Speech by Rep. Sam Farr (D-California), July 15, 2004

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 1/2 minutes at this time.

I want to respond to the gentleman from Illinois and the gentleman from Indiana. They say that Plan Colombia is working, and it is working under the existing caps. My point is that, as a person who lived in that country and worked in the economic development and the community development as a Peace Corps volunteer, is that I believe that Colombia has the capacity with our help to win this war on terrorism, to win this war on drugs, and it is the obscene amount of money that drug cartels dumped into the country that is doing it.

But you are not going to win that by putting all of the emphasis on the military side, and that is where the mission creep is. We have the most amount of money being spent on the military than we ever have, and we are winning the war. Now we need to spend money on the civilian side, on the economic side.

You cannot win this war. What you have to do is win the peace, and the peace will not be won until the investment is in Colombians to do the job for themselves.

My job in the Peace Corps was to work myself out of a job, and I think what we have lost track of here or lost sight of is that we are not really emphasizing how do we get these countries to do the job themselves. How do we get the contractors that are being paid American dollars, how do we get military that is our military to work themselves out of a job? Until we answer that and see that we are moving in that direction, I think we are asking the wrong question and we are quoting the wrong facts here.
Yes, it is moving in the right direction. In fact, we would argue that, because of the way it is moving, there ought to be a greater emphasis, not a less emphasis, on local economic development, on fighting the war on poverty. There is only 20 percent of the budget that now goes to the economic side of it. That is the least amount of money since the war in Colombia, the Plan Colombia began. So the mission creep is on the military side, and I think the mission creep ought to be on the other side, on the economic side. Until we win the war on poverty, we will not win the peace, and until we win the peace, we will not have a stable country.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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