Written in English, Not Spanish

In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of US military and police assistance, replacing Turkey (Israel and Egypt are in a separate category). Colombia receives more US military aid than the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. The total for 1999 reached about $300 million, along with $60 million in arms sales, approximately a threefold increase from 1998. The figure is scheduled to increase still more sharply with the anticipated passage of some version of Clinton's Colombia Plan, submitted to Congress in April 2000, which called for a $1.6 billion "emergency aid" package for two years. Through the 1990s, Colombia has been by far the leading recipient of US military aid in Latin America, and has also compiled by far the worst human rights record, in conformity with a well-established and long-standing correlation.
In theory, "Plan Colombia" is a two-year Colombian government program of $7.5 billion, with the US providing the military muscle and token funds for other purposes, and some $6 billion from the Colombian government, Europe, the IMF, and the World Bank for social and economic programs that Colombia is to prepare. According to non-US diplomats, the draft of "Plan Colombia" was written in English, not Spanish. The military program (arms, training, intelligence infrastructure) was in place in late 1999, but "the Colombian govern-ment has yet to present a coherent social investment program" as of mid-2000, and few governments are "willing to climb aboard what is widely perceived as an American project to clean up its backyard," by means that are familiar to those who do not choose what has been called "intentional ignorance."
The Colombian Commission of Jurists reported in September 1999 that the rate of killings had increased by almost 20 percent over the preceding year, and that the proportion attributable to the paramilitaties had risen from 46 percent in 1995 to almost 80 percent in 1998, continuing through 1999. The Colombian government's Human Rights Ombudsman's Office (Defensoria del Pueblo) reported a 68 percent increase in massacres in the first half of 1999 as compared to the same period of 1998, reaching more than one a day, overwhelmingly attributed to paramilitaries. Daniel Bland, a human rights researcher who worked in Colombia through most of the 1990s, concludes that in the past three years alone, "more than a million people have been forced from their homes in the countryside, and between 5,000 and 7,000 unarmed peasants have been slaughtered by right-wing paramilitaries." Of nine people he interviewed for a documentary on human rights in 1997—professors, journalists, priests, human rights workers—"three have since been murdered by paramilitary gunmen; four have fled with their families after receiving death threats." UNICEF and the Colombian Human Rights Information Bureau CODRES estimate that in June-August 1999 alone, 200,000 more people were driven from their homes.

Rogue States, Chomsky