Correspondence
Four thousand five hundred policemen were on hand to protect President Clinton last August, in the "secure oasis" of Cartagena, Colombia. Announcing a $1.3 billion American plan to eradicate the...
...This applies to both private and public property, and legitimizes extreme predatory behavior so that today it is accepted for a person to take wealth from whomever has it, including the state...
...Pastrana cannot run for reelection...
...Population: 40 million...
...Poor people in Colombia, as in most other parts of Latin America, do not enjoy secure property rights, but the guerrillas protect their property in exchange for "taxing" the crop...
...the country, along with the herbicide Roundup, produced by Monsanto...
...Since then, coca leaf has been growing in Farclandia "like corn in Kansas," another visiting journalist wrote...
...The general insecurity of property in Latin America has also played a role...
...Army General Barry McCaffrey, on a recent visit to Colombia...
...As long as the farmers remain illegal landowners [because there is no legal framework for property rights], short-term cash crops, like coca and opium poppies, remain their only alternative," Hernando de Soto writes in his new book, The Mystery of Capital "For small farmers in some areas of the developing world, money advanced by drug traffickers is practically the only credit available, and because their property arrangements appear in no official system, law enforcement cannot even find them, never mind work out an enforceable crop substitution agreement...
...Their ten-point plan has advocated a more just distribution of land...
...You forgot your intellectual property...
...Colombia is more than twice the size of Texas...
...One consequence is that peasants are discouraged from switching over to higher-valued, legal crops, such as coffee or pineapple, that require more capital investment and longer time horizons than coca...
...Professing Marxism, they remained hidden in the Andes for decades...
...Colombia furnishes the raw material for 80 percent of the worlds cocaine supply, and perhaps half the heroin...
...He was instantly rebuked by that mysterious body called the "international community" and could not even secure a visa to visit the United States...
...Announcing a $1.3 billion American plan to eradicate the country's most valuable crop, the president sounded an unavoidably defensive note...
...Pastrana looking at an empty chair in front of television cameras and photographers...
...Aid dollars are raining down on their water cannons...
...Large parts of the country are said to be "government-tree," a vacuum abhorred by Congress...
...it is sold with labels warning users "not to apply this product in a way that will contact workers or other persons, either directly or through drift...
...In the Andean foothills, poppies also flourish...
...Coca farmers in poor regions have been able to earn several thousand dollars a year from the crop...
...In every defense of "Plan Colombia" we are reminded that the country is Latin America's "oldest continuous democracy") Pastrano's predecessor, Ernesto Samper, took the path of least resistance- six million dollars in "campaign contributions" from the traffickers...
...Leftist influence since the 1960s has undermined all institutions, including the law...
...Marulanda delivered a calculated snub by failing to appear, sending subalterns instead and leaving Mr...
...It enjoys a working relationship with the president of Colombia, a former television journalist by the name of Andres Pastrana, who was elected in 1998...
...Pastrana withdrew all government forces from an area larger than Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined, and more or less let the guerrillas run their own show...
...This was a "crucial miscalculation," the NewYork Times reporter on the scene boldly wrote...
...This is not Vietnam," he said...
...A corollary has been "the lost legitimacy of propTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ? March 2001 19 Some said President Pastrana's concessions were naïve, but who could blame the man...
...The "lack of legal protection" obliges the growers of drug crops "to band together to defend their assets, or call on traffickers to defend them," de Soto added...
...He had already been kidnapped once, in the admittedly risky pursuit of running for mayor of Bogota...
...Coca production, down elsewhere as a result of American pressure, has in recent years soared in Colombia...
...Violent protests rocked the American embassy in Bogota, and three banks were bombed...
...Pastrana has chosen a more sophisticated course...
...The largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 17,000 strong, is known by its Spanish-language acronym, FARC...
...The key to understanding the drug war in Latin America is the symbiotic relationship between peasant growers and their "guerrilla" protectors...
...Land for peace...
...But they, too, have since gone into the more profitable, and victimless, business of protecting and "taxing" coca...
...The cocaine is increasingly said to be "pharmaceutical grade...
...Unemployment rate: 20 percent...
...The head guerrilla is Manuel Marulanda, aged 70, and under him are commandantes galore...
...Nor is it Yankee imperialism...
...In the U.S...
...Andres Pastrana was elected as a "peace candidate," at one point being photographed with Marulanda himself, in the Colombian equivalent of a White House lawn photo-op...
...A remote storekeeper near the border with eeper near the border with...
...While it apparently was never used, when the cops mixed the stuff it left a faint redolence, and you could smell it in downtown Davos...
...Some took to the hills in 1964, at the time of Che Guevara...
...Some said this was naïve, but who could blame the man...
...Since then, the negotiations have repeatedly stalled, with the FARC breaking off discussions every time the government refuses to bend to one of its demands...
...Murder rate: ten times that of the United States...
...That would render powerless the $300 million in Plan Colombia for farmers who switch to legal crops...
...On national television that night, Clinton said: "We do not believe your conflict has a military solution " But 60 armored helicopters would soon be on their way, along with herbicides to defoliate the coca fields, and military advisers to train new army battalions: Plan Colombia...
...The illegality of the crop shelters both guerrillas and peasants from the competition of more efficient producers elsewhere in the world...
...Farclandia (as the Switzerland-sized zone was soon called) had been intended as a gesture of good faith, "to lure the rebels into peace negotiations...
...He started a "peace process" with the guerrillas...
...The landowners developed protectors of their own, known as "paramilitaries," occasionally as "right-wing death squads...
...Coca leaf requires little soil preparation, and in the tropics several crops a year can be harvested...
...erty rights," Francisco Thoumi writes in Political Economy and Illegal Drugs in Colombia...
...He had already been kidnapped once, in the admittedly risky pursuit of running for mayor of Bogota...
...But when the president flew south for opening peace talks in the largest town in Farclandia, a few weeks later, according to the New York Times, "Mr...
...Sometimes they would kidnap wealthy landowners for ransom...
...Colombian farmers have become the world's most productive growers of coca leaf...
...It is "totally safe," said drug czar and U.S...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
