The Colby Echo

Issue date: 12/3/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Chris Hoder

After a week testifying in hearings of the Human Rights Caucus in Washington, D.C., 2007 Oak Fellow Nancy Sanchez returned to Mayflower Hill to give an update on Plan Colombia, the controversial U.S. assistance package passed in 2000 that has since totaled roughly $6.3 billion. Assistant Professor of Anthropology Winifred Tate translated the presentation. Tate, who is a friend and colleague of Sanchez, researches political violence and drug economies in Colombia.

Tate has worked and traveled with Sanchez in Putumayo, a southern region of Colombia that has been the focus of Plan Colombia's centerpiece, "Push Into Southern Colombia," which deals primarily with massive aerial fumigation of coca crops, counternarcotics battalions and social investment in alternative crops. Putumayo has also been a stronghold of Colombia's largest guerilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), for decades.

Sanchez works as Southern Coordinator for MINGA, a non-governmental human rights organization. In her day-to-day work, Sanchez collaborates with local civic and peace initiatives and organizations, and supports the networks of women, indigenous people and Afro-Colombians. She works with people who live in regions experiencing war and helps protect leaders who are often suddenly threatened.

"Unfortunately, Nancy's work and my own interests have shown the ways in which Putumayo has been illustrative of the larger failings of these programs in the Putumayo region and throughout the country," Tate said. Coca cultivation has not been reduced by aerial fumigation, but rather has simply spread to other areas. Plan Colombia, originally packaged and sold as a counter-drug policy, has been reframed since 9/11 in terms of improving the security situation in the region. For the past 50 years, Colombia has been in a state of civil war between government forces, anti-government insurgent groups (the FARC and the National Liberation Army [ELN]), and illegal paramilitary groups. The violent conflict, coupled with fumigation that has had devastating health effects on rural peasants, has displaced nearly four million people.

Human rights issues are still persistent in this region, Tate said. In October the head of the Colombian military was fired because of cases related to what have become known as "false positives:" civilians killed and then presented as guerillas killed in combat. Also, in recent years, massive graves have been uncovered in the southern region of the country.

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