Washington's war in Colombia

...The lack of significant debate in the Senate was caused in part by the defection of some Democratic leaders traditionally strong on human rights, including Senator 26 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 Christopher Dodd from Connecticut, who lobbied strongly for the Blackhawks...

...But any comprehensive solution is difficult, requiring not only local programs but agrarian reform efforts throughout the country...

...Though it was long a stronghold of the country's largest and oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), for the past three years right-wing paramilitary groups have steadily gained control of small towns under the protective wing of the Colombian armed forces...

...We don't need coca, we need money...

...Only the silent testimony of occasional graffiti betrays the outward calm...

...Colombia has long been synonymous with drugs, and the dramatic violence associated with the Colombian drug cartels, is a staple of American popular culture from Miami Vice to Get Shorty...

...Rather than direct military intervention, the United States provides escalating assistance in the form of equipment, training, and intelligence technology, as well as advisers to elite battalions handpicked by the Special Forces...

...This aid is for counterinsurgency, pure and simple," an intelligence official told me in Bogota...

...Now, the United States is planning to intensify fumigation efforts in Putumayo...

...The Democratic leadership urged a reconsideration of the entire approach, focusing on demand reduction and treatment, while the Republican leadership, backed by the Clinton White House, pushed for military spending...

...I'm just trying to get by with the ten hectares I've managed to earn with hard work and loans, growing plantains, yucca, and coca, and now it's all been destroyed...

...His proposal inDISSENT / Fall 2000 n 25 POLITICS ABROAD volved economic and development aid for the small farmers growing coca, in hopes that the international community would respond to the devastation caused by drug production and trafficking as it had to the devastation of Europe after the Second World War...

...Along the low concrete walls and across shuttered storefronts, spray paint shouts: "Army assassins...

...Right-wing paramilitary groups have used profits from the drug trade to finance their dramatic expansion in the past decade as well...

...Some have traveled as long as eight hours to meet me, by foot and canoe...

...Guerrilla traitors...

...The War in Colombia The bulk of this assistance—$600 million—is destined for the "Push into Southern Colombia...

...The role of Colombia in the drug trade has shifted over the years, from marijuana exportation in the 1970s, to cocaine processing and shipping in the 1980s, and increasing drug cultivation in the 1990s...

...military expansion...

...Given the options, it's not a bad life...

...Of the $1.3 billion package for Colombia, more than 80 percent is for military aid...

...Prompted by our host, a local health promoter unleashes a flood of complaints...

...Unlike in Peru and Bolivia, where peasants have for centuries grown and chewed the coca leaf (a mild stimulant compared with processed cocaine), in Colombia this practice was limited to a very few, small indigenous groups...

...Expenses in remote rural areas are high, but coca farming has allowed many families to send their children to school and survive in the increasingly depressed rural economy...

...military, which POLITICS ABROAD was looking for a new mission at the end of the cold war and anxious to preserve ties with Latin American military forces...

...The mayor of one of the region's major towns told me that in his municipality alone more than six thousand families live off small coca plots, but no one asked him...

...No one has ever come here asking why we grow coca...

...Using a modified weedcutter, they shred the leaves, mix them with cement powder, then soak them in barrels of gasoline...

...Money laundering has distorted the Colombian economy and led to increasing land concentration as drug dealers buy up huge farms...

...officials classify the entire Colombia proposal as counternarcotics aid, claiming that the battalions will act only against drug operations...

...However, these conditions were significantly weakened in conference...

...military command with jurisdiction over Latin America, the drug war is an opportunity to apply the low-intensity conflict skills honed during thirty years of fighting guerrilla insurgencies and the principal means of maintaining and enhancing relations with militaries throughout the region...

...Farmers have complained that fumigation has destroyed food crops, caused respiratory illness and skin problems, and destroyed their only means of support, while the coca cultivation has simply moved into new areas, including Putumayo...

...policy toward El Salvador in the 1980s...

...100 a month...

...Coca in Colombia is grown on industrial plantations owned by absentee landlords and on small family farms alongside food crops...

...But Colombians don't mince words...

...The teachers, the storekeepers, the doctors— even church donations at Sunday mass...

...No to the gringo invasion...

...military aid in 1999, after Israel and Egypt...

...instead of coca...

...More attention was devoted to the helicopter companies competing for the lucrative contracts that the package would generate—Connecticutbased Sikorsky, maker of the more expensive and sophisticated Blackhawk, or Texasbased Bell Technology, source of the more pedestrian Hueys...

