Colombia at a Crossroads essays

Colombia at a Crossroads essays Colombia is presently at a crossroads, Nazzi suggests, noting that since 1995 the dynamics of their civil war intensified with a tendency to escalate, partly due to the rise of paramilitarism. Sweig takes us further, to 2003, after President Uribes sweeping election victory during the fall of the peace process and the advent of a policy of "democratic security for the region. Through hard-line policy, Uribe has focused on three challengers- all on the US State Department's list of terrorist organizations: the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the paramilitant United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia (AUC) and the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN). Sweig attributes Colombias friction to a mixture of terrorism, drugs, resistance and counterinsurgency. The FARC, the AUC, and the ELN battle the state, each other and society. The FARC and the AUC use the coca and poppy trade, kidnapping, extortion, and assassination; the ELN uses kidnapping and targets Colombias oil. Hence, Colombia is the murder capital of the planet with the third largest amount of people having been pushed out of their homes worldwide. Importing weapons globally, it exports eighty percent of European and US consumed cocaine and most heroin on the East Coast. Nazzi pinpoints those that oppose the peace process- landowners, the military, the middle class and the paramilitary, who transformed the battle with the rebels into a more complex, three-way interaction, President Reagan's shoddy "contra" war in Nicaragua and brutality in El Salvador were thought to have brought counter-insurgency to a hault. With the flick of a switch, Bush restarted it. Most agree that drug eradication in Colombia failed. The billion-dollar aid given to Plan Colombia in 2000 was offset by an increase in coca production; efforts to supply coca farmers with alternate means of sustenance failed. Washington&a...