Al Gedicks is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and the author of "Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations" *. He writes that the anti-drugs campaign conducted by the Colombian government with U.S. help is in reality a political war against indigenous peoples and others who oppose Colombia's domination by multinationals.

Human rights groups estimate that more than 70 percent of the political killings in Colombia, about 3,500 a year, can be attributed to paramilitary groups and to their military allies.

The other 30 percent are carried out by guerrillas and drug traffickers. Another two million Colombians are refugees from the violence. With the election of President Alvaro Uribe this year and his pledge to double the size of the army and police forces, this violence will only get worse.

Within days of his inauguration on August 7, Uribe authorised emergency measures that will result in the government's ability to restrict citizens' movements, make arrests without warrants and control television and radio airwaves.

These measures will concentrate even more power in the very security forces that have been cited by human rights groups as the hemisphere's worst abuser of human rights. What is the U.S. stake in this conflict?

The official government reason behind the massive U.S. support for Colombia's war against the guerrillas is to stop the drug traffic in cocaine and heroin. While it is true that the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) depend on taxes they collect from coca farmers in southern Colombia to finance their activity, they have also called for development plans that would allow peasants to grow alternative crops.

In the absence of farm-to-market roads, technical assistance and credit, subsistence farmers have little choice but to plant coca if they are to feed their families.

However, the other major coca-producing region is in northern Colombia where most of the traffickers and paramilitaries are located. This area has not been targeted as part of the war on drugs despite the fact that Carlos Castano, the leader of Colombia's biggest paramilitary group the AUC, told a national Colombian television audience that the drug trade provided 70 percent of his organisation's funding. His autobiography, "My Confession", in which he admits to ordering and planning the 1990 assassination of left-wing presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro, is a bestseller in Bogota bookstores.

The so-called drug war has not targeted the drug kingpins. Instead, it is directed to the Putumayo coca-producing region of southern Colombia, the stronghold of the FARC.

Much of the $1.8 billion worth of U.S. military aid since 2000 has provided for the training, weapons and attack helicopters for the army's anti-drug battalions operating in this Amazon jungle area on the frontier with Ecuador.

When I arrived in the Putumayo as part of a Colombia Support Network delegation, the Colombian army was preparing to enter guerrilla territory in advance of the low-flying planes spraying herbicides on coca plantations as well as legal crops nearby.

This escalation of the drug war has fallen disproportionately on the indigenous peoples of the Putumayo, including the Ingas, Kofanes, Sionas, Huitotos, Paeces, and Embera-Chami.

We spoke to indigenous leaders who told us that previous rounds of spraying had devastated their small subsistence farms and gardens and polluted the rivers.

We talked to a local Colombian government official who visited a fumigated area two weeks after spraying and could still smell the chemicals. She broke out in skin rashes and experienced severe diarrhoea after drinking the water. The U.S. embassy officials we spoke to said people who complained about the drug spraying were the ones who benefited from the coca trade.

The results of the latest round of spraying, according to the indigenous leaders, will be a further escalation of the war and a huge number of people who will be driven from their homes.

This becomes a vicious circle. As more weapons are brought in by the military and the paramilitaries, the guerrillas rearm themselves by simply increasing the area under coca cultivation and available for taxation, pushing further into the jungle, invading the lands of yet more indigenous communities.

Despite widespread spraying last year, the amount of coca under cultivation rose by nearly 25 percent, according to a report by the U.S. State Department. If the anti-drug program is so ineffective, why is the United States pouring even more money into these programmes?

From the perspective of the indigenous leaders, the hidden agenda behind the drug war is the elimination of obstacles to massive U.S. and international investment in mega-projects including mines, dams, roads and canals that will allow the efficient exploitation of Colombia's rich natural resources as envisioned in the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA, or ALCA in Spanish). Approximately a quarter of Colombian territory is legally recognized indigenous territory, and a significant part of the country's oil reserves are on indigenous land.

Under the Colombian Constitution of 1991, indigenous communities are recognised as "territorial entities" with the right to self-government and control of their natural resources. Indigenous land rights and decision-making authority regarding natural resources threaten access to resources, which is fundamental to multinational mining and energy corporations.

Since the first indigenous organizations emerged in southern Colombia in the 1970s, government security forces, drug traffickers, left-wing guerrillas and paramilitary groups in the pay of landowners have killed more than 500 indigenous leaders.

The violence is not limited to indigenous people. Under the Colombian doctrine of national security, the war against "subversives" justifies killing peasant and labor leaders, teachers, journalists, priests, nuns, human rights workers and unarmed citizens.

The Colombian army publicly stated that 85 percent of the "subversives" they must attack are engaged in a "political war", not combat. This is not a war to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S. It is a war against the people who stand in the way of the domination of Colombia by multinaional corporations and multilateral development banks.

* "Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations" is published by South End Press