...Clinton administration documents anticipate displacing ten thousand plantation workers, with four thousand small farmers remaining in the area...

...The Coca Wars Sitting in the concrete cool of a local community building, a group of farmers accompanied by a tiny, round-faced nun won't meet my eyes as they talk about the coca grown by their neighbors...

...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...

...programs in Colombia is U.S...

...Colombia in Washington When Colombia's telegenic new president, Andres Pastrana, visited Washington in October 1998, President Bill Clinton promised to expand the bilateral agenda beyond drugs to include human rights, trade, and peace...

...The bill passed by Congress includes aid for the victims of these efforts—$15 million "to provide shelter and employment for the Colombians who will be displaced during this push into southern Colombia...

...15,000 a year, well above the minimum wage of U.S...

...In all cases, the people working the land are peasants and itinerant workers, known as raspachines...

...For officials with SouthCom, the U.S...

...The process itself is simple...

...The two largest Colombian drug cartels, dismantled in the mid1990s, have been replaced by smaller, more vertically integrated trafficking organizations whose nimble, independent traffickers are much more difficult to detect and infiltrate...

...After a final refining process, cocaine is shipped north, where it sells for as much as $100 a gram on the streets...

...POLITICS ABROAD Colombia and the Drug War What is called "drug trafficking" in the United States is in fact a major, multifaceted, and global industry...

...During the debates in the House of Representatives, critics, led by the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, argued for increased support for domestic treatment of drug abusers and against military funding for Colombia...

...Some paramilitary chiefs are high-level traffickers and have used drug profits to finance massacres and assassinations, killing hundreds and forcing thousands of peasants from their lands...

...In fact, the money and violence generated by drug production and trafficking magnified existing schisms and have come to fuel all the actors in the war...

...During that and subsequent visits, Pastrana requested support for the nascent peace process with the FARC and assistance for his "Marshall Plan" for southern Colombia...

...No one with the administration has produced an explanation for these numbers, which woefully underestimate the rural population directly involved in coca production...

...Shortly thereafter, the Senate also voted to approve the package...

...We'd be perfectly happy to change, if you tell us you need yucca, we'll grow that and send it to the U.S...

...According to one Pentagon official, their objective will be to "permit the Colombian government to take control of Putumayo and [the neighboring state of] Caqueta in two years...

...Yeah, I grow coca, and I'm not afraid to tell President Pastrana or President Clinton...

...Frustration with the closed political system in the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of guerrilla groups, most of which adopted variations of a Marxist line...

...Most peasants have sad stories of projects that have been tried and failed—because of lack of long-term investments, markets for the new crops, or technical assistance...

...In areas where economic and community development efforts are combined with sustained assistance, however, some communities have found ways out of the coca quagmire More complicated and less marketable in an election year than helicopters, these kinds of long-term solutions are rarely considered in Washington...

...The wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid cannot compare, however, to the price Colombians will pay as the war escalates...

...This opened the door for an expanded role for the U.S...

...One man stands and summarizes their protests...

...These traffickers employ new and constantly changing shipping routes through Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean for moving cocaine and, increasingly, heroin...

...Now, however, the war on drugs has replaced communism as the driving force behind U.S...

...Regional alliances between drug traffickers, local military commanders, and landowners unleashed a "dirty war" in the 1980s, in which thousands of reformist politicians, including more than two thousand members of the Patriotic Union (born of frustrated peace talks between the FARC and the government)— union leaders, peasants, and community organizers—were killed...

...Even U.S...

...Day laborers earn the equivalent of U.S...

...government study published in July 1999 reported that "despite two years of extensive herbicide spraying...

...Peasant farmers in Putumayo grow most of Colombia's coca—the raw material for cocaine...

...But the "war on drugs" is becoming more and more a real war, with billions of dollars in military aid, helicopters, guns, and training recently approved for the Andes, mostly Colombia...

...Since 1996, the United States has sprayed thousands of acres of Colombia with Glyphosate, a commercial herbicide that kills a wide range of plant life, while refusing to provide any development assistance for the region...

...6 to $10 a day, and a family with a four-hectare plot can earn up to U.S...

...pesticides sprayed from the sky are already drying up their crops...

...Stretching from the Andean foothills to the Amazon jungle along the border with Ecuador, Putumayo is a frontier province, with a history of bloodshed inspired by regional conflict and international trade (British rubber companies were active here at the turn of the century...

