Seeing for Ourselves...Tracking US
Policy in Colombia
by Ed Kinane

Last fall, with my help, my partner Ann Tiffany began organizing a Witness for Peace delegation. We called it, "Colombia & U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Rages…Fueled by U.S. Money, U.S. Soldiers and by SOA Training."

We would go to Colombia with an open mind -- sort of. We'd also go knowing that the U.S. government, for reasons of its own, is pouring oil on the flames of this decades-long civil war.

Ann and I had both been to Colombia with WFP before. As Latin America solidarity activists, we focus on Colombia because in recent years the U.S., through "Plan Colombia," has provided $3.3 billion in military aid to this war-torn country.

And as SOA Watch activists we know that Colombia is the country with the most military officers trained in "anti-insurgency" at the School of the Americas and the one whose army has long had the worst human rights record in Latin America. (In late February the peace community of San Jose de Apartado reported that the army's 11th Brigade massacred seven of its members.)

Another dimension of our involvement in Colombia is that here in Central New York we have a sister community relationship with Cajibio, a rural municipality in the southwestern department of Cauca. Our main contact in Cajibio is Marylen Serna Salinas, a community organizer and a campesina trained in anthropology. Last spring Marylen spent two weeks in Central New York giving talks and concretizing the links between our communities.

By early February when our 11-day delegation began, we had recruited nine others: two more Syracusans, two more upstate New Yorkers, a Canadian and four others from all over the country. We were four women and seven men. An older group, our youngest was 49; two are in our late seventies. We came from diverse spiritual traditions: Jewish, Catholic, Hindu, Unitarian, Gaian.

We included two nuns, a priest, a former priest, a professor emeritus, an ex-marine, a retired nurse, an ex-Wall Streeter and the CEO of a mining company. Most have previous experience in Latin America; most are seasoned activists. Significantly, seven of us have been to federal prison for nonviolently protesting the SOA.

On Friday, February 4 we all -- and Amy Morris of the WFP Colombia international team -- met in Miami for orientation and individual "discernment" -- a process of determining whether this trip would be right for us. For two long days we had briefings on WFP, security, and on various facets of Colombia.

We were joined one afternoon by drug policy analyst and WFP board member, Sanho Tree. Sanho tutored us on lobbying technique to use when we returned to the States. (Our delegation's purpose was to come home better informed in order to work to make U.S. policy toward Colombia more humane.)

We also did many "go arounds" -- sharing our activist work and personal histories, our spiritual orientations, our views on nonviolence, our fears and concerns about the upcoming trip.

These exercises helped shape us into a cohesive, trusting and disciplined group -- a group that would be together continuously in very close quarters for the next nine days. We would have to eat, work, travel and sleep in a quasi-lockstep -- in a country overrun by men with guns and plagued by abduction and assassination.

On to Bogota

The following sketch doesn't mention everyone we met or everything we did. Some Colombians we met might well be endangered if we identified or quoted them. Some would not risk our taking their photo.

At Bogota's Mennonite church on Monday we met with two former guerillas, now part of the Mennonite project to help demobilized armed actors rejoin civilian society. They told us their chilling and discouraging stories. Many young people become "armed actors" (soldiers or guerillas or paramilitaries) because there are so few opportunities in civilian life. But when they try to break away from their armed lives, they find opportunities for work or schooling are even scantier.

Because most of us had been political prisoners in the states, when we were planning the delegation Ann and I had asked the WFP team if they could arrange for us to meet with Colombian political prisoners. While making no promises, Amy and her teammate Leo Gorman said they would try. Working through the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners, they arranged for us to visit with such prisoners in two adjoining federal prisons in Boyaca, the next department north from the capital.

On Tuesday, after a three-hour chartered bus ride we arrived at the prison complex. There, for the only time on the delegation, we divided into two groups. The small group Ann and I were in visited with a young Afro-Colombian in the medium security prison. By U.S. standards, security was casual: before we even got into the prison we happened to get into lengthy conversations with three trusties, who must have had job assignments outside the walls. In U.S. federal prisons such unauthorized contact between prisoners and outsiders is verboten.

