opinion

Human rights groups in the United States received disappointing news this October when Congress approved a request from George W. Bush's administration to double the number of US troops allowed in Colombia and increase by 50 percent the number of US civilian contractors allowed.

Disappointing because the groups last spring defeated an attempt by Representative Duncan Hunter (R-California), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, to eliminate the caps altogether. In subsequent months, human rights advocates put great effort into mobilizing labor unionists, religious activists and various other peaceniks to oppose any personnel increases.

The tragedy is not that the administration got what it wanted from a Republican dominated Congress, but that the human rights groups did no better than quibble over such minutia.

Grassroots mobilizations here in the US capital were a great idea, but I propose we raise our sights. Instead of fixating on annual Congressional appropriations, let's address what sustains Colombia's affliction --- the illegal drug trade. If the warring parties could no longer fund their violence through cocaine and heroin, it would be easier to bring them back to conventional politics and end their killing, torturing and kidnapping.

Many advocates of Colombian human rights fear that embracing drug decriminalization would isolate them. They don't seem to realize that pushing for the United States to quit supplying and training security forces linked to countless civilian massacres has already put us on Washington's political fringe.

The human rights community tends to describe the carnage as resulting from a war rooted in social injustice. President Alvaro Uribe Vélez's regime and his US backers would rather conceal the politics and speak of terrorism and delinquency. But neither paradigm is working.

Let's pull the plug on Colombia's killing machine. Let's decriminalize drugs.


© 2004 Colombia Week. W. John Green is a senior research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, DC, a Colombia specialist for Amnesty International USA, and author of "Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in Colombia" (University of Florida, 2003). Find previous installments of this column at http://www.colombiaweek.org/series.html#context.














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