by Dawn Paley
In 1997, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was added to the US State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list, and with increasing frequency after September 11, 2001, the FARC were labeled narcoterrorists by US security agencies. The focus on the FARC implies that it was guerrillas who were the primary conduits for cocaine heading north, but that has little basis in reality: in 2001, the Colombian government estimated that paramilitaries controlled 40 percent of the drug trade, while the FARC controlled just 2.5 percent.[3] Indeed, in a television interview in the early 1990s, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) leader Carlos Castaño admitted that 70 percent of his paramilitary organization’s funds came from drugs.[4] In 2003, the government and AUC entered into negotiations aimed at dismantling the organization and reintegrating its members into society, and by 2006 criminal bands (bandas criminales, or Bacrim) emerged. These supposedly apolitical groups are presented as ideology-free, neither left nor right wing, but as we shall see, the reality is that they are often made up of former paramilitaries who did not demobilize in the early 2000s.
Through this whole period, the Colombian army played a role in drug trafficking, working closely with paramilitary groups, even as it received more and more funding from the United States. In many areas, local and state governments were at the behest of paramilitary and drug-trafficking groups, as were the police and secret police. The US and Colombian governments have continued experimenting with various methods of controlling the flow of narcotics, while also exercising social, economic, and political control in Colombia.
The overlap between anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency, as well as the connection between drug trafficking and paramilitarism, is explained well by William O. Walker III: “Since South American drug traffickers have carefully established routes for narcotics through Central America and the Caribbean, often with the help of conservative or reactionary elements that the White House has also relied upon, it is no surprise that there exists a connection between security operations, coming under the broad rubric of low-intensity conflict, and drug control.”[5] Fourteen years after the initial imposition of Plan Colombia, understanding who the players were in the drugs game and how their activities were linked to the state is worthwhile, but it seems urgent that we go beyond an exclusive focus on drug trafficking to look at the roles that the expansion of capitalism, the acquisition of lands through dispossession, and the extractive economy have played in Colombia’s drug war.
Plan Colombia and the Drug War
Plan Colombia consisted of US legislation and funding for Colombia, based on an economic development strategy first advanced by Colombian president Andrés Pastraña in 1999. Pastraña’s vision of a Marshall Plan for Colombia was taken up by US policy makers and crafted into Plan Colombia, which consisted of a military strategy, a legal strategy, and a humanitarian strategy. Non-US diplomats claimed that the first draft of Plan Colombia was written in English, and later translated to Spanish.[6] While Colombia and the United States had maintained close military links since the late 1940s, Plan Colombia, which began in earnest in 2000, represented a much closer relationship than had previously existed.[7]
The military component was focused on intelligence gathering, disrupting drug trafficking routes, the training of Colombian police and prosecutors, and eradication programs that included aerial spraying of coca crops. It included the transfer of equipment including radars, heavy artillery, and at least seventy-two helicopters to the Colombian armed forces.[8] Plan Colombia was justified as a means to destroy the country’s burgeoning cocaine trade and to decimate the FARC and other rebel groups. The Colombian military received $4.9 billion worth of US State Department and Defense Department assistance between 2000 and 2008, the majority of which was provided under the rubric of Plan Colombia.[9] In addition, the CIA is responsible for a covert action program in Colombia that has a “multibillion-dollar black budget” first approved by George W. Bush in the early 2000s and continued by Obama.[10] Significantly, special battalions of the Colombian army were trained to protect oil pipelines belonging to US companies.
