Unsavory Allies: U.S. Power and the Drug War in Columbia
by Elanor Starmer '96

Early this year, outside an elevator at the National Defense University, I met an old, balding man named General Carlos Ospina Ovalle. Recently appointed head of the Colombian army, Ospina was in Washington to receive an award from the U.S. government for his leadership and military excellence. In my three years working on Colombia with a human rights and policy organization in Washington, I had heard Ospina’s name mentioned frequently—but quietly and carefully, as if speaking the name itself could somehow do harm. This is because Ospina, who cheerfully greeted me on his way to the elevator, is best known in human rights circles for his participation in Colombia’s 1997 El Aro massacre, in which a brigade under his command aided a private armed militia as they entered a town, rounded up civilians, and murdered them in front of their families.

General Ospina is by no means the only military commander in Colombia with such a past; in fact, among Colombia’s military elite, a history of “excesses”—to use that euphemistic term—is frighteningly commonplace. Despite these abuses and the impunity enjoyed by those who commit them, Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, trailing only Israel and Egypt. Shortly after Ospina’s award ceremony this spring, the U.S. Congress passed another in a series of massive aid packages to the armed forces he controls, bringing U.S. assistance to Colombia in the last three years to a total of over $2.5 billion.

U.S. power in the form of military aid to Colombia was not intended to promote the abuse of human rights by Colombian generals, but was first wielded as part of a domestic war on drugs. The hemisphere’s largest producer of cocaine, Colombia is now the front line in America’s war. But in our quest for measurable successes in the drug arena, our aid has had far broader repercussions. In choosing a brutal military as our drug war ally, we have fueled a civil war and eroded the trust of Colombian citizens, undermining the very institutions that could help ensure the hemisphere’s long-term stability.
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The late 1980s first brought U.S. law enforcement to Colombia’s dense jungles and urban battlefields in search of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Following Escobar’s assassination in 1993, and U.S.-sponsored drug eradication efforts in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador which effectively shifted coca production to Colombia, that country became a major exporter of cocaine. Communities in poor, isolated provinces such as Putumayo, on Colombia’s southern border, welcomed the modest income that coca brought them. In the words of one Colombian peasant leader, “We prefer growing coca to dying of starvation.” Putumayo’s rural areas have no major markets or banks and few paved roads, and traffickers used the underdevelopment to their advantage by bringing money and supplies in by helicopter—something few governments were willing to do at that time.

By 1999, Colombia was producing 80 percent of the hemisphere’s cocaine, and Colombian President Andres Pastrana asked the international community for social and economic assistance. Backed by President Clinton, the U.S. Congress passed a $1.3 billion package called Plan Colombia, most of which funded the Colombian armed forces for anti-drug work. But this was not a continuation of the hunt-to-kill operations of the Escobar era. Plan Colombia stepped up the fight against a more benign and less specific enemy: the coca plant, and, by extension, the people who grew it. Trained, equipped and funded by the United States, Colombian military battalions now fly aerial fumigation missions that drop herbicides on fields in Colombia’s southern provinces with the hopes of reducing coca yields. The policy of aerial fumigation is outlawed in Bolivia and Peru, and has never before been used on such a massive scale.

In the spring of 2002, I traveled to southern Colombia to document the impact of U.S. fumigation policy. There I met Juan Ramirez, a Colombian farmer who owns three acres of land on which he plants corn, yucca, and plantains for his family. Some of his neighbors plant coca. In November 2001, spray planes dropped herbicides throughout the area. And despite the claims of U.S. officials that only coca fields were targeted, Juan Ramirez’s food crops withered and died a few days later, along with both the food crops and coca crops of his neighbors.

In 2000, the U.S. Congress pledged to use fumigation as a “stick” to scare communities out of growing coca, but farmers like Juan Ramirez, who never grew coca, were not supposed to be targeted. After their cash crop had been destroyed, his neighbors were supposed to receive the “carrot” of alternative, legal crop assistance, so that they would not go back to planting coca. The U.S. funded the fumigation of almost 300,000 acres of land last year alone, but since the beginning of 2001, has provided alternative crop assistance to farmers on only 30,000 acres. The Colombian government’s Human Rights Ombudsman—an official mediator between the government and the people on human rights issues—has documented numerous cases in which U.S. spray planes have actually fumigated alternative development projects by accident, including several funded by USAID. The result has been a humanitarian disaster for all who find themselves under the wing of the spray plane. “Sometimes,” a Colombian development worker told me, “I go to the communities and sit with the men in their doorways, and they have nothing to do now that they cannot farm. Sometimes we play cards. On bad days, we look out at their withered crops and we cry.”

