Why The US Is Losing Its War On Cocaine

America has spent billions battling the drug industry in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. And the result? Production as high as ever, street prices at a low, and the governments of the region in open revolt. Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports from La Paz, Bolivia

Taken from The Independent, 27 May 2007

The immensely costly "war on drugs" in Latin America is slowly collapsing like a Zeppelin with a puncture. The long-forecast failure for strategies which involve police and military in forcibly suppressing narcotics - first decreed by President Richard Nixon decades ago - is now pitifully evident in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries of the Western hemisphere.

The estimated $25bn (£13bn) that Washington has spent trying to control narcotics over the past 15 years in Latin America seems to have been wasted.

In 2005, according to UN guesses - and, amid merciless political spinning of what few facts there are- Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the main producers of cocaine, had the capacity to produce 910 metric tons a year. As more productive strains of coca bushes appear, production has been increasing. Unsurprisingly, the price of cocaine on US streets has tumbled, according to the White House drug tzar John Walters, to $135 (£70) a gram, a fraction of the $600 a gram it was fetching in 1981. The purity of cocaine has gone from 60 per cent in mid-2003 to more than 70 per cent last October. Like the conflict in Iraq, the US's other great war is now being visibly lost.

Here, indigent Bolivian President Evo Morales, once a poverty-stricken llama herder and itinerant trumpet player, is resisting pressure from the Bush government to eradicate coca bushes by fire and sword.

The Bolivian leader is no lover of cocaine and his policies are summed up in the slogan "no to drugs, no to cocaine". More than 5,000 hectares of coca bushes were destroyed last year by growers voluntarily. "We did it without violating human rights", says Morales.

But he refuses to ban the consumption of coca leaves, which country people regard as gifts from heaven: the indigenous peoples have been chewing them for thousands of years as an aid to survival at 14,000 feet in the perishingly bleak highlands of the Andes which surround this city.

Their teeth are sometimes discoloured but otherwise they have come to little harm. Morales has no hesitation in saying that his refusal to allow foreigners to dictate Bolivia's policy on what Bolivians call Mama Coca has been one of the secrets of his political success. "The sacred coca leaf meant that we poor people are in government today," he proclaims.

Morales' stand was backed up here earlier this month when Jean Ziegler, the influential former Swiss parliamentarian, now the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, announced that promoting the cultivation and consumption of coca "doesn't go against international treaties to fight drug trafficking and organised crime."

But the determination of Morales, the leader of a poor country of nine million people, is only a tiny part of Latin America's rejection of the "war on drugs". In a Venezuela enriched by high prices for its oil exports, President Hugo Chavez, himself a political and financial supporter of Morales and ally of Fidel Castro, is placing strict controls on his country's co-operation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The democratically elected Chavez sees the DEA as an arm of a government which was involved with the right-wing coup d'état in 2002, which toppled him briefly.

He sees it as devoted as much to Washington's political and military strategies in Latin America as to the battle against narcotics. The plain-speaking Chavez, who has called President Bush "a devil", has accused the DEA of spying.

Pedro Carreno, Chavez's justice minister, has said that Venezuela would not allow the DEA to mount anti-drug operations on its territory. Chavez has also forbidden overflights by US government aircraft. Carreno suggested that instead of Plan Colombia, the US "should apply a Plan Washington, New York, or Miami, so that they fly over their own air space, and take care of their coast and border because 85 per cent of the drugs that are produced in Latin America go to the United States."

Now a third Latin American leader, the newly elected President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, has announced that his country will ignore US instructions in the "war on drugs". He has announced that he will no longer allow US forces to occupy a large base at the Pacific port of Manta, which was leased to them by a previous government and which the Pentagon says is used for aircraft monitoring cocaine shipments between Peru and Colombia. Many small farmers in Ecuador along the border with Colombia have seen their crops and livestock ruined and their own health affected by the spraying of poisons, such as glyphosate, by Colombian and US pilots in a so far vain attempt to destroy coca bushes in Colombia. The pesticides have drifted over the international border spraying Ecuadorean farms.

Last week, Professor Paul Hunt of Essex University, the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, speaking in Ecuador said: "There is credible, reliable evidence that the aerial spraying of glyphosate along the Colombia-Ecuador border damages the health of people living in Ecuador.

There is also reliable evidence that the aerial spraying damages their mental health. Military helicopters sometimes accompany the aerial spraying and the entire experience can be terrifying, especially for children. "

If this continues the Ecuadoreans have threatened to shoot the offending aircraft down.

But it is in the Colombian capital city, Bogota, that the "war on drugs" is seriously falling apart.

Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, is in deep political trouble as his opponents dig up unsavoury evidence of his past. He was for years seen as the strongest ally of the US and Britain in South America - he has been received several times at the White House and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office paid him a substantial bursary in 1998 for two years' study at St Antony's College, Oxford before he was elected president in 2002. As a model recruit into the "war on drugs" his country has received $5.4bn under the so-called Plan Colombia from Washington for drug control, more US foreign aid than any other country except Israel and Egypt.

