Kerry the drug warrior with Beers by his side [View All]

From http://www.counterpunch.org/donahue01262004.html

The Toxic Career of Rand Beers
Kerry's Drug War Zealot
By SEAN DONAHUE

When Rand Beers quit his job as counter-terrorism advisor to President Bush, and signed up with John Kerry's presidential campaign, he quickly became a hero to Democratic Party loyalists and the "Anybody but Bush" crowd. But Beers, who has become Kerry's top national security advisor and would likely serve as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State in a Kerry administration, has a dark history. Under Presidents Clinton and Bush, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, and was one of the chief architects of and apologists for the United States' cruel policies in Colombia.

Beers was most closely associated with the disastrous aerial crop fumigation program the U.S. introduced in southern Colombia. The State Department hired DynCorp, a private military contractor, to fly crop dusters at high altitudes over the rainforests of southern Colombia, spraying a chemical cocktail that includes a stronger version of Monsanto's popular and controversial herbicide, Round-Up, over suspected coca fields. Beers was the public face of the fumigation program, defending and advocating for it in Congressional hearings and in the media.

Touted as a way of stopping cocaine from entering the U.S., the fumigation program targets the poorest people with the least involvement in international drug trafficking--the coca growers--while leaving the cocaine processors and exporters, who make the real profits in the drug trade, completely untouched. In a good year, a farmer planting 5 acres of coca can bring in $4,000. Once that coca is processed into cocaine and brought to the U.S. it has a street value of close to $800,000. During a visit to Putumayo, the main coca growing area in southern Colombia in 2001, a parish priest told me "We look on in great pain when we see how the farmers are trampled on like cockroaches while the big traffickers walk the streets of New York and L.A."

The processing and export of cocaine are largely controlled by wealthy landowners and the right-wing paramilitaries that support them, while coca growers are "taxed" by the Marxist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC.) The paramilitaries are technically considered terrorists by the U.S., but play a significant role in protecting U.S. economic interests by using massacres to clear off land for oil development, logging, hydro-electric dams, and cattle ranching, and by assassinating union organizers, indigenous leaders, and other critics of the political and economic order in Colombia, while the FARC keeps attacking oil pipelines and kidnapping wealthy people--and so the FARC is defined as a "narco-terrorist group," and U.S. policy is focused on weakening the FARC. Fumigating coca crops indirectly cuts into FARC revenues, and so the program is sold to the public as part of both the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. Beers played a central role in creating the myth of the "narco-terrorist" which has been used to justify both the fumigations and continued U.S. military aid to Colombia.
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Kerry is just another plutocratic representative. He could care less about people as he has been in the Senate while the US imposes a civil war on Colombia that killed 35,000 "people" last year. This is a great article in that it shows they are not about stopping cocaine smuggling. They are about getting the peasants land. It is all lies and something that is silenced on conglomerate news. The fifth paragraph contains this line -"The truly difficult materials for cocaine producers to procure are the chemicals used to process coca into cocaine. But the U.S. has made only minimal efforts to regulate the export of these chemicals."

Say no to Kerry and his henchman Beers. He might not be a Neocon, but he is not for democracy. He is for plutocratic rule.

"If you can say Constitution, you can say Kucinich!"