Shooting up Colombia
White, Robert E.
cut domestic drug demand. Yet we will casually intensify an- ...
...The Council jority of Colombians from the country's political and ecolasted for five years and saw his death, but it nomic life...
...As Linda Robinson writes in World Policy Journal (Winter 1999/2000): "The U.S...
...But cess only if they are made understandable by precision of Colombia's treasury is empty and the chances of an angry, language, clarity of objective, and transparency of purpose...
...To the authors of the original Plan Colombia, the prob- Nevertheless, this was the moment for the Clinton adlem of illicit drug crops is inextricably bound up with the ministration to have come in with its billion-dollar aid packdesperate struggle of campesinos to survive in a region of age: 75 percent for economic and social assistance, and 25 total government neglect...
...This may be too sim- overridden Colombian policy requirements came from Unplistic...
...Dialogue the Colombian military with its long history of undermining with the guerrilla organizations and civil society is crucial to presidential peace initiatives...
...Although our military intervention in Colombia's years old, Angelo civil war is only in its beginning stages, our policy already Giuseppe Roncalli was displays those telltale patterns of official deception and disonly expected to stage tortion that presage failure...
...At a Euro- Clinton's Colombian initiative fails on every count...
...bian government cannot stand up to Washington pressures...
...cision for the Pastrana government, and very possibly for 0-8245-2356-3 $19.95 hardcover the country as well...
...In Colombia, the Clinton campesino cultivators...
...NY 1000] it with just another massive counterinsurgency operation At your hookstore or call 1-800-395-0690...
...El Commonweal 10 October 6, 2000...
...As part of my duties, I coordinated priorities into a preexisting Colombian plan and representthe embassy's counternarcotics program...
...Pastrana, however, specifically rejects the with whom I have spoken, it should be read as a declara- term narco-guerrilla, used so frequently by McCaffrey and tion designed to bring an end to the national-security state the Colombian military...
...He has develton's dotty war on drugs...
...The conflict is deepwith eyes wide open merits respect, even praise...
...We later learned that both the chief of the national age is titled, "Emergency Supplemental for Plan Colombia...
...Of istration has conducted its diplomacy...
...Subsequent negotiations of peace through investment that will produce the social, have repeatedly broken down...
...involvement on any terms he Meanwhile, more than three-quarters of the U.S...
...aid packmisfire...
...While all his statements taken together do not add up to a coherent Robert E. White, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, policy, McCaffrey has repeatedly insisted that our interis president of the Center for International Policy in Washington, vention rests on the bedrock of Plan Colombia...
...To overMy fascination with Colombia goes back to the mid-1970s come American reluctance to intervene in another country's when I served for three years as deputy chief of the Amer- civil war, administration aides have written our drug-war ican embassy in Bogota...
...It also requires the Colombian military and some minor funding for economic and social developCommonweal 9 October 6, 2000 ment could be subsumed under the overall American strat- pean donor meeting in early July, Colombians raised $621 egy of reasserting Colombian government control over the million out of a hoped-for $1 billion, most of it in loans that entire national territory...
...priorities...
...According to Alejandro Reyes ern Ireland, the Korean peninsula, and the Middle East, he of the National University, the history of the country can has achieved solid progress toward peace through diplo- be seen as "a long, drawn-out struggle between large matic support for negotiations and, in the latter two cases, by landowners and small peasants, between cattle-raising and timely financial support to guarantee the durability of any subsistence agriculture, between [members of] a powerful agreement...
...It pronarcotics program were in the pay of drug traffickers...
...Of the three trips I made last year, one included a ership of Columbian President Pastrana...
...As Columbian President Andres Pastrana said recently, ecoSHOOTING UP COLOMBIA nomic and military pressure on drug-producing countries U.S...
...police and the general in charge of the Colombian counter- the key chapter is "Push into Southern Colombia...
...With this onciliation had been heard...
...Although D.C...
...and hold them for ransom...
...This was the time to have launched a multinationsite for the transformation of rural Colombia through pro- al peace initiative to create a surge of confidence inside the grams of land reform, massive investment in farm-to-market Colombian government that its plans for healing and recroads, schools, health centers, and access to credit...
...administration has proved even more imaginative...
...Despite the con- ed the radically altered outcome as a Colombian request for siderable risks run by the highly professional agents of the military assistance...
...In North- rooted, complex, and brutal...
...little choice but to secure U.S...
...that is already driving Colombia closer to the brink of economic and social chaos...
...However, funds-alit drugs and for redistribution of the huge estates purchased most without limit-were available to fight the war on drugs, with drug money...
...Pastrana's ability to keep the army in line, environment...