Yet Colombia is estimated to be producing nearly 800 tons of cocaine every year and it has been an open secret for years that senior politicians and the armed forces are deeply mixed up in drug dealing and the right-wing death squads - coyly referred to as "paramilitaries" are also involved in the trade.

In February, Uribe had to sack his foreign minister Maria Consuelo Araujo because of her family connections with the death squads and the drug trade. Uribe is becoming something of a pariah and his support is falling away, even in Washington. Senator Al Gore withdrew from a conference on climate change in Latin America to avoid being photographed with him because of allegations linking Uribe and government members to death squads and drug dealing. Gore called the claims deeply troubling. In 2001, some senior politicians signed the so-called Pact of Ralito, which bound them to well-known drug smugglers with names such as Jorge 40, Don Berna, Salvatore Mancuso and Diego Vecino. Other accusations against Uribe include one by an opposition senator that death squads used farms belonging to Uribe's family to carry out meetings and killings in the 1990s.

Earlier this month, the Vice President, Francisco Santos announced that "more than 40 members of congress" could go to prison because of their links to drugs and death squads. More than a dozen senators, congressmen and political insiders have been arrested. This month, two police generals were sacked.

The truth is also emerging about the Colombian army, beloved of the US government but widely hated by many Colombians for its closeness to the death squads. Senator Patrick Leahy ordered a temporary freeze on tens of millions of dollars of US military aid after the Colombian army commander, General Mario Montoya, was found to be deeply involved with the death squads.

Leahy condemned the waste of US money in Colombia: "When Plan Colombia began, we were told it would cut by half the amount of cocaine in five years. Six years and $5bn later, it has not had any measurable effect on the amount of cocaine entering our country."

Big business is also caught up in drug dealing. In March, Chiquita Brands International, a US banana multinational, was fined $25m by the US Justice Department for having funded the AUC, the principal Colombian death squad which is closely linked to international drug-smuggling. The collapse of the "war on drugs" in Latin America is of a piece with Tony Blair's failure to control drugs in the UK by police action and imprisonment. Britain's drug use rates are among the highest in Europe and there are 327,000 problem drug users. The failure to stem the supply of heroin is illustrated by the fall in price of a gram, from £70 in 2000 to £54 in 2005.

The annual number of drug offenders jailed more than doubled between 1994 and 2005 and the average length of their sentences went up. The courts handed out nearly three times as much prison time in 2004 as they did 10 years earlier.

Last month, an inquiry for the UK Drug Policy Commission said: "The research suggests that the greatest reductions in drug-related harm have come from investment in treatment and harm reduction. However, the bulk of expenditure on drug policy in the UK is still devoted to the enforcement of drug laws".

In Britain, as in Latin America, drugs clearly can't be controlled by armies and police forces.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy is the author with Sue Branford of 'Chemical Warfare in Colombia: the Costs of Coca Fumigation'

Cocaine Wars Make Port Colombia’s Deadliest City

Taken from The New York Times, May 22, 2007
By SIMON ROMERO

Visitors to this city can be forgiven for thinking no place is safe here. Gunfire often echoes through the slums surrounding its port, the country’s most important on the Pacific coast. As larger cities have calmed, Buenaventura has emerged as the deadliest urban center in Colombia’s long internal war.

Soldiers search almost every car at checkpoints on the winding road from Cali. Guerrillas recently fired mortar shells at the police headquarters. The stately Hotel Estación, a neo-Classical gem built in 1928, where executives come to hammer out deals to import cars or export coffee, is guarded by dozens of soldiers in combat fatigues.

“It’s as if we have a little Haiti within Colombia,” said Lt. Nikolai Viviescas, 25, a police officer who was transferred from Bogotá six months ago. “It feels like another country.”

Although Bogotá, the capital, and other cities have become secure and prosperous enough that it is possible there to forget about this country’s four-decade-old civil conflict for a while, Buenaventura is a different story.

Killings in this city of about 300,000 climbed 30 percent last year, to 408, giving Buenaventura the nation’s highest homicide rate at 144 per 100,000, more than seven times the rate in Bogotá and four times that of Medellín. And this year, the police say, 222 people have been killed here.

A vast majority of the killings are the product of a narrow territorial conflict over control of the edge of the city’s slums, acres of wooden shacks built on stilts over the sea. From these makeshift wharves, police and naval officials say, fast boats depart with cocaine for points north. Buenaventura’s geography, crucial in connecting Colombia to the global flow of trade, also holds strategic cachet for drug traffickers.

Despite receiving more than $5 billion in antinarcotics and counterinsurgency aid from the United States this decade, making the country the largest recipient of American aid in the hemisphere, Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer and the supplier of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

Drug lords, rebels and resurgent paramilitary gangs all draw on Buenaventura’s slum dwellers as their foot soldiers.

