Speech by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana), March 29, 2000

Speech by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana), March 29, 2000
[Page: H1529]
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, for several years now the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), the chairman of the Committee on International Operations and Human Rights, and I, as chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, and the gentleman from Illinois (Speaker Hastert) and the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Mica) and a number of others have been working trying to get helicopters and other equipment down to the Colombian National Police and the military in Colombia so they can adequately defend that country against the FARC guerillas, who are, and I hope my colleagues will get this, are getting as much as $100 million a month from the drug cartel. That is a billion dollars a year.

Now, what happens if we do not do anything? What happens if we do not do what the President has suggested? And the President is a late-comer to this fight. I am very happy that he is on board with this $1.3 billion, but it is coming rather late. What happens if that money does not get down there?

The FARC guerillas who have been trained by the Cubans, who are Marxist oriented, they may very well take over that country. We may have a narcoguerilla government running Colombia. There will be no impediment to the heroin and the cocaine coming out of that country into the United States.

Ninety percent of the cocaine coming into America comes from Colombia. Sixty-five percent of the heroin coming into the United States comes from Colombia. One out of seven people, according to officials in Baltimore, are heroin addicts.

[TIME: 1645]

We have an absolute epidemic. Yes, we need to deal with education and rehabilitation and a lot of other things. But we have got to go to the source and take on these guerillas who are being supported by the drug dealers down there, the drug cartels, because if we do not, they are going to have a sanctuary from which we will not be able to do anything to them.

Now, my feeling is that the problem may get so big if we do not deal with it right now that we will be forced to send American troops in there to deal with it. I do not want that to happen. I do not want American young men and women fighting in the jungles of Colombia with the drug cartel and the drug guerillas. That could very well happen. They now have 20 to 30,000 people in that army. Many of those people, those combatants have been forced into being involved, and they are going to have more because of the tremendous amounts of money that they are getting from the drug cartel.

Let me just tell my colleagues what they are doing. The day before yesterday, there was a police outpost in Vigia del Fuerte. I hope my colleagues on the minority side will get this. For 36 hours they held off the FARC guerillas who attacked them. After 36 hours, after the Colombian National Police ran out of ammunition, they came in and they hacked them to death, 26 people, with machetes; they castrated the men; they chopped off the heads of the mayor and the head of the Colombian National Police there; they put them on spikes in the middle of the town as a warning to anybody that gets in the way of the FARC guerillas down there.

The people are terrified of the FARC guerillas. As a result, a lot of people, including people in the Colombian National Police and the military, are scared to death of them. They know if they are captured, they are going to be chopped into pieces. They took one man who was in the Colombian National Police, they hacked his wife and child to death in front of him and then they tortured him to death. These are the kind of people we are dealing with.

Either we give the Colombian government and the Colombian National Police and the Colombian military the wherewithal to fight these people or they are going to take over that country in all probability. If that happens, what do we do? Do we let them flood this country with heroin and cocaine with impunity because we know how porous our borders are? No, I think what will happen then is we will have to get directly involved militarily, and that is something none of us wants.

There is an old commercial in Indianapolis that shows a guy with a Fram oil filter saying, `You can pay me now or you can pay me later.' The implication is that if you do not use a Fram oil filter, and this is not a commercial, that the engine is going to go bad on you and you are going to have to buy a whole new engine.

I am saying to my colleagues today, we can either deal with the problem today as the President has now seen fit to do and give them this $1.3 billion or we can wait around another 4 or 5 years until the matter gets so bad that we have to send our lifeblood down there to fight these guerillas. I think it is better to do it now. It is the prudent thing to do.

I urge my colleagues, not because the gentlewoman from California does not have a good heart and not because she is not making some sense but this is the time to send the money to Colombia to fight the guerillas and also to do the other things that need to be done as the time goes by, but fight the guerillas now, defeat them as they have in Peru and Bolivia and to make absolutely sure that we do not have to send our young people down there in the future.

As of March 30, 2000, this document was also available online at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r106:H29MR0-173: