John Barry: "From Drug War to Dirty War"

Pues el caso sería risible si no fuera trágico: los ciudadanos norteamericanos financian las dos partes
del conflicto: como contribuyentes, ayudan a los Estados que tienen “problemas” con los narcos;
y como consumidores de estupefacientes, ayudan a los narcos a crear esos “problemas.”

- Antonio Caballero

FORWARD

On October 5th and 6th, 2001, the Journal of Gender, Race & Justice at the University of Iowa hosted a symposium titled, “The Law’s Treatment of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of the American Drug War” At the symposium, scholars from around the United States presented research on the negative direct and indirect domestic effects of the War on Drugs. The research of these scholars clearly indicates that the Drug War discriminates along the lines of class, race, and gender.[1] As a consequence, the Drug War has had a disproportionate impact on persons of color, women, and children.[2]

In summarizing the scope of inquiry of these scholars into the impact of the Drug War, the forward to the symposium states that

[a]long with our realization of the U.S. drug war’s far-reaching impact on various facets of the law, we saw that the drug war affects various groups of people differently. In keeping with the Journal’s mission, we wanted to examine the drug war’s disproportionate impact on certain individuals. At the same time, we knew we did not want to focus on a single grouping such as race or gender. In order to get a full understanding of the drug war’s scope, we decided to focus on multiple groups of individuals that the drug war has constructed as the ‘other.’[3]

This paper also examines the Drug War’s disproportionate impact on certain individuals who have been constructed as the ‘other’ -- but from an international perspective. There is no doubt that the War on Drugs has been terribly damaging in terms of its discriminatory effects in the United States, but ample evidence demonstrates that the international impact of the War on Drugs has been worse. If there were an unfortunate prize for most disproportionate impact suffered by a group “constructed as the ‘other’” by the War on Drugs, it would have been won many times over by Colombians and the other peoples of the coca-growing regions of Latin America.

1. INTRODUCTION

On September 30th, 2001, the Colombian army discovered the body of Consuelo Araujo, a popular journalist and former Colombian culture minister, in a rural northeast area of the country.[4] Nearly one week before her body was discovered, guerrilla soldiers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had kidnapped Araujo and several other people at a roadblock in the Cesar Province in northeastern Colombia. Army officials speculated that the guerrillas shot Araujo to death because “a patrol had discovered where she was being held, and had been closing in on her captors when soldiers came across her body.”[5]

The following month, on October 10th, 2001, the Colombian village of Alaska also made international headlines. “Alaska” is the unlikely name of a small village located approximately 150 miles southwest of Bogotá. Unfortunately, the massacre that occurred there was far from unlikely. Paramilitary soldiers from the United Self-Defense Forces (AUC) of Colombia entered the village in the early afternoon.[6] For several hours, the paramilitaries arbitrarily rounded up villagers, divided them by age, and then systematically shot and killed them next to a kindergarten building.[7] An additional twelve villagers kidnapped by the paramilitaries on the same day are still missing.[8]

Earlier in the year, on January 17th, approximately fifty paramilitaries murdered twenty-four men in the village of Chengue, Colombia “‘by crushing their heads with heavy stones and a sledgehammer.’”[9] Local authorities had known about the impending massacre for several months and had alerted the Colombian government.[10] Their pleas fell on deaf ears. In the wake of the massacre, two-dozen residents interviewed by a Washington Post reporter said that the Colombian army willingly allowed the massacre to occur. The residents said that, “the military sealed off the area by conducting a mock daylong battle, allowing the paramilitaries to search out and kill the Colombians they had targeted for death.”[11] The alleged complicity of the Colombian military in this massacre comes as no surprise given prior cases of military-paramilitary cooperation, amply documented by organizations like Human Rights Watch.[12]

The above descriptions are only a small sampling of the human rights catastrophe currently taking place in Colombia. Although human rights violations have historically occurred in the country as a result of internal conflicts, external factors have catalyzed these conflicts and have substantially expanded the scope and nature of human rights abuses. These external factors are the international drug trade and the U.S. Drug War. This paper examines the complex causes of this human rights catastrophe -- causes that go to the heart of the long narcotized relationship between Colombia and the United States.

