Speech by Rep. Mark Souder (R-Indiana), July 8, 2003

Speech by Rep. Mark Souder (R-Indiana), July 8, 2003

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Illinois, and as he knows, as a long-time close personal friend of the Speaker, from the State Legislature in Illinois, and since we have been to Congress that our Speaker has been a leader on this issue, and he asked us to do this Special Order tonight. He asked us to go last weekend down to Colombia and has stood firm in making sure that this initiative was funded, make sure that we stayed focused on the narcotics issue. And it is our appreciation for his leadership in addition to each of us trying to take responsibility and work to help solve these problems that are big. Whether it is the streets of Joliet, Illinois, or the streets of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and throughout the rural parts of his district and the rural parts of my district, we see that drug problem, along with alcohol, as being the number one problem of crime and breakup of families, the reason people lose jobs. It is a problem that is not only a world problem, but it is a problem back home where the people are talking about it at their dinner tables, they are talking about it with their kids hopefully, but they are certainly talking about the byproducts of illegal narcotics. So I thank him also for his leadership.

What I would like to do is lay a little bit further out how we got into the Andean Initiative and the Colombian problem, how some of it has evolved over the years here in Congress and with our funding, some of the primary questions that have been coming up often in the news media, but with my colleagues here in Congress and address some of the myths that have been plaguing us in these debates.

First, let me describe a little bit what our Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources Subcommittee was working with. When the Republicans took over Congress in 1995 and reformulated the committee that I now chair to focus on drug policy so we had one committee that pulled together oversight from what was 23 different committees looking at the narcotics problem, as we looked at this, we saw certain basic things that needed to be addressed. One was eradication. Two was interdiction. If we failed to eradicate it, we had to try to intercept it before it got to our borders. If it got inside the United States, we needed to do law enforcement, which explains the DEA, local police forces, State police. Then if we could tackle the problem at

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either end through prevention or treatment, we could try to reduce the demand side, too.
So there were five prongs: Eradication, interdiction, enforcement, along with prevention and treatment. And in that part it became apparent that the Andean region and the Colombian region was most in danger because of the drug habits of the United States and particularly Western Europe.

Myth number one is that there is a civil war going on in Colombia. There is not a civil war going on in Colombia. The FARC as well as the ELN, and even counting the paramilitaries, we are talking about a percent of the population that is, quite frankly, less, far less, than the prison population in the United States. What we are basically talking about are terrorists and criminals who have not been captured. Some of them early on may have started with the revolutionary idea that they wanted power and did not want to get it through a democratic process.

We have already heard from my colleagues that this is the oldest Latin American democracy, that has had many stable elections. They have had a history of some violence for numerous geographical reasons and others, but so have we in the United States. So have we in other parts of Western Europe. But a few dissidents that are a tiny minority of a country do not constitute a civil war. It is a rebellion of people who want to take the law into their own hands.

Over time, as we had the ELN which used kidnapping as its main route, we saw the FARC, which was the largest of the groups, decide to finance themselves by providing first protection and then actually running the growing operations after some of the big cartels were broken up; the Medellin and the Cali cartels, for example. Then we saw communities try to form a contract with so-called paramilitaries. Sometimes they were former members of the military. Sometimes they dressed like military and they were really kind of like Pinkerton detectives on steroids, that people wanted to protect themselves, so they hired them. Pretty soon that group got corrupted as well by narcotics, at least much of them, whatever their original intention was, to protect themselves from others because they could not establish order in the community, and the government was not strong enough to do so or whatever. Now we have three groups, still a tiny percentage, maybe numbering 40,000 in a country of 28 million, a tiny percentage of the country. It does not constitute a civil war. Their motives are not civil war. Their motives are to make money on narcotics.

Some of them now would like to buy peace and get power without having to go through a democracy, but President Pastrana, who more than bent over backwards, who turned every cheek times three to try to negotiate with them and wound up with what? Nothing. He had the right motives. I and others backed him in that effort to try to do that as we tried to rebuild and organize the Colombian military and the Colombian national police. But the bottom line is they did not want to come to the peace table. They are not interested in peace. They are terrorists, they are interested in selling narcotics, protecting narcotics and terrorizing villages.

