Bolivian Mercenaries

Chris Floyd, on Counterpunch, recently wrote Global Eye — Jungle Fever that the “Bush Regime is paying — lock, stock and barrel — for a band of local mercenaries taking part in Bolivia’s campaign to eradicate coca production in the jungle region of Chapare”. This was reported in the Washington Post in US Role in Coca War Draws Fire at the end of June.

This “Expeditionary Task Force” is just another feature of the last unending war the U.S. engaged in, the Drug War. The Drug War started in response to the immense drug trade flowing from South and Central America. It was this market that attracted “organized crime and its allies in the Western security services as a high-yield money-maker.” The Western security services in question was the CIA for the most part. Once the drug trade got even out of the CIA’s control, and this control continued regardless of the effect on the U.S. population, there came the war on drugs.

“This has proven every bit as profitable as the drug-running itself—perhaps even more so, as corrupt officials now can play both sides, drawing huge amounts of tax dollars for the “war effort” while also raking in bribes from favored crime bosses to keep the trade thriving.”

“A Bolivian civil court judge issued a preventive arrest order this past week for the unit’s commander, Col. Aurelio Burgos Blacutt” for the murder of an unarmed peasant, a union leader. However, in response to the allegations of human rights violations in Bolivia, carried out by soldiers trained and paid for by the U.S., the answer is “We don’t believe them, the human rights allegations,“ a Bush spokesman said, even after videotape of the January murder was produced.”

The Washington Post article has a lot more background information, with the start of the “Dignity Plan in 1998” to combat. These actions always co-opt a noble word for their names, don’t they? Wars named enduring freedom, infinite justice, etc.: it all seems a bit trite.

“In the case of Bolivia, I think the war on drugs is being used as an excuse to carry out behavior that we would never otherwise accept,” said Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey (D-N.Y.), who has raised the issue with the State Department. “Our actions in Bolivia represent a gross complacency that borders on complicity. There seems to be purposeful obfuscation about the facts.””

Of course, as the U.S. Embassy says, “[t]he coca growers are not peace-loving beatniks”, but they don’t have to be. They’re the ones growing a plant that they’ve grown for centuries, and whose use was twisted into profit by members of the same government that has now hired a new army to kill them for growing it. It’s their land and the U.S. pays an army to patrol it as they see fit. It’s not the farmers who a morally obligated to seek peace.