For five decades, Colombia has been torn by civil war, with rebel groups fighting the nominally "democratic" government for greater political and economic justice for all Colombians. 
Advancing the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) and other U.S. corporate interests depends on regional "stability," however.  A lot is at stake for U.S. elites in a region so rich in oil and other natural resources.   (Colombia is the U.S.'s seventh largest oil supplier and neighbor-ing Venezuela is its largest.)
So, the U.S. government started calling rebel groups "narco-guerillas," and last July Congress approved $1.3 billion in funds to the Colombian government under the auspices of "fighting the drug war" - a policy known as "Plan Colombia." Eighty percent of this sum is for purchasing weapons for the Colombian military, which has a well-documented record of human rights abuses and which supports paramilitary death squads responsible for the vast majority of Colombia's human rights violations and political murders.
Plan Colombia is not about addressing problems of drug abuse or the drug trade (not only rebels but the Colombian military and paramilitaries have been linked to drug trafficking, and Colombian poverty and U.S. demand ultimately drive trade).  It is definitely not about bringing peace to the Colombian people.  It is about suppressing struggles for democracy and advancing short- and long-term corporate interests.  U.S. weapons manufacturers and Occidental Petroleum were major supporters of Plan Colombia. 
In the longer term, the FTAA depends on it.

Bush to Expand Plan Colombia
The Bush administration would like to expand Plan Colombia and extend U.S. militarization further into Latin America.  Colin Powell recently stated, "[The new administration will] try to regionalize the approach, to get all of the nations in the area to recognize that the problem is theirs, as well as Colombia's."  In other words, if the U.S. government and corporate elites have a problem, they'll define it as everybody's problem and make sure that it is.   And the U.S. Congress, not anonymous trade bureaucrats, are backing this policy. 
Further militarization will not only suppress rebel groups in Colombia and hurt civilians, but undermine resistance to FTAA and other forms of corporate domination throughout Latin America.   This is why peace and anti-corporate globalization activists need to unite to fight corporate imperialism in Latin America - by opposing both Plan Colombia and the FTAA.   

For more information, contact: Seattle Colombia Committee <cheryl@riseup.net> or <mariawposada@hotmail. com>

Source: Email posted to Citilist (an electronic listserve for the Citiaction campaign), January 22, 2001.