We were sold to the United States Congress that Plan Colombia and the Andean Regional Initiative was going to be a joint effort, and while I have talked about the United States using the narcotics, the truth is we only consume about 50 to 60 percent of the cocaine production coming out of Colombia. Europe is consuming huge quantities of that, but also Canada, the region itself, and others, and Asia, because that is where they are getting their cocaine, and this should not all be the United States' problem. But some of the European countries and other countries who in the beginning promised huge amounts of dollars to help Colombia have not followed through. Their argument was they did not want to spend money on the military and law enforcement violations.

Okay. Let us accept that premise, which I do not think it was a very good premise, but let us accept that premise. Now as we are making progress in Colombia, and as villages are finally getting stabilized where people are again ready to be a judge or to be a mayor, where is Europe? Where are the alternative development dollars that they said were coming? Where is the help with

setting up those law enforcement systems? If the United States has been willing to bear, along with Colombia, 100 percent of the burden even though 50 percent of the problem is not ours, and none of this basically is Colombia's, these groups would not be armed if it was not for drug abusers in the United States, and Western Europe, and Japan, and Canada and other places using cocaine and heroin.

We stimulated and funded the terrorism that is occurring in Colombia, the thousands of deaths, the police who are getting massacred, the individuals who are getting massacred. They are getting massacred with our money. It is our problem, not Colombia's problem. They need the help with it. Their people are using this. Their people are growing it. But they met our market demand. We have an obligation to help put order back and to help them reestablish their country.

The United States is helping Colombia, and Colombia has taken tremendous efforts, particularly under President Uribe, to go after the eradication, to go after the law enforcement, to get some stability in these areas. We need partners around the world now to follow through on their commitments, because if we cannot provide alternative development, if we cannot provide jobs, if we cannot make decent schools, if we cannot get a legal system that works with local police and mayors, we will go back to chaos with our money, because we have been the drug abusers and we need allies around the world.

Let me step back again and illustrate. Earlier I talked about the funnel, and let me in particular here show one of the problems that we face in the United States before I get into some specifics. My subcommittee has been holding hearings on the borders in the north and south border. We just did a hearing in El Paso. We spent 3 days here in this region of Texas. We did a hearing over here in Sells. We have had a hearing over here at San Isidro. We did a hearing and visited multiple times in Nogales and the area of Douglas, Arizona.

Let me guarantee the Members something. If the American people are saying it is not working, and we are not getting it stopped in Colombia, let me assure the American people something. We cannot get control of that border, and this is the easiest border to control in the south. We have virtually no control over the water coming in from the Caribbean. We have had to pull our boats in for homeland security, but once they are coming in water and going up the coast, it has been very difficult in the Caribbean region. It is even worse in the Pacific. As they come in with little boats up the California coast and out into that water, it has been very difficult to intercept.

We have 1 million plus illegal immigrants making it across the border every year in the south border, 1 million. That is a huge number. Some of them are running small amounts. Most of them are not. But it shows how porous the border is. We have thousands of Border Patrol. We are doing everything we can to control that and will continue to try to close it, but as we start to close the border, let me tell the Members about a hearing we had here in the Tohono O'odham Reservation. That day while we were having a hearing, one person was interdicted. It is a town of maybe 2,500 on an Indian reserve, the Tohono O'odham. Their police did one seizure of 200 pounds, one seizure of 300 pounds, one seizure of 500 pounds, and one of 400 pounds; a total of 1,500 pounds in 1 day. Then seven SUVs went through later in the day, of which one got through, but they managed to catch a number of them. They found a hole in this zone. A National Park Ranger was killed in the Organ Pipe National Monument, and as we squeezed other parts of the border, they moved to that hole. This is important because the previous 3 months they had 1,500 pounds, the previous year they had 1,500 pounds, and in that day between 9 and 2 o'clock, they got 1,500 pounds even though we had Federal people around.

There is so much stuff moving across, we cannot even intercept it all, even though we keep boosting the number of Border Patrol people. We will continue to make the efforts because when that comes in, the two biggest cocaine busts in my district's history, or it appears

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to be two of the biggest, if not the two biggest, occurred last 3 weeks in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

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One of them came from Texas, and I believe the other through Arizona, and it was Colombian.

