Colombia: The Link Between Drugs and Terror

This article is about creating a connection between a government that is controlled by drug traffickers and the people who use terror as a form of defense. The cause for the terrorism is blamed on the poverty situation that is the result of a huge class difference because of a drug trade. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer in Colombia. And it all boils down to demand from North America fueling the drug trade and the acts of terrorism that go along with them.

The article starts out by giving a general definition of terrorism from the lexicon of the U.S. State Department which, defines terrorism as, "premeditated, politically-motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub national groups

or clandestine state agents, normally intended to influence an audience." The author says that terror takes many different forms and is viewed differently depending on what country is being terrorized and which country is doing the terrorizing. While the people of Colombia see the drug demand from the U.S. as the cause of their nation's strife they are not to big to ask for U.S. intervention to help restore order to a broken and corrupted government.

The author goes on to compare and contrasts different forms of terror of different ethnic groups, how it is carried out, how it is funded and the connection between organized crime and terrorism. The data collected for the information of this article was collected over the past 50 years through various sources. The author goes into detail about all of the different violent movements to take back power that have occurred over the past 50 years. Things like who has been assassinated and what significance it had on the drug trafficking and power struggle within the country. Pinpointing the causes of terrorism as: collective identity prone to individualism, an embryonic democratic system, and a traditional recourse to violence to settle conflicts the author then divides the drug conflict into two fazes. The first was in the 1970's the second is from the 1980's to the present. The author is really only concerned with the second one because it has the most impact over the situation today, it started with mafia drug lords warring against the guerillas.

The subjects in all of this terrorism based solely off of the war on drugs are the guerillas, the innocents, the drug lords, and the government that has been corrupted by internal