THE ANDES   map

VENEZUELA (The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela)

-24m inhabitants; 88% mestizo or "white", 80% urban
-oil, OPEC member

Lt. Col. Hugo Chavez: led aborted military coup in 1992
    1998: elected president
    1999: promotes new constitution
    2000: re-elected for 6 years
    2003: referendum to recall Chavez
                         
Chavez meets with Castro                         Chavez meets with Gadhafi

COLOMBIA
-population 38 million; <1% Indian
-third-most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil and Mexico

-world's second largest supplier of coffee and cut-flowers
-Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
-contemporary painter Fernando Botero

History
Liberals (from Santander) and Conservatives (from Bolivar)
War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902)
La Violencia (1946-1958)
The National Front (1958-1978)
on-going guerrilla war, which heated up in the 1980s; peace reached with the M-19 rebels and a new constitution in 1991


The Players:
Álvaro Uribe
        -elected President in 2002 on a platform to improve security

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
        formed in 1964, currently with as many as 20,000 troops, control a demilitarized zone; ties to cocaine producers
                                              
Peace talks with government constantly on-again, off-again
FARC's big demands: land reform that benefits impoverished, landless peasants, human rights reforms, democracy initiatives
FARC's little demands: retain demilitarized zone, release of its captured members, unemployment benefit for ex-guerrillas
The government demands a truce and an end to abductions before more concessions are made

In January, the most senior FARC leader ever was captured in Ecuador

National Liberation Army (ELN)
        specializes in kidnappings

United self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group

Violence:

                         
-2003 murder rate in Colombia fell to 50

Cocaine traffickers
Columbia supplies baout 70% of the world's cocaine
drug money brings $2.5 - $5 billion/year to Colombia (2-4% of GDP)
Narco-terrorists assassinated three presidential candidates before Cesar Gaviria Trujillo was elected in 1990 (anti-drug president)
Ernesto Samper president from 1994-1998: believed to have accepted large amounts of drug money
Medellín leaders arrested in 1993 (Pablo Escobar)
Cali leaders were rounded up in 1995 and 1996

Plan Columbia and Southcom presentation by Captain Scott Roberts

Plan Colombia:
-since 2000, $2.4 billion mostly military aid package from the US to help fight drugs, $120m for alternative development
-aims to gain control of Putumayo province from drug producers
-initially was not to be used to fight the FARC (even if FARC controls the area); in 2002 Bush authorizes U.S. militray aid to be used to fight FARC

 

coffee: 400,000 farmers + 400,000 workers

flowers