We encountered only one roadblock, manned by skinny, self-important kids in shiny uniforms and wearing big guns on their belts. They carried much bigger ones slung over their shoulders. It was a para group – but it’s hard to distinguish one armed faction from another. Our shepherds from Witness for Peace, Amanda Martin and Kath Nygard, two young women of great courage and resourcefulness (not to mention their encyclopedic knowledge of the country) put us through a drill before we left on how to respond: remain on the bus, immobile unless ordered to move, and never say a word – leave that to them. That’s exactly how it went down. Witness for Peace has been a presence for a decade and they have established some credibility with all factions – mainly by an overabundance of diplomacy and tact – and they rarely get seriously hassled.

That is the short version of my time there. There is so much more to the larger picture: protection of foreign corporate interests (including Canadian) at the expense of small landholders; the pending Free trade Agreement, which will almost certainly make life worse for the camposinos; the continuing need for serious land reform. They have little or nothing to do with drugs but they set the table for the narco-traffickers and their own brand of terrorism.

What is clear from all the available evidence is that crop eradication has been a disastrous failure. It has displaced a huge portion of the rural population; it has caused health problems for those who remained behind: it has repeatedly destroyed legitimate crops; and it has polluted large areas of previously arable land.

And cocaine shipments from Colombia have remained stable throughout.

The Colombian government is in line for a significant share of the blame for the deteriorating situation. But there is no doubt that the U.S. government deserves equal condemnation. They have bankrolled, planned and executed a deliberate campaign of destruction in a sovereign nation, all because less than 1% of Americans are abusing a drug.

Our meeting with representatives at the U.S. embassy was embarrassing, if only because of the expressed conviction that everything is fine. If these four men, said to be the heads of the separate departments in the embassy involved in Plan Colombia, were being sincere, they revealed just how little awareness they had its reality. They disputed the figures we had been given by the public defender. They said that a “fact-finding” mission had been conducted as recently as July. That turned out to have been one man who flew down to Putamayo, spent a couple of hours on the ground and then, because of “security concerns”, flew back to Bogota. On the other hand, they could be true believers in the evils of cocaine and in the God-given right of America to interfere at will in the affairs of another country. Either way, there is enough shame to go around.

I recognize that someone’s career may require him to buy into an ideology and be willfully blind to the harms it causes. Or he may be incompetent, ignorant and far too convinced of his own importance. In the typically fortress-like confines of that embassy compound, the thought kept recurring: how do these guys sleep at night?

Jerry Paradis
December 8, 2007