Proposed Aid to Colombia

Your March 27 editorial, “Congress Must Act on Colombia,” advocates another act of aggression by the U.S government on a Third World country, this time in the name of fighting drugs. The $1.3 billion in military aid to Colombia would benefit Occidental Petroleum and the U.S military corporations that are lobbying steadily in Washington. The $1.3 billion in American tax dollars could be used for drug treatment and other programs to fight drug use.

Human rights organizations have found links between the Colombian military and paramilitary death squads and the massacre of noncombatants, including members of religious communities. Indigenous people were forced out of their lands for the purpose of oil drilling by corporations. A look at the history of U.S. interventions in Latin America should give us pause rather than reason to plunge into violence against innocent people. Basta!

SHAEE KHATAPOUSH

Los Angeles

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Your editorial offers great support to our country’s misguided drug war but little support for solutions to Colombia’s problems. The U.S. drug war is a failure. Interdiction is a failed policy. Destroying the source of the drugs is a failed policy. You mention nothing about the helicopters that the $1.3 billion will provide for the Colombian government to keep its opposition under control.

The use of $1.3 billion toward education and treatment of drug addiction in this country would be more of a solution. And the real solution is to finally learn from our lessons of the Prohibition era--that making alcohol illegal increased the cost and the desirability of booze and created a plethora of criminal activities in our country and abroad. It would be helpful if The Times would cease pandering to this hopeless government policy.

RALPH LONG

Newport Beach