[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 24 (Wednesday, March 1, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H499-H505]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                COLOMBIA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I sat here and listened to the last special 
order. It was the longest extensions of remarks devoted to how to 
increase taxes in America that I have heard.
  It is one thing for the other party to criticize us in spending and 
then vote against every attempt to control the budget. They can 
criticize us simultaneously as they did in the last hour for not 
spending enough in education and then not controlling the budget. There 
was such inconsistency. We are clearly in the season of partisanship, 
but the harshness and tone and the misrepresentation has been very 
uncomfortable. And I hope that as we go through this year we can have 
reasonable debate over very, very difficult questions on international 
trade, on how we manage our deficit, on how we manage our tax code, on 
how we manage our spending without the tremendously aggressive tone of 
partisanship that is increasingly happening in America.
  I want to talk about a subject that will hopefully be relatively 
bipartisan as we move through. It certainly has been in part. And there 
is a broader issue that has come up, and that is related to the issue 
of Colombia.
  Colombia, most of us think of, if I ask you what do you think of, 
probably the first thing you think of historically would be coffee. 
Colombian coffee. Juan Valdez and Colombian coffee. I know in Indiana 
and at least me from Indiana and many other people would think Colombia 
is spelled like the District of Columbia. But it is not. If you think 
it is not, just listen to the accent when they go ``Colombian coffee.'' 
It is C-O-L-O-M-B-I-A.
  Colombian coffee and Juan Valdez were established images in the 
United States until about the eighties when the number one thing 
Americans started to think about with Colombia was cocaine.

                              {time}  2015

  Almost all, 90-some percent, of the cocaine that comes in the United 
States and all around the world comes from Colombia. Almost all of our 
heroin and a high percentage of heroin around the world comes from 
Colombia. Now Afghanistan has kind of dominated the world on heroin, 
but in the United States while Asian heroin and Afghan heroin is coming 
into the west coast, most of the rest of the country has either 
Colombian heroin or some variation of Mexican heroin.
  So now when many people think of Colombia, if I say, oh, I am going 
to Colombia, people go, well, do not get shot. They do not think do not 
drink too much coffee. They think do not get shot, and that is partly 
because of the book by Tom Clancy and then the movie, ``Clear and 
Present Danger,'' which talked about kind of the height of the Medellin 
cartel. Then the book, ``Killing Pablo,'' which then was followed up 
with a movie about Pablo Escobar running the Medellin cartel, and the 
visions of Colombia from those movies and books have really driven the 
definition of Colombia.
  What I want to do a little bit tonight to lay this out is to tell you 
a little bit about the history of Colombia; then how, in fact, the 
drugs because of the American drug habit and the European drug habit, 
it is not domestic consumption of cocaine and heroin that drove the 
problems and the violence in Colombia. It was U.S. and European drug 
addictions that drove Colombia to the situation where they are today.
  Then what we have been doing in Congress, starting under the Clinton 
administration, moving to the Bush administration, with Plan Colombia 
and the Andean Initiative and some of the impacts of that, and then 
finishing up with some of the hope of Colombia, which on Monday 
President Bush and President Uribe of Colombia signed the Colombian 
Free Trade Agreement and what that would mean both for us and for 
Colombia and for the Central American region.

[[Page H500]]

  So let me first start with this map; and the number one thing that 
becomes apparent from the map, which I like a lot in this map, is you 
can tell that it is a geographically diverse country, that it is the 
start of the Andean mountains. Venezuela is over to the right. Lake 
Maracaibo, the number one oil region in all of the Americas and 
possibly in the world, the richest oil well is over there, the big 
lake, just south of the mountains. The mountain up at the top, I 
believe, is around 12 to 14,000 feet. Then you come into these kind of 
lower Andes where you get down to 14,000 feet here and about 8,000 to 
10,000 feet in the middle.
  If you continue on down, actually the Andes do not go as much 
directly through Ecuador, but jump over to Peru and down through Chile. 
Then you get down to the huge Andes, where they are 23,000 feet, and 
