| ARMS TRADE RESOURCE CENTER
RECENT NEWS COVERAGE: May 22, 2000 Providence Journal Dubious Colombia Aid Package As the US Senate prepares to vote on a supplemental aid bill that includes $714 million for Colombia, members would do well to heed the cautionary words of Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI). Rhode Island’s junior senator is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Narcotics and Terrorism. In an opening statement before a Subcommittee hearing in February, Chafee warned: “American taxpayers need to understand that their tax dollars are being used to dramatically and quickly escalate a program that will involve US military personnel training foreign troops that may well become involved in a shooting war in Latin America.” Chafee’s concern is well founded. The infusion of money and weaponry into Colombia provided for by this bill is an expansion of a policy that has failed to curtail drug production or end a bloody 40-year civil war. Chafee’s position is also courageous. He has questioned a bill being vigorously promoted by the Providence-based Textron corporation, which now stands to gain a $182.5 million windfall for its Bell Helicopter Division in Fort Worth, Texas, for 33 refurbished and 60 new Huey helicopters for Colombia. Bell Textron has enlisted former US Ambassador to Colombia Tony Gillespie to push its interests in Congress. Powerful oil interests like Occidental Petroleum and BP Amoco are also lobbying for the bill. Clinton’s original $1+ billion supplemental aid package for Colombia included 33 Hueys, 30 Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters, airborne and ground-based radar, surveillance aircraft for interdiction efforts, and money to train and arm two 1,000-man counter-narcotics battalions. On May 9, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a version of the bill that reduced overall spending and expanded human rights funding and conditions. The Committee voted to cut the Black Hawks (used in the past by the Colombian military to strafe civilian villages) and replaced them with Textron’s cheaper Huey helicopters. The supplemental appropriation is in addition to $330 million in assistance already planned for Colombia for 2000 and 2001. While eliminating the Black Hawks and strengthening human rights requirements are positive steps, the emergency aid would still leave Colombia the third largest recipient of US military aid, after Israel and Egypt, and the second largest non-NATO recipient of US military training programs, after South Korea. In a country where 2-3,000 civilians died last year in political and extrajudicial killings, where the military routinely violates human rights, and where drug production has not slowed, additional weapons and training continue a dangerous and flawed policy. Military training puts new tools into the hands of a corrupt and out-of-control military that has been responsible for countless human rights abuses. A recent Human Rights Watch special report found that 7 Colombian officers implicated in human rights violations and linked to Colombia’s notorious paramilitary groups were graduates of the US Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) in Ft. Benning, GA. Major David Hernandez Rojas, schooled in psychological operations at the SOA in 1991, set up the La Muerte death squad, equipped with uniforms, guns and munitions seized from slain guerillas. Colonel Diego Fernando Fino, who took classes at the SOA in 1989, is a leader in the Fourth Brigade, which has close ties to paramilitaries. Colonel Fino ordered the murder of three civilians on their way to ransom a family member kidnapped by paramilitaries, and then divided the ransom money with his soldiers! The Leahy Law, named for its principal sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), is an important means of ensuring that officers like Hernandez and Fino are not benefiting from US training or using US weapons. Although the law prohibits military assistance from being transferred to foreign military units cited by the Secretary of State as human rights violators, it is routinely circumvented in Colombia. Generals there have redefined the word “unit” to mean an individual soldier, rather than a brigade or company of soldiers. Thus, an individual soldier who has not been charged with abuses is eligible to receive training even if he is a member of a unit responsible for numerous violations of human rights. Analysts at the Center for International Policy who monitor implementation of the Leahy Law concluded that only two Colombian military units were eligible for training in 1998. Nevertheless, 15 units received US military training. Despite enormous increases in aid to Colombia over the past 4 years, drug cultivation has skyrocketed. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that cocaine production in Colombia in 1999 reached 165 metric tons – three times the 1998 estimate. At the same time, US military aid jumped from $65 million in 1996 to $300 million in 1999. It is unlikely that an increase to more than $1 billion for 2000-2001 would reverse this trend. President Clinton’s insistence that this aid package will reduce “the drug flow into America” while not leading to “another Vietnam” is not reassuring. The arrest on cocaine-smuggling charges of Laurie Hiatt, wife of the US military attaché who oversaw US Special Forces counter-narcotics operations in Colombia, should make it clear that military action is not the answer to the US drug problem. An aid package of this magnitude makes it difficult to ensure that US training and weapons will not simply escalate Colombia’s civil war. Robert White, US Ambassador to El Salvador during that country’s protracted civil war, has stated that the aid package “amounts to intervention in another country’s civil war.” Colombia may need US support and assistance in bringing about a lasting peace. This aid should not be in the form of Huey helicopters, radar systems and military training. Rather, a new and effective policy that addresses the problem of drug production and seeks to get at the root causes of the civil war would provide Colombia with substantial aid for alternative development programs, humanitarian assistance, and the strengthening of its judicial and civil institutions. The citizens of Rhode Island should consider the implications of a militarized aid package being promoted by corporations like Textron, which is, in the words of one Bell Helicopter lobbyist, “just trying to sell helicopters.” Frida Berrigan is a research associate at The World Policy Institute in New York. Carol Bragg is with the RI Committee for Nonviolence Initiatives and serves on the National Council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
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