The police say that many of the combatants on the rebels’ side belong to the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Urban Front, a cell of the main rebel group FARC that is based in Cali and opposes the Autodefensas Campesinas del Pacífico, composed mostly of former paramilitary fighters.

“Nothing in this fight is about ideology,” said Antero Viveros, the head of a community group in Lleras, a large slum controlled by the guerrillas. “It is about drugs, with members of one ethnicity killing each other.”

Despite its emergence as Colombia’s most dangerous city, people displaced by fighting in the countryside still see Buenaventura as a refuge. About 42,000 refugees have arrived here since 1998, mostly Afro-Colombians from rural areas, according to the federal government. They swell the ranks of what may be Colombia’s poorest slums.

“If you’re hungry, you’ll do whatever imaginable to survive,” said Fernando Nuñez, 29, a Lleras resident who ekes out a living repairing old cellphones.

President Álvaro Uribe has forcefully criticized the violence here and sent new police and navy commanders to the city at the start of the year. About 2,000 soldiers and police officers, who also wear combat uniforms and carry semiautomatic weapons, patrol Buenaventura.

Still, critics say authorities have long neglected Buenaventura’s problems in part because Afro-Colombians receive scant federal attention. Nongovernmental groups say Afro-Colombians account for up to a quarter of the country’s population of 44 million, by some measures giving Colombia the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world. And more than 80 percent of Buenaventura’s residents are black.

This month, when the president chose Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata as culture minister, was the first time an Afro-Colombian ascended to a cabinet position in the country’s history. Yet political analysts and black advocacy groups said the appointment was largely to appease Democrats in Washington who complain of racial exclusion in Colombia as they weigh a trade agreement.

“The war in Buenaventura is not going to be ended by symbolic actions from Bogotá,” said Rosaliano Riascos, a Buenaventura native who fled the city after a wave of paramilitary-led killings several years ago. Mr. Riascos, who heads an independent black advocacy group in Bogotá, said it had been a year since he returned to Buenaventura to visit family.

“Buenaventura is a no-man’s land,” he said.

The entrance to Lleras looks like that of any shantytown elsewhere in Colombia, with cinder-block shacks and a few paved streets. But deeper into the slum, the structures are made from discarded wood, with newcomers squeezing into lean-tos alongside older houses. Rusted barrels collect rain from zinc roofs, the only source of fresh water.

Sewage bubbles down trash-strewn dirt roads before flowing into the sea. Stereos blare vallenato and reggaetón music. And precariously built homes are hoisted above the water on spindly pieces of wood.

Many of the residents of these hovels hesitate to offer their names out of fear of retaliation over what they might say. One middle-aged man, offering a visitor a cup of rum from the steps of his house, said he had worked as a stevedore at the port years ago before losing that job. “Now,” he said, “I do nothing.”

Some economists hold up Buenaventura as an example of the risks of exposing certain areas of developing economies to market forces. María del Pilar Castillo, an economist at Valle University in Cali, said many residents lost economic security when the city’s port was privatized more than a decade ago, cutting its work force and reducing benefits.

With taxes on the imports flowing through Buenaventura’s port largely going directly to the central government, the city reaps few benefits from international trade, even as Colombia’s economy grows more than 6 percent a year. So the poor in Buenaventura, with an unemployment rate of about 28 percent, resort to the drug trade.

“There is no other viable industry here, so there are no other viable jobs,” said Ana María Mercedes Cano, director of Buenaventura’s Chamber of Commerce. “So we live in a situation with violence all around us.”

Civilians are increasingly caught in the cross-fire. Guerrillas were blamed for an attack earlier this year in which five people, including one police officer, were killed when a homemade mortar shell was fired at a police truck. Security officials here say laws that are lax on minors, who carry out many of the attacks, make it difficult to reduce the killings.

“We have a justice system designed for Switzerland, yet we have no Swiss here,” said Col. Yamil Moreno, the chief of police in Buenaventura. In the same breath, Colonel Moreno, who was transferred here from the north, callously described Buenaventura’s dying combatants.

“These vagabonds,” he said, “are good only for drinking, dancing and killing.”

Exile And Extinction Face A Tribe That Lost Everything To Cocaine

Taken from The Times, UK, May 19, 2007
By Catherine Philp in Chocó, Colombia

The Wounaan Indians are used to newcomers. Over the past 500 years the Spanish conquistadors, freed African slaves and Marxist guerrillas have all tried to encroach on their ancestral land. But the Wounaan, one of the oldest indigenous peoples in the region, have held firm. And then came the coca leaf.

Living in small villages of wooden houses on stilts in riverside clearings in the jungles of Chocó, the Wounaan had largely succeeded in keeping out of Colombia’s bloody conflicts. They hunted, fished and farmed along the banks of the San Juan River, left alone by the battling rebels, paramilitaries and government troops.

Then, three years ago, the guerrillas came with an order at gunpoint. “They said we had to grow coca or else leave,” Fernando, a Wounaan leader, said. “And so we began planting it on our lands.”

