Brother Roy Bourgeois -- On Colombia

Things are going to escalate. That is the experience of our delegation that just returned from Columbia. Without a doubt Bill Clinton is opening up something very serious. I and others see it as another Vietnam in the making. Some call it another El Salvador.

So this situation is very serious. The military aid-the 1.3 billion dollars is the first installment for Plan Columbia-most of that is going into the hands of the military. The military is very happy with Plan Columbia because it enriches them and gives them more power. In Columbia they have hundreds of what they call "outsourcers". They are in a sense, they come from a corporation that actually hires retired high ranking military officers who they pay as civilians in the field helping to train hundreds and hundreds of Colombians. They are doing this of course to get around the restrictions that are being put on Congress and the White House that they can only have a maximum of 500 U.S. advisors Columbia.

Here's the way it really worked. General Barry McCaffrey our drug czar arrived with Plan Columbia all laid out by the pentagon and those at the state department, the CIA, with no consultation, or very little debate in Colombian congress, and with no participation at all from the indigenous leaders or governors throughout Columbia. Barry McCaffrey arrived and said basically this is the plan, this is what you are to do.

We asked the ambassador "if" all of the cocoa plants are destroyed in Columbia is this going to solve the problem?" She of course said, 'NO' if they killed all of the cocoa fields and destroyed Columbia with all the chemicals that are being sprayed destroying mother earth. Is this going to solve the problem? Of course not, it's simply going to move it into Ecuador. It'll return to Bolivia, it'll go into other countries in Latin America. And she said, which was just incredible her response was "at least we will have solved the problem here in Columbia".

What we heard was very alarming. The planes arrived dropping the very strong chemical glyphosate (Round-Up), which is produced by Monsanto (who also brought us Agent Orange in Vietnam). This chemical being sprayed on the coca plants is also being sprayed indiscriminately on their food sources and their corn, on their banana plants, on their yucca, on their beans and rice. What's happening is it's killing their food sources and also running off into the rivers and its killing the fish, it's killing their chickens. Very serious too are the health problems involved. There are serious respiratory problems among the children.

What they also said to us is that they do not see this really as a drug war. They say that what the U.S. is about there is to get their vast oil reserves. They could care less whether they destroy mother earth driving the indigenous off of their lands is part of the process.

We also say that Plan Columbia is not to fight a drug war but to fight a counter-insurgency. It's really to go after the FARC and the ELN. We heard from the Vice-president, the U.S. ambassador and from the indigenous - they are all in agreement here, that there is a problem here in the United States. The demand side is not being addressed. The solution here seems to be let's just build more prisons. Let's put people away. I have to say that during those four years that I spent in federal prisons around the country from protesting the School of the Americas, the vast majority, 80%, in the prisons we go to are non-violent drug offenders getting 5, 10, 20 years for small amounts of drugs. That is of course not the solution. There is very little dialogue or debate going on about the demand side and how are we going to solve the problem here.

With the issue of the U.S. Army School of the Americas, which just changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, it's still about providing the muscle for the economic policies of the IMF and the World Bank, the sweatshops and the large corporations who go down they're to exploit the cheap labor and the vast resources. At the SOA most of the soldiers today are coming in from Columbia. Columbia has trained over 10,000 soldiers at the school. We are preparing Columbia for war. In that sense we have another Vietnam in the making.

The U.S. is going in to exploit the resources at any cost. They are going to kill many people. What we have learned from Vietnam is very important. When our troops started coming back in body bags it caused problems here at home. What we are doing now is somewhat different than in Vietnam-they have learned from Vietnam. We are training their soldiers to do the dirty work for us. We probably will not send U.S. troops there. We'll bring their troops to Fort Benning, Georgia. We will send advisors.

The enemy in Latin America has always been the poor. The enemy has always been within their borders, not outside their borders. The threat is from within their own borders, the poor, those who call for land reform and for adequate housing. What we're doing to Columbia is nothing more or less than what we've done to other countries. It's Imperialism, it's U.S. intervention. We are the new conquistadors.

The guerrillas in El Salvador and Nicaragua had a lot of support from the people. There seems to be more respect for the ELN than for FARC.

They use Round-up, saying it's "ultra" Round-up doesn't really express the effects of this, it's deadly. It's killing the wildlife. What's happening is they're going further into the rainforests to destroy it. We did hear that there was a lot of experimental research going on to make a stronger chemical. The coca plant is very resilient. They're looking into a fungicide. They're looking for a chemical that will do it all in one spraying. What happens then, we're going to see a lot of kids dropping dead. This is going to be very close to Agent Orange. I think that's what they're working toward. There are no limits.

This is going to escalate really fast. There are probably going to be a couple of these black hawk helicopters shot down, these low flying planes doing the spraying they also are at high risk. There are going to be some casualties there, we've going to have another Gulf of Tonkin incident. An incident, and an investigation, that's going to really escalate things in Columbia. There will be more advisors going of course, more mercenaries, and more soldiers from Columbia being trained at the SOA. A lot of people are starting to mobilize on Columbia. There is urgency here. We've got a lot of people working on environmental issues who are coming on board. We've got animal rights people joining in with human rights people. What we have going on with this Plan Colombia is it's really a plan of death. We're also drawing on the experience of a lot of veterans, Vietnam vets and others-we've drawn on the experience of a lot of people who've working on Latin America over the years and who know first hand U.S. foreign policy, the brutally of the military towards the poor.

I encourage you to order our video: "SOA Guns and Greed" which connects the SOA to the economic giants like the IMF and World Bank. For more info on Columbia see www.soaw.org, 1-800-227-8523, SOA Guns and Greed, or SOA Watch, PO Box 4566, Washington DC 20017.