...To Pastrana, the FARC are authenin which the army, in conjunction with the paramilitaries, tic revolutionaries who seek political power through force of treated the insurgents as subversives, to the point that even arms but who are open to negotiation and compromise...
...ing of coca leaf, only 1,000 square miles is needed to meet the In El Salvador in the 1980s, the Reagan administration world's demand for cocaine...
...Above all, this was the time to new cooperative relationship between the central govern- have sent a message to the guerrillas that the United States ment and local authorities, the campesinos' dependence on il- did not intend to intensify the war by concentrating aid on licit drugs will diminish and ultimately disappear...
...and they assassinate Defense is conspicuously absent from the list of state insti- suspected paramilitaries and people they believe support tutions with responsibilities for the execution of Plan Colom- them...
...Yet to se- 1999, stated, "The peace process must support and not incretly convert a peaceful negotiating strategy in Colombia terfere with narcotics cooperation...
...Termed the Common Agen- were forced to explain that the world's richest power lacked da, the agreement calls for an end to the cultivation of illic- the resources to nourish civil society...
...Furbia appeared with chapters on drug eradication thermore, by defining the Colombian crisis in largely military and military force...
...As a New York Times editorial put it, FARC's "bad bebia...
...The titles tell Already seventy-seven the story...
...All sources agree that it is the paramilitaries who this...
...visit to southern Colombia, the area that is soon to be the Truth is again the first casualty of war...
...government...
...Colombian territory cannot be explained by references to In the first year of his administration, Pastrana's bold ne- illicit commerce...
...a transitional papacy...
...With unemployment in Columbia must be repaid...
...divided Congress voting for new taxes are nil...
...To get stated that the "peace policy of the government rests on four FARC to the negotiating table, Pastrana made a number of pillars: negotiation, political reform, tolerance (convivencia), important concessions, including establishing a safe area and citizen security...
...Many human-rights activists in Colombia believe bution to the revised plan is for military aid...
...To fund a military campaign that involves the United States y September 1999, after a series of meetings be- in another country's civil war while insisting that the pursuit tween American officials and Pastrana, a re- of a negotiated peace yield to the priorities of an unwinnable B vised English language version of Plan Colom- drug war makes neither ethical sense nor policy sense...
...Always distrust policy that depends for its legitimacy on Nowhere in the original plan is there reference to the erad- the demonization of the enemy...
...The revised Plan Colombia is form on which he was elected...
...into a military campaign, and then to represent the result For the United States to conceal its role in turning Plan as nothing more than our contribution to Pastrana's original Colombia's priorities on their head is to convince all who Plan Colombia, raises serious questions about the merits of know the truth, including guerrilla leaders, that the Colomthe policy...
...gotiating strategy achieved one important success...
...Coast Guard Academy, he said that Pastrana "has asked for our help to finance his comprehensive Plan Colombia to fight drugs, build the economy, and deepen democracy...
...the success of Plan Colombia...
...In both letter and spirit Plan Colombia constituted a re- havior and repeated snubs at peace talks have made Mr...
...jection of the drug war and armed combat among Colom- Pastrana look weak and damaged the public consensus for bians...
...for example, remains tenuous...
...That was the good news...
...This first version of Plan Colombia for the guerrillas by withdrawing government troops from states that "its objective is to contribute to the achievement a large area in southern Colombia...
...they attack remote police staNowhere is there mention of a role for the military in the tions with bombs and other indiscriminate weapons that achievement of a negotiated solution...
...As I General Barry McCaffrey, U.S...
...In their view, a negotiated settle- percent for upgrading and professionalizing the Colombian ment and the cooperation of the insurgents is a prerequi- military...
...And revolutionary leaders who had laid down their arms to enter he is correct that an insurgency which has acquired the the political life of the country were routinely hunted down strength and cohesion to dominate more than 40 percent of and assassinated...
...particular importance in assessing U.S...
...The bad news was above 20 percent, with foreign investment disappearing and that of the twenty-seven nations attending, only threethe credibility of his government sinking fast, Pastrana had Spain, Japan, and Norway-actually pledged support...
...Thus, aerial eradication makes justified its military intervention on the grounds that the no sense except as a weapon to reduce the wealth of the in- Salvadoran insurgents were not real revolutionaries, that surgents in Colombia's long-running civil war, who depend they took up arms not in their own cause but only as for a share of their income on the "taxes" they collect from hirelings of Moscow and Havana...
...drug czar and former comflew over jungle and savannah and drove across the ne- mander of the Southern Command, has emerged as the adglected countryside, I thought about the arrogance of our ministration's leader on Colombia, and by his definition the government's refusal to take common-sense measures to crisis requires military action to interdict drugs...
...Yet we will casually intensify another country's civil war so that contract pilots can safely Robert E. White rain down herbicides over the fragile Amazon ecosystem...