Now, as that moves through, it is not a theoretical exercise we are talking about here. When you are driving down the road at night and you do not know whether somebody is whacked out on coke or whether they have injected themselves with heroin or are high on this high-grade marijuana, that has nothing to do with the historic marijuana that you hear about from the sixties and the news media jokes about. That is not what we are talking about in marijuana. We are talking about THC content; in my hometown a lot of the marijuana is selling for more than coke and heroin. This stuff is potent.

Think about it. When you get behind the wheel, whether you want to legalize drugs and whether you think we should back off from the drug war, do you feel safe? Does your family feel safe, knowing that the more that pours across there, the cheaper it is, the more of it there is, the more you could be killed driving home or there could be a robbery at the bank where you get caught in the shoot-out, or watching neighborhoods in your communities get sucked under, or people operating a bus or truck or equipment as they are building, using this drug?

Harmless crime? Harmless drug? Baloney. This is the biggest threat to the United States, 30,000 people dying because of illegal narcotics. We talk a lot, and I am on the Committee on Homeland Security, but the numbers we are looking at on an annual basis dwarf what we have seen yet.

Yes, one nuclear weapon and we could all be destroyed; but the fact is, while we are talking about that, we are watching people get killed every night. Tonight, in every city of the United States, somebody is going to be impacted. Maybe shot in some cities; in other cities it will be a dad or mom who use their money for drugs when they should have been supporting their family, or not being with their kids or abusing their kids or spouse abuse or not making their child support payments because they used it on illegal narcotics. Those are the real problems with that, and we are not going to be able to control, no matter how hard we try, enough of our borders; but we will improve that, but we have to get it at the source.

Now, let me deal with a couple of other questions. We heard a little bit from my colleagues about is it working? Let me start out with, first off, how do you define ``working''? I constantly hear Members saying, well, there is still drugs.

Well, should we stand up when we deal with spouse abuse and say, you know, we funded spouse abuse last year and there is still spouse abuse. In fact, we funded spouse abuse programs for the last 10 years, and there is still spouse abuse. In fact, we have tried to deal with spouse abuse ever since the American Republic was started, and there is still spouse abuse, so we should give up?

On child abuse, when we come down here on Labor-HHS later this week and talk about funding for child abuse, could you imagine if somebody stood up and said, well, you know, we have been fighting child abuse the last few years. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades here, and there is still child abuse here in America.

Of course there is. There will always be drug abuse. The root problem in my opinion is sin. It may be different variations and different people have different problems; but every day, somebody is newly exposed to the temptations of narcotics, and no matter how much we try to prevent it, and treatment is after the fact, and treatment is very important and I am pretty much on most treatment bills that are moving through Congress, but the truth is, that is treating the wounded.

We cannot just treat the wounded; we have to get into prevention. But there is a funny thing about prevention. You can convince people they should stay off drugs, and then they break up with their girlfriend and go to a party and all of a sudden they forgot everything they learned in the drug prevention program. They lose their job. Somebody packages something more potent or they are smoking cigarettes or having a beer and somebody says you want a little bit bigger high? And all of a sudden, at the very least, they are psychologically addicted, if not physically addicted. New people are exposed by the minute and by the hour. It is not something that you can ever fully eliminate.

But we can control it. And we have made successes. Even though we had a surge between 1992 and 1994, of which we are only making a little progress, the truth was that its peak was at 1994.

Let me briefly mention another method. ``Just Say No'' does not work. Under Just Say No under the Reagan administration, we had 8 straight years of decline that carried through the first 2 to 3 years of the Bush administration, 11 years of decline.

In that 11 years of decline, it went down so far that even in the surge up in 1991 to 1994, in the last year of the Bush administration and the first two of the Clinton administration, where now we would have to have a 50 percent reduction to get back to Reagan, even that peak in the United States was less than the peak in 1980 before Just Say No. So it is a myth that Just Say No did not work. It worked, because it was not Just Say No. That was one part. We did treatment, we did interdiction, we did eradication where necessary, but we fought and we had a consensus of how to fight it.

When we lost the consensus, the problem ``upped'' again. Now we have had a couple of years of success. But now they are better funded.

So among the things we are hearing about Colombia is, for example, everybody violates human rights. It is simply not true. There are degrees of violations of human rights, that human rights are not respected much at all by the FARC and the ELN. Kids are kidnapped, they use 14-year-olds in their military, they terrorize people. They do not respect human rights at all.