The “humanitarian” component of Plan Colombia was designed to encourage farmers to grow legal crops instead of coca and opium, and along with the military component of Plan Colombia, the program of aerial spraying proved to be the most dramatic, and the most devastating for the country’s rural poor. Plan Colombia’s legal component helped to spearhead the transformation of the Colombian judiciary as well as spur economic reforms. Immediately following Plan Colombia, the state oil company, Ecopetrol, was partially privatized, and new laws were introduced to encourage foreign direct investment. Throughout the 2000s, the mainstream media made it appear that the country was in the throes of a battle that pitted right-wing paramilitaries against left-wing guerrillas, with the state, backed by the US, stepping in to eliminate and demobilize irregular armed groups through force as well as through demobilization programs. This sketch of the conflicts, however, leaves out the role of the Colombian army as well as that of US troops and mercenaries as protagonists with their own agenda, which as we shall see is tied directly to the protection of corporate and commercial interests. According to one study, anti-narcotics and military assistance given to Colombia was regularly diverted to paramilitary organizations, strengthening them.[11] Overall levels of violence in Colombia increased markedly with the launch of Plan Colombia, and in 2002, its second year, there were 673,919 victims of the war—largely Colombia’s poor and working majority—the highest recorded number for any year in the past decades (tellingly, homicides in Mexico peaked in 2010, two years after the Mérida Initiative began).[12]
One example of the brutality suffered by Colombia’s working poor is the aerial spraying of coca crops as a form of chemical warfare; peasants and their crops—illicit and otherwise—were poisoned from above with toxic compounds. I asked Sonia López, an activist with the Joel Sierra Human Rights Foundation in Saravena, Colombia, what Plan Colombia meant for people in Arauca, a state bordering Venezuela. “It was a dirty trick to boost the war against the people. The supposed war on drugs generated a food crisis throughout the country,” she said. “Many people had to leave, because what they had was a little piece of land where they had plantains, and it was fumigated, and it ended up desolate.” She explained that though many people were forced into urban centers by fumigations, they have never been counted among the country’s displaced, as crop spraying was not considered a cause of displacement. But the results of these crop-dustings fit neatly within the aims of the counterinsurgency war and the drive to displace small farmers from their lands. “Those who were not removed a plomo [by lead, which is to say, bullets] were removed by fumigations, and today they’re begging in social programs, in Families in Action, in Forest Protector Families, in all of these programs that seek to put people to sleep and make them forget what the real struggles are that we have to carry out.… In addition to the fumigations, [Plan Colombia] strengthened the entire military apparatus,” she told me. “Fumigation from the skies, and on land the soldiers killed, raped, and displaced.” Monsanto manufactures Glysophate, the primary chemical used in fumigation, which “damages the human digestive system, the central nervous system, the lungs and the blood’s red corpuscles. Another constituent causes cancer in animals and damage to the liver and kidneys of humans,” according to a report on Colombian crop spraying that appeared in the London Observer in 2001.[13]
Plan Colombia officially ended in 2006, but there has been strong continuity between the policies of President Álvaro Uribe, whose two terms spanned Plan Colombia, and those of President Juan Manuel Santos, who was Uribe’s defense minister.[14] Over time and thanks to a brave press corps, details of the army’s role in mass murders, disappearances, and various scandals have emerged. In 2005, five years into Plan Colombia, there were an estimated 800 US military personnel and 600 private military contractors in Colombia, working with an army mired in increasingly serious controversies. [15]<
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During Uribe’s presidency, while the country received an unprecedented amount of US aid, the army was known to carry out joint patrols with right-wing paramilitary groups, and was found to have perpetrated the false positives scandal, in which soldiers captured and murdered civilians, later dressing them up as guerrilla combatants, in order to claim progress in the war. According to a 2009 report by the United Nations Human Rights Council, Colombian soldiers were preying on local people as a form of career advancement: “With a view to obtaining privileges, recognition or special leave, soldiers detain innocent people without any valid reason and then execute them. Their bodies appear the day following their disappearance tens of kilometers away and are identified as members of illegal armed groups killed in combat. These are mainly vulnerable people—street dwellers, adolescents from poor areas of big cities, drug addicts and beggars—who are dressed in a uniform and executed. In some cases, for example in Soacha, young people are tricked with promises of work and transferred to a place where they are finally executed.”[16] In the case of Soacha, twenty-two young men were offered jobs, only to end up dead at the hands of soldiers. The same gruesome practice was repeated thousands of times, in other regions of the country; some claim it carries on today.
