Speech by Rep.
Janice Schakowsky (D-Illinois), June 9, 2006
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY.
Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the bipartisan McGovern amendment
which I am also proud to cosponsor.
That passionate speech against liberals and against this piece of legislation
might be interesting, but it is absolutely wrong. The fact that we have
spent billions and billions of dollars in Colombia, and the gentleman
talked about success and failure, and all of the evidence, the objective
evidence, shows that this policy of fumigation and drug eradication
unfortunately has been an abject failure. As far as ending violence
in Colombia, I want to just give a couple of facts that the gentleman
from Massachusetts mentioned.
On May 22 of this year, soldiers of the Army's Third Brigade killed
10 members of Colombia's most elite police unit against narco-trafficking,
trained by the DEA, in what evidence shows was a premeditated ambush.
The police unit members who were killed had captured 205 drug traffickers,
23 of whom had been sent to the United States for trial. Armed Forces
chief Mario Montoya initially called the killings a case of friendly
fire.
On June 1, two officers and six soldiers were arrested for the massacre.
Colombian Attorney General Mario Iguaran said in announcing the arrests:
``It was not a mistake. It was an ambush planned as a favor to the drug
traffickers.'' The Army officers apparently were working for the mafia.
The International Committee of the Red Cross found that 13.6 percent
increase in forced disappearances between 2004 and 2005. According to
CODHES, the Colombian nongovernment organization that maintains data
on forced displacement, the number of people forced from their homes
by violence increased by 8 percent from 2004 to 2005.
But you know what, we are not really having a debate about that because
the modest offsets that we are talking about still leaves the accounts
for drug eradication at $9 million above the President's request, but
let us look at how that money has been spent.
In Colombia and in the Andean region, as I said, the U.S. has invested
billions of dollars, hundreds of millions year after year of our taxpayers
dollars, and what have we gotten? Plan Colombia was supposed to reduce
Colombia's cultivation and distribution of drugs by 50 percent, but
6 years and $4.7 billion later, the drug control results are meager
at best. If you look at the U.S. government data, our own data, there
is as much coca today in Colombia and as much cocaine in the United
States as there was 6 years ago.
But I want to get back to the point. What we are trying to do is to
have a commonsense and compassionate effort to produce modest additional
resources to help President Bush alleviate some of the world's most
dire humanitarian crises. There is a lot that happens around the world
we cannot control. We cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot prevent droughts,
and we cannot prevent all conflict, but when we know where the hungry,
the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help. That is what this
is about.
I have travelled to places like Colombia and places where people are
suffering. We are asking for a modest amount of money to be transferred
out of this account, and the simple choice is should we overfund our
efforts in Colombia by a lot or a little or should we do all we can
to maximize the President's power to help the powerless suffering as
a result of genocide and other crises.
As of June
13, 2006 this page was also available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r109:FLD001:H53648
