads. The term "displaced," sounds bad, but the depth of the horror doesn't sink in from a distance.
One woman described what it means to be displaced. It doesn't simply mean you are moved from point A to point B. She explained, "They take away your land, your food, your house, often your family and friends through disappearance, murder or massacre, your support, your community, your culture, your history. They burned our farm animals in front of us, you flee with whatever you can carry on your back, and you go to the city and become a beggar in the streets. The pain is unbearable, the shock is sometimes deadly, and many have gone crazy. We can't even protest for basic human rights or they will disappear a family member, or kill us."
Seven hundred and forty three people were physically disappeared in Colombia last year. To "disappear" someone is to murder them, but there is no body, hence no closure for the victim's family and friends. It is another form of terror employed against the population. It is the terror of knowing, but not knowing for sure. It is the terror of psychological and emotional instability.
I wish I could tell these people that the world cares, that help is on the way, that we are not all barbarians.
As another US helicopter flies over the ridge top, I wonder if there is anything to say at all.
The fate of Colombia’s 42 million people hangs on the whim of US morality and the tenacity of the FARC-EP guerrillas and their many supporters.
Viva Bolivar, Viva La Esperanza (Hope!)

Information in this article came from sources on the ground in Colombia, from correspondents in neighboring areas and from our heralded articles backed up by substantial research and citations, “Andes on Fire: The War for Latin America.” This article can be found at www.ANNCOL.com and www.Bluegreenearth.com (an Irish Magazine and website).

ECOSOLIDARITY-ANDES LIBRE-
Bush continues a long tradition of giving billions to
corrupt governments and US friendly terrorists (From global
corporations to death-squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia,
Venezuela...).This terminal madness of the rich elites can be
arrested by a strong, clear program alternative to WTO/FTAA Neo-
liberalism.—ECOSOLIDARITY-ANDES LIBRE investigates
conflicts where the US threatens poor people and the environments they
depend on. — WE welcome input as we seek to portray the peoples’
story and the consequences of US military and economic interventions
in the Andean Region. JOIN US IN AID!

IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE POOR AND THE EARTH,
WE SALUTE THE DETERMINATION OF HUGO
CHAVEZ AND THE BOLIVARIAN CIRCLES IN VEN
-EZUELA; THE HEROIC STRUGGLE OF CAMPESINO
& INDIGENOUS REBELS IN ECUADOR & THE
MARVELOUS YOUTH OF THE FARC-EP & ELN …IN
THE MOUNTAINS OF COLOMBIA.
——“We wage war to conquer peace with social justice.”——