The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  In return for not growing coca, USAID back in 2000 had sent 50 laying hens to each of Putumayo’s 1,800 poorest families, along with a six-week supply of Purina concentrate for the hens to feed on. But as Gersony learned, after the six weeks were over the farmers could not afford to buy more concentrate, and had trouble finding substitute foods for these hens, since in the course of shipping the hens south to Colombia in small cages, their beaks had to be cut off. Thus, all these beakless hens had trouble eating anything but Purina. By the time Gersony arrived on the scene, 80 percent of the hens were dead.

  There was more.

  Because USAID had failed to take into account the loose, fragile soils of Putumayo, all its crop substitution plans involving rubber, cacao, and so forth had failed. “Elefantes blancos,” white elephants, is how the local farmers and traders, literally laughing, kept describing these plans to Gersony.

  “Alternative development is a comedy, a farce,” a nun told him.

  Said one farmer:

  “Cacao? Doesn’t work here. Rubber? What do I do for eight years [while the rubber trees mature]? Hearts of palm? Takes a lot of time and work. Plantains? Let’s say I plant 300 stems—who will buy them? Nobody.”

  Said another farmer:

  “Rubber? I’ll be dead before I see my money. Pepper? Nobody knows anything about it. Hearts of palm? Others have tried it, lost money, no market.”

  A local official summarized:

  “Plan Colombia is just another bonanza [boom-and-bust cycle], like quinine, rubber, and coca.”

  So it went.

  As in other places, in southern Colombia there was no mystery to what Gersony did. It was just a matter of going out into the field alone and asking people questions in their own language, and listening to them for hundreds of hours. “He was our secret agent, without needing to work for the intelligence community, always designing low-cost elegant solutions to problems,” Mike Walsh, a USAID contracting officer, half jokes about Gersony.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Bogotá, for a few days Gersony did something he had never done before and never would do afterward: he started drinking. Two Brandy Alexanders each evening in the luxury hotel—for him it was a lot. His nerves were shot after living in fear every minute of the day for weeks.

  On Wednesday, November 28, 2001, he briefed Ken Ellis, the USAID mission director, and three others for an entire day to get feedback and refine his conclusions. As usual, he started with the history and geography of the area, which determined its psychology and attitude toward the central government. Putumayo was a remote and violent region where USAID was unable to send bureaucrats and its Colombian partners had proved to be incompetent, Gersony said. Nothing could be done there without security. Moreover, there was no political constituency for coca eradication. Local people thought all of USAID’s efforts for crop substitution were a joke. The beakless chickens, the $900 payments, and so on were all subject to ridicule. Only African palm, owing to foreign demand, might work, as it did in the case of northern Ecuador. Face it, nothing but coca could grow in the poor soils of Putumayo. USAID should do agricultural projects to the west of Putumayo, in the neighboring provinces of Nariño and Cauca, where the soils were less fragile; which, in turn, would encourage migration and lead to a better life for the farmers of the region.

  Colombian president Andrés Pastrana greets U.S. ambassador to Colombia Anne Patterson, who oversaw Gersony’s investigative work on cocaine production in the country.

  There was no pushback from Ellis.

  The next day Gersony briefed the U.S. Embassy’s country team, headed by Ambassador Anne Patterson: a red-haired woman with a crisp manner who was as acute and forceful in intellect as she was slight in stature. Anne Patterson represented the next generation of heavy-hitting ambassadors after Deane Hinton. Born in Arkansas and educated at Wellesley, she would go on to become ambassador in Pakistan and Egypt. She was always trusted with the big, difficult countries. She wanted granularity, every detail, from Gersony, especially about the history and geography of the region—the smart ones always did, in his experience. She appreciated the contradictions in his presentation and the critiques of the embassy’s previous positions. “I’ll give you another three hours tomorrow,” she told him. It wasn’t like she didn’t know any of this. It was just that Gersony’s briefing allowed her to crystallize her thoughts.