The arrival of coca cultivation set in motion a chain of events that has left the Wounaan divided, displaced and at risk of extinction.

With cocaine increasingly the drug of choice in Europe – 1.2 million Britons are regular users – the plight of the Wounaan, and of Colombia’s three million other displaced, are prompting a major rethink in how to police the world’s most important drugs war.

It is more than four decades since the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, began their armed struggle to install a Marxist regime. In the 1990s, with added pressure from right-wing paramilitaries, the guerrillas became increasingly dependent on cocaine to finance their campaign, to the point where it has superseded the Utopian vision.

Since 2000 the US – where more than 75 per cent of Colombia’s cocaine exports end up – has spent $700 million (£350 million) a year to help to root out drug traffickers and eliminate coca crops. Plan Colombia, which began as a mixture of social programmes, crop eradication and military action, quickly lost sight of its social elements.

Chocó, an extravagantly fertile eco-region along Colombia’s Pacific Coast, was never traditionally an area for coca cultivation. Although coca has grown wild in Colombia since time immemorial, and was chewed by indigenous people as a mild stimulant, like coffee, it did not naturally take root in Chocó.

As spraying began in provinces such as Caquetá and Putu-mayo to the east and south, the rebels who supervised the growing of the coca crops started moving into areas farther afield, like the rainforests of Chocó.

Under threat of death or expulsion, the Wounaan began planting coca, which the guerrillas then bought from them. The crop was lucrative: a three inch cube of pressed coca would fetch them 1.8 million pesos ($900). The rice they had grown before fetched only 4,000 pesos a small sack.

Not everyone liked what else the coca brought. “At the beginning there was money,” Fernando said. “But then it started to destroy the culture. Drinking and prostitution, all these things begin when the money comes.”

In March last year leaders in Union-Wounaan, the largest settlement, sent word to the guerrillas that their coca-grow-ing days were over. A day later guerrillas seized a teacher from his classroom. His mutilated body was found hours later. The next day a tribal leader was seized and beaten to death.

The killings caused panic in the community. More than 1,000 of the area’s 3,500 Wounaan fled upriver to the town of Istmina, with hundreds more fleeing elsewhere into the jungle. Hundreds more wanted to leave but those arriving in Istmina said that there were no boats to bring them and they remained trapped upriver.

The displaced tribespeople took shelter in a house by the river, crammed 30 to a room. Exile proved too hard for many and some climbed into boats and travelled back. Those who had opposed the guerrillas had no choice but to stay – 47 of them were given asylum in Panama and more than 70 remain in Istmina.

In recent weeks right-wing paramilitaries who have refused to disarm under a government programme have started to move onto Wounaan land, seeking control of the coca crops themselves.

José Llanos, a tribal leader who has been speaking out against coca cultivation, arrived in Istmina with his family last month after receiving death threats from the paramilitaries. He told of a community caught between two illegal armies.

“We cannot be neutral,” he said. “Wherever we live, the other group thinks we are with that group. And both groups want the coca.”

The Wounaan join a human tide of migration across Colombia. More than three million people have been forcibly displaced across the country, second only to Sudan. Every day, 850 more people are driven from their homes. Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s President, has received plaudits for improving security, though many blame his policies for the new crises in far-flung corners of the country previously little touched by the war.

“It is true that the violence is no longer affecting the governing classes as much,” Marie-Helene Verney, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency in Colombia, said. “But the situation is very different in the countryside where voiceless minorities are coming under threat.”

In Condoto, a riverside cathedral town, hundreds of the displaced inhabit rundown slums that they built after fleeing their villages. Afro-Colombi-ans, the marginalised descendants of former slaves, have been here as long as five years. “I don’t believe we will ever go back,” Maria Cesario, a heavily pregnant mother of six, says. She is probably right. The vast majority of displaced Colombians never return home.

For the Government, there is little political capital to be won from helping the displaced. An average displaced family receives just one quarter of the subsidy given to the family of an illegal militiaman who turns in his guns. But for the Wounaan, there is more at stake than for most.

“The conflict has put their way of life at risk,” Ms Verney said. “They have been forced to leave their ancestral lands and now they find themselves at risk of extinction.”

Many more of Colombia’s one million indigenous people are also under such a threat. A year ago, 80 members of the hunter-gatherer Nukak tribe walked out of the jungle after months on the run from armed groups who ordered them off their land to grow coca. Only 500 remain in the jungle and fears are growing for their survival. For the Wounaan, the future looks bleak. In Istmina, they live in their own small community by the river, surrounded by an alien Afro-Colombian culture of hard drinking and casual sex. An air of tragedy hangs over them. All have taken Spanish names, the ones used here, to hide the Wounaan names that appeared on the guerrillas’ hit lists.

With their teachers dead, they struggle to teach their children to read and write their own language. At school they are taught in Spanish, which few Wounaan can speak.

At night, they try to perform traditional dances to preserve their culture but they find little to celebrate. They live as close to the river as they can. “The river is like our blood. Just like somebody without blood cannot live, we cannot live without the river,” said Fernando.

