No AU student is a stranger to country-dropping. We constantly toss our abroad experiences into conversation, creating this constant dialogue on who went where and when, and the way that people and parties and politics operate in said country. While I've made my fair share of contributions to this discourse, my latest international escapade made a much more significant impact than any drunken night in Barcelona or intellectual afternoon at the Louvre. This January I went to Colombia with AU's alternative break program. The number one phrase I heard before I left? "Be careful." But I wasn't worried. Even if my father's worst fears were confirmed, being kidnapped by a bunch of narco-traffickers seemed like a good story to tell.
My father, like a substantial number of Americans, understands the conflict in Colombia as a drug war. Money from cocaine funds several bands of guerrillas, most notably the FARC - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. These murderous terrorists, the enemies of freedom, wage war on an otherwise peaceful society. In reality, however, the war on cocaine has more to do with the governments already in power than with their so-called enemies. For nearly a decade, the U.S. has provided aid under Plan Colombia, an agreement that originally involved several other countries, but they backed out when the Clinton administration rewrote the plan to emphasize military spending. Since then until just recently, roughly 80 percent of our aid to Colombia has been allocated to military efforts, while the rest funds social developments like schools and healthcare.
The continuation of this funding is contingent upon measurable results. In Colombia the most prominent measurement of success is a body count. With every additional guerrilla that is killed, the army is winning the war on drugs. Jos? Giraldo was killed by the Colombian military in 2006. We were able to visit Se?or Giraldo's farm to talk with his family and the families of Jhonny Silva and Katherine Soto, two other recent victims of extrajudicial execution. For me it was a day of contrasts. Situated on the side of a mountain, the farm burst with color - flowers, banana trees, a grassy clearing, a few horses and chickens, a rainbow of clothing hanging on a line and a view overlooking the sweeping green mountain passes we had just navigated to get there. Beautiful simplicity. It was hard to believe that a man had been murdered here. As we sat in that clearing, listening to these families' stories, the spell of our newfound oasis shattered. Se?or Giraldo's daughter, Marta, told us how her father had been murdered twenty feet from where we sat, by a military squadron who accused him of storing (nonexistent) weapons inside the one-bedroom dirt floor house at the bottom of the hill. Katherine Soto's mother could barely muster words through the tears during her story. The army offered to pay her for mistakenly shooting Katherine nearly point-blank in the face, yet when she refused in favor of prosecuting them in court, she and her surviving daughter received only death threats, rather than due process of the law.
Jhonny's father too sought justice in the courts after his son was killed by the ESMAD, the equivalent of Colombian SWAT teams, while studying at the local university. He'd hired a lawyer and investigators, discovered the exact identity of his son's shooter, brought the evidence to the man's commanding officer only to be told, definitively, that it was in the commander's greater interest not to disrupt this man's career over the death of one 20-year-old kid. In fact, all of the officials involved in these deaths have been promoted to higher positions since their occurrence. The body counts signal success.
Jhonny's father, later led us down a path to see the pineapple fields, beyond which stretched a valley and what appeared to be another small city. "Industrial park," he told us. Foreign investment, another popularly encouraged force among politicians. Murders like the ones we'd just heard of, as well as Plan Colombia-funded crop fumigations, are often used to scare people into moving away from certain areas, where foreign companies can conveniently take over the land for themselves. Meanwhile Colombia has one of the world's highest counts of internally displaced people - higher even than Sudan. I could go on, but the story is hardly new. These are the types of operations the United States has been funding for decades. Ultimately, under cover of fighting cocaine, the U.S. protects our own corporate interests at the expense of the innocent. As many times as I have heard this chain of events before, in Colombia it was given a face. Marta, Jhonny, and Katherine were students not unlike any one of us, and we could feel their pain and that of their parents reflected in ourselves. Marta and her friends have no need to converse on their travels to other countries to make some point about what worldly experience they have. They've had enough experiences in their own backyards.
Andrea Bachmann Junior, School of International Service