For Immediate ReleaseOctober 2, 2000
Contact: Alisa Giardinelli (610) 690-5717 [email protected]www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News
Colombia 'Drug War' Will Fail and Mire the U.S. in Unwinnable Civil War,Swarthmore College Drug Policy Expert Says
President Clinton says the $1.3 billion aid package he recently approved for Colombia will be used to help fight the war against drugs. A Swarthmore College drug policy expert says the plan will not only fail to affect the price or availability of drugs in the U.S., but will drag the U.S. deeper into a protracted and unwinnable civil war.
"Some U.S. officials insist with a straight face that the purpose of this program is solely to combat drug trafficking, not counterinsurgency," says political science professor Kenneth Sharpe in the Fall 2000 issue of World Policy Journal. "No one in Colombia believes that, and no one in Washington ought to either."
Sharpe says the U.S. has the ability to improve the prospects for peace in Colombia, but only if it disentangles its drug policy from the guerilla war and acknowledges neither problem is amenable to a military solution. He adds the Colombian aid package will create a situation similar to that in El Salvador in the 1980s, when American-trained death squads killed thousands of civilians. In that civil war, he says, a peace accord was signed only after the U.S. cut its military assistance to El Salvador in half and threw its diplomatic weight behind negotiations.
"The powerful talisman of 'fighting drugs' has led sensible policymakers to endorse a futile and bloody war they would otherwise never countenance," he says. "If Washington makes these two wars one war, the Colombian people will pay the price for the inability of the U.S. to face the fact that the 'war' on drugs can only be won at home."
An expert on foreign policy, Latin American politics, and U.S. drug enforcement policies, Sharpe is the co-author of Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (University of California, 1996), which examines why the U.S. continues to pursue a punitive narcotics policy that has so long proved to be ineffective. He argues that the U.S. will never ameliorate abuse and addiction at home by fighting abroad and calls instead for a public-health approach. He writes often on this issue for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and other major U.S. publications.
Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college with an enrollment of 1,450. Swarthmore is ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News & World Report.
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