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]
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