When we entered the walled building, the men, but not the women, among us were patted down but not searched; there was no guard present during our visit. The other group visited several political prisoners at the maximum security prison. There visitor security was stringent and involved each being fingerprinted twice -- on the way in and on the way out.
That prison was new and had been built with Plan Colombia money and through consultation with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. We were dismayed to learn that the U.S., which has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world, is now foisting its penal model on Colombia. We were told that, as in the U.S., Colombian prison philosophy is now punitive whereas before it had been rehabilitative.

The next day, in downtown Bogota, we met with department heads and economists at ECOPETROL, the state oil agency. They provided a rapid-fire PowerPoint presentation consisting almost entirely of tables and graphs. It made my head swim. We needed to have done much more homework on Colombia's oil industry to have made sense of the numbers.

Later that day we met with Jose Fernando, an Oil Workers Union representative. Both these meetings were the WFP team's way of responding to our specific request that the delegation be able to explore the role of oil in U.S. designs on Colombia. Some suspect it's the region's oil, as much as drugs, that's behind the U.S.' keen interest in Colombia….

We Fly to Putumayo

On Thursday we flew south between the cordilleras of the Andes to Puerto Asis, the commercial capital of Putumayo. Putumayo, bordering Ecuador, is Colombia's southernmost department. It's notorious for coca, source of cocaine -- and for the highly toxic fumigation of that lucrative weed.

The next morning we got our usual early start, boarding a chartered bus for the three-hour, sixty-mile drive along Putumayo's main road to Mocoa, the political capital. The unpaved road was rough; the lush mountain landscape was beautiful. We saw few people along the road: this was a war zone contested by armed actors and punctuated with landmines.

On the outskirts of Mocoa we visited Nueva Esperanza, a self-organized camp for the internally displaced. Hundreds of small farmers fleeing the strife and the fumigation squatted here with their families, carving their fields out of the surrounding jungle. Their situation is precarious: none have title to the land here -- a problem plaguing most of Colombia's rural poor.

We met in the pre-school with some of the camp elders and a couple dozen of the youngsters. On its outside wall was a colorful mural itemizing universal rights. I was struck by the prominent phrase, derecho a tener padres, the right to have parents. The youngsters were studious and disciplined, yet lively and beaming; if they didn't all have parents, there were folks there doing a wonderful job of filling in. The several elders who addressed us emphasized their community's needs and the neglect they suffer at the hands of the government.

Our next encounter was back in Mocoa in the departmental office building on the main square. There we were scheduled to meet with several government representatives and various members of civil society. As we were getting underway, we were joined by Carlos Palacios, the governor of Putumayo. Palacios, an unassuming man in shirtsleeves, came unannounced. He spoke and answered our questions for the better part of an hour. Prior to his election, Palacios had done a WFP-sponsored speaking tour in the U.S.

The next morning we bussed back to Puerto Asis, stopping at the military base at Villa Garzone. There we met in the officers' bar with Col. Quintero, the base commander. Quintero, a charming man, had spent six months at Ft. Benning. He had many friends in the U.S. Army.

Almost the first thing Quintero told us was that Putumayo had "two special conditions: coca and oil." He said Putumayo had two groups of "bandits," the FARC guerillas and the AUC paramilitaries. These bandits interfered with oil production. The army's strategy, he told us, is to deprive both groups of their drug revenue. As we prepared to leave, the Colonel gave us his phone number.

The U.S. Embassy

On Valentine's Day back in Bogota, as WFP delegations customarily do, we wrapped up our time in Colombia at the U.S. Embassy. Five Embassy staff met with us for ninety minutes. One of them, working on coca eradication, argued for the nontoxicity of Monsanto's Ultra Round Up, the chemical spray used for fumigation. Another, a USAID employee, cited the Land O'Lakes company's entrance into Colombia's dairy industry as an example of a useful U.S. agricultural initiative in the country.

Clearly these Embassy people brought a different ideology to their experience of Colombia than we did. Their experience and ours were worlds apart. To mention one contributing factor: because of the extreme security precautions they are forced to operate under, they couldn't go places where we could. They seldom get to listen to the prisoners, small farmers, disarmed guerillas, social workers, labor organizers or displaced people we were privileged to meet with.

It is on the backs of such people that the footprint of U.S. policy is made visible.

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In the early nineties Ed worked in the WFP development office then based in Syracuse. You can reach him at edkinane@a_znet.com.