| Dear Letters Editor: Sanho Tree, director of the Washington based Institute for Policy Studies' Drug Policy Project, was not convinced by reassurances from Pentagon and Clinton Administration officials that U.S. oversight will prevent further human rights abuses in Colombia. "They say they're going to monitor the human rights situation and purge violators from the army," Tree told The Week Online. "But there are no jobs, so when these people leave the army, they join the paramilitaries," where abuses continue unchecked. Moreover, Tree explained, the interdiction and eradication programs which the aid package is supposed to fund are widely acknowledged to be the least effective strategies for reducing illicit drug use in the United States. According to a 1999 report from the Government Accounting Office, more than one half billion U.S. dollars spent on interdiction and eradication of Colombian coca products in the past decade, including record seizures and lab destructions in 1998, had no impact on the availability of Colombian cocaine in the U.S. Nor are such strategies cost effective -- a 1994 study by the RAND Corporation found that providing treatment to cocaine users in the U.S. is 10 times more effective than interdiction, and 23 times more effective than eradication. Given that eradication and interdiction are largely ineffective, and the likelihood that the U.S. is being drawn deeper into Colombia's civil war, why would the U.S. consider a massive increase in funding for just these policies? Tree said that SOUTHCOM, the U.S. military's Latin American operation and McCaffrey's former command post, depends mightily upon the drug war for its subsistence. "Without the drug war, SOUTHCOM would be a coast guard," Tree said. "It's one of the few areas in the military that really wants to fight the drug war. It's their bread and butter." http://www.drcnet.org/wol/121.html#colombia Sincerely, Bill Holmes, Vice Chair Antelope Valley Libertarian Party P.O. Box 3202 Quartz Hill, California 93586 wtholmes@avlp.org, 661-943-7473 voice/fax http://avlp.org |
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