There have been problems with the paramilitaries, and the question is, are they too tied to the military? The answer is we have worked hard in this government.

Uribe's government is committed to trying, for once and for all, to prosecute them all.

When you go and talk to the counternarcotics brigades of the Defense Department, off to the side what they will tell you is literally when there is a firefight with the terrorists, they have to have an attorney there. They cannot move the bodies so they can identify and make sure they were not shot in the back, and they do things we do not do.

We are holding Colombia to a different standard even than the United States. Now, that is because we are putting money in. They have had a historic problem with human rights and there is an accountability with it.

But it is just wrong for anybody on this floor or anywhere in the world to imply that there has not been tremendous progress, that we have not vetted these brigades better than we have ever in the past, and there is not accountability, and that when you go to a Colombian military camp, their prisons will have a number of people in it who are being held for possible violations, something that is stricter than any other process we are doing; and it is important they have that, because if the American people are going to put the money in, they want to know we are doing human rights.

But we have been making progress and have made dramatic progress on human rights, and those who want to criticize the Colombian military and the government, I have asked people in my district too, sometimes they are criticizing what we do and sending our money down to violence. Why do they not criticize the FARC? Why do they not criticize the FARC? Why do they not criticize the ELN? Why is it always the government or the paramilitaries?

The FARC are the ones who started it, who have violations. I am not defending any human rights, but let us at least acknowledge that they are the primary perpetrators of human rights violations, that there is still violence, therefore the program has not worked because there is still violence in Colombia.

Yes, there is still violence. You know what? There is going to be violence for quite a while. They have got a lot of dollars from the American Government to work with. They can buy weapons. And one proof we are successful is they are getting more violent.

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When we were down there, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis) and the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Boozman), and I this last weekend, we went to a hospital. There we talked to a bunch of young soldiers, basically 22- to 24-year-olds. One of the solider's eyes was gone and his leg was gone; and he was in pretty bad shape, generally. A number of them were dead; he was in better shape than them.

They died because they were trying to eradicate the drugs Americans wanted to buy and Europeans wanted to buy. It was not predominantly Colombians who want to buy it. It was our money.

They were attacked from both sides. A number of them said it was the worst firefight they had ever been in. It was homemade bombs, screws coming at them, going into their eyes and their bodies. It was terrorist-type bombs, not traditional.

Now, they have traditional weapons too. For the first time we are seeing it looks like some arms-for-drugs shipments coming in from some of the arms negotiating sales places in Eastern Europe and some of the Mafia-type around it, not the traditional definition of the word, that are shipping arms in there.

We are going to see more sophisticated weapons. This myth that if we suddenly legalize this, that there would not be this conflict, oh, yeah. They are making $3 billion a year; and if we say we are going to legalize something, forget a second that I do not want to be driving down the highway worried about whether somebody is whacked out on drugs.

Let us say it was not that. But they are going to suddenly give up? Are you going to legalize cocaine and heroin? Are you going to legalize whatever the next thing is? Of course not. They are not going to give up their market. They are going to continue to step people up to more potent drugs.

They are making money on this. They are making buckets, trucks and boatloads of money on this, and they are not suddenly going to say, oh, they legalized marijuana, I think we will quit. We will just retire.

I mean, give me a break. There is going to be violence because there is tremendous money; and to the degree we try to cut off the source of their money, they are going to continue to become more violent.

Another question that comes with this is, yes, but you have not stabilized any villages. I have heard my colleagues on the floor testify that they have been to villages where there still is not order.

We all know that. When you have a place in a country where people, judges are getting shot, mayors are getting shot, we have a president of Colombia whose father was assassinated, we have a vice president of

Colombia who himself was kidnapped for 9 months, they know what it means.

Quite frankly, I was sitting there in the presidential palace along with the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) with the delegation for the inauguration of President Uribe, and we heard this big boom, and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) said I never heard a one-gun salute.

They blew off part of the corner of the presidential palace. They were trying to aim with their howitzer, blew up a housing complex, killed many innocent people, shot to the left, shot to the right. They did not care that there were thousands of troops around. They were shooting from a mile and a quarter away with sophisticated equipment. This is a tough battle, and they do not care who they hit. Even President Chavez, who you would think would have some connections, was in the building they were shooting at.

