|
p o l i c y b r i e f Colombia's Role in International Drug Industry This brief was commissioned and originally distributed by the IRC's Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. It is reproduced here courtesy of FPIF. Foreign Policy in Focus—A Think Tank Without Walls—can be accessed online at http://www.fpif.org Key Points
What is called “drug trafficking” in the U.S. is in fact a major, multifaceted, and global industry. Colombia’s role in this industry has evolved over the past decades. In the 1970s, a boom in marijuana cultivation along Colombia’s Atlantic Coast created a class of newly rich traffickers supplying the U.S. market. In the late 1970s, Colombia’s new cartels, first in Medellin and then in Cali, expanded from marijuana to the processing and export of cocaine. Led by a small number of powerful drug kingpins, these family-based empires came to control a billion-dollar cocaine industry that processed coca grown primarily in Bolivia and Peru. The power and violence of the drug industry came to permeate all facets of Colombian society, as signified by the saying “plata o plomo”—silver or lead—meaning “take the bribe or take a bullet.” Drug lords achieved unprecedented political influence through threats, bribery, and political contributions. Drug violence also undermined Colombia’s longstanding democracy, particularly during the 1980s, when the Medellin Cartel waged war on the Colombian government, killing hundreds of judges, police investigators, journalists, and public figures. In addition to these targeted killings, paramilitary organizations—supported by drug traffickers—have carried out more generalized violence in rural areas against the civilian population. Since the early 1980s, drug traffickers, together with landowners and local military commanders, have formed paramilitary organizations to “clean” their territory of guerrillas and alleged guerrilla sympathizers and to protect land, cattle, and cocaine laboratories and strategic shipping routes. During the 1990s, ties between illicit drug operations and paramilitary organizations solidified, with several paramilitary chiefs becoming high-level traffickers. For instance, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has labeled paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño a “major drug trafficker.” Castaño is the public face of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an umbrella group of regional paramilitary forces. Over the past three years, the AUC has orchestrated hundreds of massacres and selective assassinations throughout Colombia, in many cases with the support of local Colombian security forces. The U.S. State Department estimates that paramilitary forces are responsible for more than 70% of Colombia’s human rights abuses. Beginning in 1989 with the “Andean Strategy,” U.S. funds, equipment, logistical support, and personnel from the DEA, the CIA, and other agencies have played a leading role in counternarcotics operations in Colombia. U.S.-assisted operations resulted in the killing of Pablo Escobar in 1993 and the jailing of the heads of the Cali Cartel in 1994. However, the breakup of the two largest cartels did not lead to a long-term decline in Colombian drug trafficking. These drug syndicates have since been replaced by smaller, more vertically integrated trafficking organizations whose nimble, independent traffickers are much more difficult to detect and infiltrate. These traffickers employ new and constantly changing shipping routes through Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean for moving cocaine and, increasingly, heroin. In recent years, cultivation of both coca and poppies (used to make heroin) has expanded enormously in Colombia. Unlike in Peru and Bolivia, where peasants have for centuries grown and chewed the coca leaf (a mild stimulant, compared with the processed form, cocaine), in Colombia this practice was limited to a very few, small indigenous groups. While coca cultivation has recently declined in Peru and Bolivia due to U.S.-financed eradication programs, cultivation in Colombia increased 54% from 1996 to 1998, leaving overall Andean coca production constant. Guerrilla groups active in areas of increasing coca cultivation, primarily the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), have increasingly financed their activities by taxing coca crops and by protecting drug processing labs and other illicit installations. The dramatic increase in coca cultivation in southern Colombia, a FARC stronghold since the 1960s, coincided with the organization’s strategic effort to increase its military capabilities in the mid-1990s. Although politicians in Washington frequently use the term “narcoguerrillas” to imply a complete integration of Colombia’s drug cartels and guerrillas, there is no evidence that FARC and other insurgent groups are involved in the illicit industry’s most lucrative stages: transshipment and sale of drugs on the international market. According to the DEA, “There is little to indicate that insurgent groups are trafficking in cocaine themselves.”