Machu Picchu is in Peru, and then runs down through Colombia down in 
this range. The equator obviously moves here, roughly through Ecuador, 
but this whole area is the basic center of the world where the equator 
is working through.
  So all this side to the east is jungle, and you can see these big 
rivers down here, Putumayo coming through along the border between 
Colombia and Ecuador, all feed into the Amazon basin. Brazil is over 
here to the right, and all this area drains into the Amazon River, and 
then the Amazon River comes out and pours out to the north of Brazil.
  In this pattern, first off you see Colombia really has basically 
three parts. It has a coastal region, and it is, I believe, the only 
country in South America with both a Caribbean side up there and an 
eastern Pacific side here. So about half of Colombia is a little more 
on the Pacific and a little, about half, is on the Caribbean. So it is 
on both oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Then you have the 
mountainous region, and then you have this huge jungle.
  Now, in understanding the history of Colombia, by looking at the map 
you start to understand and can more understand the economics of 
Colombia, the democratic traditions of Colombia and the problem that we 
have with narcotics in Colombia and how we have been addressing the 
problems. But if you do not understand the geography, you cannot 
understand the history very well and the economics and the politics.
  First off, there are 1,098 municipalities. Many of these 
municipalities are very, very small. Most of them are in the mountains. 
Bogota, here is 7 million people in Bogota. Medellin, which is up a 
little higher in the mountains, is 2 million people. Cali, which is 
down over here in the mountains closer to the eastern Pacific, is about 
2 million people. Cartagena, which is up kind of in between the edge of 
Panama and the larger mountain to the top, is about 1 million people. 
Santa Marta, up towards the big mountain, is about half a million 
people.
  What you see is the bulk of the people are actually in the mountains, 
but there are small municipalities scattered all through the mountains. 
Then there are some out here in the Amazon; but the Amazon basin, this 
whole green area over there, is basically uninhabited except for a very 
small native population. There are no roads to connect it. There are no 
airstrips other than the occasional coca producer plain, that it is 
basically undeveloped. There are a few cities, Barraquilla up towards 
the mountain between Cartagena and Santa Marta is another 2 million in 
the city; but other than Barraquilla and Cartagena on the coast, that 
coast is more developed. This coast has no big cities on it, and most 
of the people are in the mountains.
  So most of the democracy, the histories, the traditions in Colombia 
are in the mountains, not in the Amazon basin or along the coast.
  Well, how did that happen and why did it happen? Partly because they 
have great temperatures. In Bogota now, it is basically 70 to 72 
degrees during the day, and it is about 40 to 50 at night. If you go 
another time of the year, it is in the 70s during the day and about 40 
to 50 at night. In other words, it is fairly stable because Bogota is 
up at 5,000 to 6,000 feet. So are the other cities. So one thing you 
had was stable weather.
  A second thing which is important to understand, and I should have 
said this earlier, is that Colombia is the oldest democracy in South 
America, 200 years. You get this impression sometimes from the news 
media and other people that all of South and Central America, where all 
these military dictatorships that do not have a tradition, that 
Colombia just fights all the time, that they have these revolutions all 
the time. No, they do not. They have had periods of violence and 
different things. They had one military general dictatorship for 4 
years in the 1950s. That is it. It has been a functioning democracy.
  We did not have the most stable government during our Civil War 
either. Abraham Lincoln held it together the best he could; but we were 
fighting with each other, and we had a period of civil war, too. In 
other words, the period of civil war, true, where you had a military 
governance and a period of civil war was basically the same as the 
United States.
  So Americans who point the finger and say Colombia is a violent 
country, it is not true. They are an old democracy, an old democracy. 
Basically, why was Bogota with 7 million people and Medellin with a 
couple of million people and Cali with a couple of million people, why 
are they in the mountains? Because to move 100 kilometers, which would 
be 60 miles, can take you up to 4 hours, 25 kilometers an hour, because 
you have these roads moving between these cities. Now, if you have a 
decent road, you can get all the way up to 25 miles an hour. It takes a 
long time to move between the cities.