  “I had doubts about the spraying beforehand, but the main thing about his briefing was his knowledge of agriculture and how crop substitution was a bust,” Ambassador Patterson recalls. “Bob was totally credible. He was not a purist driven by ideology, like others in the aid and humanitarian communities. He was very practical. There’s an increasing shortage of people like Bob. Nowadays, inside the bureaucracy there is immense risk-aversion, you would never risk writing a critical report anymore. What’s worse is that tours are short, people less and less speak the local language, and people less and less even get out of the embassy building. Bob is from another era.”

  And even in those days, it was crucial that Gersony was a freelancer, uncompromised by the bureaucratic mindset.

  She sent him back to Washington to immediately brief the Latin America and narcotics bureaus in the State Department. When Gersony ended his brief, Bill Brownfield, the force of nature who was the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, announced: “What Gersony just said, that’s what we’re going to do!”

  Brownfield now explains: “To get disparate parts of the bureaucracy working together, I needed the voice of an independent, outside fact-checker. And rarely in my experience have I encountered such a brave explorer type, who, nevertheless, looks and sounds like an accountant. Gersony wins arguments without stridency, but by piling on data because he has seen more, done more, and collected more information than everyone else in the room combined.”

  Next Gersony briefed the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, which the reader will hear more of in the next chapter.

  Finally, Gersony saw Andrew Natsios, the George W. Bush appointee who had replaced Brian Atwood as the new administrator of USAID. A tall, voluble ethnic Greek, Natsios had been chairman of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee and had rescued the Central Artery Project (the “Big Dig”) in Boston from cost overruns. He was a cerebral quick study with a fast computerized memory. Though Gersony had first impressed Natsios with his northern Uganda briefing at a time when Natsios had been the vice president of World Vision in Washington, the southern Colombia briefing solidified their relationship, which would lead to much more dramatic assignments in the future for Gersony. “Gersony became my one-man, humanitarian CIA. H-CIA, how’s that?” Natsios says.

  Postscript:

  The moment that the conservative Álvaro Uribe Vélez replaced Andrés Pastrana as Colombian president in the summer of 2002, Gersony’s recommendations began to be implemented. Whereas Pastrana had played the role of Neville Chamberlain, naïve to the point of madness when it came to the FARC, only realizing his folly at the end, Uribe, however sordid some of his right-wing paramilitary connections, played the role of Winston Churchill, going after the FARC with everything he had. Though to be fair to Pastrana, had his policy failure not been so obvious, it would have been politically impossible for Uribe to take such dramatic action so quickly.

  * * *

  —

  Seven years later Gersony found himself back in Colombia. It was the fall of 2008 and the United States was soon to have a presidential transition. Bill Brownfield was now the U.S. ambassador in Bogotá, and he knew that whether Barack Obama or John McCain was elected president, new people would be storming into the State Department and USAID brandishing a different approach toward Plan Colombia than that of George W. Bush. Ambassador Brownfield wanted his own reassessment of what had been accomplished and what hadn’t in order to have an answer for his ne
w bosses, whoever they might be. Susan Reichle, the USAID mission director in Bogotá, assigned Gersony to Catatumbo in eastern Colombia, along the Venezuelan border. Catatumbo was the new Putumayo, an epicenter of coca production, the FARC guerrillas, and the right-wing death squads.

  “I want you to find out why we haven’t reduced coca production there, even though we’ve been spraying,” she told Gersony. She was worried that Plan Colombia, which had already cost U.S. taxpayers billions, was still a one-size-fits-all approach, whereas each region of the sprawling country required its own carefully tailored plan.

  It was worse than that.

  Plan Colombia was a precursor to the fiascoes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  In Catatumbo, for example, 55,000 hectares of coca had been sprayed, even though the CIA said there were only one-third that many hectares to begin with. Something was terribly wrong.

