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- #121
Street cops, you say... And what about ordinary American conscrips (you won't be a able to win this war without mobilisation) ?No, the US was not involved by then with "boots on the ground" (other than I think 1 or 2 DEA agents). That was essentially Columbian "Special Forces". However, we were very much involved in giving them the training and equipment to do the job, as well as intelligence as we had much more capabilities in doing that than Columbia did.
When I was in Panama, I got to know some of the DEA guys that were involved as well as their Columbian counterparts. These were all good DEA agents, from both countries. However, they were all mostly "street cops", so did not really know how to operate in the jungles. So they would be sent to the US Army Jungle Warfare School at Fort Sherman in Panama to learn how to operate as "soldiers" in a jungle environment.
And it does not matter that they were Columbians who lived in a jungle nation, they were mostly street cops that did not know how to operate in that kind of environment. No more than a street cop in Phoenix would know how to operate in a Desert Environment. Or a street cop in Anchorage would know how to operate in an Arctic environment. But once they got that training from Jungle Warfare experts and stopped acting like cops, they became much more effective. Primarily in Columbia, that is all the US provided. Training, equipment, and the intelligence to allow them to take the fight to the cartels themselves.