  So why are they there? Well, because probably more Americans have 
been to, I think it is safe to say, Hawaii than Colombia. If you go to 
the Big Island in Hawaii, where are you going to find the coffee? The 
coffee in Central America, Hawaii, and South America is at elevations 
between usually 3,000 to 6,000 feet. If you go south of Kahlua-Kona and 
the famous Kona coffee region in Hawaii, you are going to see the same 
pattern that you see in Guatemala, in Ecuador, in Colombia and 
elsewhere, that is, somewhere around mid-afternoon some rain comes in. 
There is some cloud cover. You are high enough up in the mountains that 
you get rain and you get steady rain. At the same time, you do not get 
so much that it drowns your crops. You have the drying out in the 
elevation, and it gives you a mix.
  So you tend to see coffee at 3,000 to 6,000 elevation and with good 
soil. Colombia's coffee region is in this zone in here where the people 
are because, for many years, it was Colombian coffee that was their key 
ingredient that kept their economy going. Ironically, because coffee 
plantations are relatively small, as you see if you go to Hawaii and 
other places, it has not been a business that really thrives on huge 
conglomerate farms. Because you have that mid-size farm, you see this 
tradition of more, it is not as much of the middle class as the United 
States, but unlike other countries, where you see, say, bananas 
dominate or other products completely dominate like oil, like 
Venezuela, you do not have just a few rich people controlling 90 
percent of the wealth. You have more of a middle class, thanks to the 
historic part of coffee.
  But guess what else you have in those mountains: you have gold in 
those hills. Interestingly, you also have not too far from Bogota 
almost all the emerald mines in the world. So interestingly, let me 
give you a little side point that is lost and is very wrapped up in our 
immigration debate in the United States.
  The number one source of income in pretty much every country, in 
Central America certainly, and even increasingly in South America, is 
expatriated income. What does that mean? It means that for all the 
complaining about the wage rates in the United States that the Mexicans 
who come in the United States, the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the 
Hondurans, Ecuadorans send somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of their 
wages back to their home country. It started in the smaller countries 
that that income became greater than any crop they produced; but even 
Mexico, until the recent rise in oil prices, the expatriated income 
going back to Mexico was greater than even their oil revenues because 
their number one business that they export anymore are immigrants who 
send part of their income back to their country.

[[Page H501]]