In summarizing these causes, it can be said that as a consequence of United States anti-narcotics policy and the War on Drugs in general, the U.S. government is both directly and indirectly implicated in the growing human rights crisis in Colombia. Because of its past and present role in these human rights atrocities, the U.S. is in violation of the Leahy Amendment and similar human rights requirements placed on Colombian aid. However, beyond the explanation of the specific violations in question, an analysis of the U.S. role in the present Colombian conflict will allow for a more general critique of U.S. Drug War policy.

2. BACKGROUND ON COLOMBIA AND THE DRUG WAR

Just a few decades ago, Colombia brought to mind bucolic images of Juan Valdez and Andean coffee plantations. Now any mention of the country automatically elicits images of cocaine, powerful drug cartels, mafia kingpins like Pablo Escobar and the Orejuela brothers, guerrilla attacks, kidnappings, paramilitary massacres, and generalized chaos.[13] The causes of this apparent chaos are varied and complex. A recently published report by the RAND Corporation used the term ‘labyrinth’ to describe the causes of Colombia’s current instability.[14]

Even before the growth of narcotrafficking in Colombia in the 1970s, and before the declaration of the U.S. sponsored War on Drugs in the 1980s, the South American country was already wrestling with a series of internal social and political crises.[15] These crises included massive economic disparities, a burgeoning guerrilla movement, a tenuous peace after a long and terrible undeclared civil war, recurring political violence and corruption.[16] With the rise of the international drug trade and the Drug War over the last thirty years, this already complex internal situation has become much more complicated and international in scope.

Colombia is a country that is deeply misunderstood by a majority of North Americans for a variety of reasons, most of them related to stereotypes generated by the War on Drugs.[17] Given these common misperceptions about the country, it is important to provide the reader with some useful, but brief background information to better understand the complex issues addressed in this article.

2.1 Geography

Because of its location between South and Central America, Colombia has been called the “Gateway to Latin America.”[18] Colombia’s geographical location and its status as a key Latin American country have certain implications for U.S. strategic security interests.[19] Consequently, the U.S. is concerned with Colombia for much more than the circumstances involving the Drug War.[20] These strategic concerns help to explain the movement from Drug War to dirty war given the recent refocusing of U.S. military aid to be discussed below.

In comparative terms, Colombia is “slightly less than three times the size of Montana.”[21] The major urban centers are Bogotá (the nation’s capital), Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bucaramanga. Bathed by both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the country has an enviable geographical location. Poised at the northern tip of South America, this is a country of vast plains, high mountains, rivers, and rain forests.[22] The tropical rain forests of the south, and the hot, vast plains of the east come abruptly to a stop at the base of the Andes Mountains in the west, which make up the vital backbone of western Colombia.

The Andes enter the country from the south and branch off into three distinct ranges called the East, Central, and West Ranges respectively.[23] In ascending the Andes, the temperature cools and the environment changes.[24] Like most of the Native American peoples living in this area at the time of the arrival of the Spanish, the majority of Colombians currently inhabit this mountainous region.[25] It is also the Andes Mountains and the variety of microclimates found at differing elevations there that have made it possible for Colombia to become the world’s largest coca cultivator and cocaine producer.[26]

2.2 People

By the latest estimates, Colombia has more than forty million inhabitants.[27] In dispelling the media-hyped myths about Colombians, the distinguished Colombianist and historian, Professor David Bushnell, has said that,

I have had my share of bad experiences in that country as elsewhere, and I have seen things that I would rather not have seen; but I have made firm friends there and have come to love the sights and sounds and smells that assault my senses whenever I again set foot on Colombian soil. I have also observed that the great majority of Colombians (trite as it may be to say so) are peaceable, courteous, and not engaged in any kind of violent or criminal activity.[28]

It is important to add to Professor Bushnell’s observation that although the vast majority of Colombians are not engaged in any violent or criminal activity, more and more Colombians are nevertheless victims of violent crime by groups intimately tied to narcotrafficking and/or the Drug War.[29]

2.3 Economy

Colombia has a variety of natural resources, including petroleum, natural gas, coal, iron ore, nickel, gold, copper, emeralds, and hydropower.[30] In addition to exporting natural resources, the country exports coffee, clothing and footwear, processed foods, beverages, chemicals, cut flowers, bananas, and many other agricultural and industrial products.[31] Until a severe recession hit the country in 1999, the economy had been noted for its slow, but steady growth rates since 1931.[32] Prior to the recession, Colombia had enjoyed “strong business performance. . . a stable currency supported by sound external accounts and an international investment grade rating, manageable fiscal imbalances and a stable and moderate inflation.”[33] Furthermore, Colombia is the only Latin American country that has never defaulted on its international loan obligations.[34]

It is essential to emphasize the historical strength of legal Colombian economic activities to dispel the myth that Colombia is a “narco-economy.”[35] In discussing media reports about the country’s economy, Bushnell mentions that there have been “many wildly exaggerated reports about the importance of the drug business to the Colombian economy….”[36] He continues by stating that cocaine was never more significant to the economy than coffee, “even though there may have been years when net illegal earnings of foreign exchange from cocaine –- for which the best estimates ranged between 2 percent and 3 percent of Colombia’s gross domestic product –- were greater than the total export sales of coffee.”[37]

Although cocaine earnings may have rivaled coffee earnings at times in the past, the economic impact of cocaine has been much more limited because “coffee [has] employed far more people, both in the growing and, because of its bulk, in handling and transportation.”[38] It follows that the Colombian economy is by no means “addicted” to the trade in illicit drugs. However, the fact that Colombia is not a narco-economy does not mean that cocaine has not had a major corrupting influence in Colombian society. This point is particularly clear when discussing the undeniable corruption of Colombia’s human rights violators by narcotrafficking. ‘

2.4 History, Politics, and Society

In social and political terms, the phrase that has most described these realities in Colombia is La Violencia.[39] As mentioned in the Introduction, human rights violations historically have occurred in the country as a result of internal social and political conflicts. Accordingly, the internal factors of these conflicts must be examined to understand how the external factors of the drug trade and the War on Drugs have acted as catalysts to create a human rights disaster.

La Violencia was the term initially used to characterize the undeclared civil war that lasted from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, which began as a conflict between Colombia’s two main political parties and later broadened into a wider social conflict.[40] There had been political conflicts between the elites of the Liberal and Conservative parties since the nineteenth century, but this conflict differed in that it eventually transformed into a “peasant-based social rebellion.”^[41] The more than 300,000 lives lost during La Violencia are a testament to the scope and intensity of this bloody conflict.[42]

A military coup in 1953 established a dictatorship that attempted to end the violence, but Liberal and Conservative party elites -- the main contenders at the beginning of the conflict -- united to overthrow the dictatorship in 1957.[43] Garry M. Leech, publisher of the electronic journal Colombia Report, explains that

[t]he following year the Conservative and Liberal elite implemented a power sharing agreement called the National Front, in which the two parties would alternate four year terms in the presidency with all public positions being distributed evenly between the two parties. The formation of the National Front brought an end to the nineteenth-century style aspect of La Violencia: conflict between factions of the ruling elite.”[44]

Before it ended in 1974, the power sharing arrangement between traditional political elites was characterized by rampant corruption, high abstention rates, and a complete lack of legitimacy in the eyes of broad sectors of Colombian society.[45] Since the beginning of La Violencia, peasant groups had been forming self-defense organizations in rural areas of the country.[46] Liberal and Communist peasants, who instinctively distrusted the central government and large landowners, formed many of these groups.[47] After National Front governments began attacking these groups as “gangs of Communist bandits” in 1996, many of them joined forces to become the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1966.[48] During this time, the two other major guerrilla groups, the Army of National Liberation (ELN) and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), were also formed.[49]

Even though there have been other guerrilla groups since the 1960s, the FARC and ELN are the largest guerrilla organizations today.[50] Since that time, Colombia has been in yet another undeclared civil war pitting the guerrilla groups against the government.[51] The guerrillas denounce the government as a violent “false democracy” that lacks complete legitimacy.[52] Accordingly, the guerrilla groups and their sympathizers believe that an armed struggle against the state is not only a legitimate means to oppose and overthrow the government, but the only means available.[53]

