Have you ever heard of the yellow submarine? How about the white one?The Colombian National police discovered a submarine, which was being designed by drug traffickers to smuggle large quantities of cocaine, most of which was headed north to support the U.S.’s $36 billion per year habit.

The fact that Colombian drug cartels are able to purchase such advanced equipment says a lot about their wealth. Not only do they have the funding for a high-tech submersible, but have also been able to buy a Caribbean island for the sole purpose of refueling planes.

To counteract the huge Colombian cartels, the U.S. is pumping $1.3 billion dollars into fighting the expansive cocaine. “I’m sure [President Alvaro Uribe] will put that money to good use,” said Guilford senior Fernando Pardo, a Colombian.

Much of the money is going towards spraying glyphosate, a weed killer, from planes across 300,000 acres of coca fields, which cover the Colombian landscape.

“I don’t know if [the spraying is] a good thing or a bad thing,” Pardo said.

The U.S. and Colombia together have built Plan Colombia, which has a goal of slashing the large amount of coca fields by half within the next five years. Plan Colombia uses glyphosate along with alternative development programs for farmers, hoping to encourage the cultivation of legal crops.

A major glitch in the effort to halt the growth of coca is the environmental problems glyphosate may cause. Many conservationists claim that spraying the chemical will leave fields barren and infertile for legal crops. Depending on the source, it could take as few as three months or as long as 30 years before the land is arable again.

Many of the planes never reach their destination anyway. Guerrilla organizations protect the countryside from the aircraft. Plan Colombia also seeks to bring down the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the prominent terrorist organization responsible for maintaining the cocaine trade. The group is notorious for kidnapping the relatives of important, wealthy people and also whipping peasants.

This is definitely not an issue the U.S. should ignore. Unfortunately, “since the U.S. began Plan Colombia and President Alvaro Uribe created a state of alarm … the kidnap rate [in Ecuador] has increased over the past three years drastically,” said sophomore Ecuadorian Martin Pallares. Due to the shared border between Ecuador and Colombia, when Plan Colombia pushes out the FARC, many terrorists find themselves in Ecuador or another neighboring country.

Although the efforts of the U.S. are well supported, the plan needs its own submersible, because it’s drowning. Many believe that military action is the only way that the guerrillas could be stopped.