Colombia

[LowerCaseRepublican]

I had the opportunity to read some of the Bush proposed budget. One thing struck me. Bush wants to give $104 million to Colombia. U.S. military aid to Colombia will not help the U.S. war on drugs. A 1994 RAND

Corporation study found that it would cost $34 million in treatment programs or over $750 million in coca crop eradication in other countries, to reduce cocaine use by 1%.

 

Here are a few factoids on Colombia (1988-1995)...and they only go up a lot from here.

Political Assassinations: 6,177

Assassinations Presumed to be Political: 10,556

Assassinations Presumed to be "Social Cleansing": 2,459

Deaths in Combat between Army and Guerrillas: 9,140

People Forcibly Disappeared: 1,451

Obscure Assassinations: 37,595

Total: 67,378

Average per month 701.9

Average per day 23.4

 

From "Data Bank of the Commission Inter-Congregacional de Justicia y Paz"

 

Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human

rights situation in Colombia, 2000 Report released on 8 February 2001:

The majority of the massacres were committed during violent paramilitary raids,

many of which resulted in the forced displacement of the local inhabitants. The

Ministry of Defence has stated that the paramilitary groups "are largely

responsible for the increase in human rights violations in recent years".

 

Figures supplied by the Inter-Institutional Commission for the Defence,

Protection and Promotion of Workers' Rights put the total number of unionists

killed in the year 2000 at at least 112.

 

The human rights violations have increased exponentially as the years progress. General Uribe gasses the peasants' food crops in "the war on drugs". The more their human rights violations increase, the more we give them aid! It's not just a Bush thing either. The Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush regime has been giving money to Central and South American paramilitary dictatorships for years.

 

Don't you think that we have something better to do with $104 million than give it to people who kill political dissidents (the popular way of murder is handcuff and blindfold them and toss them out of a helicopter over the ocean), slaughter labor organizers (I have had the opportunity to meet two men that were targeted for death for the "crime" of trying to organize a union), and kill innocent peasants that pose even the smallest threat to their sickening iron fist regime?

 

Don't get me wrong, I hate what the left wing FARQ does there in the country as well, but giving $104 million to Colombia while they kill so many innocents, it's just moronic especially since we are fighting against a dictator who could be considered a "lightweight" in the murder field when compared to the death and destruction Uribe has wreaked in Colombia.