August 2001

Last year, the U.S. Congress approved an unprecedented $1.3 billion for aid to Colombia. This represented the U.S. contribution to the $7.5 billion Plan Colombia, originally designed as a multifaceted, five-year program, aimed at addressing the country’s many ills by promoting peace. It was presented by President Andrés Pastrana in late 1999 and endorsed by President Bill Clinton in early 2000.

However, a year later, while still only in its initial implementation stages, Plan Colombia has already engendered heated political debate, created many negative reactions, and produced severe ill effects on the conflict itself.

The almost exclusive anti-drug focus of U.S. aid, featuring the eradication of coca crops by aerial fumigation of pesticides in the southern departments, gave Plan Colombia a whole new direction and character, essentially erasing its original broad-based approach. Four-fifths of the U.S. resources were allocated to the military and police, making Colombia the Western Hemisphere’s prime recipient of U.S. security assistance. Plan Colombia sent the message to Colombians that, rather than betting on the peace process, the United States was putting its money on escalating the war.

The same message reverberated in Brussels and other European capitals, where Plan Colombia quickly met with opposition, especially to its military component and emphasis on aerial fumigation. For this reason, Europe has fallen far short of the $2 billion that it, along with Canada and Japan, had been targeted to contribute.

But more significantly, Plan Colombia has divided Colombians, contrary to its stated intention to unite them.

The plan was never consulted, discussed, or debated within Colombia before it was presented abroad. Neither the directly-affected local communities nor their elected officials were brought into the decision-making process. While the U.S. Congress has held countless hearings and open sessions on Plan Colombia, the Colombian Congress has yet to hold its first.

In the regional elections of October 2000, all of the southern departments targeted by Plan Colombia elected governors who had run on strong anti-fumigation platforms. Upon taking office, they formed a common front to propose their own version of Plan Colombia, based on gradual, manual, and concerted eradication, accompanied by subsidies and credits to enable peasant farmers to find viable alternatives to coca.

The most dramatic effect of Plan Colombia has been on the internal war. Although it was billed in the U.S. as counter-narcotics intervention, it is clearly seen and understood in Colombia as counterinsurgency. Although the bulk of the military hardware –mainly Blackhawk helicopters- has yet to arrive and will only be fully in place at the end of this year, Plan Colombia has already had a strong impact on each of the parties to the armed conflict, shaping the way they view each other and develop their respective strategies.

On one hand, it has rekindled hopes for a military solution within the army and conservative elements of the civilian elite. After years in which the guerrillas have held the upper hand on the battlefield, Plan Colombia has led many to believe that now, thanks to U.S. help, it would be possible to turn the table on the rebels. Pastrana thought that Plan Colombia would strengthen his hand in peace talks with the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; in fact it has done the opposite, by reducing his room for maneuver and encouraging mistrust on the part of the insurgents. The Armed Forces have increased their already significant leverage within the government, tilting the balance of civilian-military relations further in their favor.

Plan Colombia has equally emboldened the insurgents. It has finally given some credence to their life-long claim of fighting for national liberation against Yankee imperialism. In departments like Caquetá and Guaviare, there is no doubt that increased rebel recruitment is greatly due to the discontent generated among peasants by aerial fumigation. Plan Colombia has played into the hands of the hard-liners within FARC who have argued all along that the government, far from pursuing social reforms and negotiating peace, is preparing their military defeat. In fact, there are documented reports that the FARC acquired ten thousand AK47’s via Peru’s notorious former intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos; this, the group has stated, is only the beginning of its response to Plan Colombia. There is now an internal arms race, in which the guerrillas, with their ample resources and fewer troops, have a clear long-term advantage over the army, which must rely on Colombian and U.S. taxpayers to sustain current levels of military spending.

The implementation of Plan Colombia has also coincided with the fast growth of the right-wing paramilitary groups, most of which belong to the AUC, the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia. The AUC has moved into the department of Putumayo, where most of the coca fumigation is taking place. Some observers have interpreted the AUC migration as Plan Colombia’s unofficial "first phase," designed to clear the way for the army.

Plan Colombia was focused solely on the southern part of the country, the FARC’s historic stronghold, and not in the north, where the paramilitary groups are based. Many see this as evidence that Plan Colombia is a counterinsurgency strategy disguised as counter-narcotics. Carlos Castaño, the leader of AUC, has publicly announced his support for Plan Colombia: evidently, he too sees it more as an arm against the FARC, his hated enemy, than as an effective strategy against narco-trafficking, from which he has confessed deriving 70% of his organization’s income.