But their ancestral lands are far away and they have no prospect of return. “The land is like our mother. To lose it is very hard.”

Plan Colombia, the programme that drove the coca crops deep into their forests, is nearly over.

While the acreage of coca has shrunk, the yield has increased, so the amount of cocaine produced has not changed.

That fact, and revelations about links between the Government and illegal paramilitaries, have led to a suspension in the US aid money that funds it.

A new scheme, Plan Colombia II, has been hatched with less emphasis on military action and more on social programmes. But sceptics say they have seen this scheme before, and give warning that it may go the way of the original plan.

For the Wounaan, such geo-political manoeuvring is mean-ingless. But one thing they do know.

If no one wanted the little green leaf, no one would plant it. As Colombia gears up for the next chapter in the war on drugs, a dying tribe has this plea for the outside world.

“If nobody bought the drug, it wouldn’t be produced,” José Llanos says. “To those who buy it, it’s just merchandise. For us, it is disaster. They have our blood on their hands.”

Trading in misery
# 80% of the world’s cocaine is produced in Colombia
# $400bn - value of the global trade in the drug
# 500 hectares of rainforest cleared each year for new coca cultivation in Chocó province alone
# 3,000 people killed each year in Colombia’s cocaine-fuelled conflict
# 3m people displaced in what the UN describes as the worst humanitarian crisis outside Africa
# 60% of the world’s cocaine is consumed in the US
# 6.8% of Britons have tried the drug
# 5% of British banknotes have significant traces of cocaine indicating that they have been used to snort the drug

Coca-Cola Vs Coca Sek In Colombia

Taken from ABC News, May 10, 2007
By SERGIO DE LEON, Associated Press

President Alvaro Uribe is taking the war on drugs to the supermarket, prohibiting the sale of products made from the coca plant.

With the help of more than $600 million a year in U.S. aid, Uribe has strengthened Colombia's anti-narcotics police, seized record tons of cocaine and extradited 520 drug trafficking suspects to U.S. jails.

But until recently, his hardline government had not gone after natural coca products made by Indians, acknowledging that millions of peasants have chewed calcium-rich coca for thousands of years to stave off hunger and as a remedy for ailments from altitude sickness to stomach aches.

Uribe's presidential Web site even promoted natural coca products as a rare commercial enterprise for poor Indian communities, and the federal food-safety agency provided quality-control advice to the manufacturers of coca tea, cookies, shampoo and other consumer goods.

That suddenly changed in February, when Uribe's administration started banning the sale of coca products outside the reservations where Indians have a constitutional right to grow the hearty plant. Though it's still possible to find coca products at boutique markets and health food stores, inspectors have begun to forcibly remove them from supermarket shelves.

What prompted the switch?

For one, the success of Coca Sek, an energy drink made by the Nasa Indian tribe.

The carbonated drink made with coca, which looks like apple cider and tastes vaguely like ginger ale, was becoming a trendy alternative to Coca-Cola among Colombia's urban youth. The logo on the can even mimicked the popular U.S. soft drink's curvy script.

Newspapers around the world ran David-and-Goliath stories about the challenge by an unknown Indian tribe to the U.S. soda behemoth.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. responded with a trademark-infringement suit that Colombian authorities quickly dismissed.

Word also reached Austria, where the International Narcotics Control Board enforces a 1961 treaty that requires the "uprooting of all coca bushes which grow wild" and bans the distribution of products with even trace amounts of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine.

The board sent Colombia's foreign minister a letter asking how the "refreshing drink made from coca and produced by an Indian community" didn't violate the treaty and months later, the food safety agency quietly imposed the ban.

The Nasas cried foul, suspecting behind-the-scenes pressure from Coca-Cola.

Colombia's food safety agency, the narcotics control board and Coca-Cola Co. all denied that.

Agency lawyer Carolina Contreras says it was the control board's letter that prompted the ban, and the control board says it had no communication from Coca-Cola before sending it.

But the Indians remain suspicious. While they've appealed the ban, their $15,000-a-month income from the sale of Coca Sek and other coca products is suffering, says David Curtidor, a Nasa in charge of the company that produces the drink.

"Why don't they also ban Coca-Cola?" he said, claiming: "It's also made of coca leaves."

Dana Bolden, a spokesman at Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, would neither confirm nor deny that a coca extract is part of the secret recipe. He repeated the company's longstanding refusal to reveal any elements of the Coca-Cola formula.

A loophole in the 1961 treaty allows coca leaves to be sold internationally if they are later distilled of their cocaine alkaloid to produce a "flavoring agent." That's what Northfield, Ill.-based Stepan Co. does under a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration license.

The Stepan Co., according to its Web site, is a "a global manufacturer of specialty and intermediate chemicals used in consumer products and industrial application." The company didn't respond to repeated requests to confirm that Coca-Cola is a client.