  Colombia, when I was there last week from Fort Wayne, Indiana, my 
hometown, we have regional connections. We are a regional airport, but 
not a hub airport. So everywhere we go, every week when I go back and 
forth, I live in Fort Wayne and my family is in Fort Wayne, when I go 
back and forth, I have to take a plane to Detroit or to Cincinnati or 
to Cleveland or to Chicago or to somewhere to get to Washington. But I 
could take a plane to Atlanta. I had about an hour and a half in 
Atlanta and then a plane straight from Atlanta to Bogota.
  Bottom line is, I could go from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Bogota in 
about net, from the time I got to the Fort Wayne airport with that 
layover to Bogota, about 9 hours. To come from Fort Wayne to 
Washington, DC, takes me four to five, and I had the same number of 
plane switches. Now, with that type of access into Miami from 
Cartagena, you are talking like an hour and a half flight. It is just a 
basic short hop over.
  Now that said, we have between 600,000 and 800,000 Colombian 
immigrants in the United States. They tend to be, based on studies, the 
highest educated group of immigrants from anywhere we have for a 
variety of reasons, but the bottom line is that expatriated income to 
Colombia is about $3 billion. It is 3 percent of their national income.
  Now, what sent me into that discussion was gold and emeralds and 
jewelry are 5.7 percent of their gross national product. Meaning that 
in gold and emeralds alone, forget coffee which is a huge percent, that 
they have more of an internal economy than almost anybody in all of 
Central and South America.
  Now, when you look at that, the mix of what they have in their 
economy, it is not just about gold and emeralds. I know many people, 
like me, are fascinated with gold and emeralds, and many people are 
fascinated with coffee; but few people know that the same areas that 
were doing the coffee and where the gold and emeralds are, when you 
look at why is so much of the population in Bogota and Medellin and 
Cali, you have to look at flowers.
  Sixty-seven percent of cut flowers in the United States come from 
Colombia. The flight connections that I just talked about not only work 
for people; it goes even faster for freight, because the freight 
companies can do a direct flight into the different regional places and 
then distribute it. Think about that. If you buy cut flowers, the four 
big seasons are, I find this interesting, Mother's Day is the biggest, 
not Valentine's Day. It says something still for our values in the 
United States. Mother's Day is number one. Valentine's Day is number 
two. Then I cannot remember whether Christmas or Thanksgiving.
  The four big periods that they basically put the stuff in all these 
huge kind of, for lack of a better word, greenhouses on steroids, just 
huge floral operations are located near the different airports because 
the key thing is how to move these flowers into the United States in 
basically 24 hours so they can get into the huge chains, the Wal-Marts, 
the Meyers'es, the Safeways, the Targets, the huge grocery operation 
wholesalers where most flowers are sold.

                              {time}  2030

  We are not talking about what you might get from your local 
greenhouse; we are talking about the huge operations where flowers are 
sold. The only real rival is Ecuador on roses. Colombia dominates 67 
percent of the American market. Guatemala, I think, has some orchids. 
So you may find certain specialty flowers in some areas, but Colombia 
is basically where all our flowers come from. And flowers constitute 
nearly twice as much as expatriated income.
  In other words, now we have got coffee, we have got gold and emeralds 
and jewelry, and we have flowers. But there is also apparel. Medellin, 
in particular, is known as an apparel center. So you have another 
sector of the economy, apparel, that is around 5 percent.
  Now, the reason I am raising this is when I get into the drug 
question, part of the reason we think of, well, these countries, like 
Afghanistan, I would guess, it is safe to say right now that about 70 
to 80 percent of their working economy is related to heroin.
  But Colombia isn't dependent on coca; coca is a small percentage. 
They have businesses in Colombia. They had businesses in Colombia. They 
had successful markets in Colombia. America's drug addiction hurt their 
business. It wasn't that they needed to have a product to sell.
  When you go to Bolivia, which had tin, and now President Alva 
Morales, who came out of the coca growers, because it was very hard to 
do substitution of other things because coca had been such a critical 
thing to the Cuchabama area, where President Morales was from, and it 
was done by a lot of the native peoples. And it is a very difficult 
question for he and others to handle in a country like Bolivia. But in 
Colombia they had a different country that was corrupted by America's 
and Europe's drug habits.
  Now, I mentioned apparel, flowers, coffee, gold and jewelry, and 
others. But guess what their two biggest things are? One is oil. Oil 
constitutes 26 percent of their exports. There are two big operators 
and then a smaller EcoPetrol is the Colombian company that is a 
partner; and basically Colombia owns the ground and the resources. The 
operating companies are two, B.P. and Occidental.
  Occidental is in this range up in there. Now, the question comes, how 
do you get the oil from there, which is part of this gigantic field 
that is coming down from Venezuela, to the coast, because you have to 
go through the mountains? Now, in that challenge, because unlike the 
traditional things they had, the oil is scattered up there and down 
here, the second biggest category besides oil is coal. And coal is in 
this region right here. Neither of those things are in places where 
they have very many people.
  Now, I want to do one other transition, but I want to illustrate that 
the biggest categories are energy and their biggest country that uses 
those imports is the United States. Colombia at one point was our 
eighth largest oil supplier. According to the President's energy plan, 
it is now emerging again as one of our primary oil countries. They have 
an estimate of 47 billion barrels in reserves. That is their estimate. 
That may be slightly high or it may be slightly low. But in this 
process of understanding how much oil is there, having a stable 
Colombia is important to our energy.
  The coal mine there is either the second or third biggest in the 
world, and I will show some pictures of it in a few minutes. And when 
they get the new mine open, it will be the biggest in the world, and it 
is low sulfur coal, which means it is safer coal. And where it comes 
into, the bulk of it, the coal mine in that area is owned by a company 
that is based out of Alabama, and it is co-owned then with the 
Colombian Government, and the coal comes into the United States for our 
energy.
  In fact, somewhere near 40 percent of their oil comes to the United 
States and somewhere near 15 percent or so of their exports are coal to 
the United States, critical energy sources if we are not going to mine 
it in the United States. And this is open-pit mining, as opposed to 
what we are doing mostly in the United States. We are sending miners 
down below. We have all seen the tragic accidents, and we are battling 
about mine safety standards in the United States.
  But if we don't have coal and we don't do nuclear, and we have pretty 
well dammed about every river you can dam in the United States. And 
Canada is pretty much doing the same thing. We have pretty well put 
windmills about everywhere you can put windmills, and there is now 
objection and pushback when we do the big windmill farms. We are 
working with solar.
  And there are people worried about oil; they are one of the big oil 
places where we have enough oil. But if you are going to shut off 
everything, then your costs are going to go up, because the less supply 
there is, the higher prices are going to be. And if you regulate it too 
much, nobody will go down and dig up the reserves in Colombia. So then 
it won't be so expensive, we just won't have any. We will just get to 
sit at home maybe and just freeze.
  So there has to be an energy supply that helps keep the price down, 
and it needs to be balanced. And this is relatively clean in a country 
that is favorable to us.
  And before I move into a little more depth with this, I want to share 
also, in

