Dan Burton: “Mr. Chairman, for several years now the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), the chairman of the Committee on…”

“Mr. Chairman, for several years now the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), the chairman of the Committee on International Operations and Human Rights, and I, as chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, and the gentleman from Illinois (Speaker Hastert) and the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Mica) and a number of others have been working trying to get helicopters and other equipment down to the Colombian National Police and the military in Colombia so they can adequately defend that country against the FARC guerillas, who are, and I hope my colleagues will get this, are getting as much as $100 million a month from the drug cartel. That is a billion dollars a year. Now, what happens if we do not do anything? What happens if we do not do what the President has suggested? And the President is a late-comer to this fight. I am very happy that he is on board with this $1.3 billion, but it is coming rather late. What happens if that money does not get down there? The FARC guerillas who have been trained by the Cubans, who are Marxist oriented, they may very well take over that country. We may have a narcoguerilla government running Colombia. There will be no impediment to the heroin and the cocaine coming out of that country into the United States. Ninety percent of the cocaine coming into America comes from Colombia. Sixty-five percent of the heroin coming into the United States comes from Colombia.”