With the growth of narcotrafficking between 1972 and 1982, a new and often violent social group arrived on the national scene -- the cocaine mafia.[54] Garry Leech describes the initial relationship between guerrillas and drug lords in the following terms:

During the early years of the coca boom the guerrillas and the drug lords worked together. The guerrillas controlled many of the coca growing regions while the cartels managed much of the cocaine production and trafficking. However, this informal alliance soon collapsed when the leaders of the drug cartels in Medellín and Cali began investing their new found wealth in property, primarily large cattle ranches, which placed them firmly in the ranks of the guerrillas’ traditional enemy [i.e., large landowners]. The new narco-landowners soon began organizing their own paramilitary armies in order to fight the guerrillas and the various groups they viewed as guerrilla sympathizers.[55]

Since this time, the Colombian Armed Forces have worked closely with paramilitary forces to fight the guerrillas.[56] Today, it is the conflict between these three actors -- the Colombian Armed Forces, the paramilitaries, and the guerrillas -- that is the primary internal motor of violence and human rights abuses in the country.[57] However, it is the vast amount of funds and weapons provided by the external drug trade (particularly because of U.S. Drug War policies) that have fueled the motor of violence and expanded this historical conflict into disastrous proportions.[58]

2.5 Origins and Evolution of the Drug Trade

There are at least six general historical periods related to the production of coca, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin in Colombia.[59] The first period encompasses the cultivation of coca during pre-Columbian times.[60] The second period, from the sixteenth until the early nineteenth centuries, involved the cultivation and commercialization of coca leaves.[61] The third period from 1810 to 1960 witnessed the same ancient cultural use of coca among the indigenous peoples of Colombia as in pre-Columbian times.[62]

The fourth period from 1965 to 1982 introduced the first contemporary form of narcotrafficking with the growth of marijuana cultivation on the northern coast.[63] The cocaine trade was consolidated during the fifth period from 1972 to 1991.[64] A sixth period, characterized by the processing and export of both cocaine and heroin, is discernable from 1990 to date.[65]

As mentioned above, the enormous sums of money from the illegal drug trade have had a serious corrupting influence on Colombian society.[66] In particular, narcotrafficking has had an equally corrupting influence on all of Colombia’s principal human rights violators.[67] Consequently, the usual attempt to malign only guerrillas and/or paramilitaries for narco-corruption misses the point that government security forces are equally implicated.

2.6 The U.S. Drug War(s)

From President Nixon’s first declaration of war on drugs in 1971 to the current Drug War policy of G.W. Bush, U.S. counter-narcotics programs have experienced an enormous transformation.[68] When Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one in the United States,” his proposed drug policy focused primarily on treatment, rather than law enforcement.[69] In spite of compelling research demonstrating the effectiveness of drug treatment programs and the ineffectiveness of law enforcement solutions to the problems caused by illicit drug consumption, U.S. Drug War policy since Nixon has focused primarily on the latter at the expense of treatment.[70]

During the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, Drug War policy became a main priority.[71] Counter-narcotics policy was expanded and militarized as Customs, FBI, ATF, IRS, Army and Navy were recruited into the Drug War.[72] The international, supply-side orientation of U.S. Drug War policy began to grow substantially during that time.[73] This orientation was readily apparent by joint U.S.–Mexico and U.S.–Colombia anti-narcotics operations, which resulted in the confiscation and destruction of nearly four billion dollars worth of illicit drugs in only two well-publicized drug busts in 1984.[74]

The Drug War tendencies of the Reagan Administration were continued and strengthened under the G.H. Bush Administration. The international application of military force in the Drug War reached new heights with the 1989 invasion of Panama and the conviction of General Manuel Noriega on charges of narcotrafficking.[75] The presidentialelection of Democrat Bill Clinton did nothing to change the militaristic enforcement focus of the Drug War. Instead, the trend continued with the Clinton Administration’s support in 2000 of a major military aid package, called Plan Colombia.[76] Today, in the tradition of the last several administrations, the counter-narcotics policy of G.W. Bush aims to further intensify the military aspect of the Drug War.[77] As explained in detail below, the military focus of counter-narcotics policies has already converted the Drug War into a dirty war in Colombia.