[[Page H502]]

thinking about Colombia, a couple of other points. Pablo Escabar isn't 
the primary export or famous Colombian, but we don't necessarily think 
of the people we might know.
  Grammy Award winning Colombian rock stars Shakira and Juanes sell out 
their concerts in the United States and around the world. They are very 
famous. I am more familiar with Shakira than Juanes, but they are both 
taking the U.S. market by storm. Fernando Botero is one of the world's 
most accomplished painters and sculptors. Wherever you go both in 
Colombia and other countries, you will see these big, kind of oversized 
Botero paintings and statues. It is an acquired taste. It is not my 
taste, but he is very famous.
  Gabriel Garcia Marquez is among the world's most widely read 
novelists and has won basically every writing award you can, and has a 
home there in Cartagena and is from the countryside. Juan Pablo Montoya 
has sped to the top of the Formula 1 auto racing circuit. He's a very 
famous racing driver.
  Colombia actress Catalina Sandino Moreno was nominated for an Academy 
Award for best actress this year in ``Maria Full of Grace.'' So when 
you watch the Academy Awards, you will see a Colombian as one of the 
nominees.
  I am a big baseball fan, and while Colombia doesn't have as many 
shortstops as Venezuela, Edgar Renteria, Orlando Cabrera, and other 
Colombians are in baseball. Even if you set aside all these economic 
and industrial exports, they also export culture around the world.
  The Colombians have stronger universities, they have more educated 
people, and people who are famously literate and writing many books, 
not just Marquez, but I wanted to use that as an illustration because 
we have a warped view in America about what Colombia is that makes it 
very hard for us to kind of tackle the battles on funding narcotics and 
what is actually happening in Colombia.
  Now, let me talk just for a little here about what happened in the 
drug wars. To some degree in these areas, the most famous cartel 
probably in world history is the Medellin cartel. Medellin was the home 
of Pablo Escobar. Last week, when I was in Colombia, President Uribe, 
who is originally from the Medellin area, asked me what did I think 
about Medellin; how did it strike me. And I said, well, my impression 
of Medellin was that it was a dusty little town and up on the hill 
Pablo Escobar had this fantastic estate that he had bought with his 
billions of dollars of American cocaine money, and then bought these 
exotic animals and started a zoo, and all the people came up to his zoo 
because they didn't have anything else to do.

  Then I flew into the airport that was above the city before we went 
to the other airport down in the city, and this is just one of their 
promotional brochures, but this is Medellin. Medellin isn't a dusty 
little town that Pablo Escobar had a little house above it with a zoo 
where people would go because there was nowhere else to go. Medellin is 
a city of 2 million people with all sorts of businesses functioning in 
it, with huge high-rises, parks all over the city, all sorts of 
athletic facilities and arts facilities, and with major universities 
there.
  How in the world did Americans who were tracking it not understand 
what was happening in Medellin? Partly because of the violence.
  I believe in my trip to Medellin this week I was the first Member of 
Congress to get into Medellin since all the coca wars broke out, 
because it has been so difficult to travel. Our ambassador was able to 
drive from Bogota to Medellin, and that is the first time an American 
ambassador has been able to go on that road for, I believe, 20 to 30 
years. Things got really bad, and it left us with a really wrong 
impression about what Colombia is and what is happening in Colombia.
  So Pablo Escobar was controlling the Medellin cartel. And Colombia 
has been probably the most cooperative country in all of Central and 
South America in working with extraditions, when we go after these big 
guys. Why? Why would the different presidents work with the United 
States when in other countries they have not worked as much with us on 
extraditing, that is, sending their criminals to the U.S. to go through 
our court systems? Partly because they had an economy. It was our drugs 
that wrecked their economy.
  There has been some reluctance on the part of some of these countries 
to send their citizens back to the United States because they are 
worried. For all the talk about wanting to get rid of the drugs in 
their country, if they get rid of the drugs in their country, what is 
going to happen to their banks? Who will build the big buildings? Who 
will open all the stuff if you suck a couple billion dollars out of 
most economies and they sink? So to some degree, quite frankly, we get 
lip service.
  But in Colombia they actually extradite, if we can prove the case, 
major drug criminals. So we broke the Medellin cartel.
  Then many Americans know of the Cali cartel, which is another of the 
big cities I pointed to. It is more over in this zone in the mountains. 
So we had the Cali cartel, and we broke up the Cali cartel.
  In the process of breaking up these cartels, there are three violent 
groups in Colombia that have dogged over the years and challenged 
democracy. Rather than participate in elections, because they do not 
have any support, they chose to use violence. One is the FARC. The FARC 
are probably the best known, the most violent, and the ones most 
embroiled in the drug trafficking.
  I know some dissident groups want to make the FARC to be like their 
Che Guevara, communist revolutionaries who just want to have land 
reform, but, no, they are a bunch of drug-pushing drug addicts who want 
to violently overthrow their government because they won't participate 
in the democratic process. When they founded the FARC, for some of them 
it was about land reform, but it is long past that. They are basically 
thugs.
  One young man I met, and I have been to Colombia now 11 times, it 
could be 10, it could be 12 times, somewhere in that range, since I was 
elected to Congress in 1994, but when you go into Colombia and you talk 
to them--and I went with colleagues who are now, both of them, 
governors, Governor Blagojevich and Governor Sanford, and we were 
waiting for Speaker Hastert to come into the area.
  We weren't as important at the time, so because there was a big 
rainstorm going on, they turned his helicopter around because they 
didn't think it was safe, but they brought us in by taking a 
handkerchief and cleaning off the windshield of the helicopter and 
trying to find the ground, so we were there for a little bit. And they 
brought in a captured FARC.
  He was a young guy, and we asked him a question, and I can't remember 
if it was Mark or Rod who said, have you ever killed anybody? And he 
said, well, yes. And this kid is maybe 18 years old.
  And we said, why did you kill him? He said, well, he hadn't paid his 
fees.
  What do you mean, he hadn't paid his fees? He said, well, he owed us 
money and he didn't pay his fees. He said, I warned him.
  We said, well, how did you kill him? He said, well, he was eating 
lunch at a restaurant and I came up behind him and I took the pistol 
and I shot him in the back of his head. He hadn't paid his fees.
  Now, what the FARC does is they provided protection money first. In 
other words, if you wanted to grow coca for the different cartels, you 
paid the FARC, say 5, 10 percent, much like the Mafia worked in the 
United States in a shakedown operation, and then they ``protected'' you 
from U.S. forces. But then they decided that wasn't enough margin, so 
they started killing the people who wouldn't cooperate and grow coca. 
They didn't want you growing palm heart, they didn't want you growing 
bananas, they didn't want you growing coffee. Coca is more profitable, 
so we will shoot you if you don't.
  So Colombia has a huge number of displaced persons right now at the 
Nelson Mandela kind of training center, a housing center outside the 
edge of Cartagena where I visited several years ago with Congressmen 
Davis and Moran, and there are tens of thousands of people who have 
been chased out of these villages because they were being killed by the 
FARC for not cooperating in coca and they became drug runners.
  The second big group are the paramilitaries, or the AUC. Now, what 
happened there was, many people started hiring guns, kind of Pinkerton 
detectives gone bad. They started hiring

