-Caveat Lector- Contragate revisited.. CIA/cocaine connections see: http://www.copvcia.com http://madcowprod.com/ http://www.dcia.com/do-drugs.html http://www.dcia.com/ http://www.onelist.com/messages/cia-drugs Get involved ! Learn how to start a lawsuit in YOUR town against the Cocaine Importing Agency of America. Los Angeles and Oakland are suing ! http://www.copvcia.com/Oakland.htm How to: http://www.copvcia.com/classaction1.htm Stop the war on PEOPLE, decriminalize drugs and take away the profit center for the covert criminals behind the MAJOR drug trafficking. Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com http://www.ioa.com/~davehart -----Original Message----- Recently, the United States military lost a plane in the skies over Colombia. According to Pentagon sources, this plane was not shot down, nor was it on any kind of mission that involved the civil war in Colombia. These sources claim, with the backing of General McCafferty--U.S. drug "czar", that the mission was solely related to drug production and the so-called war on that production. In almost the same breath, however, McCafferty called for a billion dollars (yes $1,000,000,000) in military aid to fight the drug war and the Marxist revolutionaries (FARC -Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia and ELN-Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional)in the region. Now, I don't know about you, but one can't have it both ways: either the United States is fighting against the leftist forces in the region or they are not. My reading of the situation goes with the former. That is, they are and intend to do so until these forces are defeated. Of course, the likelihood of such a defeat is remote, even should full scale U. S. military involvement eventually occur. This is not out of the question. Indeed, the United States let it be known during the week of July 26, 1999, that it has "a couple hundred" troops in Colombia training elite battalions whose job will be to sever the ties between the coca and opium farmers and the revolutionary forces. Of course, as any one with a basic knowledge of prior Pentagon training missions in other parts of the world is aware, these trainers often participate in military missions and may even denote an even greater U.S. involvement in the future. In order to understand what exactly the Pentagon means in describing these battalions' mission, it is essential to examine the relationship between the peasant coca and opium farmers and the revolutionary organizations. To understand this relationship, it is first necessary to understand the role drug production plays in the economy of Colombia. The peasants have two basic choices in today's Colombia--to go to the big cities and become beggars and prostitutes or farm the land. If they choose the latter, they till the land and plant crops such as corn or plantains. Since these areas were never developed, there are no transportation routes. Only by using the rivers and crossing hundreds of miles overland can the crop reach Bogota or other markets. By the time it gets there, the crop is unsaleable or has become so costly that the profit is practically lost. There is only one alternative open to the peasant farmer who wishes to subsist : growing coca leaves and, more recently, opium plants. Transportation costs for these crops is provided by the drug lords, who move incredible amounts of these products with the consent of high placed government leaders and the armed protection of the Colombian military and paramilitary forces funded by large landowners and drug lords. The FARC and ELN guerrilla forces operate in the coca and opium growing regions. Indeed, they literally administer these regions. Like various parts of southern Vietnam that were in the control of the NLF, the residents of the region consider the revolutionary forces as their government and support their administration. In order to pay the cost of running schools, health care centers, police forces, and other such infrastructural apparatus, the FARC and ELN forces tax the drug trafficking operations--farmers and those involved in the product's transportation and refinement. Although it is their preference not to do support the dependency of the farming population on drug production, the reality is that this is where the money is in rural Colombia. This is where the United States comes in, once again. Most of these drugs are shipped to the streets of our country. This does not happen without the complicity of government and law enforcement officials. In some cases, this means turning the other way when a shipment from a trafficker who has paid off the right people comes through. In other cases, the complicity is much more involved. Even those of us with rather short memories can remember the U.S. involvement in the drugs-for-guns operation run by Ollie North and his cohorts that supplied the contra forces fighting the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. This operation (not the first of its kind, by the way--see Alfred McCoy's 1991 book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Trade) can be considered a model of how U. S. government agencies cynically manipulate modern society's desire for pharmaceutically induced escape to finance their dirty operations in the service of various corporate interests. Speaking of corporate interests, if we follow the trail this leads us down we may discover the most fundamental reason of them all for the U. S. interest in Colombia: oil. Oil is the most important commodity in Colombia. It represented over one-fourth of the country's exports in 1996 and close to 5% of its Gross National Product (GNP). In comparison, coffee represented 15.2 % and 3.4 %, respectively. Interestingly, few private Colombian citizens have any significant investment in the oil industry. Instead, the majority of the exploration and refinement interests are controlled by a state company known as Ecopetrol, which serves as a conduit for foreign oil companies, primarily British Petroleum (recently merged with Amoco to form the world largest oil company and may help to explain the increased desire for a greater U.S. military role in the country). Over the course of the thirty year war, support for the revolutionary forces has expanded into the cities. This is due to the ever-widening disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the Colombian population and the military's harsh repression of those who organize the workers and the unemployed. Literally hundreds of labor organizers, social justice workers (clerics and laypersons) and student activists have been murdered and disappeared since the late 1980s. Such murderous actions push both activists and their supporters to a conclusion that armed struggle is the only workable strategy for the kind of social change they seek. In addition, the recent election of and popular mandate for President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his policies makes the United States awfully nervous. As leftist webmaster and history professor Jay Moore of Vermont stated in a recent letter to various email groups formed during the recent NATO adventure in Yugoslavia, Venezuela is next door to Colombia and provides more oil to the U. S. than any other country. Should Chavez withstand the certain opposition he will face from internal and external reactionary forces and put his democratic and socialist-oriented policies in place in his country, the United States will have to deal with a popularly elected leftwing government in its "backyard" for the first time since the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. As history tells us, this means those U.S. citizens who support true democracy and oppose the neo-liberal agenda of the corporation and their cohorts in our government must do every thing in their power to oppose any attempts to destroy the Chavez government. As for Colombia, we must oppose any and all U. S. military intervention in that country--whether this intervention comes in the forms of "drug war" aid, trainers, advisers, or troops of any kind. -Ron Jacobs Burlington, VT. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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