It is an equal-opportunity terrorist. They will hit anybody if they are trying to threaten their money. And we have to understand that this is not something you can just sit down and have a nice negotiation, maybe we can give them some trinkets and they will give us some trinkets and everybody will pat each other on the back and say, yeah, I will give up my $3 billion business.

We have to establish order in those communities. The plan under Plan Colombia, quite frankly, is taking a little longer than we thought, because they have chosen to fight, because another myth is that it is a balloon: if you squeeze Colombia, it is going to go back to Peru and Bolivia. The truth is that that is hard.

We have made progress in those countries. Some seem to be coming back a little bit, but it is nothing like it was, and they are trapped.

In Colombia, if you look at this map, much of the progress is being made a long the Putumayo. If we squeeze in from the south, and this is a big coca region, the heroin is in the higher elevations. Those mountains, by the way, are up to 18,000 feet. I thought the topography here was important, because you can see most of the people are on this side of the mountain range. That side is the Amazon basin.

They kidnap and harass people and terrorize people on this side, but most of the growing is over there. And as we start to put the pressure on, they move more out in the jungle. This is not an easy task. When you fly over, you cannot see the stuff. And the coca fields are at least big. The heroin poppy, you cannot see it.

Furthermore, I have heard people say, well, they are spraying legitimate crops. Walk on the ground. They are smart. They can make more in coca than they can make in palm heart; and unless you convince them that you are going to provide stability and protection for them and there is going to be an alternative crop, they just grow it underneath.

We are spraying where there is evidence that there is coca or heroin poppy; but as they move further in the jungle, you are farther and farther from any air base, you are farther and farther from re-fueling places, you are farther and farther from any roads. If you have a helicopter crash, guess what? They go in and capture your pilots, which they have right now with three Americans.

The farther out we go, they are going to get there. But the farther out they go, guess what? They are longer in the air and we can see them longer. They have more risk that we are going to interdict.

It is not true that we do not make progress by moving them. It just is that we are not going to eliminate the problem by moving it. We reduce the problem, we manage it. To the degree we reduce the amount of cocaine coming into the United States, we change the price and purity questions. They do not package it with marijuana as easily. It is watered down. It does not have the same potency. Addicts are not as difficult. You make step-by-step progress; you do not make huge progress.

Now, back to the villages. They have been able to establish a reasonable amount of order in about half the villages. The goal was to establish it in more than that.

Now what are some practical implications of that? Let me first show you something here. On the spraying of poppy crops, there is a discussion of why is this so hard to spray. First off, you have to hit it several times. Heroin poppy is one of the cases. They can replant it, so you need to do it multiple times a year.

But, do you know what? They try to shoot down those planes. This have taken more hits in the last couple weeks than they had in a long time, because they realize the more heroin poppy that we eradicate and the more coca we eradicate, the more they can predict where the planes are going to go for eradication, because there are fewer fields to eradicate. So they can take their armaments and focus better on where we are coming.

Another thing is that you have to have ground protection. My first trip there in 1996 and 1997 when we were doing some of this, I went out to one, I think it was in the Guaviare area, but I talked to some pilots whose concern was this: one of their partners had been killed because they would string up line that you could not see and their plane went through and it crossed their neck as they tried to eradicate.

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So now you have groups of soldiers on the ground trying to protect the planes to eradicate.

A couple of other illustrations. You can see here when you are flying the plane over, you have people in the fields on all sides. In different countries we use different things. In Bolivia and Peru, some were ground eradication, some were air eradication, but in that effort, every place you went,

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whether you are going after labs or field eradication, you have to be protected. As I have gone into the field and seen some of this, you have to be protected.
I want to illustrate one other point as to why this becomes important. There are somewhere in the vicinity of over 200,000 displaced people in Colombia. These people in these rural villages, as they are out in the villages, what started often is that the FARC will come in, they will say, grow coca. They can make a lot of money, they will bring the planes to it, and they will provide protection and forcibly push them into coca. Then the paramilitaries would come through their villages and say, you put up somebody from the FARC, you are cooperating with the FARC; we are going to kill you; we are going to terrorize you. Then the FARC would come back in town and say, you cooperated with the paramilitaries; we are going to kill you. And these poor villages just decide: I am not staying here. I do not care if my family has had a farm here for 100 years. I do not care if my family has had a business here. I do not want to get myself and my family killed.