[[Page H503]]

guns to fight the FARC. So what happened is, the FARC would come in to 
one of these villages in the outer areas and basically shoot you if you 
didn't grow coca; then the paramilitaries, the AUC, would come in and 
kill you if you did grow coca. And pretty soon the AUC realized, hey, 
there is more money to be made in coca, so they start fighting over the 
different zones and over who gets to do the shakedowns. And what used 
to be the paramilitary protection, instead of operating as paramilitary 
protection, themselves became drug dealers.
  However, interestingly, because of their history of being hired for 
protection, in this period of being hired for protection, the AUC, the 
paramilitaries, have about 10-to-12 public support where the FARC only 
has one or two.

                              {time}  2045

  Now from some of the leftist groups in the United States you would 
think the FARC has 10 to 12 percent or 20 or 30 or 40 percent, but they 
do not. They have minimal percent. But the paramilitaries, because they 
were trying to protect the villagers, had more but they went bad too.
  Now the third group, the ELN tends to work in these mountains and the 
mountains up towards the top. The ELN basically does not appear to be 
as heavily involved in coca. Their business is kidnapping people. They 
kidnap people for ransom, and that is how they fund their group. Of the 
two, I do not know how you could say kidnapping is less egregious than 
coca because at least in kidnapping you just kill the individuals with 
you. They captured some new tribes' missionaries and killed them. We do 
not know for sure, but we have not heard from them for close to 8 years 
now. And others, if they do not get the ransom, the historic pattern is 
they kill them.
  You always hope that the FARC has captured some of our U.S. soldiers, 
so we can hope they are alive. The FARC is a little different than the 
ELN. The ELN is kidnapping for money. The FARC is in the business of 
kidnapping for trade. And if you want to read a great book on the Diary 
of Kidnapping by Gabriel Marquez, it will give you some idea of what 
they put these different people through.
  But the ELN also appears to, at times, be more willing to work with 
communities and less violent overall. Even though kidnapping is awful, 
they are not in the business of cocaine, which kills in the United 
States, illegal drugs kill in the United States 20- to 30,000 people a 
year of which a big chunk of that is cocaine.
  So basically you are not just a kidnapper if you do cocaine; you are 
a murderer. You are a mass murderer if you are growing fields of 
cocaine. You can try to coat it over and say, oh, these poor peasants 
are just trying to make a living. Look, mass murderers. They are 
killing more people than somebody going into a school and killing six 
people.
  A coca field growing may be killing thousands of people, depending on 
how it is broken and how it moves through the city. They are mass 
murderers in every step of that process. The grower is a mass murderer, 
the people who process it are mass murderers, the people who transit it 
are mass murderers, the people who sell it in the street are mass 
murderers because they are killing people with the cocaine.
  It is not this kind of quiet little thing that you are drinking 
coffee on the side. It is killing people. And in trying to hold that 
accountable, we have these three different revolutionary groups that 
have more or less terrorized at the margin. At one point, at the peak 
of the Medellin cartel, which is what the movie Clear and Present 
Danger is about, based off the book, which is roughly, my first visit 
into Colombia, former Ambassador Busby was with us, and he was there 
during the period of the greatest violence. And I said, is the book 
Clear and Present Danger accurate? You were the ambassador during that 
period. And he said, not completely. I died in the book. But it was 
basically accurate in that somewhere in the vicinity of two-thirds of 
the judges and a big chunk of the legislative body was killed. Many 
mayors were killed.
  It is one thing to say we have differences between the Republicans 
and Democrats and we argue on the House floor about how to do it. We 
argue back in our districts. But basically it is another thing if you 
are running for office and they are going to murder you.
  President Uribe's father was assassinated. Vice President Santos was 
kidnapped and escaped. There are very few leaders who do not have huge 
prices on their heads. And particularly in that period it took 
incredible courage to be a leader in Colombia.
  And then it came back up again after the groups. For a variety of 
reasons, we got control of the Medellin and Cali cartels. It looked 
like we were stabilizing it and it took off again, which led to the 
modern Plan Colombia.
  The peak problem here in the second kind of wave that came up was, in 
the year 1999 Colombia, for all those things I was talking about, had a 
negative growth rate, the only year it has had a negative growth rate, 
about a 4 to 5 percent GDP that was negative.
  How did they get a negative growth rate? Well, one thing is that I 
talked about the oil fields up here. That pipeline has to go over the 
mountains, and in that area, Occidental Petroleum, the oil that was 
headed for Houston and into the United States, had 91 percent of their 
oil production stopped that year because they basically had, I think it 
was 200 pipeline attacks that, even at a fast speed, it takes you a 
while to fix the pipeline, 24, 48, 72 hours, basically meaning nothing 
got from the oil fields. Nine percent got there.
  I earlier said that oil was 40 percent of their exports. You knock 
out oil, you cannot get any money.
  The big coal mine that we visited, if you are there, how do you get 
it to the ocean? Certainly not by roads. There are no roads in the 
jungle. At this huge coal mine the people driving the trucks, let me 
give you an idea of the scale of this coal mine.
  In the U.S. roads nothing can be bigger than 40 tons. Their trucks 
are 140 tons that this particular coal operation is. It just gives a 
vague idea of the size of this mine; it is just an incredible scale. 
You can see a truck that is a 140-ton truck there.
  I have been in the iron mines in Montana and Arizona and in northern 
Minnesota, whether it is copper or iron, the open pit mining. You are 
talking in this little tiny corner is when we talk about the huge 
mines. And, in fact, much of this area has already been covered up and 
started to be reclaimed.
  Now, this huge mine, these guys who are driving these 140-ton trucks, 
they did not know how to drive a car. There are no roads there, or to 
the degree there are roads, it takes you at most, I said, 15 miles an 
hour. So most of these drivers, they are training the Colombians, the 
Drummond oil mine, which is, I mean the coal mine people who come out 
of Alabama, this is a book on what they have done for social balance. 
Because when you are up--let me show one other picture, and I want to 
go back to the big map. I want to show this one for a second from 
Drummond. This is the coal cars.
  In Indiana we have a law that you cannot, a train cannot block an 
intersection for more than 20 minutes. I asked, do you have a 20-minute 
rule? They said, no, we have a 30-minute rule.
  Now, in that map, and I will have it back up in a minute, but 
basically it has to go from that coal mine all the way out to the 
Caribbean Sea. They load 90 cars at a time with coal. The 30-minute 
rule, because they only have one track, that track has to shut down for 
30 minutes so the empty cars can come back in to get reloaded. The 
operation goes 24/7, 365 days a year. In other words, basically it is a 
permanent block to an intersection. They do not have a 20-minute rule. 
The 30-minute rule means you switch directions. So basically you would 
need an overpass. But they do not have any roads anyway. It is a 
jungle.
  Now what happened with Drummond, because if you are out in the middle 
of nowhere and you are doing constant filling of train cars as far as 
the eye can see that direction, as far as the eye can see that 
direction, that are going 24/7, and you do not have anybody who can 
drive the trucks, and you do not have very many people, what do you 
have to do? You have to build the infrastructure.

  So they have been building schools in the area. They have been 
building housing in the area. They have been

[[Page H504]]

