In the State Department, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is tasked with ensuring that the Department is functioning efficiently and maintaining its integrity at each post.
In practice, the OIG works to root out crime and abuse conducted by LSEs, or people from the host country that work at each posting, and FSOs.
You can read on at the link to learn more about the OIG and the work they do.
On this day in 1980, the Colombian socialist guerrilla group known as the April 19th Movement, or M-19, burst into the Dominican Embassy in Bogota during a reception celebrating Dominican Independence Day and took dozens of people hostage, including several ambassadors. The U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Diego Asencio, was one of the hostages taken.
Asencio and the others were held for 61 days, when the hostages were released in exchange for a (greatly reduced) ransom and a flight to Havana, Cuba.
Read on at the link to learn more about M-19 and to hear Diego Asencio’s experiences in his own words.
A few days ago, the UN Security Council approved a team of international observers to monitor the peace process between Colombia’s government and the group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). FARC has been at war with Colombia since 1964, making it the longest-lasting armed conflict.
This is not the first time that Colombia has attempted to stop FARC’s actions. In 2003, the United States Ambassador to the UN worked to implement “Plan Colombia” to combat the guerrilla army and to stop the booming drug trade that was funding FARC’s efforts.
You can learn more about the fight against FARC at the link.
On this day in 1985, there was a siege on Colombia’s Palace of Justice. By the end, over 100 lives were lost, including 12 justices and 48 Colombian soldiers.
It’s believed that behind the siege was the infamous Pablo Escobar, whose “plata o plomo” (silver or lead) policy meant that those who did not accept his bribes would be eliminated.
Read on at the link to learn more about the tensions in Colombia in the mid-1980s from the perspective of former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Anthony Charles Gillespie Jr.
November 3rd 1903: Panamanian separation
On this day in 1903, Panama separated from Colombia, forming an independent state. Earlier that year, Colombia and the United States had signed a treaty granting the latter use of the Isthmus of Panama to build a canal. The Colombian senate, however, refused to ratify the treaty. With foreign trade routes in jepoardy, President Theodore Roosevelt sought a solution, adhering to his policy to ‘walk softly and carry a big stick’. While the United States had previously worked with the Colombian government to undermine Panamanian independence movements, they now turned to these same revolutionaries. The United States gave tacit support to a nationalist rebellion, sponsored by French business interests with investments in a potential Panama canal, sabotaging the Colombian effort to crush the movement by removing US-owned trains which provided vital support for Colombian troops. The revolution, led by José Augustin Arango and Manuel Amador Guerrero, was successful, and the Republic of Panama swiftly signed a treaty granting the United States possession of the Panama Canal Zone, receiving $10 million in return. Construction on the canal began in 1904, and was completed in 1914. For many Panamanians, who had long dreamed of their nation’s independence, the treaty appeared in violation of their newly-won soverignity. The Panama Canal remained a contentious issue in the region until 1999, when it formally returned to Panamanian control.
Marijuana legalization and usage has been a hot topic, especially in the last few years, in the US political scene. We frequently hear discussions on the news, or in our classrooms, about whether or not the plant should be legalized, permitted for medicinal usage, or felony charges in relation to the drug be lessened.
Below are the testimonies of several US Diplomats and their experience abroad with marijuana. You will read two testimonies about the horrors of Vietnam and how American soldiers (and their allies) were forced to cope with the atrocities that they were witnessing and committing. The last testimony, if you are aware of Project Colombia and the problems that Colombia faces with drug trafficking, sheds a startling light on how the US used practices illegal in the United States to try and combat marijuana production in Colombia and failed, ultimately framing us as the culprit responsible for Colombia’s shift to cocaine production and trafficking.
“When you got assignments from Washington like “We need an analytic model to validate the body count,” reporting, that took a couple weeks worth of drinking beer late into the evening to say “If you saw 50 left feet in a rice paddy at 4:00 PM in an engagement in which we had expended 1,000 rounds, how many bodies would there be in the rice paddy?” The answer is, nobody had a clue. One way to validate the body count would be to send out Lance Corporal Jones at dusk to try to do an accurate body count.
The problem is that Jones would usually get killed. So, it was better to dummy the system than to lose Lance Corporal Jones. That we knew….
It left me convinced we were going to lose and it left me with a set of objectives for my life in terms of trying to not let things like that happen again.” –David C. Miller talking about his service Vietnam from 1967-1968
“There was one kid who, at least he said and I suspect he showed me some evidence because I know I believed him at the time, had lost half his jaw. He said he had been in the Marines and had it shot off, just barely ticked with a .50 caliber bullet. When he went before an Israeli judge on a possession of hashish/marijuana charge, he had explained to the judge that that was the mitigating circumstance, that this whole Vietnam business had been so excruciating for him and that dope relieved him of his travails.
And the judge, with tears, set him free.”
–Thomas B. Killeen, talking about his knowledge of what was happening in Vietnam from his post in Tel Aviv 1972-1974
“We brought in a batch of helicopters that we gave to the Colombian army for use in counter-narcotics activity. In those days we were fighting to get the Colombians to spray the marijuana crops with paraquat.
One of the problems was, of course, we couldn’t use it in our own country because the EPA wouldn’t let us. So we had the delightful proposition of trying to convince the Colombian government to do something that our own government wouldn’t do. It made it very difficult. In the end they did agree to spraying, and in the end we pretty much took out the marijuana production in Colombia, but while we were doing that, unbeknownst to us, Colombia was very rapidly becoming a major transshipment point for cocaine.
By the time I left, while one could have legitimately declared, if not an end to the war, at least several victorious battles in the marijuana war, we had almost no victories in the cocaine war.”
–THOMAS D. BOYATT Ambassador to Colombia, 1980-1983
To read the rest of the US Diplomat testimonies on marijuana overseas please follow this link: http://adst.org/2014/03/pot-pourri/#more-6567
