August 13, 2006
ATTAC Report This Week
Sabotaging the War on Drugs
(Transcript)
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Hello. I’m your host, Boruch Ellison, and this is “ATTAC Report This Week” for August 13th, 2006.
America’s epidemic of drug use did not begin until the 1970s, when narcotics production increased dramatically and organized crime sent drug pushers into the schools to seduce or pressure young people into becoming addicted.
The source of the expanded drug supply is no secret. More than two thirds of cocaine on American streets originates in the war-torn country of Colombia, where government attempts to stop the drug’s manufacture have failed.
That’s led to intervention by the United States, which spends billions of dollars on a massive program of aerial spraying and physical uprooting on the ground to destroy crops of coca plants. Millions of acres of the drug-producing plants have been destroyed over the course of several years.
But now new survey data shows that for every acre eradicated, more than one new acre is planted. In other words, cocaine farming and production have expanded sharply. By fighting cocaine production rather than the criminals who produce it, the U.S. is losing the war on drugs.
But who is planting the crops and producing the cocaine destined for American cities?
For many years, virtually the entire Colombian cocaine industry has been controlled by two terrorist groups: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, founded as the armed wing of the Colombian Communist Party, and the equally Marxist-Leninist National Liberation Army, or ELN. The FARC and the ELN are conducting guerrilla warfare to overthrow the government of Colombia, and they are armed and supervised by the Cuban military and secret police. They also work closely with other Marxist terrorist groups around the world; the FARC has learned bomb-making techniques, for example, from the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA of Spain, both of which are also armed and coordinated by the Communist Bloc.
The FARC and ELN together conduct a reign of terror over much of the Colombian countryside. They have kidnapped thousands of civilians, at times taking hostage entire church congregations at once, or driving whole villages full of peasants into the jungles without food or shelter. The terrorists have tied and shot, execution style, thousands of civilians, often after torturing them and mutilating their bodies. In at least one case, FARC terrorists blew up a church with the congregants inside, killing over 100 and injuring many others. The victims have included the elderly, the infirm and handicapped, women, and children, often murdered in front of their own families to send a warning that they must support the revolution — and the cocaine industry that finances it.
Yet U.S. presidents have refused to fight the FARC and ELN terrorists, or even to allow the Colombian government to do so. Until just a few years ago, U.S. aid money couldn’t be used by the Colombian military to fight the revolutionaries. Even now their hands remain tied; U.S. aid is cut off from any military units that actually start to fight with the intention of winning, and under U.S. pressure, anti-Communist militias that kill the terrorists are being forced to disarm.
Meanwhile, U.S. presidents look the other way while Occidental Petroleum, a major American oil company, illegally funnels many millions of dollars directly to FARC and ELN terrorists. This financing began under the leadership of Armand Hammer, an identified agent of the Soviet Russian KGB and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR, a Fabian Socialist group that collaborates with Communist objectives. Both the Clinton and Bush Administrations have also been filled with CFR-affiliated advisors who shape U.S. policy toward Colombia.
As long as pro-Communist policymakers are allowed to support the Marxist guerrillas in Colombia while disarming and sabotaging the anti-Communist resistance, the cocaine epidemic in America will only continue, and Colombia itself remains at risk of falling to Communism.
Thank you for listening. From all of us at ATTAC Report, good-bye.
(“ATTAC Report This Week” is available at www.ATTACReport.com.)