doing health care in the area. Seven thousand meals a day are served by 
Drummond coal mine because when you come into this coal mine they have 
different various places where you can eat. They provide multiple 
shifts for people to eat. And they provide 7,000 meals a day, which 
means that is an incredible food operation. It is an incredible health 
care operation. And what they have chosen to do is invest in the 
infrastructure and the people.
  Now, what is interesting about this investment in people is that part 
of the challenge that you have, if you are going to change the drug 
patterns in Colombia, is you have to have some alternatives for the 
people. So here is roughly where the coal mine was. It goes up by that 
big mountain up there and it comes, the train track will go somewhat 
similar to the oil pipeline.
  The trains in 1999 were being shot up and intercepted. You could not 
get anybody to get coal out if you are going to die, so until you could 
get a little bit of order, they could not ship coal. So they had a 
negative growth rate, not because Colombia did not have products, but 
because Americans got so addicted to cocaine, and Europe got so 
addicted to cocaine, that it brought a violent group of people into 
their nation that made their railroads not working, that made their oil 
pipelines not working, not to mention the mining and the textiles.
  Now, what they have now, well, in that railroad in the area, when we 
were there--and like I say, once again, we were some of the first 
people to be able to move around in the country. So going up there, I 
said, are the FARC around here and the ELN and so on? And the president 
of the company says, no, they are not in the immediate area. They are 
over there.
  Now, over there was, ELN was in the north mountains about 10 miles 
away and the FARC were in two locations in the south mountains between 
8 and 12 miles away. To me that was close. My little hometown of 
Grayville, Indiana, is 15 miles from downtown Fort Wayne, and I think 
of it as close to Fort Wayne; and when I said, are they close, I was 
thinking, Grayville to Fort Wayne terms to me is close, and this is 
half the distance. But at least they are up in the mountains.
  Well, why are they up in the mountains? Two reasons. One is the Uribe 
government has provided protection. For example, there are now police 
stations in every municipality. All 1,098 in Colombia now have a 
Colombian national police presence, which they did not have in 1999. On 
that train track they have police every so many minutes with a cell 
phone, and they are each supposed to call in; and if they do not call 
in, the army goes in to find out what has happened at that point of the 
track.
  So when Members of Congress say, why did you vote for money for 
pipeline protection, why did you vote for money for this, it is because 
we are trying to stabilize the railroad tracks and the pipelines, 
because if you can do that, the reason the ELN went to the hills is, 
thousands of these people are working for Drummond coal mine. When they 
are working for Drummond coal mine and getting health care and getting 
education and having a job, they do not want a bunch of revolutionaries 
around. It is not good for their lives. And so they basically fight 
back.
  Now, let me give you a couple of other stories. We spent $4 billion 
in Colombia. They spent $9 billion, and that $13 billion is what has 
led to this change in the pipeline. It has led to a change in the 
ability to move around on the roads. It has led to the change that now 
they are going to put a second track in on that railroad which will 
enable us to get more coal into the United States in our southern ports 
and in our East Coast, low sulfur coal that is environmentally much 
more favorable to the United States. Because the money that we have 
invested and the Colombians have invested has stabilized the 
mountainous zones in the north Colombian zones to a greater degree than 
it has been for a long time.
  Now the economy is growing at a 3 to 5 percent rate, not a negative 
growth rate like it was in 1999. There is a direct relationship between 
security and the ability to have economic alternatives.
  Let me briefly describe what we did last--well, I said I went to 
Colombia 10 to 12 times, somewhere in that range; I am guessing 11. But 
the first time I went to Colombia was not that long after I got 
elected. We went in and we were the first delegation other than I think 
Senator Specter had been into Cartagena for just a brief period. But we 
were the first ones to go into the center of the country, into Bogota.
  We were allowed to come in for 3 hours. When we landed at the airport 
we were to duck down, get in a basically tinted window car with machine 
guns coming out of it, with sharpshooters on all the roofs at the 
airport all along the route till we got to the embassy. We had so many 
police going around, anybody who was walking on the sidewalk had to go 
up to the side of the walls, one person basically kept walking. The 
police cop went up and pushed them against the wall because they were 
so afraid we were going to get assassinated.
  Ambassador Busby, former Ambassador Busby, who I referred to earlier, 
who lived and did not die in the book Clear and Present Danger, said he 
had over $1 million price on his head if they knew he was there. It was 
a very dangerous place, but we felt we needed to make a statement that 
we were going to stand with Colombia.
  The next time I went back, and the next couple of times we were able 
to stay finally overnight, I think, about the third or fourth trip. One 
of the trips we went in with the former chairman of the International 
Relations Committee Ben Gilman, a couple of different times as well as 
with then-Chairman Hastert that we went into the hospitals because 
unlike other places in the country and the world, Colombians are dying.
  The Colombian national police have lost the equivalent of 30,000 
American police officers, given the size and proportion. They are 
getting shot up all the time. They are not getting shot up because 
somebody is robbing a bank. They are getting shot up because Americans 
are using cocaine. Because Americans are using cocaine, they are 
shooting their police. But they have been willing to fight.
  This is partly what we are trying to do in Iraq. What is happening in 
Colombia is what we are trying to do in Iraq. Colombia has a democracy 
that we are trying to rescue and keep from going down the tubes, so to 
speak, and it looks like they are well on their way back.
  But we built up their national police. Then we took vetted units in 
the military that had a horrible human rights track record. It has been 
a big battle.
  We had a ban on U.S. funds going there. We got vetted units. Now they 
have attorneys that walk around with their different things and they 
have to graph, if somebody gets killed, which way they were lying so 
they know they did not use human rights torture.
  Sometimes it can be inconvenient when you are fighting terrorists.
  But quite frankly, Colombia is doing the best job and the best human 
rights job of fighting terrorists who do not follow human rights rules, 
who are more than willing to shoot you in back, are more than willing 
to use torture. But we have trained vetted units, and whereas in the 
1990s, to be kind, the Colombian military defense establishment could 
not have fought their way out of a paper bag, I have a small town of, 
say, New Haven in my district of 14,000, I do not think their military 
could have defeated the New Haven police department.
  And their equipment was better than the New Haven police department. 
They just did not know how to fight. They did not have command and 
control systems. They ran when they got in a fight with the FARC and it 
was a disaster.
  We trained units who are now winning battles and it is hard to win 
battles with terrorists. And it is the Colombians who are fighting that 
we have done the training, and they are even buying equipment. We put 4 
billion in, but they put 9 billion in. Even though the drug problem was 
our problem, not their problem, they have enough of an economy that it 
is working.
  What we are trying to do in Iraq is what is working in Colombia. It 
has been an investment that has helped rebuild and establish the 
country of Colombia, such that the kidnappings are down like 67 
percent. You can now move around the country. I started to say then 
after our first trip we were

[[Page H505]]

able then finally to stay after visiting a hospital a couple of times, 
finally able to stay overnight.

