The Plan Colombia is a complex and multifaceted monster produced by global capitalism.

It is a good example of the kind of situations that people all over the world will reach if we don't act before it is too late.

It is a sophisticated war plan designed by the US government (which is 'investing' 1.3 billion US$ on it, mainly as military aid) to displace the Colombian rural communities through the massive and military-backed spraying of the heavily toxic product manufactured by Monsanto, called Round-Up Ultra.

It involves the creation and training by the US army of special military battalions for these operations, equipped with war helicopters and the latest military technologies.

All of this is justified as 'war on drugs' but in fact it is increasing the production of drugs, since the spraying is done indiscriminately (targeting water sources in many cases), and for many rural families whose livelihood is destroyed by the chemical war the only option for survival is to produce drugs. According to the research of the Transnational Institute, since the US-led spraying policy started in Colombia, the production of drugs has increased more than 220%. The real objective of the Plan Colombia is the displacement of the rural population in order to

* wipe out the Colombian rural grassroots resistance movements (peasant, indigenous and black movements),

* get access to natural resources in general and oil in particular,

* get people out of the way in order to build massive transcontinental transport infrastructure to increase global trade (including a new canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans to complement the Panama Canal)

* replace self-sufficient communities with export-oriented monocultures (funnily enough, this destructive transformation of the Colombian countryside is subsidised as 'alternative develpment' in the 'social component' of the Plan Colombia that European governments are expected to finance).

Since mid-January, representatives of three Colombian rural movements (the Process of Black Communities, the Association of U'wa Councils and the National Union of Peasant Users-Unity and Reconstruction) have been on tour in Europe. On the 23rd of March, just before the European meeting of Peoples Global Action, the European groups that organised the tour met with the Colombian representatives, and we all decided to call for the following Europe-wide days of action against Plan Colombia (on which non-European groups are of course most welcome to participate):

19th OF APRIL:
On this day, the summit for the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) takes place in Quebec, and many groups will be taking action. One of the main issues there will be the Plan Colombia, as the prime example of where the road of global capitalism ends.

On the 19th of April, the Dutch platform against Plan Colombia will do an action to expose the military involvement of the Dutch government in that war, by allowing the US army to build military bases in the Dutch colonies of Aruba and Curacao in the Antilles through the so-called FOLs agreement, signed 2 years ago. The Dutch parliament will soon have to decide whether to extend the FOLs agreement for 10 more years, and there is a new but very dynamic and intense campaign in the Netherlands (started by the tour) to stop this extension. If this campaign succeeds, the US government will lose two basic components for its military operations in the Andean region. The campaign actually has chances to succeed: two weeks ago at the national congress of the Social Democratic party (the largest party in parliament and part of the government coalition) a local party chapter (that had received the tour while it was in The Netherlands) proposed a motion against the FOLs agreement, and it was approved by unanimity.

This shows that when people know about this treaty, they usually reject it, but the problem is that most people, also in The Netherlands, know nothing about it. International pressure is one of the most effective means to expose the Dutch involvement in the military part of bloody Plan Colombia: the Dutch consulate in Dijon was already occupied, and this kind of actions really have a very good impact. We hence call European action groups to take action against Dutch embassies, consulates, tourist offices, etc on that day, to make clear that the devastation created by the Plan Colombia is not just the responsibility of the US government, but also of European governments, and particularly the Dutch, and as a way to show solidarity with the actions in Quebec. If we manage collectively to get the gringos out of Aruba and Curacao, the US 'war on drugs' will face an important logistical, political and public-relations problem.

Also on the 19th of April, British Petroleum (BP) will celebrate its Annual General Meeting. ANUC-UR (the National Association of Peasant Users of Colombia - Unity and Reconstruction) has proven that BP has created paramilitary groups to displace the rural population from the areas where it wants to extract oil, it financed their operations and massacres, and it even got the UK elite forces to train the paramilitary groups. BP hence exemplifies quite well the European involvement in the paramilitary side of the war in Colombia, and is also a good target for actions on that day, especially if there are no Dutch offices around.

