The following is an announcement and statement from PeaceInColombia.org, which is sponsoring The Week for Peace in Colombia 2006: Social Justice and Reconciliation

Future U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) human-rights policy toward Colombia will be carried out with the assistance of a Washington, D.C. consulting firm -- a firm whose president and founder, Alfredo Cuellar, Jr., is a former USAID Foreign Service Officer. The agency late last month awarded a $38 million contract to Cuellar's company, Management Sciences for Development, whose executive roster includes Ruth Sanchez-Way, former director of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

As reported in Narcosphere earlier this year (see Input From Human Rights Groups Sought by USAID/Colombia for 2006-2010 Roadmap), USAID held a series of consultations with Colombian and international civil-society groups prior to crafting a Statement of Work governing the USAID plan. Management Sciences for Development will now help to carry out those policies, among whose stated objectives are the protection of victims of paramilitary and rebel violence, particularly in rural regions of Colombia where the national government lacks control.

An additional 481 grenade launchers, 420 M1 carbines, and 50 MP5K submachine guns are about to make their way into the arsenal of the Colombian National Police (CNP), which currently possesses such weaponry but soon will have more, courtesy of the U.S. State Dept.

Caracas, Venezuela was the destination point for a planned shipment of radiation-powered "contraband detection" devices sought by the U.S. State Dept., which intends to train a small corps of unidentified users in the art of surreptitiously scanning the contents of boxes, crates, and pallets.

But whereas Caracas initially was listed in an Aug. 1 solicitation notice as the "place of performance" -- in other words, the destination to where a selected vendor will ship the detectors -- the State Dept. by Aug. 8 had issue an amended document absent of references to Venezuela. In fact, State without explanation had changed the shipping destination to Miami.

The U.S. Trade & Development Agency (USTDA) is financing a "technical assistance" project whose goals include the development of a "world-class marketing strategy to attract foreign investors to participate in the development of Colombia's hydrocarbon sector." USTDA, on behalf of the National Hydrocarbons Agency, or ANH, yesterday (July 21) began recruiting potential contractors to carry out a "definitional mission" to Colombia, where the selected vendor will help devise a global marketing plan as well as train ANH officials and staff on "negotiating contracts in a manner consistent with international best practices." Similarly, the project will seek to streamline Colombian regulation of this industry segment.

Only U.S. firms are allowed to bid on the initiative, which has a potential pay-out of $250,000.

The Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) has launched a research & development initiative whose aim is to deploy unmanned aerial surveillance drones specifically for border security. The Untethered Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) Platform Concept Development Project, as DHS calls it, seeks to create and eventually launch an unspecified number of airships loaded with advanced sensor and communications technologies. The goal is to equip the U.S. with a “persistent border surveillance” capability.

The minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee yesterday released a scathing report chronicling the widespread abuse of taxpayer dollars via the awarding of federal contracts.

The report, Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration, points out among its findings that the State Department "had the largest percentage increase in procurement spending of any major federal agency over the last five years. In 2000, the Department of State spent $1.2 billion on federal contracts. By 2005, this spending grew by $4.1 billion to $5.3 billion, an increase of 331.9%.”

The Bush Administration is developing a master plan that will govern future highway- and port-modernization initiatives, a project whose goal is to enhance the private sector's ability to more efficiently move freight across the nation and to ship cargo around the globe.

Those transportation initiatives, however, will not take place in the U.S.

Instead, the projects are for Mexico.

To view the entirety of this report, go to The Peacock Report, where the piece originally appeared.

A computer system that the government of Bolivia uses to conduct and track criminal investigations is slated to undergo technological modernization, courtesy of the U.S. State Dept. According to a presolicitation notice dated May 22, a unspecified State international narcotics & law enforcement program intends to award a sole-source contract to Neotec, Inc., to integrate automated fingerprint-identification technology into the existing Bolivian system.

The project's goal is to enable Bolivian law enforcement personnel "to establish the identity of a person based on fingerprints, especially in cases where a suspect is arrested more than once with different names and in different locales," the document says. National and regional officials could benefit from the proposed system via the heightened ability to connect disparate criminal records -- and suspects -- and to notify relevant, local law-enforcement agencies when necessary, according to the document.

The planned delivery of 90 heavy-duty trucks to Bolivia related to the attempted escalation of U.S. counternarcotics and crop-eradication initiatives has been abruptly suspended by the State Dept. According to an amended contracting notice dated May 19, it appears that a previous agreement between the government of Bolivia and the State Dept. Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) has been rendered null and void.

The amendment document, which State posted to the FedBizOpps contracting database on Friday, offered a simple, albeit vague, explanation: “This solicitation is cancelled.”