In conjunction with many
geopolitical interests, general stability and prosperity in the Western
hemisphere (i.e., the stratification and disparity in wealth) have kept Latin
America, in Washington’s eyes, ripe for free trade and economic alignment.
There exist unimaginable caches of resources, such as Venezuela’s oil stores, which
could foreseeably feed into America's global capitalist system over the course
of its now decline. Hence the free trade agreements and America's subversive
efforts throughout the region. Additionally, the United States floats weak
states with military aid when it is advantageous. And, as for nonaligned groups
who resist and defend their sovereignty and/or constitutions, they acquire for
themselves the title of “terrorist” and are easily persecuted without too much formidable
pushback from an outraged American public.
To be sure, there are many
powerful mechanisms that makes US interest securable no matter the foreign
locus. Plan Colombia, which is largely ongoing proof of this, has come to
affect many Countries other than Colombia. Included are the Latin American and
Andean nations where America's drug war yet rages. As the drug war expands and
precipitates an unending capitalist genocide as far north as Mexico, the
effects of Plan Colombia grow in scale. What is yet unclear but nonetheless
palpable is the extent to which the Plan will end up eradicating the
sovereignty of Andean peoples and their nations. What is clear, however, is
that Plan Colombia has principally been a step towards regionalizing the coca-
and marijuana-growing zones of the northern Andes.
Soviets
and Drug Trafficking
The US survived the Second
World War as the definite hegemonic power in the West. Military capacity, a
lengthy post-war cycle of expansion (throughout the overall capitalist economy),
and elemental advances in science and technology each added to America’s growing
strength as a global hegemon. US supremacy, however, did not go unchecked. The
Soviet Union (USSR) proved a potential economic and political competitor on the
world stage. Washington understood this competition as a threat, one that posed
a formidable impediment to its lawless international expansion and growing global
hegemony. The Soviet threat to American “security” meant that it was also a
threat to globalizing capitalist system. Ensuing fears precipitated the US
agenda for the containment of Soviet power around the world and very much so in
Latin America.
In defense of its desire to
pursue and secure its national interests anywhere on earth, the US has promoted
coups against legitimate constitutional governments, sabotaged reformist
movements, supported both dictatorial as well as democratic regimes, and more. Washington's
two-faced approach to international politics became the “constant” in US
foreign relations in Latin America as well. To this day, relentless emphasis on
national security remains instrumental to US economic, political, cultural, and
military domination—all of which links back to America's unbelievable
self-image as the world's foremost democratic guardian of “freedom.”
By Cold War's end, the US
recalibrated its foreign policy and security plans. Drug trafficking supplanted
the Soviet threat as America's primary national security concern. The US also
sought a “re-hegemonized” Latin America by refining different forms of
intervention. This new intervention would be contextualized by an increasing
proclivity towards what Hugo Fazio calls the “universalization of a mode of
accumulation based upon transnational capital and economic interdependence,
changes in the function of the nation-state (which lost its monopoly on a
leading role in international relations), and the re-articulation of social,
political, and cultural relations.” Accordingly, the US has treated Colombia
and the Andean region as a workshop for developing new oppressive policies,
such as Plan Colombia and the Andean Regional Initiative.
The Plan, Analyses,
and Drug War Woes
Plan Colombia went into
effect some fifteen years ago and established a specific groundwork for the US to
further its imperialist inroads on the region. Conveniently, narcotics cultivation
had exploded by 1998—the same year that Bill Clinton upped military assistance
to northern Andean countries in the name of counternarcotics efforts. The
Clinton regime espoused the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act, which met
with precipitous opposition in Bolivia and Peru. Nor did the act have any
long-term affect on the international drug trade. Regardless, the US had long
made security the keystone in its antinarcotics policy, and Plan Colombia
emerged and helped US efforts to remilitarize the war on drugs in Colombia (which never successfully
engendered any kind of crop-substitution program).
The Colombian economy dragged as the military enforced its US-backed counternarcotics
terror, and the result was twofold: campesino
coca farmers strengthened ties with guerrillas, and the American drug war
intensified.
