wake up: 08.04.04

Fuck. Today for the first time in my life I've come close to recognising the severity of the situation here. its not even that I've learned anything new, but simply that from talking to Christina this morning in the kitchen while she prepared breakfast it began to dawn on me. Speaking to a human being who’s life has been affected, who has lost relatives, has not the money to emigrate nor the desire to abandon her country and so carries on has hit me deeply. What i said about the happiness of the people here i don't take back but it is quite a rosy western traveller analysis that everything is better away from your own culture and requires some qualifications. There is also a deep sadness, desperation and real terror living in the hearts and mind of people which must be recognised. Christina told me about her family, campesinos from San Luis Tolima a place with a long history of brutal conflict. Her uncle, a farmer, now displaced from his land like so many others, lost six sons. Christina lost her younger brother to the paramilitaries. She explained how the young have four job opportunities in the countryside when farming no longer becomes viable due either to the levys campesinos must pay to paramilitaries in their area or that they are displaced from their land. These are; guerilla, paramilitary, police or army. The people are being armed to fight each other while their fertile farmland is either left to grow wild, destroyed by coca eradication chemicals sprayed from the air or is dug up by multinationals to extract valuable natural resources. Those that resist or voice disapproval are killed. Often turned in by desperate neighbours in exchange for money to feed their children. Children too are co-opted and form a valuable part of the counter insurgency intelligence network in their innocence. Others emigrate or move to the city but work is scarce here too and the armed forces offers minimum wage and health cover not to mention precious authority to the young and disposessed. Christina was almost in tears and I speechless. its easy to get wrapped up in side issues, to reassure yourself that things are not so bad, here they are. This is a fascist police state, supported by the US and Europe, viewed as a legitimate democracy and in a state of permanent war, not on drugs but on its own people. This country has been ignored for long enough and something must be done. at the very least informing people in the US and UK what billions of dollars worth of taxpayers money is being spent on while eradication of coca, the supposed rational has not only proved ineffective but counterproductive:

"Department figures show coca increasing in Colombia by 268% since large-scale spraying started in 1995, and ONDCP figures showed a 25% increase in coca production in 2001, despite widespread fumigation."

"According to a 1994 study by the RAND Corporation, coca and poppy crop eradication is the least effective method for controlling drug supply: treatment and prevention is 23 times more cost effective than source country eradication. Nonetheless, forced aerial eradication of coca and poppy crops is a central part of the US aid package to Colombia."

http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/colombia/failedDrugWar.html