Word: colombia
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...many reasons Bogota is not Saigon is that Congress has strictly limited how many U.S. troops can be on the ground. The 300 U.S. trainers in Colombia are handcuffed into training and escort missions only. U.S. drug warriors in the region have had to reach elsewhere, into the shadowy world of State Department contractors, to fill many jobs. It's an expensive decision. Chopper and crop-spraying contract pilots can make $100,000 a year. And because the U.S. doesn't want to send active-duty soldiers, the narcowars have come to serve as a retirement plan...
...production moved. Today most cocaine is grown, processed and packaged in the Colombia jungle. But instead of being controlled by a few master criminals, the production is run by more than 100 small operations, each aligned with one of the factions in Colombia's civil war. "Fighting the drugs," says Ramirez Acuna, "has gone from being a criminal problem to a military...
...nasty fight. In the past decade, the civil war in Colombia has claimed more than 35,000 lives, often in brutal massacres. The war involves four parties: the government, a Marxist movement known as the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a Cuban-inspired movement known as the ELN (National Liberation Army) and an increasing number of paramilitary right-wingers taking the antiguerrilla fight into their own hands. The only groups that don't often fight each other are the FARC and the ELN. But both the FARC rebels and the paramilitaries derive huge revenues by "taxing" coca production...
...Colombian strategy is to try to squeeze off the drug money as a way to strangle the FARC and the ELN. Under the $7.5 billion Plan Colombia--including $1.3 billion from Washington--the U.S. has been giving Bogota choppers, training and advice on eradication. Some of the money will arm three highly mobile, 1,000-member counternarcotics battalions able to apply pressure to many parts of the country at once. Growers who are tempted to move out from under spraying missions in the Putumayo region, for instance, will find there's nowhere...
...worry. It exposes the U.S. to a basic problem of policy: while U.S.-supplied planes and their American-trained crews are allowed to get involved with antidrug missions, they are not, by law, allowed anywhere near counterinsurgency operations. Thus, for instance, the U.S. Blackhawks in Plan Colombia can be used to hit FARC drug operations but not other FARC offensives. It's a tough distinction to draw in the real-time world of combat...