Military aid package to Colombia:  Declaration of war on Colombian people; STOP U.S. INTERVENTION IN COLOMBIA!

25 Jun 2000

The U.S. aid package to Colombia passed by the Senate on June 21 is  a declaration of war against the people of Colombia. It is an open  admission of the hidden war that the Pentagon and the CIA have been  waging in Colombia for decades.  

The International Action Center condemns the $1.3 billion aid package and calls on President Clinton and the Pentagon to end all military aid to Colombia. We call on activists to join in protesting the aid in their communities.  

In New York, the IAC will join the Colombia Action Committee’s picket on Monday, June 26 at 6 p.m. at Senator Chuck Shumer’s office on 3rd Ave. between 47th St. and 48th St.  

“The Colombian military and police are waging a dirty war against  Colombia’s unions, peasant organizations, students and all those  fighting for social change,” charged IAC leader Teresa Gutierrez. “The U.S. government is funding a counterinsurgency war under the cover of the phony war on drugs.”  

“It is no surprise that the aid package was approved just a day before Shaka Sankofah was executed in Texas,” Gutierrez said. “The U.S. government’s policy is to export its brutal repression of poor and working people to every country in the world that it can.”  

Colombia is already the third largest recipient of military aid in the world. Up to 300 Special Forces troops are already on the ground there.  

NY Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez recently exposed the role of U.S. Special Forces in one of the worst massacres in recent history in Colombia, the 1997 Mapiripan massacre. This confirms what groups like Human Rights Watch has confirmed as a pattern: the U.S. government has helped organize the Colombian military and their informal paramilitary units to target all those who are considered allies of the revolutionary movements there.  

“The latest escalation of military aid is another step down the road to open U.S. intervention in Colombia,” stated IAC co-director Sara Flounders. “The Pentagon generals and Wall Street tycoons have grown so arrogant that they have forgotten the lesson of Vietnam: a people’s struggle for social justice cannot be crushed by bombs and high-tech weaponry.”  

No more Vietnam Wars!
U.S. hands off the Colombian liberation movement!

International Action Center
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