Stepan is the only U.S. firm currently importing coca, a DEA spokeswoman told The Associated Press. It buys about 55 tons of Peruvian coca leaves each year, said Jimmy Salcedo, commercial manager for Peru's state-owned National Coca Company, Enaco.

Many Indians in the Andes where coca is revered as a sacred plant and a matter of national pride in several countries are angry that the United States is importing coca leaves legally while their own coca products are banned.

"The coca leaf is legal for Coca-Cola and illegal for medicinal purposes in our country and in the whole world," Bolivian President Evo Morales told the U.N. General Assembly last year.

Colombia Seeks Israelis Accused Of Training Death Squads

Taken from Haaretz., Isreal, 04.03.2007
By The Associated Press

Interpol issued an international arrest warrant Tuesday for three Israelis accused of training private armies of Colombian drug cartels and right-wing death squads.

Yair Klein, Melnik Ferri and Tzedaka Abraham were being sought on charges of criminal conspiracy and instruction in terrorism and face nearly 11 years in prison if convicted, a spokesman for Colombia's domestic intelligence agency said, speaking on the condition that he not be identified.

The men are accused of helping set up training camps to teach private armies working for drug lords Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha about explosives, car bombs and high-profile killings. The armies later morphed into Colombia's right-wing death squads.

Klein, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army, appeared in a 1998 video used to train far-right squads. In 1991, he was convicted and fined US$13,400 (10,030) by an Israeli court for selling arms to Colombia's illegal groups.

Klein also spent 16 months in a Sierra Leon prison for his role in a guns for blood diamonds deal.

In an interview with Caracol television conducted in Israel and broadcast in March, Klein denied ever working with the cocaine cartels, but confirmed that he did instruct the far-right death squads in how to eliminate the leftist insurgency.

He said he was originally hired - with the Colombian Ministry of Defense's blessing - to organize security for the banana industry in the northern region of Uraba.

Many of his students went on to carry out some of Colombia's most brutal massacres.

Klein said, however, that, They were not trained to kill, only trained to defend themselves.

Headed by Escobar, the Medellin cartel pioneered the use of unrestrained violence in its dealings with enemies and allies alike.

As Escobar fought against the threat of extradition, he declared war on Colombia, bringing down air planes, blowing up police headquarters and offering his army of assassins a set rate for the killing of policemen.Escobar was finally shot down by police in his hometown of Medellin in 1993. Rodriguez Gacha was killed by police in 1989.

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I'm glad the truth is coming out. The US asked the Israel government to do the dirty work and assist the right wing governments in South America. I suppose this is a small price to pay for the billions of money in Aid and Arsenal Isreal receive from the US. Also The Mossad helped establish, organize, and train SAVAK (secret service of Shah of Iran) and also helped the secret police of apartheid South Africa, Pinochet`s Chile, and the right-wing military dictatorships of Argentina, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Uganda and El Salvador. Seems wrong doesn't it but now it is all coming out.

Colombia Army Chief Linked To Outlaw Militias

The allegations come as Congress reviews aid to the U.S. ally. The CIA says the intelligence hasn't been fully vetted.

Taken from The LA Times, March 25, 2007
By Paul Richter and Greg Miller

WASHINGTON — The CIA has obtained new intelligence alleging that the head of Colombia's U.S.-backed army collaborated extensively with right-wing militias that Washington considers terrorist organizations, including a militia headed by one of the country's leading drug traffickers.



Disclosure of the allegation about army chief Gen. Mario Montoya comes as the high level of U.S. support for Colombia's government is under scrutiny by Democrats in Congress. The disclosure could heighten pressure to reduce or redirect that aid because Montoya has been a favorite of the Pentagon and an important partner in the U.S.-funded counterinsurgency strategy called Plan Colombia. The $700 million a year Colombia receives makes it the third-largest beneficiary of U.S. foreign assistance.

Montoya has had a long and close association with Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, and would be the highest-ranking Colombian officer implicated in a growing political scandal in the South American country over links between the outlawed militias and top officials. The scandal already has implicated the country's former foreign minister, at least one state governor, legislators and the head of the national police, and has shaken Uribe's government.

President Bush called Uribe a "personal friend" two weeks ago during a visit to Bogota, and his government is one of the Bush administration's closest allies in Latin America.

The intelligence about Montoya is contained in a report recently circulated within the CIA. It says that Montoya and a paramilitary group jointly planned and conducted a military operation in 2002 to eliminate Marxist guerrillas from poor areas around Medellin, a city in northwestern Colombia that has been a center of the drug trade.

At least 14 people were killed during the operation, and opponents of Uribe allege that dozens more disappeared in its aftermath.

The intelligence report, reviewed by The Times, includes information from another Western intelligence service and indicates that U.S. officials have received similar reports from other reliable sources.

In addition to his close cooperation with U.S. officials on Plan Colombia, Montoya has served as an instructor at the U.S.-sponsored military training center formerly called the School of the Americas. The Colombian general was praised by U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when Pace directed the regional military command for Latin America, and Montoya has been organizing a new Colombian counternarcotics task force with U.S. funds.

