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May 18, 2005

They can't be serious

Take a look at this letter that four key Republican House members (all of them committee or subcommittee chairs) sent to the Appropriations Committee five days ago. They want the appropriators to find $150 million in the 2006 foreign aid bill to provide even more military and police aid to Colombia.

The letter basically transmits a request that President Uribe made to members of the House International Relations Committee on a recent visit. Through his congressional mouthpieces, Uribe is asking for four new spray planes (Colombia already has nineteen) and eight new helicopters (6 Huey IIs and 2 expensive Blackhawks). This equipment, which will be stationed at an additional fumigation base in southwestern Colombia, makes up the bulk of the request ($120 million). The request also includes two DC-3T aircraft for the Colombian Navy to perform interdiction ($22 million) and electronic interception equipment for Colombia’s judicial police (DIJIN).

This request – especially the $120 million for more fumigation – should be swatted down and forgotten, for at least three reasons.

  1. Fumigation isn’t working anyway. Every year since 2002, the ratio of acres sprayed to acres reduced has increased, meaning steadily less bang for the buck. We couldn’t even measure that ratio in 2004, because it’s mathematically impossible to divide by zero: record spraying last year failed to gain a reduction of even one acre of coca. State Department figures showed Colombia with 114,000 hectares (1 hectare = 2 ½ acres) of coca at the end of 2004, only 8,500 hectares less than in 1999, the year before Plan Colombia started. If fumigation is failing as a strategy, it’s madness to increase spending on fumigation by hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s time to alter the strategy.

  2. Who is making the policy? The left in Colombia often accuses the United States of acting imperialistically. If this request is granted, though, it should be clear to all that U.S. policy toward Colombia is now being made more in Bogotá than in Washington. The Bush administration has paid little attention to Colombia lately, while policymakers who work on Colombia have gone to great lengths to avoid any appearance of distance between themselves and President Uribe. This has led them to take positions that must make them uncomfortable, such as support for the paramilitary negotiations in their present form, or endorsement of Uribe’s view that there is no armed conflict, just a terrorist nuisance, in Colombia.

    The U.S. government can’t just rubber-stamp all of the Uribe government’s requests, especially if they don’t make strategic sense. This latest request offers a perfect opportunity to draw the line – especially since the Colombian government is pressuring the U.S. Congress to adopt this package even before the executive branch (the Bush administration) has publicly offered its opinion of it.

  3. Where would one find another $150 million? If the authors of the May 13 letter get what they want, 2006 aid to Colombia would be bumped up to nearly $900 million, nearly $750 million of it for Colombia’s military and police. Somewhere around $725 million would have to come from just one U.S. budget bill, the annual foreign aid (or, formally, Foreign Operations) law.

    The House Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee is dealing with a small enough bill already. It has been allocated only $20.3 billion with which to distribute aid to the entire world (PDF format), and it has a host of urgent priorities elsewhere, from the insufficiently funded Millenium Challenge and HIV-AIDS initiatives, to tsunami aid, to increased assistance to the Middle East. Most of Latin America is already facing declines in both military and economic aid for 2006. If appropriators were to accede to the Uribe-Hyde-Davis-Burton-Souder request, they would face the unpleasant task of freeing up $150 million by cannibalizing other programs elsewhere in the world. For this reason, we doubt that this request is going to prosper, though it’s conceivable that some elements of it might still get approved.

If appropriators do somehow find that they have another $150 million available for Colombia, there are many, far better priorities on which to spend it. There are millions of displaced people living in extreme poverty, a potential source of future violence; thousands of rural hamlets without roads, electricity, potable water or credit (but with armed groups and drug-traffickers always nearby); hundreds of judges, prosecutors and investigators in need of protection, equipment, computers and transportation; and thousands of young ex-combatants who, if it can be proven that they did not commit gross abuses, need help starting new lives.

That is just the beginning of a very long list. Colombia has many other needs that are more urgent, and more important to long-term U.S. interests, than yet another shipment of helicopters.

Posted by isacson at May 18, 2005 02:54 PM

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