USA - Plan Colombia and the American War on Drugs in Latin America

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Plan Colombia and the American War on Drugs in Latin America

MICHAEL BUSCH
http://gcadvocate.org/index.php?action=view&id=253



As my host proudly shows off his cocaine factory, deep in the mountains of Colombia’s northeast department of Magdalena, I realize that I stand at a frontline in America’s War on Drugs. The small lab is little more than a ramshackle shelter, constructed under layers of thick jungle canopy that block the view of spy planes flying over-head. Nevertheless, despite its size, this tiny lab is an important cog in the gigantic wheel of Colombia’s cocaine industry.

Inside, filthy plastic barrels of gasoline surround an ankle-deep pit of coca leaves. The fumes are overpowering. My head starts spinning as I’m shown the process of turning fresh green coca leaves into soft white powder. It’s sickening: at each step, toxic new chemicals are added; dirty bowls, grimy containers, crusty utensils, and soiled cheesecloth are employed. This is the lowest of low-tech enterprises. Yet, what begins as murky brown liquid gradually ends up a gooey paste, which will later be cut into cocaine. “The best in the world!” boasts its creator.

This tiny outpost symbolizes America’s failure in its fight against drugs. As the United States pours billions of dollars into “Plan Colombia,” an anti-narcotics initiative designed to combat the production of cocaine in the Andes, hundreds, if not thousands, of these tiny workshops dot the countryside. Business is booming. According to a recent report commissioned by the Colombian government, coca production has spiked in the past year, and yields from the plant have reached their highest levels since the program’s start seven years ago. Up north, on the streets of American cities, cocaine remains available, prices are stable, and users enjoy a consistently pure product.

Originally conceived as a six-year program to eliminate drug flow into the United States, Plan Colombia has become a permanent fixture in the national budgets of both Colombia and the United States. The program kicked off in the summer of 2000 with $1.3 billion in start-up funds from the United States, and another $4 billion promised from Colombian coffers. Since then, American spending has mushroomed to nearly $4.7 billion, making Colombia the largest recipient of U.S. money outside of the Middle East. Adam Isacson, of the Center for International Policy, estimates that seven of every 10 dollars of military aid spent by the United States in the Western hemisphere goes to Bogotá.

On paper, Plan Colombia outlines a comprehensive approach to fighting the drug war. According to the State Department, U.S. monies are designated for “promoting the peace process, combating the narcotics industry, reviving the Colombian economy, and strengthening the democratic pillars of Colombian society.” Proponents of the plan point out that these goals have been largely met. Indeed, the number of drug traffickers extradited to the United States has increased, as have levels of coca eradication and guerilla demobilization. And perhaps most importantly for Colombians, the roads are safer than they’ve been in decades.

Securing land travel for regular citizens has been the crowning achievement of Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe. Uribe took office in 2002 with a mandate to put down the country’s raging guerilla insurgencies, disarm paramilitary factions, and aggressively pursue Plan Colombia’s drug eradication program. Of his three charges, Uribe can claim the greatest success in fighting the guerillas. His skillful use of U.S. assistance to beat back the leftist guerilla group, las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), into the southern jungles has made journeys between major cities considerably less hazardous than in the past.

The highway between Bogotá and Colombia’s second-city Medellin was once the favorite playground of guerillas, paramilitaries, and bandits. The road provided the stage for countless kidnappings, robberies, torture-sessions, and murders. Today, the nine-hour ride can be made in relative peace, with frequent checkpoint stops and military searches. When I made the trip I was surprised to find soldiers stationed every 100 feet along the highway for the last 10 miles into Medellin. This sort of demonstration of a strong state presence has inspired confidence in ordinary Colombians to travel freely and often, and contributed to Uribe’s wild popularity throughout the country. But a trip to Medellin also offers hints at the dark side of Uribe’s administration, and a glimpse at the realities of Plan Colombia in action.

At one time, Medellin was famous for being the world’s most dangerous city. During the days of drug lord Pablo Escobar, it was joked that a citizen of Medellin diagnosed with lung cancer was still more likely to die from being murdered. Today, that image has been turned on its head. Since the demise of Escobar’s cocaine cartel in the mid-1990s, Medellin has reinvented itself as Colombia’s artistic capital and a model of social welfare development. A sleek new metro system shuttles residents around town, cable cars ascend into the mountainside slums, and markets bustle with activity. Medellin claims to be the safest city in Latin America, and statistically, its crime rates are lower than most American capitals.

