[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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