We visited the Nelson Mandela village just outside of Cartagena. Mr. Speaker, 35,000 people live in basic shacks with these kinds of streets. Right now Indiana is flooding a lot, and it looks a little like this, but underneath there is actual, real streets. Here, it just turns into mud. AID has tried to develop some alternative development in this area. I had two, I do not think it was these two young girls, but two young girls came up to me and wanted to talk to a Congressman. I had drifted off from the group. I quick got back after they talked to me. But they said, even in this camp, the FARC is hunting them down, as are the paramilitaries, if they believe they cooperated with the other side. They go right in to where we have an AID plan where it might be 100 miles or 200 miles away from the village and terrorize them. The person I was with, the photographer and I decided we were going to go back to the rest of the group because we had not banked on them being in the same camp that we were.

But these kids deal with this every day. They cannot escape. They do not have the type of protection that a U.S. CODEL has, a congressional delegation, when we go in. They have to live with it. One young girl sang a song as opposed to just telling a story, sang a song about how she was in her home and the FARC came in and shot her husband right in front of her and her son, the little kids wandering around in this type of environment.

Now, part of the solution to that is, bluntly put, we can only do so many tar-paper shacks around the world. What we have to do is get their villages safe to the degree we can establish order and security in their villages. They did not want to leave their farms. They did not want to leave their businesses. Yes, some of them did not have employment and came to the cities. In Rio and in Lima and Buenos Aires and all over the world, you see at the edges of the cities some of this. But Colombia has a middle class. It is not Guatemala. It is not Venezuela. They have a relatively stable middle class and democracy.

The question is, how can we reestablish it? How do we do this? That is why we not only need at this point to finish off what we are doing in Plan Colombia and the Andean Initiative, we need to have the Europeans follow up with their commitment to help us now to get these people back to work and back to their villages if we can get those villages safe.

Now, another part of this is I met an amazing man. His name was Rudolfo Gedeon. He is president of PETCO. But he is doing one of the initiatives that has been so successful in Bangladesh, and that is microloans. In this pattern in Bangladesh, they gave little loans to try to build little capitalism that moves into a little bit bigger capitalism, that moves into a little bit more, because in so many of these countries you have the very wealthy people and the very poor people. In Medellin they started, and now they are doing in the Cartagena areas, a number of these businessmen working with AID are starting these loan processes with AID. Some AID capital, but the real success here is having local people be the monitors. Their loans, $1.5 million, 8,000 loans over the last year; average loan, $200, some a little bit bigger, some are $60. But do my colleagues know what? Ninety-eight percent, two percent default rate. No bank anywhere has that, except in Bangladesh and a couple of these microloans, because they are the people themselves monitoring them.

Now, how does this relate to the broader question?

In this village AID has a project where they are teaching some people metal working, some people how to sew, how to bake, how to make crafts. So they teach them that. Where do they go? What are they supposed to do? Mr. Speaker, it is amazing: $80, $100 you can start to sew in your neighborhood. Pay that back, like a credit union, which is really kind of how this is functioning, because your neighbors are all part of this, and you are watching each other, and there is accountability. Then you can get justified for maybe a $400 loan, then an $800 loan. You crawl, you take baby steps, you walk, but that is how you build a middle class.

But to do that, you have to have order. Some people do not understand, you can not give somebody $400 or $10,000 or $50,000 to start a business if they think their family is going to be murdered or kidnapped the next week.

Somehow, we have to establish order. We have to establish credible government units that are not involved in human rights violations, which this government is committed to do. Some people say, well, I cannot make as much growing soybeans as I can selling coca or growing coca. I cannot make as much in palm heart. Do my colleagues know what? The kids on American street corners cannot make as much at McDonald's as they can being a lookout either, but that does not mean we are going to pay them $400 an hour if they give up being a lookout. There are things that are not legal to do and that are destructive, and there are things that are legal. We need to work to give people a living wage, where they can work to support their family with their income, and we need to help the Government of Colombia, which has been undermined.

For example, they were the eighth largest supplier of oil in the world. There has been so much oil spilled in attacking that pipeline that it would be 8 Exxon Valdezes pouring into the north part of Colombia.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt).

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