Problems with Current U.S. PolicyKey Problems
In 1989, President Bush declared that the “gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs,” and he announced the “Andean Strategy” to reduce the amount of illicit narcotics entering the United States. Over the last decade, this strategy has expanded and intensified “source country” counternarcotics operations. Antidrug funding for Colombia has dramatically escalated from $18 million in 1989 to almost $300 million in 1999. U.S. programs in Colombia have been two-pronged: extensive herbicide spraying in illicit crop growing areas, primarily coca fields in southern Colombia, and hundred of millions of dollars in military hardware and training for Colombian security forces involved in counternarcotics operations. Despite inflated funding, counternarcotics efforts have failed dramatically. A July 1999 General Accounting Office (GAO) report found that “despite two years of extensive herbicide spraying, U.S. estimates show there has not been any net reduction in coca cultivation—net coca cultivation actually increased 50 percent.” Coca cultivation has moved further into the Amazon and into increasingly remote areas. Peasant farmers, pushed into colonizing isolated regions because of political violence and land pressure in other areas of the country, have turned to coca and poppy production as a means of economic support for themselves and their families. A lack of regional development programs and the failure of the Colombian government to provide basic services have worsened social tensions. U.S.-financed fumigation campaigns targeting peasant growers actually work to the guerrilla’s advantage by further exacerbating social tensions. This climate of discontent has helped swell the ranks of FARC and has cast the guerrilla organization as the defender of small peasant farmers. The second major thrust of U.S. counternarcotics policy—support for Colombia’s security forces—has meant increased support for army and police counterinsurgency campaigns. Since 1989, the Colombian National Police (CNP) has received the vast majority of U.S. counternarcotics assistance in the form of military hardware and training. This has been consistent with Washington’s contention that the police should be responsible for domestic law enforcement, including eradication and local interdiction efforts, while the military should protect Colombia’s borders and concentrate on international interdiction operations. Beginning in 1999, however, U.S. assistance for the Colombian Army—couched as counternarcotics assistance but destined for combat troops in FARC-controlled areas—as well as U.S. support for military intelligence operations has grown dramatically. As a result, U.S. counternarcotics aid is increasingly indistinguishable from counterinsurgency aid. In addition, there are some 300 U.S. advisors on the ground in Colombia from an array of agencies including the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the DEA. The current level of military assistance and number of advisors in Colombia on any given day has now reached levels comparable to U.S. involvement in El Salvador in the 1980s. Some government and military officials as well as members of Congress have raised the concern that the U.S.—by sharply increasing its hardware, training, and intelligence support for the Colombian army (despite eschewing direct intervention)—is being drawn, once again, into an unwinnable and costly Latin American civil conflict. Due to the secrecy surrounding many of these operations, particularly those by the DEA, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies, the exact dimensions of U.S. aid to Colombia are impossible to determine. The ground for this shift in policy was laid by a December 1998 military cooperation agreement between the U.S. and Colombia. This agreement followed several years of rocky U.S. relations with the Colombian Army because of human rights violations and U.S. frustration that the Colombian armed forces were not sufficiently committed to performing counternarcotics operations. The new cooperation agreement includes the establishment of a bilateral “working group” of U.S. and Colombian defense officials and the creation of a counternarcotics battalion staffed by the Colombian Army and equipped and trained by the United States. By late 1999, embassy officials in Bogotá confirmed that three such battalions were being formed. According to U.S. officials, these battalions are intended to support CNP counternarcotics efforts in southern Colombia and to protect against attacks by FARC. The battalions will be under the command of the army, and sources within the CNP complain that the police have been largely marginalized from coordination efforts. The training and equipment provided for this battalion, as well as its theater of operations, point to an overriding counterinsurgency mission. The first battalion received light infantry and jungle warfare instruction from U.S. Special Forces. The U.S. is also training and funding the Colombian Special Forces Battalion and Special Forces School, which were instrumental in army victories during the July guerrilla offensive. In addition, the U.S. provides military intelligence assistance that could be used in counterinsurgency operations. A June 1999 GAO report revealed that the U.S. is sharing military intelligence on Colombian insurgents but not monitoring how Colombia’s security forces are using this information. The U.S. has been instrumental in establishing the Joint Task Command, a Colombian military and police facility intended to coordinate all operations in southern Colombia. Washington also helped reorganize Colombia’s military intelligence following the 1998 disbanding of the armed forces’ intelligence brigade due to its role in human rights abuses. The extent of the U.S. role in Colombian intelligence gathering was brought home with the July 1999, plane crash in which five U.S. and two Colombian military personnel were killed. No Colombian police were on the plane, which was involved in intercepting FARC communications. Toward a New Foreign PolicyKey Recommendations
