America Says It’s Intensifying The War On Drugs. The Truth Is Sinister

By Isabel Hilton, The Manchester Guardian Wednesday 21 June 2000

Meeting in London this week, senior officials from the EU, the US and Japan were discussing how much backing they should give to an aid package for Colombia. Colombia certainly needs assistance. The question is whether the help on offer will make matters better or worse.

Just to recap on what ails Colombia: an undeclared civil war that has lasted 30 years, displacing up to 40% of the population. Last year there were 402 massacres, many committed by paramilitary gangs working in conjunction with the Colombian army, others by guerrilla forces. The government has effectively ceded a third of the country—mainly the south—to the FARC, the largest guerrilla army, with whom it has initiated peace talks. Oh, and there’s cocaine, of course—a trade that keeps the war going, corrupts the government and the judiciary and ensures the attention of the US.

That might be a good thing, except that it is the wrong kind of attention. The document under consideration in London is called Plan Colombia. President Andres Pastrana first announced it as a development plan for his country when he visited Washington two years ago, shortly after his election. Even before taking office, Pastrana had flown to meet rebel leaders—showing that he wanted to negotiate and that he acknowledged that a real end to violence required social justice. Social justice, in turn, demands development, and the plan he brought to Washington was a collection of economic and social programmes that he hoped would transform the areas in conflict. He called it a Marshall plan for southern Colombia, hoping that his country’s patent need would elicit a generous response.

In the event, the international community pledged nothing to the plan.

The US, however, offered to expand military assistance for counter-narcotics operations until, last year, Colombia became the world’s third-largest recipient of US military aid. Meanwhile, Plan Colombia has been redrafted. Social and economic concerns come last. Top of the list is more military aid aimed, the US would have us believe, at suppressing the cocaine trade.

There are two problems with this. Firstly, all the many wars that have been declared on drugs have ended in defeat. Secondly, the areas that the US proposes to target are, funnily enough, those controlled by the FARC, or, as Washington calls them, the narco-terrorists. There is no mention of counter-narcotics operations against the paramilitaries—despite the fact that the DEA itself described Carlos Castano, the self-proclaimed leader of the paramilitary death squads, as a trafficker linked to a powerful cartel.

The redrafted Plan Colombia has little to do with Pastrana’s vision and everything to do with the US desire to get involved in counter-insurgency in Colombia. The role of the EU would be to pay to alleviate some of the suffering this would cause.

Latin America hands are thinking they have seen something like this before. Where else did the US pour vast sums into a corrupt army working closely with psychopathic death squads? Where else did it pretend to believe that the men who shot dead an archbishop as he celebrated mass had nothing to do with government security forces? Twenty years on, have lessons been learned from El Salvador?

Apparently not. There are already US advisers in Colombia in numbers that are beginning to reach El Salvador levels. Evidence collected by the New York based Human Rights Watch links half of Colombia’s 18 brigade-level army units to paramilitary activity.

These units operate throughout the country, including areas in receipt of US military aid. In 1997, 1998, and 1999, the Colombian government’s own investigations demonstrated that army officers worked closely with paramilitary groups, sharing intelligence, carrying out joint operations and supplying weapons. Their targets included human rights workers and academics who had documented atrocities. The officers named remain in their posts.

Nowhere in the latest version of Plan Colombia is there mention of curbing paramilitary activity or bringing to justice those responsible for civilian massacres and disappearances.

What will be the result of Plan Colombia? The US estimates it will create another 10,000 refugees. Aid agencies believe there could be 10 times that.

Aerial spraying of coca with herbicides and bacteriological agents will destroy legitimate crops, create more forced migrants and wreak ecological damage—all without denting the traffic one iota. US helicopter manufacturers, on the other hand, think it is a fine idea. Tony Blair has also expressed enthusiasm for the plan and offered to mobilise EU support.

For Colombia’s sake, I hope he changes his mind.