BY AL GIORDANO
While it is front-page news in South America, US President George Bush's half-billion dollar increase in funds for Plan Colombia — complete with a public relations facelift and attempted name change — has flown under the radar of the US press.
Plan Colombia, Washington's US$1.3 billion dollar "anti-drug" package — consisting mainly of arms, military advisors and aid to the civil war-torn South American country's government and armed forces — will now be officially called the "Andean Initiative".
"The new administration will try to regionalise the Colombian conflict, so that the countries in the area recognise that this is their problem as much as it is Colombia's", said US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Washington is publicising this information. It is the US media that has not reported it. And it's not that the newsrooms haven't heard the drums of war beating from the south. As Village Voice media critic Cynthia Cotts noted in her March 2 column, "The New York Times plans to move its Buenos Aires bureau to Bogota (Colombia) or Caracas (Venezuela) sometime soon. Other papers are following suit. The Los Angeles Times plans to open a Bogota bureau next week, and the Washington Post is moving its Caracas bureau chief there as well. The big three will join the Miami Herald, the Houston Chronicle, and several wire services that have been in Bogota for years."
Even the Wall Street Journal recently established an Andean bureau in Caracas. The imminent escalation of militarised drug war hostilities in the Andes is no secret in the newsrooms of the United States but it remains AWOL on the pages that the US population reads. Not one of these newspapers or wire services have reported on Plan Colombia's expensive new turn.
The US State Department can't be accused of keeping the news secret. It held a press briefing on Colombia policy in early March, in part to divert attention from an inconvenient story four Colombian governors had to tell.
The governors arrived in Washington to inform the US people that aerial eradication of coca plants, paid for by the US, is damaging food crops in their hungry country and must be ceased. Among the messengers was Colombia's first indigenous governor, Floro Alberto Tunubala of the state of Cuaca, elected last October as an outspoken opponent of Plan Colombia. (President Andres Pastrana's Conservative Party lost all 30 Colombian states in that vote, a fact that also went unreported in the US media.)
With the announcement of the "Andean Initiative", backed by US$550 million in additional funds, the Bush Administration has removed all doubt: it will continue the Clinton Administration's military intervention and herbicide spraying in the region, in the name of the "war on drugs".
The Bush administration has upped the ante considerably. The opposition to Plan Colombia by the European Parliament, voted early this year, signalled that the US now stands alone in paying for this intervention. Washington simply writes a larger cheque, even as the administration seeks tax cuts at home.
The Colombian war is being regionalised into other countries — Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela and Panama — not by accident but by intentional strategy. It's a high-stakes attempt to force neighbouring countries — so far reluctant — to support the militarised drug war in Colombia.
[Former Boston Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano runs the Narco News Bulletin. Visit <http://www.narconews.com/>.]