3. THE WAR ON DRUGS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

With this background, it is now possible to examine the current connection between the War on Drugs and human rights violations in the country. Today, Colombia exports an estimated eighty percent of the world’s cocaine supply and is a growing source of heroin and other opium derivatives.[78] The United States is the largest consumer of these illicit drugs produced in Colombia.[79] This narcotized relationship between the two countries has been the main catalyst of Colombia’s current instability and human rights crisis. As the Colombian journalist and intellectual Antonio Caballero puts it,

Colombia’s relationship with drugs prohibited by the United States government and consumed massively by the U.S. population can be summarized in a single phrase: it has been, in twenty-five years, the main source of moral and physical annihilation of this third world country due to the envy and hypocrisy of the North American empire. To summarize this relationship in only two words, it has been ‘a crime.’[80]

In addition to being the world’s largest cocaine producer, Colombia also has the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere.[81] The relationship between the human rights debacle and the drug trade is by no means a coincidence. As explained above, even though the production and commercialization of illicit drugs is not the sole cause of human rights abuses in Colombia, the drug trade and the attempts to limit or stop it altogether have empowered the actors most implicated in committing these abuses.[82]

According to the Rand Corporation, the ‘synergy’ between the nearly four decade old insurgency in Colombia with drug trafficking has created a situation that threatens not only the stability of the Colombian State, but U.S. national security interests as well.[83] The U.S. Government appears to have arrived at the same conclusion, given the approval last year of the 1.3 billion dollar support package called Plan Colombia during the Clinton Administration. President G.W. Bush’s Andean Regional Initiative, the name of the Bush Administration’s counter narcotics strategy for the producing and drug exporting countries of the Andes,[84] has recently adopted Plan Colombia without significant changes. As the largest aid package ever sent to a Latin American country, Plan Colombia represents a watershed in U.S. – Colombian relations and a major change in Drug War policy.[85] Approximately seventy-five percent of U.S. Plan Colombia aid is earmarked to provide weapons and training to Colombian military and police forces in the fight against narcotrafficking.[86]

This escalation of the Drug War has created a great deal of concern and criticism. The European Union, several NGOs, and a number of scholars have accused the plan of being overly militaristic and misguided.[87] The U.S. is sending hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and training to the Colombian armed forces –- an institution with a deplorable and very well documented human rights record.[88] All of this is reminiscent of the U.S. support for the bloody armed forces and paramilitary groups of certain Central American countries in the 1980s.[89]

Now it appears that under the pretext of national security, the War on Drugs in Colombia has become a dirty war with U.S. military and financial support. Once again, the United States is deeply embroiled in a human rights tragedy of enormous proportions in Latin America.[90] Sadly, the U.S. strategy adopted will almost certainly fail to stem the flow of illicit narcotics on the world market and will miserably fail to address the real problems of illicit drug consumption in the U.S.; however, Plan Colombia is guaranteed to make a bad human rights situation in Colombia much worse.

3.1 The Scope of the Human Rights Crisis

According to statistics, Colombia is arguably the most dangerous place in the Western Hemisphere. As the RAND report states, “[t]he homicide rate rose from 15 to 92 per 100,000 inhabitants between 1974 and 1995” and “[h]omicide rates for males aged 14-44 years increased from 29 to 394 per 100,000 between 1980 and 1995, a 1350 percent increase.”[91] Each day, an average of fourteen people are victims of political violence or death in combat.[92] At 3,000 kidnappings per year, Colombia is the kidnapping capital of the world.[93] In addition, there are nearly two million forcibly displaced people in Colombia and hundreds of thousands of Colombian refugees in surrounding Latin American countries.[94] People are regularly threatened, “disappeared,” tortured, kidnapped and massacred. Journalists, community leaders, human rights workers and government investigators are frequently attacked and assassinated. There are frequent extrajudicial killings, and criminals and human rights violators operate with a high degree of impunity.[95]

The internal refugee situation created by the violence has been so critical that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has maintained a permanent office in Bogotá since 1998 to monitor the refugee crisis as well as general human rights abuses in the country.[96] Human rights organizations issue permanent alerts about the crisis in Colombia.[97] Even the U.S. State Department has issued strong statements regarding the human rights abuses in the country.