Security improvements are largely due to the control that Cacique Nutibara Bloc (BCN), a drug-funded unit of the larger Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitary outfit, exerts over the city. Its program of “social cleansing” – a creepy euphemism for the murder and disappearance of street thugs, prostitutes, petty thieves, and other undesirables – has created an environment for the city to emerge triumphant from its recent blood-soaked history. In return for monthly payments, local residents are provided with protection and peace of mind. Critics contend that the mafia-style tactics employed by these de facto landlords have Uribe’s implicit endorsement, so long as they keep the streets safe, and the FARC at a distance.

Uribe’s actions suggest there’s some truth to these charges. He has argued that blanket amnesty be given to “reformed” fighters, and his efforts at disarmament have been half-hearted, at best. This was most egregiously demonstrated in Medellin, where a recent disarmament ceremony was held with great fanfare, despite the fact that more than half of participating paramilitaries showed up without turning in any guns. Opponents charge that Uribe’s soft posture toward these factions reflects his cozy relationship with the paramilitary leadership.

Indeed, 2007 brought successive waves of scandal to the Uribe administration, linking the president to crimes carried out by right-wing armed groups. Of the numerous arrests and indictments of government officials in connection to paramilitary activities, the most damaging was the arrest of Uribe’s presidential campaign manager Jose Noguera, who was later appointed director of secret police. Noguera has been charged with ordering hits on dozens of union organizers, activists, and left-leaning academics. According to the Colombian magazine Semana, those on Noguera’s list were either killed or threatened by paramilitaries belonging to the AUC. Yet, if paramilitary activities raise concerns about Uribe’s presidency, a closer look at recent events surrounding the military question the country’s very stability.
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Bogotá was a ghost town when I visited for Uribe’s second presidential inauguration in 2006. Light rain and chilly winds reinforced the general feeling of gloom on what was supposed to be a day of national pride. The empty streets and shuttered gates contrasted sharply with the scene I witnessed a month earlier on Colombian Independence Day. On that holiday, a colorful parade marched down the city’s main boulevard; families congregated around storefront bodeguitas enjoying ice creams and empanadas; a couple danced the Argentine tango in the middle of the street to the enjoyment of a large group of onlookers.

Inauguration Day was different. I spent my time trying to sneak past the military checkpoints into Plaza de Bolivar, in order to get a better look at the ceremony. But because I was virtually the only one on the streets, I didn’t stand a chance. Every street corner was protected by a military guard armed to the teeth. Alleyways were filled with milling troops and roaming squads with bomb-sniffing dogs were everywhere. The officers I spoke with were edgy and unhappy with my presence. So I settled for watching the celebration blocks away on a storefront display TV with a group of homeless drunks.

Colombians stayed off the streets due to threats from the FARC. Four years earlier, FARC guerillas fired mortars at the square during Uribe’s first inauguration. Far from assassinating the Colombian president, however, the FARC’s poor aim killed dozens of poor civilians in a neighboring barrio. This time around, a series of car bombings throughout the country in the weeks leading up to the inauguration lent credibility to warnings of a repeat performance. Luckily, the day passed without incident, and the following morning Colombians resumed their normal lives.

Shortly thereafter, however, it came to light that members of the Colombian military were responsible for both the violence and the threats preceding Uribe’s inauguration. This chilling revelation followed on the heels of another, more brutal incident perpetrated by Colombia’s armed forces. In May, the small western town of Jumundí witnessed the massacre of an entire squad of U.S.-trained anti-narcotics policemen by Colombian soldiers. The murders were planned and executed on the orders of a local drug cartel being harassed by the policemen. Then in August, the army was involved in yet another incident, initially described as a botched rescue attempt of kidnap victims in the northern city of Barranquilla. The government later admitted that the officers involved had in fact been paid by a drug gang to execute members of a rival group.

