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 was the closest US ally in the region and lauded as a partner and a true democrat. In Colombia, he was 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