The latest front in America’s war on drugs is a multi-billion dollar aid package to the Colombian government before the US Senate now.
Plan Colombia would train and equip military and police forces with US helicopters and counter narcotics technology to eradicate the cocoa fields of southern Colombia – the source of 80 percent of America’s cocaine and most of its heroin.
The country is in the midst of a long war fueled by violence and drug profits of rival guerilla forces and paramilitary terrorists. For critics of the plan, it evokes comparisons with the U.S. involvement in the Central American wars of the 1980’s. It’s not a drug war they say; it’s a war against another Latin American insurgency in the name of another Latin American government of human rights offenders.
But if it’s America’s drug appetite that’s responsible for a country that’s on the verge of collapse after all, might it be a war worth fighting? The Colombia question is on this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Ted McDonald, Anthropologist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Peter Hakim, President of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, DC-based think tank
and Francisco Santos, Managing Editor of “El Tiempo,” Columbia’s largest daily paper.