These outrages have confirmed Uribe’s critics in their convictions that the president’s hard-line, military-focused approach to leadership will ultimately do more harm than good. With U.S. funding and equipment routed through the auspices of Plan Colombia, Uribe has equipped his army with big guns and high-tech equipment. But it’s not clear that this modernization has been complimented with control mechanisms preventing military threats to Colombia’s hard-won democracy. If recent events are an indication that segments of the military have been bought by drug lords, Colombia could experience a return to the 1980s, when independent cartel commanders effectively ruled the country. Only this time, the United States would be picking up the tab.

Adding to these concerns are Plan Colombia’s other ill effects on the country’s viability. At the heart of joint-US efforts to eradicate drugs lies an aggressive strategy of crop fumigation and interdiction. Yet Plan Colombia’s supply-side focus has produced few positive results beyond a better understanding of the nature of the Colombian drug trade. According to Coletta Youngers and Eileen Rosin, co-directors of the Drugs, Democracy and Human Rights project at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), the terrain on which the War on Drugs is fought has a greater resemblance to “a balloon than a battlefield. When one part of a balloon is squeezed, its contents are displaced to another. Similarly, when coca production is suppressed in one area, it quickly pops up somewhere else, regardless of borders. Arrested drug lords are quickly replaced by others who move up the ranks; dismantled cartels are replaced by smaller, leaner operations that are harder to detect and deter. When drug-trafficking routes are disrupted by intensive interdiction campaigns, they are simply shifted elsewhere.”

The balloon effect is most painfully illustrated by statistics of internally displaced Colombians since 2000. Forced displacement has been a consistent feature of Colombian politics since the end of the country’s fourteen-year civil war in 1964. As Human Rights Watch notes, the war “appears in retrospect as little more than the opening act for twenty-five years of military rule under a state of emergency, four decades of organized armed rebellion that official repression helped foster, and the horrific abuses by all sides that continue to this day.” Yet since the inauguration of Plan Colombia, forced displacement has exploded under the falling mist of crop fumigation.



Along with the eradication of coca fields, Plan Colombia’s rigorous crop-dusting program has destroyed countless hectares of subsistence farming. With their livelihoods wiped out, entire farming communities flee to neighboring departments, and in some cases, travel across borders into Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. In the first year of chemical spraying alone, over 75,000 Colombians were displaced from their homes. The ramifications are dramatic. According to the WOLA, internally displaced persons lose their right of return home, often live in severe poverty, are subject to human rights abuses, and perhaps most ironically, resort to drug trafficking in order to survive. Between the violence of military conflict on the ground and crop fumigation from above, experts estimate that over one million Colombians have been displaced since 2000.


On top of this refugee crisis, Plan Colombia’s mandated agenda of crop fumigation highlights its connection to private American military contractors. While corporations like Triple Canopy, DynCorp, and Blackwater USA have received considerable attention for their contracts scored in the chaos of Iraq, the U.S. State Department has secured hundreds of millions of dollars beneath the radar for these same groups under the umbrella of Plan Colombia. Fumigation is farmed out to private corporations, who work in tandem with the CIA and the Colombian military to eradicate coca cultivation. Until a fumigation plane operated by private operators was shot down by FARC guerillas in 2003, U.S. and Colombian officials refused to disclose the magnitude of private contractor participation in the War on Drugs.

In its 2003 report to Congress, however, the State Department revealed that over $150,000,000 in Plan Colombia monies had been directed into the bank accounts of private American military firms in the 2002 fiscal year alone. As in Iraq, private contractors provide official governments insulation from accountability for human rights abuses and other unpleasantries carried out in the name of state objectives. And just as in Iraq, where private contractors have been accused of funneling weapons to insurgents over the black market, outsourcing in Colombia has led some private employees to participate in the very practices they’re paid to prevent. Colombian police have reportedly interdicted drugs being shipped to the United States by private contractors since Plan Colombia’s creation. Both the U.S. government and Colombian officials have refused to publicly engage with accusations that outsourcing has contributed to drug trafficking. Yet their secrecy suggests that a closer look at outsourcing in the War on Drugs would uncover unsettling revelations concerning privatized behavior in the public’s name. A current list of private companies operating with Plan Colombia contracts is currently unavailable from the United States government.
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In a tiny village near the city of Santa Marta, I drink beer with Tomas (real name withheld), a Colombian-American doctor from Bogotá traveling with his wife along the country’s northern coast. Using a coded English – because the “listening ears here are everywhere” – Tomas explains to me what he sees going on. “PU [President Uribe] plays off PGB [President Bush] against the PMs [paramilitaries], and everyone is happy. PU gets PGB money and guns that he can use to fight the Gs [FARC guerillas], which makes the average Colombian feel safer,” and Uribe more popular. Then he cuts a deal with the paramilitaries. The factions are allowed control of the central and northern territories, Tomas believes, and in return, they provide foot soldiers in the hunt for FARC insurgents, and permit a greater share of their coca to be sprayed or their cocaine seized. The catch is that they’re also growing more coca and producing more cocaine, so they don’t lose anything. “PU shows PGB that he’s getting results, so he gets more money.” And the military? “Who knows? Some of them are PMs with uniforms. Some just do their own thing.”