30 APRIL:
On that day, the Colombian government has convened a meeting with governmental officials from all over Europe in Brussels, to ask them for $$$ for the Plan Colombia. Since most European governments and the European parliament have rejected the plan, they have called this appointment 'Meeting of the Friends of Peace in Colombia', the bloody hypocrites. The European governments are expected to donate money at this meeting for the so-called 'social part' of plan, which is inseparable from and just as destructive as the military part, but more long-lasting. These funds should be used for the economic restructuring of the Colombian countryside, to 'integrate it' into the global economy by concentrating even more the property of land and the proletarisation of peasants, who are expected to work their lives away in exchange for salaries of misery at huge and heavily toxic monocultures of flowers, palm trees, bananas, etc.

This 'social part' of the plan means to subsidise the large landowners that have created and still control the paramilitary groups. It also includes money to 'assist' the displaced rural population, which makes crystal clear that displacement is not one of the 'side effects of the war in Colombia', as the government claims, but a governmental policy and objective. Finally, it includes money for nice-sounding things such as 'administrative and judicial reform' (more bureaucracy) and ' promotion and defence of human rights' (because it is sooo much more democratic and civilised to give a booklet on human rights to the soldiers just before they go to bomb the next 10 villages).

At a previous meeting of this kind, most governments in Europe declined to give any money for this, with the exceptions of Spain (which granted 100 million US$) and Norway (20 million US$). Later, the European Commission decided to give 105 million Euros to the Colombian government (which, although not officially part of the Colombia Plan, go to the same purposes). Since the Colombian government was expecting much more money to come from the European governments, it is calling for one more donors' meeting in order to beg again. But now it seems that European governments have been offered a better deal for their interests, since all reports indicate that at the meeting on the 30th of April they will give money to the plan. Similarly, many of the big and heavy development NGOs that were previously opposed to the plan don't have any objections to it now, since they have also been offered a piece of the cake: some of the funds approved by the European Commission will be channelled and administered by these unaccountable bureaucracies which in almost all cases have absolutely no respect for the grassroots participatory processes of Colombian movements, and often work actively to undermine them.

On this day there will be a 'central' mobilisation in Brussels, where the donors' meeting will take place, but we are calling groups all over Europe to do local actions to express in clear terms that no money should go to the Plan Colombia. One possibility is of course to target delegations of your own government, if you think that there are possibilities that it might give money to the plan. Another possibility is to target Spanish embassies and consulates, due to the particularly active role played by the Spanish government in support of Plan Colombia (as its largest funder and promoter in Europe) and of Colombian paramilitary groups. A clear example of this support is the meeting that the Spanish ambassador in Colombia had recently with Castaño, the head of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC, the umbrella of paramilitary groups that work under instructions of high officers of the Colombian army).

The AUC are committing massacres of the worst kind almost on almost a daily basis, involving horrendous levels of cruelty and sadism, such as cutting people in pieces with machine saws in such a way that they remain alive as long as possible, opening the womb of pregnant women and taking out the fetus to play football with them, gang-raping women before killing them, etc. Now Castaño is working hard for the acknowledgement of his fascist organisation as a 'party in the peace process', and the widely publicised meeting with the Spanish ambassador has helped him a lot. This is why there is a campaign to get the Spanish government to get rid of this ambassador and appoint a new one. Besides that, the Spanish administration has been accused of offering infrastructure and so-called 'intelligence' for the operation of paramilitary groups in Spain, who have killed already several people in exile.

For all these reasons we suggest that if you don't have a clear target for the actions on the 30th of April, you go for the Spanish embassies or consulates. However, if there are delegations of your government near you, it might be better to do an action there to express your opposition to Plan Colombia.

CONTACT:
To get regular information about the campaigns against the Plan Colombia, send a message to . This list will hopefully soon be replaced by a list on a non-commercial server, but it is the one that we are still using.

If you do an action on the 19th, the 30th or any other day, please send a report to the list . If you don't want to subscribe to the list you will not be able to send messages to it; in this case, you can also send your report to pcntoureurope-owner@yahoogroups.com and it will be forwarded to the list.

At the meeting on the 23rd of March where these days of action were decided we also discussed how to build up a campaign with continuity. Several working groups were proposed, but they have to start working, and need people to work on them. We will soon post more information about this, including the URL of a web page with all the relevant information.

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