designs other than stopping the flow of narcotics, we are meant to believe that the enemy is becoming increasingly sophisticated. “Mr. Chairman, gone are the days of the ‘cocaine cowboys.’ Instead, we and our partners are confronted with cocaine corporations that have franchises all over the world, including 1,200 American cities, as well as criminal enterprises like the violent transnational gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, that specialize in extortion and human trafficking,” said US general John F. Kelly, the commander of SouthCom, in the 2014 posture statement before the House Armed Services Committee.[55]
If we cannot see how the drug war serves as a tool for expanding capitalism, we will be left imagining this imperial strategy as a futile whack-a-mole game, where feisty criminals consistently outrun a series of multibillion-dollar military operations. In this scenario, drug traffickers are run out of the Caribbean into Mexico, out of Colombia into Venezuela,[56] and from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. But we have seen how marijuana, opium, and cocaine production not only responds to US markets, but has been historically shaped and created by US demand. Now it is time to delve into just how the drug war serves to reconfigure trafficking routes, and as it does so, brings further militarization and violence to said regions.
Chapter 3:
A Look South To Colombia
Tall and clean cut with a serious look and a small scar on his cheek, thirty-seven-year-old Fabian Laverde has been an activist for more than half his life. We met in the bottom floor of a collective house in a hip neighborhood in central Bogotá, finding a quiet room to talk while younger organizers met to plan a protest in the living room. A tent was pitched near the table, indicating that here too had become an informal safe house for someone displaced because of Colombia’s conflict. Laverde, who is the director of the Social Corporation for Community Support and Learning (COSPACC), gave the immediate impression of a rigid professional, and someone who doesn’t talk much. By the time I visited Colombia I had nearly finished the first draft of the book, and I explained to him and one of his colleagues the gist of the project. I asked what he thought of the war on drugs, and I was pleased to find out that my impression of Laverde as a man of few words was wrong. “There’s a discourse about attacking production and that whole story related to coca, but really what they try to attack is the social movement,” he said, clearing his throat gently. “If you look at the map of conflicts in Colombia, you’ll find that the highest concentrations of uniformed public forces are in the zones where the social movements resist the most. So you’ll find that there is a large military concentration in Casanare, that there’s a large military concentration in Arauca, in Catatumbo, in Cauca, and if you look at it from the other side you’ll see that the social movements become stronger and try and resist in an organized manner in these regions.”
Laverde turned the US supply-side discourse on its head, arguing that his experience of the war on drugs is nothing like what’s publicly stated. “Beyond the fact of the militarization under the discourse of the war on drugs, and saying that Colombia is a country that produces cocaine, and if Colombia didn’t produce cocaine the US wouldn’t experience the scourge of consumption, it also has to do with the fact that in most of these regions there are important concentrations of natural resources, especially for mining and energy.”
As an example of an area where transnational oil companies—in this case British Petroleum (BP), Petrobras, and others—are at the center of the conflict, Laverde cites the Casanare region, where COSPACC works. “It was possible to see that, in Casanare specifically, as transnational investment—especially in the oil industry—grew, the military apparatus strengthened, represented by the 16th Brigade of the Colombian Army,” he told me. “As those two large sectors—multinational capital and the military apparatus—were strengthened, paramilitarism also strengthened in the region.… If you take a map of Casanare and divide it into its nineteen municipalities, and you start to put some kind of symbol for assassinations, in this case false positives [civilian victims dressed up by soldiers to appear as if they were guerrilla members] or forced disappearances that took place in each municipality, we will find that Agua Azul was the epicenter … Agua Azul and Yopal. Agua Azul is the second largest city in Casanare, and Yopal is the capital. But if we look it all over carefully, all of the cases occurred very close to where the oil installations are, which belonged to the British Petroleum Company, BP.”
Casanare doesn’t have a history of coca cultivation, but it is considered an important transshipment point for the chemicals needed for cocaine production, as well as for cocaine itself. It has also been a focus of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) activity, and the National Liberation Army (ELN) and various local paramilitary organizations have also been active there. In Casanare, as elsewhere in Colombia, resources from Plan Colombia were used to go after the guerrillas, and it was civilians who paid the highest price. Laverde explained that he documented the case of a municipality called Recetor, a town that had little state presence and ongoing guerrilla activity, until the Peasant Self-Defense of Casanare (ACC) paramilitary group entered the area. Between December 2002 and March 2003, after the ACC’s arrival, at least thirty-three people were disappeared. Survivors and family members who did not vacate the area were arrested en masse by soldiers, police, and members of the secret service, and accused of being guerrillas before they were eventually released without charge. In 2011, Recetor’s city council reported that 1,232 people—95 percent of the population—were displaced.[1] But as is so often the case in Colombia, the displacement of civilians in the conflict did not mean that their lands and villages sat abandoned. Rather, one year after terror was visited on the population, Brazilian oil giant Petrobras opened offices in tiny Recetor in order to coordinate oil exploration. “This company was in charge of the Homero 1 oil well, located in the community of El Vegón, where it is believed in the coming years there will be new seismic testing for oil reserves; all of this in exchange for victims, who are added to the list of the thousands of disappeared in Casanare and Colombia,”reads Laverde’s report.[2] The same phenomenon took place with startling regularity in various areas, as entire communities were driven out of their homes only to return years later to find that their land had been planted with palm oil trees or was being explored for minerals.
In Colombia, the connections between Plan Colombia, state, paramilitary, and guerrilla violence, and natural resources vary greatly from one region to another, but organizers, activists, and those who are directly impacted regularly insist upon their connection. In addition to state security forces’ collusion with narcotrafficking groups, the country has powerful paramilitary structures that support not only the drug trade but also the repression of insurgent groups and social movements. Colombia also has multiple, long-running guerrilla insurgencies, a factor that differentiates it from any other country in the hemisphere. Thus, in addition to fighting narcotics, an important part of United States policy in Colombia is combating leftist insurgencies and (in terms of official discourse) terrorism.
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
