US Marines ordered into Colombia
This is from NarcoNews, who have an uncanny way of being way ahead of everyone else with important political / drug war news from South America.
Two battalions of US Marine Jungle Expeditionary Forces have recently received deployment orders for insertion into Colombia this coming February, 2003.
The battalions, which with support will total roughly 1,100 men, will rotate in and out of southern Colombia, with orders to eliminate all high officers of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), scattering those who escape to the remote corners of the Amazon. The FARC hierarchy has been the subject of intensive US intelligence scrutiny for several years. The offensive will mean that the US is fighting wars on three fronts simultaneously: Afghanistan, Iraq and Colombia.
The offensive will be led by the Colombian military, which will push the FARC south toward the waiting Marines. A similar but much smaller operation involving former US-SEALS was called off at the last minute two years ago. The Bush Administration is supposedly prepared to take the heat as many innocent Indigenous peoples and Colombian campesinos—a number that could reach the thousands—as might be killed in the offensive.
The presence of US troops in battle in Colombia will be in direct contravention of the Congressional parameters of both Clinton’s Plan Colombia and Bush’s expanded Andean Initiative.