...Clinton has yet to make a major policy address on Colombia, Commonweal 8 October 6, 2000 he too has made repeated references to Plan Colombia...
...In the explanatory text, Plan Colombia is described cently as adviser to various congressional and private dele- as "a counternarcotics initiative developed under the leadgations...
...In May When the Pastrana government approached the Clinton 1999, the Colombian government signed a pact with the administration to seek funding for this bold but sound proRevolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), clearing ject, sympathetic if embarrassed State Department officials the way for formal negotiations...
...Although the two guerrilla forces occasionicy initiatives undergo detached, searching ally engage in combat with the Colombian military and its analysis by foreign-policy professionals imme- paramilitary allies, this war is more about massacres of civilP diately make this world a saner and more se- ians and selective assassinations than about armed concure place...
...They kidnap rich Colombians any other method that might harm the environment...
...aid will do more harm than good makes little sense unless the consumer countries, such as the United States, do their part...
...FARC's commitment to a economic, and cultural transformation of the critical zones of negotiated peace is uncertain...
...drug war to wage a veiled counterinsurgency effort, even though past experience teaches that policies founded on duplicity are bound to fail...
...opened wide the windows of the Church - by The Clinton administration has failed to grasp that its reabating the old pomp, and leading the Church sponse to the initial Plan Colombia was a life-or-death deinto a New Age...
...beneficiary of massive American security assistance...
...The FARC are guilty of ication of coca and poppy plants through aerial spraying or gross abuses of human rights...
...Colombians know better: while gard these military actions as directed not only against the more than 2 million square miles of land is suitable for grow- guerrillas but against the entire rural population...
...policy is Reyes's obIn Colombia, however, the limits on our power to inter- servation that "guerrillas, like illicit crops, only become more vene effectively have been ignored-a victim of Washing- entrenched when they come under attack...
...Colombia's long-running civil war and the flourishing Instead, he became the drug trade will yield never to force of arms but only to a Pope of Transition by strategy that confronts the pervasive corruption of Colomconvening the Second bia's institutions, the intimate working relationship between Vatican Council in its army and the paramilitaries, and the exclusion of the ma1962...
...contricould get...
...It can be read and, according to Colombian officials negotiations...
...In fact, the Ministry of have resulted in many civilian deaths...
...The clearest that the Clinton administration simply strong-armed the statement of how completely Washington's priorities have government to accept the military aid...
...Clinton may insist, as he did in oped compelling evidence that "insurgents gather force and Cartagena, Colombia on August 30, that his policy is only a strength from state repression because the campesinos recounter-narcotics strategy...
...These promising initiatives owe much of their privileged class who own most of the land and campesinos success to the candor and openness with which the admin- who lack any influence, resources, or access to credit...
...It is legitimate for Washington officials to insist that dersecretary of State Thomas Pickering who, in October the receiving government consider U.S...
...Drug Enforcement Agency, our operations seemed always to The legislation authorizing the $1.3 billion U.S...
...Pastrana was elected to the presidency on the strength of his campaign promises to end the war by means of negotiations and to transform Colombia by means of a broad-ranging reform program...
...Instead, Washington treated Plan Colombia as a bargaining chip that forced Colombia to abandon the 'I'HE CROSSROAD PUBLISHING COMPANY only approach that had any chance of success and replaced 481 Eighth Avenue, Suite 1550, New York...
...is using popular backing for the "I am called John...
...vides funding for sixty attack helicopters, an array of dubiOver the last two decades, I have returned to Colombia ous intelligence activities, and three counternarcotics batmany times, at first in the course of official duties, more re- talions...
...Christian Feldman Of the many important books to come out of Vietnam and JOHN XXIII Central America, two of the very best were Neil Sheehan's A Spiritual Biography A Bright Shining Lie (Random House, 1989) and Ray Bonner's Weakness and Deceit (Times Books, 1984...
...estimated to cost $7.5 billion, with the Colombian govern- In our democracy, controversial policies can achieve sucment to contribute $4.5 billion over the next three years...
...On May 17, at the U.S...
...Overall, his record of confronting international crises account for 75 percent of the killings...
...Trust between the two sides is conflict, at the same time guaranteeing the preservation of the at best fragile...
...It would to be months before a Spanish terms, we have undercut Pastrana and destroyed the plattext would become available...
...Four major armies roam over Colombia, a country of 40 residents who require that all major foreign pol- million people...
...Colombians were inspired by their to fight the paramilitary forces, funded primarily by large courageous young president who, upon taking office in 1998, landowners involved in cocaine and heroin traffic...
...Duplicity is not too strong a word...
...In most cases, President Bill Clinton has done frontation...
Vol. 127 • October 2000 • No. 17