There have been rumors that Montoya has worked with the paramilitaries, but no charges have been lodged by authorities.

For decades, Colombia has been wracked by a civil war pitting left-wing militias against the government. An estimated 3 million Colombians have been forced from their homes and thousands killed during the course of the fighting. Right-wing paramilitary groups, long suspected of links to the government, joined the fight in the 1980s. They were formed ostensibly as defensive forces against leftist groups, but soon became involved in massive land grabs, drug trafficking and takeovers of businesses.

After his election in 2002, Uribe offered a plan to end the civil war under which about 31,000 right-wing fighters have given up their weapons and dozens of their leaders have surrendered in exchange for the promise of light sentences.

But Uribe has faced a steady stream of disclosures about links between the paramilitaries and officials close to him. Allegations that the militias' links reached to the top of the military are likely to intensify efforts by Democrats to cut the Colombian military's portion of a pending $3.9-billion multi-year aid package, congressional aides and regional analysts said. Eighty percent of U.S. aid to Colombia goes to the military and police.

In addition to the aid package, the administration is also seeking congressional approval of a separate U.S.-Colombian trade deal that already has met stiff opposition from Democrats.

The CIA document alleging Montoya's ties to the paramilitaries was made available for review by The Times by a source who refused to identify himself except as a U.S. government employee. He said he was disclosing the information because he was unhappy that Uribe's government had not been held more to account by the Bush administration.

The CIA did not dispute the authenticity of the document, although agency officials would not confirm it. At the CIA's request, The Times has withheld details of the document that agency officials said could jeopardize intelligence sources and methods. A spokesman urged against disclosure of the findings, saying that some are considered to be "unconfirmed" intelligence.

"By describing what it calls a leaked CIA report containing material from another intelligence service — and unconfirmed material at that — the Los Angeles Times makes it less likely that friendly countries will share information with the United States," said Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the agency. "And that ultimately could affect our ability to protect Americans."

Douglas Frantz, a managing editor of The Times, responded: "We listened carefully to the CIA concerns and agreed to withhold details that the agency said jeopardized certain sources and ongoing operations, but our judgment is that the significance of the issues raised in this story warrant its publication."

A key finding in the CIA document was that an allied Western intelligence agency reported in January that the Colombian police, army and paramilitaries had jointly planned and conducted the military sweep in 2002 around Medellin, known as Operation Orion.

The allied intelligence agency said its informant was a yet-unproven source and cautioned that the report was to be treated as raw intelligence.

But the document also included a comment from the defense attache of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Col. Rey A. Velez: "This report confirms information provided by a proven source."

According to the document, the attache said information from the proven source "also could implicate" the head of the Colombian armed forces, Gen. Freddy Padilla de Leon, who commanded the military in Barranquilla, in northern Colombia, during the same period.

After Uribe was elected in 2002 on a platform of tough measures against the rebels, he quickly organized the Medellin offensive. It was commanded by Montoya, 57, who hails from the same northern region of Colombia as the president.

Operation Orion sent 3,000 Colombian army soldiers and police, supported by heavily armed helicopter gunships, though a vast shantytown area controlled by Colombia's largest left-wing rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The operation has been widely considered a success and has been a key to Uribe's popularity.

But there have long been allegations that after the army swept through, the paramilitaries filled the power vacuum, asserting their control with killings, disappearances and other crimes.

The Organization of American States and the United Nations have investigated the reports.

Recently, Colombian Sen. Gustavo Petro, a political opponent of Uribe, publicly charged that 46 people disappeared during the operation.

The informant cited in the CIA document reported that in jointly conducting the operation, the army, police and paramilitaries had signed documents spelling out their plans. The signatories, according to the informant, were Montoya; the commander of an area police force; and paramilitary leader Fabio Jaramillo, who was a subordinate of Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano, the head of the paramilitaries in the Medellin area.

Murillo, known as Don Berna, took control of the drug trade around Medellin after the death of fabled drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. He is now in a Colombian jail, and U.S. authorities are seeking his extradition.

In an interview, U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said they have closely investigated whether Uribe himself has collaborated with the right-wing paramilitaries in illegal activities and have so far found no proof that he has. But they emphasized that they also could not rule it out.

One of the officials said that it would have been "unusual" for Uribe to be personally involved in the details of a military activity such as Operation Orion, even though the president conceived the campaign. "You don't see him typically involved in that sort of detail," the official said.

One longtime Colombia analyst, Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank, said that any collaboration between Montoya and paramilitaries "would bring the army right into the heart of the scandal." U.S. and Colombian officials have insisted that any links between the Colombian military and the militias involved only low-level, renegade officers.

Already, eight members of the Colombian Congress have been jailed in the scandal, and the foreign minister, a close Uribe ally, has been forced to resign. Colombia's former secret police chief, Jorge Noguera, was arrested last month for allegedly giving paramilitary leaders information on left-wing labor organizers, some of them later killed. He was released Friday on a procedural issue but is subject to rearrest, government officials said.

