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 on 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