...Unfortunately, instead, Congress tripled assistance for militarized counternarcotics programs, making Colombia the third largest recipient of U.S...

...The FARC has increasingly financed its activities by taxing coca crops and by protecting drug processing labs and other illicit installations...

...This strategy dramatically increased U.S...

...Unfortunately, this escalation of the war on drugs will not stem the drug trade, and may escalate the crime and bloodshed in the longest running internal conflict in Latin America...

...With congressional approval last spring of a huge aid package, the United States will be joining the fray, deploying three elite Colombian army battalions trained and 24 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 equipped by the Pentagon...

...Putumayo is known best in the United States as the name of a world music record label and a high-end natural fabric clothing line, but it is also the name of a river, and the state the river runs through, in southern Colombia...

...The House approved the Colombia package with only minor revisions...

...On industrial plantations, contract workers carry out a larger scale version of the same process...

...The resulting powder is coca base, sold in southern Colombia for about $700 a kilo...

...This past June, thousands of peasants gathered in a public hearing in southern Colombia (part of the ongoing negotiations between the FARC and the government), to present their concerns about counternarcotics operations and offer alternatives...

...Some senators justified their failure to question the policy by pointing to the strong human rights conditions included in the Senate version of the bill...

...Hydrochloric acid is added to the liquid squeezed from this mixture to crystallize the alkaloid...

...Everyone here lives off coca, absolutely everyone," a local human rights ombudsman explained...

...The country now faces the worst economic recession of the century, escalating war, and rising social discontent...

...Some Colombian politicians have taken to calling the drug trade the mother of all evil in Colombia...

...Drug lords have corrupted the political process and weakened already faltering democratic institutions through threats, assassinations, and bribery...

...This led to a spirited two-hour debate on the merits of U.S...

...By anyone's measure, the civil war in Colombia has been going on for a long time...

...net coca cultivation actually increased 50 percent...

...funding for eradication programs targeting illicit crop cultivation and for military hardware and training for security forces involved in counternarcotics operations in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia...

...Like any such enterprise, this trade involves a huge range of individuals and secondary businesses and has evolved over the past decades to respond to market pressures and demands...

...The most contentious issue there was not the wisdom of military aid, although a few lonely senators (Paul Wellstone and Barbara Boxer) expressed their doubts...

...This funding will be used to train and equip elite battalions of the Colombian Army, and to provide them with helicopters and intelligence assistance...

...counternarcotics policy...

...Life for them is hard, they explain, with no roads and no doctors...

...Despite administration pressure, the Colombia package did not sail through Congress as expected...

...In recent years, cultivation of both coca and poppies (used to make heroin) has expanded enormously in Colombia...

...WINIFRED TATE is a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America...

...Land conflicts and partisan violence between the two traditional parties in the 1950s left more than two hundred thousand people dead and forced more than one million from their homes...

...A U.S...

...The model for U.S...

...All their proposals focused on manual, voluntary, and gradual coca eradication, with the provision of real economic alternatives...

...any resolution of its continual crisis seems further away than ever...

...The same year, the Department of Defense was named the "single lead agency" for the detection and monitoring of illicit drug shipments into the United States...

...President Clinton presented the results of those meetings in January 2000...

...Since the early 1980s, drug traffickers, together with landowners and local military commanders, formed paramilitary organizations to "clean" their territory of guerrillas and alleged guerrilla sympathizers and to protect land, cattle, cocaine laboratories, and strategic shipping routes...

...Today the conflict is fueled by the drug trade...

...DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 27...

...A power-sharing agreement to end the conflict maintained a formally democratic structure, but made political reform virtually impossible...

...I grow coca and I'm tired of all this...

...All that money comes from coca, because no one will buy anything else that we grow here...

...military personnel admit the lines are blurred...

...You could be in any rural tropical region of Latin America— the same wandering cattle that drift onto the road, the same teenage soccer teams in shiny polyester uniforms playing in roadside fields, the same swept dirt yards of tiny farms, overrun with chartreuse flowers and scrawny chickens...

...Most coca base, the first refining stage in making cocaine, is produced at home by the peasant families who grow the coca...

...Despite efforts at reform, including a new Constitution in 1991, the Colombian government continued to falter in the 1990s, while guerrillas and paramilitary groups grew...

...In 1989, President George 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...

...With new interest in Colombia, numerous congressional delegations visited military installations and toured coca fields by helicopter, while high-ranking administration officials, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, met repeatedly with government officials in Bogota...