As the narcotics issue has been downplayed, so the human rights component of Plan Colombia has been relegated to the realm of short-lived public relations manipulation.
In February of 2007 Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo's brother, Senator Alvaro Araujo, was arrested for connections to the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).
Uribe was untroubled by the above and said, "When they ask, why do I keep the foreign minister, I answer: She is not involved in the criminal activities that are under investigation." [13]
Plan Colombia has entered its tenth calendar year. In the intervening years covert and overt government and paramilitary massacres, many too grisly to relate, have continued unabated and drug cultivation and exports have been, if marginally dented, not substantially affected by what is still referred to when convenient as a drug eradication program.
Drug war claims notwithstanding, Plan Colombia's activities both within and outside the nation were actuated by other designs.
Colombia: Pentagon's Base In Andean Region
From its very advent it was intended to be more than an intensification of the decades-old counterinsurgency war in Colombia and to be the opening salvo of a US campaign to escalate the militarization of the Andes region. White House and Pentagon plans to employ Colombia as a regional military force and operating base to police South America have gained new urgency for Washington with political transformations in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Paraguay heralding the end of US political, economic and military domination of the continent.
In its first full year of existence, 2001, a Peruvian Air Force jet shot down a civilian plane spotted by a US aircraft flown by CIA contractors with American missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter on board, killing both as well as the pilot.
By 2006, the US had doubled the amount of military trainers and advisers stationed in Colombia and in the same year the nation's planes started violating the air space of neighboring Ecuador. The planes, and it would not have been unusual for US personnel to have been aboard them, were ostensibly conducting fumigation missions.
The Ecuadoran government denounced the actions as "unfriendly and hostile" and "Defense Minister Marcelo Delgado said...that army airplanes will fly over its border to prevent Colombian airplanes from entering Ecuadorian airspace...." [14]
In December of 2006 not only Colombian planes crossed the border into the country. Later in the month "Some 40 Colombians...fled across the border into Ecuador after they were attacked by Colombian soldiers," the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ecuador reported. [15]
Twelve months before fifteen Colombians were killed and 1,500 displaced in the Narilo province in the country's southeast, bordering Ecuador. "Authorities remained silent as to whether this was a military operation against guerrilla fighters or a dispute between paramilitary groups." [16]
In early 2007, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Colombia and spent two days meeting with the country's military and political leadership. Shortly afterwords Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, about whom more will be said later, returned the favor and visited the Pentagon where he met with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. A Defense Department report of the visit quoted Pentagon officials as saying that "U.S. military support for Colombia, previously focused on combating drugs, has expanded to helping the Colombian military confront the country's rebel insurgency" and that "U.S. Special Forces troops in Colombia provide Colombian forces military training...."[17]
Five months later Colombia built a third military base on its 2,219 kilometer border with Venezuela, initially stationing 1,000 troops in it.
Colombia has become a military outpost for Washington in confronting and threatening both Ecuador on its southwestern and Venezuela on its northeastern frontiers.
It is also part of a strategy that is more than regional and even continental in nature and scope.
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