  In a world that was being united by technology, where elites believed geography had been conquered—and therefore had theories for everything—nobody in the capital of Bogotá had a shred of knowledge as to what was actually happening in the jungle a few hundred miles away. Gersony shrugged. This was normal for him.

  * * *

  —

  On October 1, 2008, Gersony arrived in Cúcuta, the provincial capital of Catatumbo, located right on the border with Venezuela. At 3:30 p.m.—he will always remember the time—he was riding in a taxi from the airport to his hotel when a man on a motorcycle right in front of him calmly took out a pistol, extended his arm, aimed at another man who had one foot on the curb between two cars, and shot him in the head. Blood pooled in the road. Pedestrians kept walking as if nothing had happened. Gersony’s taxi continued on its way. The taxi driver said nothing. Gersony, absolutely terrified, knew enough to stay quiet. The famous line at the end of the eponymous Hollywood film immediately came to him:

  “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

  He would spend two weeks in Cúcuta, a bustling commercial town on account of the gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer smuggled across the border from Venezuela, where it was all subsidized. Next, he traveled north along the border to Tibú, hitching rides with cars and on motorcycles. He had no security and no contacts. He was armed only with his fluent Spanish. He would interview 174 people by the end of the project: farmers, shopkeepers, priests, and so forth.

  In Tibú he called on the local bishop, Msgr. Camilo Castrellón Pizano, at his palatial residence.

  “You know, Roberto,” Msgr. Castrellón said to Gersony in a powerful, succinct voice, “I’m going to La Gabarra tomorrow. Would you like to come with me?”

  Gersony couldn’t believe what he was hearing. La Gabarra, in the north of Catatumbo, was the most dangerous town in the most dangerous province of Colombia. He would never have gone there alone. That’s why from Tibú he had planned to return south to Cúcuta.

  “Don’t worry, Roberto, you will be at my side the whole time in La Gabarra.”

  Gersony agreed, terrified at his own decision.

  It was a time when the FARC was specifically searching for more Americans to capture. Indeed, the previous July, the left-wing guerrilla organization had been humiliated by a Colombian military Entebbe-style operation, in which fifteen hostages, including three American defense contractors, had been rescued in the jungle after five years in captivity.4

  “I’m going to the heart of darkness, attached to the bishop’s rosary,” Gersony thought.

  Gersony knew of La Gabarra only from an eyewitness Boston Globe account of eight years earlier, at the very beginning of Plan Colombia. A correspondent, Richard Chacon, had described how the town’s population swelled on weekends from 2,000 to 10,000. Young males, wearing knee-high black leather boots, descended from the coca fields in the surrounding countryside and arrived in the dozens of canoes that transported them along the Catatumbo River. They came here to “rumbear,” the local slang for partying, which involved heavy beer drinking, games of pool, and spending nights with the many local prostitutes.5

  The journey in the bishop’s four-wheel-drive vehicle from Tibú to La Gabarra took four hours along an axle-breaking potholed road, which made it difficult for the Colombian security forces to penetrate the area. Gersony was stunned by how dead the town now appeared, so different from the Boston Globe account. Soon after they arrived, the bishop was informed that he had to attend a funeral six hours upriver by boat in each direction, and would be away for at least two nights. Gersony was welcome to join him, the bishop said, or he could stay behind in the empty church dormitory with its windows open to the street. It was like that in the developing world, where plans change all of a sudden and people don’t possess the obsession with time and scheduling like in industrial and post-industrial societies. Gersony made the agonizing choice to stay behind. But now he was suddenly alone with the bishop’s assistant and sullen housekeeper, in a place with no security. For two nights, in the Sudan-like heat made worse by the humidity, Gersony popped Xanax in his dorm bed.

  Trapped in the parish, afraid to walk abroad alone in this FARC-controlled town, he coaxed the bishop’s assistant to find people to come to the parish for him to interview. So he met farmers, the head of the women’s association, the head of the single mothers’ association, a beer wholesaler, and so on. All these people had obviously been cleared by the FARC beforehand, he assumed.