Colombia and the United States enjoyed extremely close relations, while the Colombian army committed atrocities and paramilitary groups bought enough politicians to control Congress. Links between these paramilitary groups and members of Colombia’s Congress (a scandal known as parapolítica) became so prevalent that it to led to the investigation of 126 members of Congress, forty-one of whom were formally charged.[17] Regardless of the ongoing repression of opposition movements and illegalities in Congress and otherwise, Uribe was the closest US ally in the region and lauded as a partner and a true democrat. In Colombia, he was referred to as a “Teflon” president, as it appeared that none of the serious allegations made against him could stick, no matter what the proof.
In the years following Plan Colombia, foreign investment in the extractive industries soared and new trade agreements were signed, including the US-Colombia and the Canada-Colombia free trade agreements. The success of Plan Colombia in achieving US foreign policy goals—though not in meeting anti-narcotics targets—marked an important point in the evolution of decades of US experiments using anti-drugs policy to impact society, politics, and the economy in Colombia. It’s worth reviewing the factors that led the US and Colombia to make a pact and spend billions of dollars to supposedly fight drug trafficking.
More than twenty years after his murder, drug kingpin Pablo Escobar remains a household name. Leader of the Medellín Cartel, he was the US’s prime drug boogeyman through the 1980s and until his murder in 1993. His story reads like an early version of Mexico’s Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán: Escobar was the undisputed king of the drug world, a criminal wanted worldwide, his name listed among Fortune magazine’s richest people in the late 1980s. After the elimination of Escobar in 1993, the Cali Cartel would be credited with controlling the business, until it was attacked in a way that encouraged the formation of smaller clandestine groups devoted to the production and trafficking of narcotics. The US-backed assault against Escobar and its operations against the Colombian traffickers, particularly through the DEA’s Operation Snowcap in 1987, were what would end up putting Mexican traffickers on the map.[18]
“What happened was not the lesser of two evils: it was the greater. Our success with Medellín and Cali essentially set the Mexicans up in business, at a time when they were already cash-rich thanks to the budding meth trade in Southern California,” according to Tony Loya, the former DEA agent who ran Operation Snowcap.[19] Paramilitarization took place in two waves in Colombia, first as state-created and elite-supported groups formed in the 1960s and ’70s, later as elite-created, state-supported groups through the 1980s and ’90s.[20] In the 1960s, various guerrilla groups were formed in Colombia, and legislation was passed allowing for the creation of so-called self-defense groups. “In the framework of the struggle against the guerrilla groups, the State fostered the creation of said ‘self-defense groups’ among the civilian population, and their main aims were to assist the security forces in counterinsurgency operations and to defend themselves from the guerrilla groups. The State granted them permits to bear and possess weapons, as well as logistic support.”[21] By the mid-1980s it was no longer possible for the state to deny that these groups had turned to supporting organized criminal activity. Officials and lawmakers promised that these death squads would be repressed by the state, and they resisted the “paramilitary” label, insisting it was misused.[22] During this time, increasingly organized rural and urban groups were rising up for land re-distribution and the right to live in dignity, and not coincidentally, it was paramilitary forces, whose activities the state tolerated, that carried out repression against these organizations. Between 1988 and 1994, there were over 67,000 politically motivated assassinations in Colombia—or 23.4 per day.[23] “In an earlier period, repressive social control was administered abruptly by the Colombian armed forces, with institutional support from a Constitutionally mandated state of siege. Now, extra-official armed groups do the army’s job, though they seemingly have no organic links to the army.”[24]
The second wave of paramilitarization in Colombia took root as the cocaine industry began to reap previously unforeseen profits for local drug runners, an elite new group whose irregular forces were backed by the state. The panorama of the armed conflict began to change dramatically for Escobar and for all of Colombia in 1989. In August of that year, leading presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was shot to death as he and his entourage ascended a wooden platform to address 10,000 of his supporters outside of Bogotá. Galán, a progressive, had been in favor of an extradition treaty with the United States, and was vocal about drug money eroding democracy. His killing marked a pivotal moment in Colombia. “The 1989 assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, senator and primary Liberal Party candidate for the Colombian Presidency, made is clear that the Colombian-US war on narcotraffic had transformed the capitalist cocaine business into a mechanism of US control,” wrote Palacio Castañeda in 1991.
