US & Colombia's Dirty Secrets

Our only ally in Latin America is a poorly-masked fascist dictatorship.

The top two directors of Colombia's secret police were forced out this week as the government investigated allegations that the agency was mounting a money-making operation to sell intelligence and surveillance equipment to right-wing death squads.

Our only ally in Latin America is a global drug merchant.

The scandal at the agency, the Administrative Department of Security, comes as human rights groups and some legislators have exposed heightened paramilitary activity, including infiltrations of Congress and the attorney general's office. The paramilitaries also continue trafficking in cocaine, despite disarmament talks that underpin President Álvaro Uribe's effort to pacify Colombia with billions in American aid.

This story is not new, and under the Bush administration US foreign policy is deeply implicated in it. Early last June, two American soldiers were arrested for allegedly selling weapons to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a Right-wing paramilitary group who the US State Department has labeled a terrorist organization. While State Department spokesman Richard Boucher denied that the US was selling arms to an illegal organization, he would neither confirm nor deny whether the weapons were part of a $3.3 billion defense deal with Colombia.

Despite a twenty year, US funded "war on drugs," Colombia (one of the few remaining US allies in Latin America) remains one of the biggest producers of cocaine and traffickers of heroin in the world. Some think the drug war is a facade, a reason to aid the right-wing Colombian government in its on-going guerilla war against the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a communist group who have been blamed for the drug trafficking), because "the notion of a war against drug production is eminently more marketable to U.S. politicians and voters than a post-Cold War crusade against South American Communist guerrillas."

Now, let me get this straight: Colombia is our ALLY in Latin America, and Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and other left-of-center social democracies constitute a "New Axis of Evil,"^TM do I have that right?

The Bush "war on terror" is a sham and a lie.