Advocating for the Environment - and the Children
of Colombia
Eco-Solidarity seeks an end to the phony drug war that the
US wages against the land and the poor people of Colombia. The
most biologically diverse ecosystems in the world are at risk
here. Almost two million people have been displaced by a brutal
civil war that is financed and directed by the US and its covert
operations. Refugees, mostly women and children, are crowded
into slums or driven further into the rainforests. Join us in
advocating for Peace with Social Justice. Disarm the right-wing
deathsquads that are really a branch of the Colombian Army. End
US arms shipments to Colombia. Take the 20 billion dollars the
US wastes in its current drug war and spend it on ecologically
sustainable development aid for the Andean nations.
Colombia's Hope for Peace Must Begin Here
By Jason Martin
If foreign oil companies supported by Indonesian-trained death
squads were destroying ancient forests and polluting pristine
rivers in the US, people would be outraged - and up in arms.
Yet environmentalists and progressives are doing practically
nothing while our country funds social and ecological atrocities
in Colombia.
Where are all the people who rallied against US intervention
in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Chiapas, Mexico ? In the last year
US military aid to Colombia has led to the death of more people
than the war in Kosovo, Yugoslavia. The chaos of East Timor is
an everyday reality in Colombia - a tragedy that has gone unnoticed
for forty years.
Colombia is three times as big as California with nearly twice
as many people as all of Central America combined. Few places
in the world enjoy the ethnic or ecological diversity of Colombia.
Fifty eight percent of Colombians are mestizo,18% are black or
mulatto, four percent are mixed indian and black, 20% are white.
Less than three percent of the population controls 70 percent
of the farm land and 90 percent of the wealth. Inequality, corruption
and death squad atrocities (25,000 dead this decade) - funded
by the US and oil companies like BP and Occidental - are the
real cause of this terrible war - not drugs !
Colombia has the most endangered areas of biological diversity
in the world. >From the extremely humid Pacific coast where
black communities fight to save the largest mangrove forests
in the world to the paramo near Pasto where a mega dam at 8ooo
feet threatens dozens of unique species Colombia is at war. The
New World Order of multinational corporate dominance encourages
the greed of Colombia's industrial elite as they rape the land
for gold and oil or degrade the environment and tropical rivers
with chemical runoff from banana plantations and cut flowers
for Europe and the US.
All of this is sustained only with the billions of dollars
in US aid that we shove into the pockets of death squad leaders
by way of their puppets in the Colombian government and military.
These are some of the biggest drug dealers in the world. Us military
aid to Colombia exceeds the economic development funds that we
have given to all of Latin America. If the US were really concerned
about fighting drugs then it would focus on shipments of drug
processing chemicals from the US or on the ties of major US banks
involved in drug money laundering. The brother of murdered Colombian
presidential candidate Luis Galan says that Clinton avoids "the
core of the problem...the economic ties between the legal and
illegal worlds...the large financial corporations...It would
make a lot more sense to attack and prosecute the few at the
top of the drug business rather than fill prisons [and graveyards]
with thousands of small fish..."
In a recent Washington Post commentary, Robert White, the
US ambassador to El Salvador when death squads killed Catholic
Arch-Bishop Romero, summed up the frustration he felt during
a trip to the Colombian peace talks this summer: "There
are few signs that the Colombian government has ever invested
a peso in education, health care or farm-to-market roads... Washington...concentrated
its major funding on counterinsurgency programs that I believe
strengthened the violent extremes in Colombia... as long as the
administration's words and actions project confusion and disarray,
the situation in Colombia will continue to deteriorate."
Jason Martin (520) 388-5514; ecosolidarity@hotmail.com www.geocities.com/rainforest/andes/2185
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