A few months after Galán was killed, a bomb exploded on Avianca Flight 203, killing all 107 passengers onboard. This attack was blamed on Pablo Escobar, and as there were US citizens on the flight, it provided the basis for then-president George Bush to argue that the United States take a more active role in the drug war. After that, the United States ratcheted up its fight against drug trafficking organizations, in the form of increased funding and manpower. Already “the war on drugs was being used to counter social turmoil in Colombia.”[25] By the early 1990s, it was clear that in Colombia, drug trafficking was “a political device used by governments, particularly though not solely the United States, to justify repressive disciplinary social control operations.”[26] The creation of Special Vigilance and Private Security Services (CONVIVIR) groups, which was encouraged by then-governor of Antioquia state Álvaro Uribe in the mid-1990s, laid the basis for the emergence of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the country’s largest and most articulated paramilitary group.[27] In the mid-90s, before tapping a formula later dubbed Plan Colombia, the United States applied narcotics-related sanctions against Colombia. The Council of American Enterprises—an American business consortium in Colombia—reported that in 1996 its member companies lost $875 million in sales because of the sanctions.[28] That same year, the State Department reported that the decertification decision required the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank to freeze about $1.5 billion in investment credits and loans. This included a $280 million loss in Colombia’s oil industry alone.[29]
Anti-drugs efforts that went against economic growth and the interests of US and transnational investors were destined to fail over the long term. Plan Colombia emerged in 1999 after the failure of the sanctions program. Even through the US government has spent over $8 billion o
n Plan Colombia and related initiatives, the flow of drugs to the United States has not been meaningfully reduced.[30] A US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Plan Colombia published in 2008 found that it failed to meet its targets for reducing drug production, and that the “estimated flow of cocaine towards the United States from South America rose over the period” from 2000 to 2006.[31] The GAO also found that, in 2006, coca cultivation was up 15 percent from 2000, the year Plan Colombia began.[32] Regardless of a donation of over seventy helicopters, police training, and other military aid, “Colombia remains one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of cocaine, as well as a source country for heroin and marijuana,” according to a State Department report released in 2012.[33] These statistics are what have led many commentators to declare Plan Colombia and the US-led war on drugs a failure, but, as we shall see, there are other ways in which US anti-drugs assistance to Colombia are considered a roaring success.
Colombia’s Paramilitary Problem
Though the anti-drugs component of Plan Colombia was an unabashed failure, the counterinsurgency segment, which some estimate to have cost upwards of half a billion dollars, reduced FARC numbers by half. Then there was the ongoing process of paramilitarization in the country, which was essentially funded by the war on drugs. It forced Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities, who for generations had defended their collective rights and/or title to their lands, off their territories and opened these lands up for corporate plunder.[34] In his excellent book Colombia: A Brutal History, English journalist Geoffrey Leslie Simons provides an example of how, in the early 2000s, paramilitary activity provided cover for oil giant BP after it took a 15 percent stake in a company called Ocensa, which built an 800 km pipeline from the Cusiana-Cupiagua oil fields to the port of Coveñas. “The construction of the new pipeline destroyed hundreds of water sources and caused landslides that ruined local farmers. To protect the pipeline an exclusion zone was created around it—denying the farmers more of their land. [Lawyer Marta Hinestroza] began to hear the complaints of many farmers, but it proved impossible to represent them effectively in the courts. Four of her colleagues—ombudsmen in neighboring municipalities—were assassinated by the paramilitaries. Then Hinestroza began to receive death threats. A short time later, the paramilitaries arrived at the home of her aunt, dragged her out, tied her hands behind her back, made her kneel down, and then in front of the villagers shot her in the back of the head. Hinestroza resigned but continued to represent her clients. BP has offered £180,000 to 17 families affected by the ODC pipeline, but offers of less than £100 per person to other claimants who have been rejected: some 1,600 people are holding out for claims worth a total of around £20 million.”[35]