“The Plan” also made way for
the Andean Regional Initiative, whose main concern and objective was border
control throughout neighboring Andean states. The US has endeavored bilateral economic
relations and stressed security in the hopes of neutralizing any authentic
multilateral alternative to the hemispheric vision of empire. The Plan has also
made possible a fortified US military presence in South American states, something
that smacks of the national security concerns of the 1960s and 70s (when wars
against insurgents played out all across Latin America and its borders). Yet, the
“insurgency” in Colombia has roots that predate the cultivation of coca for
drug trafficking, and there is a definite paucity of geographical overlap in violence,
displacement, and coca production. If this is not enough, the locations of coca
cultivation change with time. Scholars note that human rights violations and
displacement concentrate in the western part of Colombia despite the fact that
coca production takes place in the south.
Investigating
department-level dynamics proves vital because policy decisions take effect at
a national level and can have negative (and contradictory) effects on a much
smaller scale. Poverty, too, persists in Colombia despite American aid,
military presence, and the war on drugs. Needless to say, there exists an
undeniable connection between inequality and violence. Some argue that the
connection between inequality and violence disappears when “controlling for the
level of economic development.” By implementing life conditions indexes, the
GINI coefficient, and education levels, researchers have shown an inverse
relationship between Colombia's human capital and violence comes to light (as
well as a connection between high levels of violence and high voter turnout).
Department-level analyses also reveal
that coca production in Colombia is not the driving force behind contemporary
guerrilla violence, but rather, economic factors and coca eradication are key
illuminating factors. Unbelievably, the obvious and tired logic holds that drug
production feeds Colombia’s violence, risking the stability of the region.
True, insurgent groups can alter the course of economic resources, and Colombia
has seen the cultivation of coca rise along with an increase in violence;
however, to identify the increase in cultivation as the wellspring of violence
and instability is, to be sure, an oversimplification of the bigger picture
that virtually excludes US military aid, intervention, and cocaine consumption.
Displacement, which encompasses
Colombia’s large population of internal refugees, increases relative to
increases in drug crop cultivation. America’s drug war has exacerbated this
problem. Data shows increases in political violence, for example, from the
early 1980s to high levels in the 1990s. Kidnappings also increased, along with
all types of violence and displacement. When Colombia’s economic status
deteriorated, there came a boost in coca production. Scholars, like James
Fearon and David Laitin, consider that “financially, organizationally, and
politically weak central governments” (such as Colombia) allow for insurgency,
and there is little speculation as to whether Colombia has provided a uniform,
meaningful, or countrywide state presence. It has not, and the US intends to
keep it that way with continued military assistance to fuel the drug war. Additionally,
Colombia’s rugged terrain favors rebels and insurgents who have a superior
knowledge of the local populations compared to the government. Given all the
factors, it stands to reason that if America was looking for a cold war excuse
to increase militarized inroads on South America, Colombia and its guerrillas
presented an exploitable opportunity.
Colombia, the US, and the Drug War
Some
argue that Colombian history is unique within the broader context of Latin
America. Colombia’s tether to Western capitalism and the US also proves
critical to understanding US-Latin American relations in general. Analyses of the US war on drugs, for example,
commonly stress national security or more “imperial interests,” which include
but are not limited to domestic political competition between America’s
Democratic and Republican political parties. Analysts normally consider this
aspect as central to understanding the development and implementation of drug
war policy, and especially Plan Colombia. Others maintain that a
nation-state-centric focus can lack proper consideration for something experts
call the “incipient transnational state.” This observation holds when investigating
the elaboration and implementation of Plan Colombia, which shaped many transnational
actors and processes as well as Colombia’s very own globalized capitalist
integration. Moreover, because this policy has affected American and Colombian
neoliberal political elites, as well as policy making organizations and
transnational corporations, all the moving parts behind Plan Colombia show how
US foreign policy strategies, through the lens of US imperial interests,
suffers if there is no consideration for the “interconnectedness” to the “transnational.”