In light of the recent scandals involving the Colombia military, Tomas’s analysis has found echoes in Washington. The unsettling trend of violence perpetrated by soldiers has led a number of policy-makers to question Plan Colombia’s effectiveness, and call for its funding to be cut. Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts was recently quoted by the Christian Science Monitor as wondering out loud “Just how far have the drug mafias penetrated the military?”

He concluded that “all the money we have sent down there has basically not worked.” McGovern has led bipartisan efforts to fight increases in Plan Colombia’s funding. His efforts have paid off of late, though perhaps not in the ways in which McGovern would like.

In light of the scandals surrounding the Uribe presidency and statistics demonstrating that Plan Colombia’s militarized approach to fighting drugs fails to pay dividends, Congress has reduced spending on the program. The American government rescinded roughly $13 million in military aid early in 2007, then refused at the end of September to grant the Bush administration its request to increase Plan Colombia by $141 million in 2008. While it would be comforting to believe that these small victories represent the beginnings of a change in the American approach to combating drugs, such thinking is premature.

Instead, it is increasingly evident that these cuts are a reaction to regional political dynamics in Latin America. A close look at projected spending on Plan Colombia for 2008 reveals that the majority of reductions in military aid will be drawn from Plan Colombia operations in Bolivia. Moreover, as the Center for International Policy has recently argued, money saved on Plan Colombia will likely be transferred to efforts at combating drugs more broadly in Central America and Mexico. This, in turn, increases the fears of some that Plan Mexico – an idea floated by the Bush administration several months back – is beginning to take shape.

To be sure, the security agreement between the Mexican and U.S. governments signed this past fall bears more than a passing resemblance to Plan Colombia in its nascent stages.
The agreement commits the American government to an aid package in excess of $1 billion over two years to combat drug production and trafficking in Mexico. The money will cover the costs of military hardware (airplanes, helicopters, and gunboats), training of Mexican military personnel, and intelligence provided by the United States government and its private partners.

In return, the Mexican government of Felipe Calderón has promised to stem the rising tide of drugs and illegal aliens pouring across the Mexican-American frontier. That Plan Colombia continues to be funded, despite widespread bipartisan opposition and a Democratically controlled Congress, is an astounding indication of the extent to which the Bush administration has bungled diplomacy in Latin America. Because President Bush has been an eager participant in what has become Hugo Chavez’s two-man populist comedy routine, America has lost many of its allies throughout the region. Each time the president or a member of his administration issues a miscalculated response to Chavez’s baiting, America loses credibility in the eyes of Latin Americans. Uribe, no friend to Chavez, has proved a lone supporter of U.S. policy objectives in the region, and beyond (the invasion of Iraq the only serious exception). But his loyalty has come at a price. Plan Colombia thus serves as another reminder of America’s willingness to stay the course in pursuit of bad ideas. Sadly, it also symbolizes the depleted reserves of America’s international integrity.

All this highlights the need for the United States to mend its damaged relationship with Latin America. Otherwise, it will continue to be held hostage by schemes like Plan Colombia, which support those who should be in prisons, and do nothing to alleviate the suffering of people on both sides of the U.S.-Colombia divide. Back in the lab, I ask my host if he feels any remorse, knowing as he does that his trade ruins millions of lives. “No” he replies in a serious tone. “This is what I have done for 25 years. It is all I know.”

But then his face suddenly lights up, and he starts to laugh. “If Americans were not so stupid,” he says, “I’d be out of a job.”

Reputation Comments on this post:

Interesting article, a good read.