On August 30th, President Clinton visited Cartagena, Colombia in order to highlight the increased U.S. role in Colombia. The visit came just one month after Congress passed his request for $1.3 billion in “aid” to Colombia. The justification given for this massive increase in aid is the “war on drugs.” However, the aid does nothing to reduce the demand for cocaine here in the U.S. and, therefore, will probably do very little to stem the flow of drugs into our country.

During his brief nine hours in Colombia, Clinton said, “A condition of this aid is that we are not going to get into a shooting war, that it is not Vietnam.” That’s true, the war in Colombia is not like Vietnam because U.S. soldiers won’t be directly involved in fighting and being killed. The more accurate analogy is to El Salvador, where U.S. troops trained and advised the Salvadoran military, but managed (for the most part) to avoid direct involvement in the fighting itself.

The members of Missoula’s sister community of Comunidad Ignacio Ellacuría in El Salvador experienced the direct impact of this intervention during the civil war in their country, and their experience is frighteningly similar to what is currently taking place in Colombia. During the war in El Salvador (1980 to 1991), our government gave more than $5 billion to the Salvadoran government and military. During that same time, more than 75,000 people were killed. In 1993, a United Nations-appointed Truth Commission concluded that the Salvadoran security forces had been responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations during the war. More than $1 billion of the aid to Colombia will go to the security forces there. According to Human Rights Watch, the Colombia military maintains connections with paramilitary groups operating in the country, and those groups are responsible for more than three-quarters of all human rights abuses.

In the early 1980s, the people of Comunidad Ellacuría fled from the repression in El Salvador and sought refuge in Honduras. All together, more than one million Salvadorans were forced to abandon their homes during the war. In Colombia, there are currently 1.9 million people who have been similarly “displaced” by the war and repression.

In October 1989, the members of Comunidad Ellacuría returned to El Salvador to claim their right to live as a civilian community in the countryside. On February 11, 1990 the community was attacked by the Air Force. During that attack, a helicopter fired a rocket on a house where four families had sought shelter. Four children and one adult were killed, and sixteen people were wounded. The aid for Colombia includes 60 attack helicopters.

In November 1989, members of the Atlacatl Battalion killed the six Jesuit priests that ran the Central American University in San Salvador, along with the housekeeper and her daughter. Comunidad Ellacuría is named in honor of one of those priests, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, who had been the rector of the university. The Atlacatl was one of several elite battalions that were created and trained by the U.S. military. The aid to Colombia includes the creation of three elite battalions.

Fifteen of the soldiers who were involved in the killing of the Jesuits had been trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. More than 10,000 soldiers from Colombia have been trained at the School.

During the war in El Salvador, hundreds of U.S. military advisors were involved in planning the operations of the Salvadoran military. The aid to Colombia calls for 500 U.S. Army and intelligence instructors.

The Reagan and Bush administrations regularly certified that the Salvadoran government was improving its human rights record. In order to release the aid to Colombia, President Clinton waived the human rights conditions that had been included by Congress.

A representative from Comunidad Ellacuría was here in Missoula in August, and she expressed grave concern about U.S. intervention in the civil war in Colombia. She and her family directly experienced the suffering inflicted by the U.S.-backed security forces in El Salvador. Her youngest brother was dragged from their home and killed by the National Guard. She, herself, spent nine years in a refugee camp in Honduras. She said that she doesn’t want the people of Colombia to have to go through the same experience that she and her family had to endure in El Salvador.

U.S. aid to the Salvadoran military and government escalated and prolonged the civil war in El Salvador. Aid to Colombia will have the same tragic consequences there. If President Clinton and the members of Congress are truly concerned about reducing the flow of drugs into this country, they should spend our tax dollars for prevention and treatment programs here at home rather than for the waging of war in Colombia.