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Archivo de articulos más importante de ANNCOL y la prensa oficial

[NOTE: The Vietnamization of the Colombian conflict is coming along thanks to the energies of U.S. hawks and the Colombian security forces. Some credit must also go to the U.S. media who keep peddling the "narco- guerrilla" myth as justification for U.S. involvement in the so-called "war on drugs." -DG]

Some people are making the same mistakes they made with Vietnam in 1963,'' said Cynthia Watson, associate dean of the National War College in Washington, D.C. "Colombia is not the first place where the potential for mission creep is great."
 

REUTERS
Sunday, 14 November 1999

U.S. Steps Up Drug War in Colombia

CARLISLE, Pennsylvania -- The United States is due to begin training two new Colombian army anti-drug battalions next spring in a move political analysts said on Saturday could give Washington a more direct role in the long-running war against drugs and Marxist rebels.

Gen. Keith Huber, operations director of the U.S. Army's Miami-based Southern Command, said on Friday that each of the elite units would comprise some 950 men -- similar to the Colombian army's first anti-drug battalion set up earlier this year with U.S. know-how at an estimated cost of some $70 million.

Plans to create the units were outlined months ago but Huber gave the first firm timetable. He said all three units, together with a joint U.S.-Colombian military intelligence center would be based in southern Colombia, a region rife with illegal drug plantations and a stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's largest surviving 1960s rebel army.

Despite some $289 million in U.S. aid last fiscal year, cocaine and heroin production has spiraled in Colombia. Human rights groups and some political analysts argue Washington is looking to reverse that setback by setting up the battalions that will be subject to heavy U.S. influence and thereby give the Pentagon a much greater say in how Colombia's three-decade-old war is fought.

``We have been told to get prepared to train (two new anti-drug battalions) and that will begin next spring. There is no funding as yet,'' Huber, who served as a Special Forces adviser during the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, told reporters on the sidelines of a two-day conference about Colombia at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

``This is a war, a conflict that we must win collectively. (Drugs) is a chemical and a weapon of mass destruction that kills our children one at a time,'' he added.

Officials in Washington and Bogota accuse Colombia's 20,000 guerrillas of fueling a two-fold increase in cocaine production and a 20 percent rise in heroin output over the last four years. They say the rebels earn some $600 million a year in drug profits to bankroll an uprising that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in just 10 years -- a charge the guerrillas deny.

``The enemy in Colombia is a business enterprise and if you want to look at how to defeat that you must look at how they grow (the drugs) process it and transport it,'' Huber said.

Despite on-going wrangles in the U.S. Congress that have blocked a planned $1.5 billion, three-year aid package to Colombia, the creation of the new units seems unlikely to be delayed. The necessary funding could be drawn from U.S. Department of Defense coffers with little or no accountability to Congress.

Rights groups see the creation of the battalions as the start of a much more significant U.S. role in Colombia. Washington already has some 220 U.S. personnel, including soldiers and advisers, in Colombia at any one time.

``This represents a quantitative and a qualitative shift. This creates from scratch U.S.-trained units and they (the United States) will be maintaining contacts through the joint intelligence command,'' said George Vickers, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), who also attended the conference.

``It's a mechanism that could give Southern Command not necessarily a determining role but certainly a strong influence over what will be done,'' he said.

Gen. Ernesto Gilibert, sub-director of Colombia's National Police, however, believed the issue was simply one of the army giving greater operational support to the police, which until now has taken a lead role in drug interdiction efforts.

But many political analysts continue to warn that under the pretext of fighting drugs Washington will be sucked into the quagmire of Colombia's guerrilla war.

``Some people are making the same mistakes they made with Vietnam in 1963,'' said Cynthia Watson, associate dean of the National War College in Washington, D.C. ``Colombia is not the first place where the potential for mission creep is great.''