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U.S.-Colombia Relations Hearing Committee On U.S.-COLOMBIA RELATIONS HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE OF THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION APRIL 24, 2007 Serial No. 110–39 Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs ( Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/ U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 35–031PDF WASHINGTON : 2007 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800 Fax: (202) 512–2250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–0001 COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS TOM LANTOS, California, Chairman HOWARD L. BERMAN, California ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American DAN BURTON, Indiana Samoa ELTON GALLEGLY, California DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey DANA ROHRABACHER, California BRAD SHERMAN, California DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois ROBERT WEXLER, Florida EDWARD R. ROYCE, California ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York STEVE CHABOT, Ohio BILL DELAHUNT, Massachusetts THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York RON PAUL, Texas DIANE E. WATSON, California JEFF FLAKE, Arizona ADAM SMITH, Washington JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri MIKE PENCE, Indiana JOHN S. TANNER, Tennessee THADDEUS G. MCCOTTER, Michigan GENE GREEN, Texas JOE WILSON, South Carolina LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas J. GRESHAM BARRETT, South Carolina RUBE´ N HINOJOSA, Texas CONNIE MACK, Florida JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska DAVID WU, Oregon MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas BRAD MILLER, North Carolina TED POE, Texas LINDA T. SA´ NCHEZ, California BOB INGLIS, South Carolina DAVID SCOTT, Georgia LUIS G. FORTUN˜ O, Puerto Rico JIM COSTA, California ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona RON KLEIN, Florida ROBERT R. KING, Staff Director YLEEM POBLETE, Republican Staff Director SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York, Chairman GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York DAN BURTON, Indiana LINDA T. SA´ NCHEZ, California CONNIE MACK, Florida ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona LUIS G. FORTUN˜ O, Puerto Rico ENI F. H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey Samoa ELTON GALLEGLY, California DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey RON PAUL, Texas BILL DELAHUNT, Massachusetts JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia RON KLEIN, Florida GENE GREEN, Texas JASON STEINBAUM, Subcommittee Staff Director ERIC JACOBSTEIN, Subcommittee Professional Staff Member MARK WALKER, Republican Professional Staff Member ERIN DIAMOND, Staff Associate (II) C O N T E N T S Page WITNESSES The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert, a Representative in Congress from the State of Illinois ..................................................................................................... 1 The Honorable Charles Shapiro, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bu- reau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, U.S. Department of State ..................... 17 The Honorable Anne W. Patterson, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Inter- national Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State 25 His Excellency Luis Gilberto Murillo-Urrutia, Senior Fellow on International Policy, Phelps Stokes Fund ................................................................................. 45 The Honorable Mark Schneider, Senior Vice President, Special Advisor on Latin America, International Crisis Group ........................................................ 63 Maria McFarland Sa´nchez-Moreno, Esq., Principal Researcher and Specialist on Colombia, Human Rights Watch ................................................................... 72 The Honorable Robert Charles, President, The Charles Group, LLC ................. 78 LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert: Prepared statement ....................................... 4 The Honorable Eliot L. Engel, a Representative in Congress from the State of New York, and Chairman, Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere: Prepared statement .............................................................................................. 8 The Honorable Dan Burton, a Representative in Congress from the State of Indiana: Prepared statement .......................................................................... 11 The Honorable Gene Green, a Representative in Congress from the State of Texas: Prepared statement ............................................................................. 15 The Honorable Charles Shapiro: Prepared statement .......................................... 19 The Honorable Anne W. Patterson: Prepared statement ..................................... 28 His Excellency Luis Gilberto Murillo-Urrutia: Prepared statement ................... 47 The Honorable Mark Schneider: Prepared statement .......................................... 66 Maria McFarland Sa´nchez-Moreno, Esq.: Prepared statement ........................... 74 The Honorable Robert Charles: Prepared statement ............................................ 80 APPENDIX Material Submitted for the Hearing Record .......................................................... 99 (III) U.S.-COLOMBIA RELATIONS TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2007 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:07 p.m. in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Eliot L. Engel (chair- man of the subcommittee) presiding. Mr. ENGEL. Good afternoon. A quorum being present the Sub- committee on the Western Hemisphere will come to order. I ask unanimous consent that any member who may attend today’s hear- ing be considered a member of the subcommittee for the purposes of receiving testimony and questioning witnesses after the sub- committee members have been given the opportunity to do so, and without objection so ordered. I am pleased to welcome everyone to today’s hearing on United States-Colombia relations. Congress will soon be making a number of important decisions regarding Colom- bia ranging from our large foreign aid package to the United States-Colombia free trade agreement. I hope that today’s hearing will allow us to gain greater insight into the situation on the ground in Colombia. I have an extensive statement which I will not read now, and I will read before our sec- ond panel comes to testify. We anticipate shortly having a series of votes on the House floor. So I am now extremely honored to wel- come one of our own colleagues, Congressman Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House, to today’s hearing. Mr. Hastert served as Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2006. We look for- ward to hearing his testimony, and Mr. Speaker, we are all ears. STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE J. DENNIS HASTERT, A REP- RESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS Mr. HASTERT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and distinguished mem- bers of this committee. I am honored to appear before you today to discuss a topic that has certainly been a focus of mine for a long, long time, and that is the United States and Colombian relations. As a teacher and a coach and much later as a chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee dealing with drug policy, I have seen firsthand the devastation of illicit drugs on our most affluent street corners and our toughest neigh- borhoods. What illicit drugs bring to our children and do to the children of other countries is unmentionable. It is unthinkable. In fact, more Americans die annually from illicit drug use than died either in (1) 2 combat or in the effort in 9/11. Most of them are young men and women. Most of them are under the age of 25 years of age, and many more die because of the actions of drug gangs and drug vio- lence. In order to show the improvement in Colombia, it is imperative to understand what Colombia was like in the 1990s. In the early 1990s Colombia was infested with drug cartels. Drug families earned huge profits. They were involved in government corruption. The governments were corrupted in spots from the local areas, the local towns to the very top, and drug money funded that corrup- tion. As the Iron Curtain fell in the former Soviet Union and former eastern Europe, the monies that went to Cuba, they were passed through Cuba to incite revolutionary forces around the world, di- minished, and as those monies diminished organizations like in Co- lombia the FARC and the ELN and the AUC, all of a sudden had to turn to other ways to get financing. What they did was they turned to narcotrafficking. On one of my trips to Colombia as the chairman of the subcommittee, it illus- trates Colombia’s turmoil. We were about an hour out from landing in Bogota when we received a warning message from the State De- partment’s diplomatic security detail. Twenty-two people had just been killed by terrorists in Colombia’s capitol city Bogota. Police stations had been threatened or bombed, and 12 sticks of dynamite had just been pulled out from under the Colombia’s Su- preme Court building. Terrorist organizations like F–A–R–C or FARC, the ELN and the AUC began to take over the illicit drug trade and were nearly ruling the land. They were kidnapping. They were killing. People who believed in democracy and free enterprise and freedom were being intimidated in South America’s oldest de- mocracy. Colombia was well on its way to becoming a narcoterror- ist state. What was happening
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