A Revamping Plan Colombia: Deal With Uribe Will Place Five U.S. Military Bases in Colombia

Weekend Edition
July 31 - August 2, 2009

A Deal With Uribe Will Place Five U.S. Military Bases in Colombia
Revamping Plan Colombia
By JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND

The U.S. Air Force made its last flight from its military base in Manta, Ecuador in mid-July; it's closing because of Ecuador's concerns over arrogance and aggression. While the Pentagon abided by the eviction, it didn't use the occasion to re-examine its missions in the region or correct its overreach. On the contrary, the military appears to be escalating its operations in the Andes.

President Barack Obama met with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe in the Oval Office on June 30 for the first time. The presidents didn't mention it in their press conference, but the two countries are negotiating an agreement for five military bases in Colombia that would replace not only the U.S. airbase in Ecuador, but much of the controversial Plan Colombia.

With bases in place for 10 years and more, and the secrecy that accompanies such installations, the proposed agreement would constitute an end-run around the struggles to make U.S. policy in Colombia and the region less militarized.

Colombia has been the hemisphere's largest recipient of U.S. military aid since 2000, under Plan Colombia — more than $5 billion to date. Purportedly designed to halve the cocaine trade and subsequently refashioned to include fighting terrorism, the results of counter-drug programs have been a complete waste. There's been no overall decline in land planted with coca, nor in the amount of cocaine available in the United States. "Street prices" have held steady or dipped lower than when Plan Colombia began during the Clinton administration.

On the counterterrorism side, while left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas are weaker, right-wing terrorist paramilitaries acting in alliance with the military have been mainstreamed into the Colombian state and economy. Some 2.5 million Colombians have fled their homes since the plan began, most as a result of paramilitary forces violently taking control of valuable lands. Those lands would be focal areas of investment, if Washington ends up approving the Colombia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, an accord held up largely because of human rights concerns. The concerns include revelations that the armed forces, supported by U.S. aid, have killed 1,700 civilians since 2002, in acts that the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions recently called "cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit."

Yet current negotiators' objectives for the base agreement include "filling the gaps left by the eventual cutting of aid in Plan Colombia," according to sources in Washington and Bogotá cited by an explosive article published in the weekly Cambio magazine.

With an increasingly unpopular drug war and presidents (both Uribe and Obama) enamored with special operations, the establishment in Colombia of five U.S. military facilities for at least a decade, whose missions include counterinsurgency and transcend Colombian borders, would be the worst thing to happen to U.S. policy in the Andes since Plan Colombia began a decade ago.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/poland07312009.html