Unfortunately,
violence has plagued Colombia since the middle of the twentieth century, when
in the 1940s, a bloody civil war erupted known as “la violencia.” It lasted for about a decade. The two warring
factions were the two traditional Colombian political parties: Liberals and
Conservatives. After the two compromised in 1957 (from which the power-sharing
agreement called the National Front arose), a new insurgency surfaced in the
1960s, in response to pre-existing social conflict and exclusion. This rebel
conflict continues to today, which paramilitary groups (legal and non) have
entwined for the sake of countering guerrilla groups and furthering state/para-state
control. Internal conflict, in fact, changed Colombia’s very economy. The
illicit narcotics industry sprang up in the 1970s with the advent of America’s
drug war, and by the 1980s, there were powerful networks that dipped into
Colombian politics, society, and economics. Millions of Colombians fled or have
become internally displaced since. Tragically, hundreds of thousands of
Colombians have been murdered since 1985. The usual targets include
politicians, judges, trade unions, human rights workers, and journalists.
Partly
due to such strife, Colombia has grown dependent on the US, whose war on drugs
and international terror inundates Colombia with misery that stems from drugs
and violence. Coincidentally, America’s policy leaves Colombia vulnerable to
revolutionary change. Each presidential administration in Washington has perpetuated
the war on drugs since the American war in Vietnam despite the fact that it has
largely proven counterproductive. Clearly, though, Colombia is not a “low
strategic priority.” And as cocaine funnels into the US and other global
markets, escalating US counterinsurgency grows in Colombia and oppresses its
people. Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle note that, although the drug war may have
shifted to Mexico, “deep inside Colombia the ‘forgotten’ popular struggle is
busy being born as the old order is dying.”
Who
Pays the Cost?
In a 2012 Yale study, editors Ernesto
Zedillo and Haynie Wheeler address the war on drugs through the “US-Mexico
prism.” Colombia’s experience with America’s drug war, and certainly the
situation in Central America (which they dub “a region that is fast and very
painfully becoming the latest battleground of such undertakings”), sheds much
light on the matter. Zedillo and Wheeler state, “Well before the recent Mexican
drama, Colombia had become the country enduring the greatest pain from the war
on drugs.” César Gaviria, former president of Colombia and Secretary General of
the Organization of American States, states, “No other country in the world has
paid a higher cost than Colombia in terms of lives lost of its political
leaders, judges, law enforcement agents, soldiers, journalists and tens of
thousands of innocent civilians as well as in damaged inflicted to its
democratic institutions.” Of course, Gaviria’s claim comes as an assessment of what
has resulted from America’s drug war.
Many researchers are quick to cite the nominal
decreases in Colombian cocaine production that have resulted from the
implementation of Plan Colombia (and despite its enormous cost). These
decreases have been soundly negated by extensive increases in
productivity/production in Colombia’s Andean neighbors, especially Peru and
Bolivia. What is more, the drug war has done arguably nothing affect prices of
coca base prices, which calls into question a supply-control strategy to law
enforcement that has in part cost the lives of countless innocent human beings
over the years. And the violence caused by organized crime has reached
“Colombian proportions” in Mexico in just a few short years. Many writers and
researchers acknowledge the clear association between the explosion in violence
in Mexico and the incredible flow of money, corruption, and criminal activity that
drug trafficking encourages. Joaquín Villalobos, former guerrilla and Salvadoran
politician, argues that Central America stands to suffer from drug-related
organized crime, economic strife, and both institutional and human ruin.
Surely, Villalobos worries about this looming specter because of all the
suffering and atrocity that Central America and its people experienced during
the cold war battles of the 1970’s and 1980’s that took place there.
In
all, counternarcotics efforts have resulted in dismal failure and have proven
counterproductive. But for the powers that be, all is not lost: The Colombian
state has increased its control and extended its reach into more of its territories.
Whereas, in the late 1990s guerrillas controlled and operated in as much as
sixty percent of Colombian territory, the state gained control of up to seventy
percent of national territory by 2003, and roughly ninety percent of its land
by 2007. Despite losing the war on drugs in Colombia, the United States
continues its supply-side agenda in order to win more military influence throughout
Latin America. America’s drug war is central to US domestic and foreign policy,
fomenting monumental violence these last thirty years. Domestically, the US
enacted programs to supposedly abate traffic and consumption of illicit
narcotics, but these mechanisms have altered governance, including social
welfare systems, prison systems and legal systems, and, per usual, the
marginalized suffer most.
Mateo Pimentel is an Axis of Logic columnist, living on the US-Mexico border. Read the Biography and additional articles by Axis Columnist Mateo Pimentel.
© Copyright 2015 by AxisofLogic.com
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