  He struck gold with the beer wholesaler. Beer is a tropical boomtown commodity, a measure of such a town’s disposable wealth. A beer wholesaler in a place like La Gabarra is someone that any good foreign correspondent would want to interview. And Gersony’s instincts were those of a journalist, not those of a Beltway consultant or think-tanker.

  Well, the wholesaler was out of a job, as he lamented to Gersony. “This is a town closed for business, a ghost town. The hotels and discos are all boarded up,” the wholesaler explained. This was interesting. The more danger you put yourself in, the more you sweat, the lonelier you feel, the more you learn. The spraying campaign had worked miraculously, at least here. The figures in Bogotá were all wrong. The wholesaler had opened the door to this vital knowledge for Gersony. And Gersony never would have met him had he not come to La Gabarra with the bishop.

  * * *

  —

  At the five-star Hotel Dann back in Bogotá, Gersony drank two Brandy Alexanders each night before bed, while during the day compiling the results of his 174 one-on-one interviews.

  Here was his interpretation of Plan Colombia in Catatumbo:

  Catatumbo had good soils, unlike Putumayo. The rains came at night, so they did not interfere with the sunshine. There had been cattle, pigs, agriculture, you name it. But coca was much more profitable, and could not be resisted. Coca production was more intense in Catatumbo than in Putumayo even. In Catatumbo there were six coca harvests each year, in Putumayo only four. In Catatumbo, courtesy of Venezuela next door, the processing chemicals for cocaine came at a discount. La Gabarra on the eve of Plan Colombia had been a flat, sea-to-shining-sea of coca fields. It was a real agribusiness. Sources told Gersony of helicopters flying into La Gabarra from Venezuela loaded down with cash and flying back with coca. Of course, there was violence because people were fighting over fortunes.

  Meanwhile, the CIA, relying on U.N. data supplied by primitive satellite imagery, still believed the subsequent spraying campaign of Plan Colombia had had little effect. But no one that Gersony interviewed in Cúcuta, Tibú, and La Gabarra agreed with the U.N. statistics. The estimates of the number of hectares of coca production that locals provided Gersony were more than double those of the United Nations and the CIA: 16,000 hectares versus 7,000. And the spraying had destroyed most of it. “You do not have helicopters with cash flying in for only 7,000 hectares!” Gersony exclaims.

  But the real evidence of the success of Plan Colombia was the change in the town of La Gabarra itself: something learned by comparing the e
yewitness Boston Globe report and Gersony’s own eyes-on-target report eight years later, which revealed a boomtown that had become a ghost town. For nobody in the course of spending billions of dollars on Plan Colombia had ever even thought of simply walking into the towns of Catatumbo and Putumayo and asking local farmers, “Hey, are you still growing coca out in those fields?” Which is exactly what Gersony did. And the answer was no.

  Of course, the blind spots of Plan Colombia were part of a larger phenomenon. This is most succinctly explained by Gregory Gottlieb, a longtime senior official in USAID who is now a professor at Tufts University outside Boston. “I had Gersony at Tufts to lecture my students,” Gottlieb says. “My students couldn’t believe that such a person even exists and could do this stuff during this time in history. Their whole experience, like those of tens of thousands of other students at elite universities and graduate schools throughout the Western world, is to prepare themselves for jobs in elite think tanks and human rights organizations, many of which have strong institutional biases and bureaucratic interests which get in the way of their analyses, and which rarely produce anything original”—whereas Gersony, Gottlieb goes on, refuses to write the executive summaries that are the curse of organizational studies, “but will gladly brief you for eight hours on his findings.” In this way, his methodology becomes unassailable—unlike in the world of political science, “where everybody is always attacking everyone else’s methodology.” Moreover, Gersony has shown a proclivity—most famously demonstrated in Rwanda—to challenge the existing narrative: something organizational culture will rarely do.