Plan Colombia and Beyond

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August 10, 2005

More Colombia aid this fall?

Since September 11, 2001, and especially after the Iraq invasion, the Bush Administration has come to Congress once every year with additional budget requests – called “emergency supplementals” – to fund the “war on terror.” (H.R. 2888 was signed into law on September 18, 2001. H.R. 4775 on August 2, 2002. H.R. 1559 on April 16, 2003. H.R. 3289 on November 6, 2003. H.R. 1268 on May 11, 2005.)

These emergency supplementals have occasionally included funds for Colombia. The last two have not – but the next one probably will. The Bush Administration is likely to ask for more Colombia aid in its next request, which could come before Congress as early as this fall.

For the U.S. government’s budget, 2006 begins on October 1, when the new “fiscal year” gets underway. With a new budget year may come a new request, and Congress – undistracted by campaigning in a non-election year – will be around to consider it. Several sources have indicated to me that a supplemental request may indeed be on its way before the end of the year.

If that happens, we may see one or both of the following requests for Colombia:

1. Up to $150 million for new spray planes, helicopters, DC-3 aircraft and electronic intercept equipment for Colombia’s security forces. This request, formulated by President Uribe, was presented in a May letter to House appropriators from four prominent Republicans (and discussed by us here). The request went nowhere, largely because by May, the appropriators would have had to cut $150 million from other countries’ aid in order to fund it, and the State Department did not push for it.

But the push for the additional package continues. It was the subject of a syndicated column by Robert Novak (written with heavy input from Republican House staff) published Monday, and a letter last week from Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana) to President Bush. According to Novak and other sources, when Uribe mentioned this request to President Bush at the two leaders’ meeting last Thursday in Crawford, Texas, Bush turned to the State Department officials present and told them (paraphrasing) “to get Uribe what he needs.”

So expect this request, or something like it, to be in the next emergency supplemental. We, of course, oppose it. First of all, the request would really be more than $150 million: since the United States pays nearly all maintenance costs for the hardware it has already donated, the upkeep, parts, fuel and related costs – most paid to contractors, since Colombia has assumed little maintenance responsibility – will add another $10-20 million per year to future aid packages.

Second, most of the request will pay to expand fumigations, a cruel strategy that has already proven unable to reduce the availability of Colombian drugs here at home. If the United States really has an additional $150 million available to reduce drug supplies coming from Colombia, it should go to expand alternative development in parts of Colombia that have seen a lot of fumigation but almost no investment in economic alternatives, such as Nariño, Meta, Guaviare or Caquetá. $150 million in new economic aid would go far toward fixing our terribly unbalanced strategy in Colombia.

2. An unknown amount to support the paramilitary demobilization process. According to a Reuters report from yesterday, the Justice Department has issued a secret legal opinion that gives a green light to U.S. aid for the re-integration of demobilized paramilitaries. The opinion should end more than a year of bureaucratic wrangling over whether aiding former members of the AUC, a group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, would constitute “material support to terrorists” under the PATRIOT act.

The Uribe government has been asking the Bush administration to aid this process, which CIP, many other organizations, and many key members of the U.S. Congress believe is going to trample victims’ rights, legalize stolen assets, and leave much of the AUC intact. The 2006 foreign aid request includes little or no money for U.S. aid to the paramilitary demobilizations. If the Bush Administration plans to fund the process, then, the next emergency supplemental will be its only opportunity to do so before 2007.

As we have recommended several times elsewhere, and as Human Rights Watch cogently argues in a report released last week, the United States should distance itself from this very flawed process. We understand, though, that the paramilitaries’ rank-and-file includes thousands of young men who have not committed “crimes against humanity” and now find themselves unemployed and with few opportunities. We are not opposed to aiding these individuals if – and this is a big “if” – the United States can identify ex-paramilitaries who (1) are not guilty of gross violations and (2) have verifiably cut their links with their old commanders, and are not part of new paramilitary structures.

However, the “Justice and Peace” law Colombia’s government is using to verify innocence and dismantlement is too weak. Just because a demobilized paramilitary has been cleared by the Colombian government’s rapid, disorganized verification process – which relies on voluntary confessions and a 60-day time limit for overworked investigators to do their job – does not give us enough confidence that he is truly innocent of crimes against humanity and has truly left the orbit of the AUC. If the United States is to provide any aid to demobilized rank-and-file paramilitaries, it will have to hold them to a higher standard of verification.

Finally, a note of caution about this posting. All of the above is a prediction, based on recent discussions, and it could be way off. It’s entirely possible that neither of these aid requests for Colombia will end up in the emergency supplemental. It’s even possible that there won’t be an emergency supplemental at all before the end of the year. But for now, we’re operating on the assumption that we’ll be facing another big Colombia aid debate this fall.

Posted by isacson at August 10, 2005 12:27 PM

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