There is no accurate way to calculate the extent of the human damage from our fumigation policy. The numbers, though, can tell at least part of the story. In 2001, after the fumigation of 200,000 acres of land, drug cultivation in Colombia rose by 25 percent as farmers with no alternatives moved their families elsewhere and planted coca again. Last year, although statistics showed a moderate decrease in Colombian cultivation, coca planting in Bolivia and Peru rose for the first time in seven years-along with record numbers of refugees fleeing to those countries from Colombia. As the drug reformers on Capitol Hill frequently remind us, one of the few laws Congress can’t repeal is the law of supply and demand.
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In 2000, U.S. policy toward Colombia was only supposed to be about drugs. But like our search for coca fields, we tried to pinpoint Colombia’s drug problem on the map of its complex history, intervening only there—and we missed. Getting involved in Colombia is risky business for reasons besides the profligate drug lords who made the country famous. It is also home to the longest-running insurgent war in the hemisphere: for 40 years, the government has been battling self-professed leftist guerilla groups, the largest of which is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Over the course of the civil war, the FARC has earned a reputation for slaughter and moral corruption, and the Colombian military has earned the worst human rights record of any state security force in the hemisphere for its attacks on civilians living in FARC-controlled territory.

In the mid-1980s, private right-wing paramilitary groups gained strength as well, and now work hand-in-hand with some sectors of the Colombian military to attack the FARC and their suspected sympathizers. The paramilitaries are responsible for some 70 percent of human rights violations in Colombia each year, and fund their activities from, among other sources, drug trafficking. To Colombia’s many ironies, then, we have added our own: the United States is sending anti-drug funding to a military that works with drug traffickers.

In response to concerns over paramilitary-military ties, administration officials have highlighted training programs designed to teach the Colombian military respect for human rights and deference to civilian laws and institutions. This faith in the potential of military-to-military relations has been exercised before during U.S. missions in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Despite the tragic outcomes of those experiments, Congress continues to act on the belief that U.S. power, in the form of massive appropriations and the on-the-ground presence of U.S. military personnel and contractors, can help wash Colombia’s corrupt institutions clean of their past, protect civilians, and, most important, keep the hemisphere safe from drugs and “narcoterrorists.” Three years and nearly $3 billion into this policy, however, we have failed to achieve these goals. And in a country where drug profits, corruption and the armed conflict are so intertwined, it is not surprising that our anti-drug aid would have negative repercussions beyond the sphere of drugs.

Putumayo, for example, has seen a massive increase in paramilitary activity since U.S. military assistance began in 2000. In Villa Garzon, where one U.S.-funded brigade is based, paramilitaries parade the streets openly and have begun systematic murders of civilians. “How is it,” asked a community leader of international observers, “that we’ve been taken over by the AUC [paramilitaries] in broad daylight... when these places are entirely controlled by the public forces?” The Colombian government’s human rights ombudsman concluded in a recent report that “the public security situation in Lower and Middle Putumayo [areas with a presence of U.S.-funded Colombian troops] has worsened considerably and the presence of illegal armed groups has grown.” Caught between a corrupt military, armed groups from the left and right, and the threat of fumigation without alternative crop assistance, many farmers in Putumayo have fled in search of a stable life. But others have joined either the FARC or the paramilitaries, who offer security and a salary. The fumigation campaign in Putumayo may be a farmer’s nightmare, but to the armed groups, it is a recruiting field day.
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On my last day in Colombia last year, I sat in the office of the government’s Human Rights Ombudsman, who was sharply criticized by his superiors for condemning the fumigation program on human rights grounds. On the wall was a poster for the agency’s newest anti-violence campaign. It was a photograph of a man on the ground, his chest bloody, with the circle and cross of a rifle sight positioned on top of him. At the bottom, in lilting Spanish, was a weak appeal: “If you get him in your sight a second time, think about whether it’s really worth it to shoot him again.” The official sitting below the poster looked as tired and desperate as the meager plea printed above him.

While fumigation has failed as a drug policy, our choice of the Colombian military as an ally in the effort has had much broader, deeper repercussions: The worst outcome of our policy is the weakening effect it has had on institutions that could improve life in Colombia in the long-term. U.S. policy toward Colombia, while focusing on drugs, has also outlined broader policy goals which include “peace, prosperity, and the strengthening of the state.” These broader goals are much harder to achieve because they are complicated by factors over which the U.S. has little control—history, family and community ties, the desire for profit or revenge. To reach them, we will have to rely on and support institutions like the Ombudsman’s office, which has shown itself able and willing to stand up to entrenched corruption even within its own administration, or a mediating party like the United Nations. Instead, our unilateral approach has been to write human rights into our policy goals with one hand, while with the other to fund a military that has no reason to respect human rights or go after drug trafficking allies as long as the money keeps flowing.

Imagination is needed as we begin to hammer out our own policy alternatives. Ending military aid and fumigation in Colombia is a start, but the effort must be accompanied by support for those programs and institutions that protect human rights: crop assistance and training for small farmers, judicial reform, protection of human rights defenders, and fair trade; drug treatment and prevention programs at home. All of this, of course, is exceptionally complicated; there is no easy remedy for what ails Colombia. But our experiences in Central America in the 1980s highlight the shortcomings of a hope for reform that is pinned on aid to military regimes. With each dollar we continue to send to militaries like Colombia’s, the meaning and power behind the words we value—democracy, freedom, rights, liberty—is slowly disappearing. If we hope to support those values abroad, they must be the starting point of our foreign policy, and not an afterthought.
Reach Elanor at estarmer@lawg.org.