CONFLICT-COLOMBIA: One Billion Dollars to Support Peace Process

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jul 7 2000 (IPS) - The 15 countries of the European Union, six Latin American nations, the United States, Japan and Canada and international bodies agreed Friday to set up a committee to back Colombia’s peace process and pledged one billion dollars to finance development projects in the war-torn South American country.

The meeting of donors, convened by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to examine the ‘Plan Colombia’, spawned support — and a few reservations — from governments and criticism from Colombian and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The discussions focused on President Andrés Pastrana’s Plan Colombia, and the main discrepancy was whether the strategy is chiefly a military plan aimed at stepping up the fight against insurgent groups, or a serious attempt at boosting economic and social development.

The Colombian government’s “peace plan” has a seven billion dollar pricetag, of which four billion are to be provided by Colombia itself. The United States is to provide 1.3 billion dollars in anti-drug and military aid.

The Pastrana administration presented the Plan Colombia last year as a strategy aimed at putting an end to the civil war, curbing drug trafficking, reactivating the crisis-stricken economy and strengthening the justice system.

But according to 65 NGOs that met Wedneday in Madrid, 70 percent of US support will go directly into the war effort.

The Latin American and European activists charged that Pastrana’s new strategy was not a plan for peace but a plan for war, because — in the words of Antonio Sandino, with the Colombian NGO Arco Iris (Rainbow) — it fails to address the economic and social structural causes of the country’s decades-old armed conflict.

However, Colombian foreign relations minister Guillermo Fernández disagreed with that perception in a news briefing Friday, and maintained that most of the US aid which the NGOs charge will go toward war activities will actually be earmarked for the fight against drug trafficking.

But the NGOs complained that while the Plan Colombia concentrates on peasants who plant coca to subsist, the lucrative international flows of distribution and trafficking are largely ignored.

They also pointed out that the recent expansion of coca crops in southern Colombia was due to a lack of real alternatives, largely because of a dearth of investment by the state, especially in infrastructure. Furthermore, they stressed that the territory controlled by the guerrillas accounts for just 500 million dollars of an overall global drug trade of 50 billion dollars.

Colombia’s National Network of Initiatives for Peace and Against War (REDEPAZ) said the US military aid package, “under the pretext of the fight against drugs…will aggravate the humanitarian crisis…putting the current peace talks at grave risk and principally affecting the civilian population.”

The Plan Colombia contains around 40 social projects, to cost around one billion dollars, which are to be implemented in areas where the rebels and drug traffickers are active.

However, the umbrella network said the “social component” of the Plan Colombia, for which Pastrana won European support Friday, merely complemented the war strategy underlying the US military component.

But discrepancies did not only crop up between the Colombian government and NGOs. Participants at the meeting told IPS that while Spain, Britain and Ireland had thrown their full support behind Plan Colombia, Germany, France and the Netherlands were hesitant due to the US military component.

At the opening of the meeting Friday morning, Spanish foreign minister Joseph Piqué reported that Spain would shell out 100 million dollars, while IDB president Enrique Iglesias said his institution would provide 300 million.

Another 100 million will come from Japan, an additional 200 million from the United States, and the rest of the one billion dollars will be supplied by other EU countries, in amounts yet to be determined.

The Plan Colombia Follow-up Committee that participants agreed to set up will be initially comprised of representatives from Spain, Britain, Japan and Canada. Other countries should join in the future.

Drug trafficking was one of the main focuses of the gathering and of the public appearances by participants.

The NGOs, who were also represented at the donors’ meeting, protested the spraying of toxic chemicals, the use of funguses or other methods to eliminate illegal crops by force, on the argument that peasant farmers planted coca simply to subsist.

Agreeing largely with the NGOs, former Colombian foreign minister Augusto Ramírez Ocampo told IPS that the policy of replacing coca with legal alternatives has been ineffective, and that aerial spraying has not worked either.

That, he said, is primarily due to the fact that on the land where coca is grown there is no other crop that can compete in terms of productivity. “The idea is to provide peasants with new land, where they can grow crops that end up being profitable for them,” said the analyst.

The Plan Colombia outlines specific projects aimed at getting coca farmers to turn to legal alternatives like palm oil, cacao or reforestation, Ramírez Ocampo explained.

The IDB’s Iglesias, who has backed the peace talks between Colombia’s guerrilla groups and the government, said “any real solution must go beyond a ceasefire and concentrate on economic and social questions, with justice as its backbone.”

The government representatives meeting in Madrid, including those who expressed their opposition to or reservations regarding the US military aid portion of the Plan Colombia, agreed that in any case the issue was Colombia’s business.

But José Miguel Vivanco, with the US-based international watchdog Human Rights Watch, spoke out unequivocally against the military component of the plan.

A last-minute clause added to the US bill providing for the 1.3 billion dollar military and anti-drugs aid package states that Washigton can suspend the conditions on human rights at any time on the basis of US national interest.

In other words, said Vivanco, the Plan Colombia would be reduced to a merely military strategy, converting any reference to human rights into dead letter.

If that occurs, there will be an unrestricted flow of military aid to Colombia, despite the clear evidence of ties between the Colombian military and paramilitary groups, which are responsible for the lion’s share of human rights violations in that country, he argued.