At a news conference in Bogota, the capital, during his visit this month, Bush expressed confidence that Uribe's government could carry out a thorough investigation of the ties between officials and the paramilitaries.

"I support a plan that says that there be an independent judiciary analyzing every charge brought forth, and when someone is found guilty, there's punishment," Bush said. He said Uribe supported the same approach. Bush administration officials say Uribe deserves credit for being willing to seek the truth about the growing scandal.

Many Democrats in Washington have been less confident. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, (D-Vt.) has argued that the scandal shows the need for a reassessment of U.S. support for Uribe. Many in Congress have contended that if aid to Colombia is not cut, it should at least be shifted so that more goes to non-military purposes.

One of the U.S. officials interviewed said there were signs that the scandal would be increasingly focusing on the military, including Montoya.

"A lot of people in the political class are very nervous," he said.

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President Alvaro Uribe rejected allegations that his army chief collaborated extensively with right-wing militias accused of some of the worst atrocities in Colombia's long-running civil conflict. The allied intelligence agency cautioned that the information linking Montoya to jailed paramilitary warlord Diego Murillo, also known as Don Berna, should be treated as raw intelligence because it was based on a yet-unproven account from an informant. Let’s hope the intelligence was not received from agent Curveball.

Colombia has a history linking the governments and organisations with various right wing paramilitaries. Only last week fruit giant Chiquita admitted paying protection money to Colombian paramilitaries including the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group on the US list of terrorists. In the past, the company had also made payments to leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), both also listed as terror groups. It was not long ago that Foreign Minister, María Consuelo Araújo resigned after fallout with Uribe from the arrest of five politicians, including her brother, Senator Álvaro Araújo, on charges of working with paramilitary squads in a kidnapping case related to the scandal, made her presence in the cabinet untenable. Then there are the scandals from the Colombia’s “U.S.-bankrolled” army: staged bombings, civilian killings and fake kidnappings have eroded confidence in the institution. A few months ago two imprisoned rebels phoned a radio station o describe how army intelligence officers allegedly paid ex-guerrillas thousands of dollars to stage phony bombings ahead of Uribe's August inauguration to a second term. The jailed guerrillas said the officers intended to take credit and claim reward money for discovering and defusing the bombs, one of which killed a passer-by and wounded 19 soldiers. "The officers offered 30 million pesos ($12,500) for each attack and they paid those who could make one happen," an ex-guerrilla known as Evaristo said from the La Picota prison. They also said the intelligence officers paid former guerrillas to organize the bogus surrender of a rebel unit and falsely accuse peasants of being rebels. Then there are disappearances and killings of general public: of particular concern are complaints that people with no history of guerrilla ties have been seized by security forces only to turn up dead. Last September, the chief federal prosecutor's office opened investigations against 14 soldiers accused of killing civilians and claiming they were guerrillas. No one keeps national figures of extrajudicial killings. But between 2002 and 2005, the independent group Judicial Freedom Corp. recorded 107 cases in five municipalities in northwestern Antioquia state.

US Warns On Corporate Terror Payments After Chiquita Fine

Taken from Yahoo News, Mar 19, 2007
By Associated Free Press

US authorities warned companies Monday they can never deal with terrorists after fruit giant Chiquita agreed to a hefty fine for paying protection money to Colombian paramilitaries.

Chiquita Brands International admitted to the US government in 2003 that it had been paying the money for years to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group on the US list of terrorists.



Under a settlement confirmed by the US Department of Justice Monday, the Cincinnati-based company agreed to pay a fine of 25 million dollars and to bolster its internal compliance and ethics program.

Chiquita pleaded guilty before Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court in Washington to one count of engaging in transactions with a designated global terrorist group. Judicial officials paid credit to Chiquita's cooperation in their investigation but stressed the gravity of the offense.

"Funding a terrorist organization can never be treated as a cost of doing business," US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said in a statement.

"American businesses must take note that payments to terrorists are of a whole different category. They are crimes," he said.

Chiquita, through its wholly owned Colombian subsidiary C.I. Bananos de Exportaction S.A. (Banadex), paid the AUC in exchange for protection in the banana-producing areas of Uraba and Santa Marta, Colombia. In the past, the company had also made payments to leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), both also listed as terror groups, US prosecutors said.

Chiquita, which sold Banadex in 2004, said it had voluntarily disclosed that its subsidiary "had been forced to make payments to right- and left-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia to protect the lives of its employees."

"The payments made by the company were always motivated by our good-faith concern for the safety of our employees," Chiquita chief executive Fernando Aguirre said in a statement last week.

"Nevertheless, we recognized - and acted upon - our legal obligation to inform the DoJ of this admittedly difficult situation."

According to the US investigation, Chiquita made over 100 payments to the AUC amounting to more than 1.7 million dollars, masked in its corporate records as contributions for "security."