                              {time}  2100

  The first time I stayed overnight in Bogota, they took us underneath 
the hotel just like in the movies and had all these police jumping out; 
and when we slept in our room, we had multiple police outside each of 
our doors and on the floor and the perimeter around Colombia. That was 
a different experience. Finally, they let us go out to eat somewhere 
other than the hotel. This may have been about the sixth or seventh 
trip. They let us go out to eat, and when we would go out to eat, we 
would have to go the wrong way on a one-way street. They would have to 
seal off the restaurant to make sure that they were not going to 
assassinate the American Congressmen when we went out to eat. But it 
was progress. We were going out to eat and we did not have as many 
police around the hotel, and it showed that there was a gradual 
progress occurring.
  Then we got to go to Cartagena. Then we got to walk around town in 
Cartagena. Then I went to President Uribe's inauguration; and what I 
would call a minor setback was as I was sitting with Barney Frank and 
we heard this big boom, Congressman Frank said, I have never heard of a 
one-gun salute. And it was a bomb, mortar shells hitting the side of 
the presidential palace while we were all inside. We had a cadre of 
about 20,000 troops around; but these guys, who were getting more and 
more sophisticated, launched the mortar shells from about 1\1/4\ miles 
away from the top of a building. As they launched those shells, they 
were not very accurate and they first were short. Then they hit an 
apartment building that killed, I think, 40 people and injured 100 or 
something like that. Then they launched over the palace and they hit 
the side of the palace where we all were.
  But by that time, I think they got 20 or 25 rounds out of 110, but by 
that time the Colombian Air Force and Army were on their case and they 
stopped shooting. But that was just about 4\1/2\ years ago with the 
inauguration of President Uribe. So then we continued to make progress.
  Now, I mentioned the ambassador could drive. This time we were able 
to go to Medellin. Nobody has been able to go to Medellin. We were able 
to go to the coal mine. Nobody has been able to go to the coal mine. We 
had protection. Yes, we were still in an armored vehicle, but it was a 
disguised armored vehicle. There were not any machine guns sticking out 
of it. Yes, the people around us had protection, but you did not see 
machine guns. And, yes, one of the police cops had a machine gun, but 
basically they were providing traffic guidance to try to move us. The 
meeting with President Uribe and others, they did not have a big army 
surrounding us like we were going to get killed before. You are 
cautious. It is still a violent country. But we are cautious in parts 
of our urban cities.
  The plain truth is that we have made progress in Colombia in 
establishing freedom and democracy and giving alternatives. In 
Medellin, we visited an AUC demobilization center. I mentioned they 
were the second biggest group, the paramilitaries. 21,000 have now laid 
down their arms, and we are investing and with some of the money we are 
eradicating coca to now get these people jobs and to track them and to 
match them up like the floral industry that is booming in Medellin. And 
we there met four of the people who had been displaced people from 
their villages, and we also met a former armed person who had been very 
violent with the AUC and who has now been trained and went back to get 
his college degree. Things are really changing in Colombia, thanks in 
part to our investment.
  We still have problems in coca, and the reason I wanted to show you 
this map is, guess what has happened. The coca has moved out here. It 
has moved into the jungle. But it is not terrorizing the people. 
Colombia now has a growing economy. They are providing us with critical 
things; and with that growing economy, they have asked the United 
States Government to buy with their money eight Blackhawk helicopters 
because we have their economy going again. We have stabilized it. It is 
still a challenge. I am disappointed we have not gotten rid of the coca 
as much as we thought we would with Plan Colombia, but we have made 
progress. We have a friend in the region.

  Now, this week President Uribe and President Bush have agreed to the 
Colombia Free Trade Agreement that at some point will come in front of 
the Congress. No free trade agreement is easy. This is very critical. 
It was very important for President Uribe to understand that in this 
process he could not put out everybody in his country and understand in 
the United States we could not put out.
  So, for example, in sugar he would have liked more free trade in 
sugar. I would have liked more free trade in sugar. In Fort Wayne, 
Indiana we have Edie's, the largest ice cream plant in the world. We 
have Kraft caramels up in Kendallville. Bread uses sugar. In 
Huntington, Indiana, Good Humor has the second biggest ice cream plant 
in the world. We use sugar. In the South, in Louisiana and Florida, 
there is a sugar lobby that wants to keep our sugar prices high; but 
ultimately they are very powerful and in agreement our sugar guys got 
some protection for a while, for a long while, quite frankly. Way too 
long for me.
  But at the same time in Colombia they grow rice. And if they, in 
fact, took the rice business away from having some protection, over 15 
years they will make the adjustments and you can do that. So this trade 
agreement is a balanced trade agreement, trying to work it through.
  One of the interesting things is, to give you another kind of wrinkle 
on how economics work and how trade agreements work, I never thought I 
would be having a discussion about chicken hindquarters. Colombians 
tend to prefer dark meat, and Americans tend to prefer white meat. What 
happens in a trade agreement to say we are suddenly going to have free 
trade, guess what our chicken companies are going to do? We are going 
to dump all dark meat on Colombia under its value and put all the 
Colombian chicken people out of business, which a very important thing 
in their small villages are their chicken people. So they had to have 
some kind of protection for hind parts.
  But guess who else wanted to have some kind of balance in handling 
chicken hind parts? Our corn growers. We ship incredible amounts of 
corn into Colombia. At lunch one of the days, next to me was the head 
of Archer Daniels Midland in Colombia. He was a Colombian, had been 
educated in the United States. And the corn that comes in from the 
Midwest, huge quantities, and in some areas all our corn is going down 
to Colombia for the chicken farms. If they do not have any chicken 
farms, we are not going to sell them any corn, which is, I think, our 
second biggest export to Colombia. We are not going to sell any corn to 
Colombia if we kill the chicken market. So when you work these 
exchanges through, both countries, I believe, in this have a balance 
between the political realities of Colombia and the political realities 
of the United States.
  But here is the bottom line: free trade agreements like this with 
Colombia will help fuel the economy that has stabilized there more than 
anywhere else. With Chavez going crazy up there choking us on oil, we 
need to know where we are going to get oil and energy. We need to know 
who is going to be our friends in South America. And we need to work 
with countries that are there.
  We also have a secondary motive here. If they grow coca rather than 
chickens, if they grow coca rather than getting emeralds and gold out 
of the mine, if they grow coca instead of selling us coal, if they grow 
coca instead of textiles, we die and Europe dies. We have an incentive 
directly with the nation of Colombia to make sure that we can make 
their economy work, that we can make their government successful, that 
we can have law and order in Colombia, because what is good for them is 
goods for us; what is good for us is good for them. That is the way it 
should work.
  And I am very pleased that the Presidents of both countries have 
signed this agreement, and I hope that whether it is this year or next 
year, we can move that forward because it is extremely important to 
Central America, South America, and to the United States.




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