Plan Colombia is an ambitious initiative to resolve the ongoing, thirty-year civil war in Colombia.
The Plan was conceived in 1999 by the administration of President Andres Pastrana with the stated goals of:
- social and economic revitalization
- overcoming the armed conflict
- an anti-narcotic strategy
Although it includes components which addressed social aid and institutional reform, Plan Colombia is fundamentally a program of military aid for the Colombian government. Officially, especially in the US, it is justified as part of the "war on drugs", but many suspect the true targets of the Plan are the guerrilla forces, which control vast swaths of territory in the interior of the country, and the peasantry and indigenous people, who are calling for social change, thereby interfering with international plans to exploit Colombia's valuable resources, including its oil.
Prominent in the aid package by Clinton is the so-called "Push into Southern Colombia", an area that for decades has been a stronghold of Colombia's largest guerrilla organisation FARC; it also a major coca producing region. This funding will train and equip new Colombian army counternarcotics battalions, providing them with helicopters, transport and intelligence assistance, and supplies for coca eradication. While the assistance is defined as counternarcotics assistance, many believe it will be used primarily against the FARC.
In June 2000, Amnesty International issued a press release in which it criticized the Plan Colombia initiative:
Plan Colombia is based on a drug-focussed analysis of the roots of the conflict and the human rights crisis which completely ignores the Colombian state's own historical and current responsibility. It also ignores deep-rooted causes of the conflict and the human rights crisis. The Plan proposes a principally military strategy (in the US component of Plan Colombia) to tackle illicit drug cultivation and trafficking through substantial military assistance to the Colombian armed forces and police. Social development and humanitarian assistance programs included in the Plan cannot disguise its essentially military character. Furthermore, it is apparent that Plan Colombia is not the result of a genuine process of consultation either with the national and international non-governmental organizations which are expected to implement the projects nor with the beneficiaries of the humanitarian, human rights or social development projects. As a consequence, the human rights component of Plan Colombia is seriously flawed. [1]
During the 1990s, Colombia was the leading recipient of US military aid in the Western Hemisphere, and has also compiled the worst human rights record, with the majority of atrocities attributed to paramilitary forces. A United Nations study reported that the Colombian security forces which are strengthened in Plan Colombia Plan maintain an intimate relationship with right-wing death-squads, organize paramilitary forces, and either participate in massacres directly or deliberately fail to take action to prevent them.