But the strongest effects of Plan Colombia are not being felt by the armed actors to the conflict, but by civilians, the principal victims of the war’s escalation. On average, two civilians are killed for every combatant, most of them peasants in the countryside. The last decade of war and political violence has produced close to two million internally displaced persons. Of the two to three thousand unarmed civilians kidnapped yearly in Colombia, about 60% are taken by the guerrillas. Youths under the age of 18 make up approximately one-fifth of both the rebel forces and the paramilitaries. On all counts, the Colombian war is fought far below standards set by international humanitarian law for the due respect and protection of civilians. By escalating the war, Plan Colombia only contributes to the increased number of civilians massacred or forced to flee their homes.

Citizen peace initiatives and grass-roots peace-building efforts have also been severely hampered. In recent years, workers, peasants, women, students, as well as business leaders and the Catholic Church organized peace projects. [Link to DeCesare] Colombian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rigorously document and denounce human rights abuses. But often those who speak out against the war or in favor of human rights are seen by the armed actors as enemy agents. Peace activists, human rights advocates, labor leaders, university professors, students, and journalists, are the principal targets of political violence. Many of the country’s best and brightest have been forced into exile, adding to the Colombian diaspora thousands more who are leaving for economic reasons, as well.

Ironically, there is one aspect on which Plan Colombia is likely to have no impact whatsoever: drug trafficking. In the first place, it focuses almost solely on the coca producers, which make up the weakest link of the chain of illicit activities of narco-trafficking. Little, if any, advance is made on interdiction, not to mention money laundering, control of precursor materials, arms control, and other more delicate affairs on which Plan Colombia is mute.

Secondly, past experience has clearly demonstrated that aerial fumigation in one area only serves to displace the coca cultivation. While there is a demand to be met, the so-called "balloon effect" has shown that "successful" eradication in Peru and Bolivia led to an increase in coca crops in Colombia, just as massive fumigation in Guaviare and Caquetá in 1995 and 1996 simply pushed the illicit cultivation down to Putumayo. Already, Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil have expressed concern over the spillover of Plan Colombia into their territories and its effects on regional security.

It must be said that, thanks to the lobbying efforts of many influential NGOs in Washington, D.C., the U.S. component of Plan Colombia also includes some positive elements (though these unfortunately have been overshadowed by the preponderance of negative ones). For the first time, the United States is funding alternative development projects, and even outspending the Europeans on this front. Protection for human rights activities and for strengthening the justice system are laudable lines of action within the "social portion" of Plan Colombia.

Plan Colombia’s greatest potential lies in its insistence on the rule of law. It should impel Colombian security forces to improve their abysmal human rights record and to sever all links with the paramilitaries. Unfortunately, however, by invoking the presidential waiver for reasons of national security, Washington sent exactly the wrong signal: violations of human rights will be overlooked in the name of the war on drugs.

Lastly, Plan Colombia must be viewed in a larger economic context. The broad-reaching agreement the Pastrana administration signed with the International Monetary Fund, though technically unrelated to Plan Colombia, seems more than consonant with its aims. The IMF agreement dictates severe cuts in the transfer of revenues from the central government in Bogotá to the regional and local authorities, a deep reform of the pension system, privatization of several state-owned entities, and reductions in social spending. All of these measures clearly go against the grain of commitments that will surely arise from any future peace accords. The Pastrana administration has recently stressed the importance of free trade in attracting foreign investment, and enthusiastically endorses the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

All of this serves to indicate that U.S. involvement in Colombia goes far beyond Plan Colombia. Yet drugs continue to dominate the US optic of what takes place in Colombia.

While Colombia is at war, no drug policy will ever be successful. And the fighting will not stop until the root causes of Colombia’s crisis--land distribution, social inequity, political exclusion, and violence--are addressed through a negotiated settlement of the armed conflict. For this reason, the best way to defend U.S. national interests is to actively support the peace process in Colombia.

Although the U.S. has formally supported Pastrana’s peace negotiations, it has largely limited itself to paying lip service, avoiding any serious commitment. Thus far, U.S. policy has confused backing Pastrana with support for the peace process, which will necessarily extend beyond his presidential term (which expires in August 2002).

In recent history, when the United States defined peace as the clear central policy objective, it has even "stepped on the toes" of its traditional allies—Israel, in the case of the Middle East, and the UK in the conflict with Northern Ireland. In Colombia, the U.S. should apply its huge leverage with the army and civilian elite to effect the democratic transformation that is needed to stop the bloodshed. In the process, the U.S. would cease to be the prime instigator of the war as it is today, and become the key player in the peace of tomorrow.