The U.S. should recognize that its war on drugs against Colombia and other “source countries” has been a failure and that it must refocus on demand-reduction at home through education and treatment. Although overseas efforts will not solve our domestic drug problems, the U.S. does have a range of policy options that could support Colombian efforts to confront drug trafficking and the violence and corruption caused by that country’s drug trade. Any significant advance against drug trafficking is unlikely as long as Colombia’s civil war continues. The opening of peace talks between FARC and the administration of President Andrés Pastrana (who took office in August 1998), the first attempt at negotiations in seven years, offers a precious opportunity for peace. The people of Colombia desperately want peace. On October 24, 1999, upwards of 10 million Colombians marched for peace in Bogotá and other cities, the largest public demonstration ever in the country’s history. President Clinton pledged support for the peace process and expressed his intent to broaden U.S.-Colombian relations to address a range of issues, including human rights, judicial reform, and trade. This verbal commitment has not, however, been translated into decisive and comprehensive support for peace and alternative development programs. In fact, U.S. counternarcotics policy is escalating Colombia’s conflict and continues to present obstacles to the fragile negotiation process. The U.S. should stop its counternarcotics programs in Colombia and switch to encouraging economic development for illicit crop producers. In 1998, Congress, for the first time, allocated money for alternative development in Colombia—$15 million over three years. But skepticism could easily give way to cynicism regarding this effort: by late 1999, only a half million dollars had been spent on alternative production, while U.S. military aid to Colombia soared to almost $300 million for 1999 alone. Further, current policy dictates that no money can be allocated for development projects in southern Colombia due to guerrilla presence. In fact, alternative development projects are operating in those areas, funded by the Catholic Church, the Colombian and European governments, and the United Nations—and some of these programs have even been destroyed by U.S. fumigation campaigns. Both peasant farmers and President Pastrana have requested increased investment in development programs for conflictive areas involved in illicit crop production. Peasant farmers in southern Colombia, including coca growers, have repeatedly called for more government assistance. In 1996, these farmers organized a large protest march to demand better government services, only to be met with violent repression from military and paramilitary forces. Although the Colombian government signed a series of agreements for increased public spending on infrastructure, health, and education, these promises have yet to be fulfilled. In 1999, Pastrana repeated his appeal for international support for “Plan Colombia,” an ambitious program calling for substantial investment in development programs. However, Washington’s FY1999 aid package and the FY2000 proposals before Congress apportion more than 90% of U.S. assistance to military hardware and training for the Colombian security forces. Washington’s aid policy toward Colombia should change to address Pastrana’s development objectives. In addition, the U.S. should dedicate significant economic resources toward strengthening and reforming civilian democratic institutions, particularly local judiciaries. The Colombian Attorney General’s Office, particularly the Human Rights Unit, has carried out a number of important investigations of human rights cases. Yet the Colombian military rarely cooperates with these investigations and has successfully blocked some probes. Because of death threats, many prosecutors have been forced to leave the Attorney General’s Office; several have fled the country. The U.S. Congress has expressed its support for these human rights investigations but has failed to provide significant assistance. Congress and the Clinton administration should publicly encourage the Colombian government to take immediate measures to combat paramilitary groups, including purging members of the armed forces who maintain ties to paramilitary groups or who tolerate their activities and enforcing the hundreds of outstanding arrest warrants for paramilitary leaders. The U.S. should deny visas to Colombian military officers implicated in human rights violations and support of paramilitary activities. Given the persistent pattern of human rights abuses by Colombia’s security forces and their support for the vigilante violence of the paramilitary groups, the U.S. should terminate all assistance to Colombia’s security forces. Sources for More InformationOrganizationsAmnesty International USA Center for International Policy Colombia Support Network Latin America Working Group Transnational Institute U.S./Colombia Coordinating Office Washington Office on Latin America PublicationsHuman Rights Watch, War Without Quarter: Colombia and International Humanitarian Law (Washington: Human Rights Watch, 1998). Joy Olson and Adam Isaacson, Just the Facts: A Civilian’s Guide to Defense and Security Assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington: Latin America Working Group, 1998). Ricardo Vargas, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Illicit Drug Trade (Washington: WOLA, TNI, Accion Andina, 1999). Washington Office on Latin America, U.S. International Drug Control Policy: A Guide for Citizen Action (Washington: Washington Office on Latin America, 1999). WebsitesDrug Enforcement Administration El Tiempo Office of National Drug Control Policy Peace Brigades International Semana U.S. State Department Colombia Human Rights Report This brief is a product of the Interhemispheric Resource Center's Global Affairs and Americas Programs. All rights reserved. Recommended citation: "Colombia's Role in International Drug Industry," Foreign Policy In Focus Policy Brief, vol. 4, iss. 30 (Interhemispheric Resource Center/Institute for Policy Studies, June 2001). Web location: http://www.americaspolicy.org/briefs/2001/v4n30colo.html |