In 1823 the United States declared in the Monroe Doctrine that it claimed interest in the Western World. And America has pursued this goal. But what kind of effect have we had in Central and South America? In many cases, America should not have had the right to involve itself in Latin America. For instance, the War on Drugs which the US has waged, which has had a very negative affect on the people of Colombia, other countries of the West, and also people of the United States.
             As the US has continued its tradition of armed intervention in Latin America, the people in Colombia suffer from death, displacement, and human rights abuses. According to Paul Wolf, one to two million people have been displaced from their homes by the violence and live in poverty in refugee camps. Two-thirds of them are children. Thousands of people are assassinated, kidnapped and disappeared in Colombia every year in this political violence. The Colombian conflict has drawn the attention of the United Nations and the international human rights community.
             I feel that America's "war on drugs" in Colombia is a false portrayal. Both the Colombian government and the Bush administration have oversimplified the causes of the violence, linking it readily to drug traffickers and undermining the role of the military and paramilitary groups. While successive Colombian presidents have made good faith efforts to control the killing, they failed to acknowledge the relationship between senior military officers, paramilitary groups and the drug traffickers. The CIA however, is evidently linked to drug trafficking in Colombia, as well as other parts of the western world. The Mercury News investigation reports that the CIA supported a drug pipeline from Colombia to the San Fransisco area which financed the Nicaraguan Contras by selling tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs. This however, as can be found in Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and t
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