To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: from The London Times From: "Jeffrey A. Schaler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 14:14:10 -0400 Clinton's billions keep a drugs war alive Simon Jenkins, London Times 1 Sept. 2000 A classic test for 20th-century historians is to enumerate the causes of the Second World War. The answers come easy. Germany was ruined by war reparations; democracies were blind; everyone misread Hitler. How simple it seems, and how stupid were our grandfathers. How much wiser we are today. Really? A good test of a 21st-century historian is to predict the next morass. I cannot read of Bill Clinton's visit to Colombia this week without seeing the Dark Ages reborn. For two decades, America has been buying gigantic quantities of cocaine and heroin from Colombia and its neighbours, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Trade in these substances is believed to outstrip world trade in oil. Cocaine and opium derivatives have been declared illegal by the UN. Yet so vast is the production, so extensive the consumption, so huge the profits from illegal drugs that changing the declaration is barely imaginable. So hail the gods of chaos. President Clinton went to Colombia to sanctify one of the most immoral American interventions of modern times. It is the decade-long campaign to stop poor South American states selling his people something they so profitably crave. Because Washington cannot restrain this craving, it defies all rules of economics and most rules of international non-intervention. As if to assuage its guilt at its own addiction, America sends herbicides, flamethrowers, helicopter gunships, soldiers, spies and billions of dollars south across the Caribbean. Its Drug Enforcement Administration now outranks the CIA as a power in the region. It colludes with corrupt politicians, undermines governments and impoverishes peoples. Two years ago the Bolivians were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy their entire coca crop. The Colombian market duly boomed. The latest initiative is Plan Colombia, priced at a stupefying $7.5 billion, of which the United States is contributing $1.3 billion. Whether this plan is anti-drugs or anti-rebels in immaterial, since Colombia is in the throes of a 36-year-old civil war financed by drugs. The rebels now control half the country, including the coca-growing areas in the south. These areas have doubled their output, to replace land taken out of coca cultivation as a result of US pressure in Bolivia and Peru. Colombia now grows or processes some 90 per cent of America's cocaine and much of its heroin. Mr Clinton's ambition is to cut coca production by half, by arming Colombian government troops against the 20,000-strong guerrilla army. He is sending 60 American helicopter gunships, some 300 troops and military advisers and will pay for the usual round of aerial monitoring and spraying of coca crops. American troops will not get involved in "a shooting war" unless the guerrillas shoot first, which they are most likely to do. "This is not Vietnam," said Mr Clinton on Wednesday, "neither is it Yankee imperialism." It may not be the former but it is unquestionably the latter. The kindest parallel is if Tony Blair were to combat teenage nicotine addiction by paying Robert Mugabe's irregulars to fire-bomb Zimbabwean tobacco farms. The spraying of coca crops has similar side-effects to Agent Orange in Vietnam. It poisons virgin forest, destroys peasant livelihoods, pollutes water and other crops and increases the market price of coca and thus its profitability. Drugs experts regard the policy as akin to Opec cutting oil production to maintain price. It also makes coca producers angry for vengeance, which they take with extreme brutality. The Colombian Government relies on "right-wing paramilitaries" to retaliate. These groups, with whom America cannot avoid involvement, make Slobodan Milosevic's Serb irregulars look like amateurs. To assist Colombia's President Pastrana, Mr Clinton has even waived a requirement that the military aid be subject to "human rights" conditions. It is hard to quarrel with one rebel commander who was quoted as saying that Mr Clinton had brought "suitcases of dollars for Colombians to continue killing each other indefinitely". The neighbouring governments of Ecuador, Brazil, Panama and Venezuela have all publicly opposed Plan Colombia. Like those of South-East Asia in the 1970s, they know that when Uncle Sam moves in next door, windows get broken and people get killed. All have Colombia's civil war threatening their borders, bringing with it refugees, lawlessness, killings and corruption. There are reputedly two million Colombian refugees in the region, more even than in former Yugoslavia. Smart Colombian children go to school in bulletproof vests. Colombia is one of the oldest and noblest of South American states. The suffering brought by the criminalisation of its chief crop is appalling. When I was in Peru last year, a local economist told me: "Watch this region carefully. It is being destroyed not by Western drug users but by Western hypocrisy." The livelihoods of its people depend on their ancestral crop, as eagerly consumed by the West as once was gold and silver. Yet for supplying this crop, these countries are destabilised and persecuted. America is now financing both sides in South America's nastiest civil war. Its drug users are financing the rebels and its taxpayers are financing the government side. As any visitor to this part of the world knows, drugs and drug money dominate every activity. When Europe stole South America's gold and silver, it at least built cities with the proceeds. Drugs are different. By declaring their production illegal, the West prevents governments from taxing and regulating them. Cocaine and now heroin are, to the Pacific seaboard, what oil is to the Middle East. But without revenue from this trade, governments stay poor and lawlessness deters traders from investing their wealth locally. Most Colombian traffickers live unmolested in the US. That is the real hypocrisy. Colombia's President is no fool. He will not refuse three American-trained and equipped "anti-narcotics battalions" plus special forces to prop up his regime. On drugs, however, he is explicit. He has been told to cut coca production by half, to bring it back to the 1997 level. His response is simple: if not Colombia, "somebody somewhere else is going to produce . . . this is the most lucrative business in the world". Nor is the butt of his criticism America alone. "Europeans like to think this problem does not touch them," he says. "Every day new trafficking routes are targeting Europe." The world's lunatic trade policy still refuses Colombia preferred access to the West for its legal produce. Only cocaine travels untaxed and "free on board". President Pastrana says what everyone knows. As long as there is demand there will be supply. As long as supply is illegal there will be vast profits. This business corrupts all it touches. World leaders may find it hard to get their heads round the idea of legalising this trade. But without a start on such a reform, gangsters will stay rich, the poor stay poor and the addicts stay addicted. Half of Latin America will be politically enslaved to the new American imperialism. Mr Clinton denies such an ambition: so why is he plunging into a Colombian civil war that promises to be nastier than El Salvador or Nicaragua? Drugs have superseded communism as the bogey of the West. Ask any general, admiral, diplomat, policeman or spy what is the chief object of his attention and he will say "the war on drugs". This war is a mirage. Its enemy is in reality ourselves. Because we cannot defeat our own weakness, we attack others as its proxy. We know we cannot stamp out drugs, so we pretend by stamping out those who produce them. They happen to be the poorest people on earth. Was the Devil ever more potent? The drugs question is a challenge to common sense. Mr Clinton's backing for Plan Colombia shows what a mountain common sense has to climb. President Pastrana may not be America's good guy for long, but he is worth an ear now. He points out that America could kill every trafficker in his country, but users will still want cocaine and growers will find new fields to plant. Already they are looking to Central Africa. Conditions there are ideal for coca and poppy, and profits will be lush. More to the point, that continent is less welcoming to democrats, do-gooders and American special forces. Africa is the next stop for this mayhem. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.members.tripod.com/dmcdivitt http://www.geocities.com/dmcdivitt _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? 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