Colombia declares forest fires national disaster, will get U.S. help

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia declares forest fires national disaster, will get U.S. help
Reuters
Published: Thursday, January 07, 2010


BOGOTA - Colombia declared raging forest fires to be a national disaster on Thursday and said it will get equipment from the United States to help douse the flames, further strengthening ties between Washington and Bogota.

Colombia, like other South American countries, is suffering from a drought that has contributed to fires in 11 of its 32 provinces. The government has ordered the temporary closure of some national parks due to the blazes.

President Alvaro Uribe, a Wall Street favorite and the White House's main ally in the region, said that the United States will provide fire-fighting equipment.

The Washington-Bogota alliance has complicated Colombia's relationship with some of its left-leaning neighbors.

More:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2417576#ixzz0c0KpLOOP

[Judi Lynn]

1. After Plan Colombia: Evaluating "Integrated Action," the next phase of U.S. assistance

After Plan Colombia: Evaluating "Integrated Action," the next phase of U.S. assistance
By Adam Isacson and Abigail Poe
December 2009

This report independently evaluates "Integrated Action," a new approach to state-building and counterinsurgency that the U.S. government is supporting in Colombia. Ten years and $6.8 billion after the 2000 launch of "Plan Colombia," officials from both governments are billing Integrated Action as the future direction of U.S. assistance to Colombia.

~snip~
The Integrated Action model
A difficult country to govern

This story begins in a country embroiled in a long, bloody, complicated internal armed conflict. Fighting has been ongoing in Colombia since the mid-1960s, when the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla groups formed in the countryside, followed in the 1980s by a series of far-right paramilitary militias. In the past twenty years alone the fighting, fueled on all sides by income from the drug trade, has killed more than 70,000 Colombians, most of them civilian non-combatants.

Some argue that Colombia's current violence in fact began in the late 1940s, with the outbreak of a decade of bloodletting between political parties, known simply as "La Violencia," that took as many as 300,000 lives. Others point to numerous minor wars during the 19th century, and one major civil war at the turn of the 20th century that took 100,000 lives, to argue that armed conflict has been the norm, especially in rural Colombia, since independence in 1819.

As the frequent strife indicates, Colombia is a difficult country to govern. Like many of its Latin American neighbors, it inherited from Spanish rule one of the world's worst distributions of wealth, land and income, which persists today. A 2003 study by the Colombian government's geographical institute found that 61 percent of land was in the hands of 0.4% of landholders.2 The UN Development Program estimates that the top 10 percent of Colombians earns 60.4 times what the bottom 10 percent earns in a year, the fourth-highest proportion of all countries measured.3

More:
http://justf.org/content/after-plan-colombia

[Peace Patriot]

2. Gee, I hope they put the fires out without killing any union leaders, peasant farmers, human rights

workers, teachers, community organizers, political leftists, peaceful protestors, journalists and other dangerous exercisers of human and civil rights, or people just standing around who might be FARC guerillas, or whose bodies might be dressed up like FARC guerillas to impress U.S. senators with "body counts."

Sorry about natural fires in Colombia. Truly. But what about all those peasant farms wasted with toxic chemicals in the failed, corrupt, murderous U.S. "war on drugs"? And how about listening to some LEFTIST South American leaders, like Evo Morales of Bolivia, who revere Mother Earth and have asked the U.S. and other "first world" countries to DO SOMETHING about their massive pollution of the atmosphere, that is causing these droughts and other climate destabilization disasters?

Cripes.

[gbscar]

3. FARC will put out the fires...if they're not busy with landmines, killing people accused of being..

...paramilitaries or their collaborators whether or not that happens to be true, reporters who dare to publish official or merely critical information in some way shape or form and are thus guilty of "apology of militarism" and worse, people who dare to travel during an armed strike or blockade, members of indigenous groups who are suspected of being army informants in disguise, people who have been kidnapped if someone dares to try and rescue them, deserters and so on and so forth.

And while I agree with your criticism of fumigations, you might also want to look into all the chemicals that are dumped into the rivers and all the trees that are cut as part of drug processing in clandestine labs and the clearing of land to make room for new plantations.