In a January
op-ed for the New York Times,
Vice President Joe Biden called for $1 billion in aid to Central America to
address the migration and human rights crisis, citing Colombia as a successful
example of U.S. intervention in Latin America. More
details on the State Department’s proposal for the Northern
Triangle have since emerged, and it appears that social, economic and
development aid programs comprise 80 percent of the requested funds—a perfect
inversion of Plan Colombia’s counternarcotics and counterinsurgency aid
approved 15 years ago. While deemphasizing military aid is a positive
development, the current proposal from the Department of State would maintain
military and security funding for Central America at current levels, in
addition to the separate Department of Defense budgets for foreign military
aid.
There is also troubling language about “trade promotion” and
economic development that is code for Washington Consensus policies of free
trade, privatization and foreign investment. The current fraught reality in Colombia, a partial
result of Plan Colombia and its successor programs and a Free Trade Agreement (FTA)
with the U.S. implemented in 2012, demonstrates that throwing money at the
related issues of organized crime, violence and forced displacement – instead
of addressing how the same policies actually drive those phenomena – does not
solve human rights crises in Latin America.
U.S. intervention in Colombia has been expensive, costing
U.S. taxpayers over $9 billion since 2000, not to mention the enormous human cost
of the militarization of Colombia’s countryside. Of the seven million victims
of the conflict registered since 1954, 5.9 million victimizations have occurred since 2000, when U.S.
funding began to support Colombian security forces already known for collaboration
with brutal paramilitaries. While paramilitaries officially demobilized in
2005, many simply reformed into loosely organized criminal structures that the
Colombian government calls BACRIM, or criminal gangs. The BACRIM act
as guns-for-hire involved in drug trafficking, illegal mining, extortion,
human trafficking, and protection services for wealthy land and business owners
along with multinational corporations.
Now the biggest
threat to citizen security, the BACRIM carry out threats, forced disappearances
and assassinations against members of Colombian social movements. In January
they were responsible for a wave of
threats against Colombian journalists and human rights defenders, as well
as the 2014 spike in death threats against more than 150 human rights workers,
activists and politicians, dubbed “Black
September.” The
splintering and reclassification of the paramilitaries as BACRIM allows their
activities to be painted as a “climate
of lawlessness” that justifies U.S. intervention
and support for the Colombian state—as if both states had not tacitly
encouraged the creation of these groups in the first place via proxy financial
support to corrupt armed forces and neoliberal economic policies that decimated
economic opportunities outside the informal or illegal sectors.
At six
million people, Colombia’s internally
displaced population is the second largest in the world. Some are rural farmers
driven from their land by Plan Colombia-funded militarization and aerial
herbicide fumigations intended to eradicate coca crops. In other cases,
powerful monoculture palm
oil and banana
operations have collaborated with legal and illegal armed actors to force
communities off their land. Additional examples of this type of development
include sugar
cane production for ethanol that has all but replaced agriculture in
southwestern Colombia, while the cut
flower industry heavily promoted by USAID has devastated food security in
the savannah region surrounding the capital of Bogotá.
Even as the U.S. government has promoted these industries in
Colombia, it has protected U.S. corporate interests by privileging U.S. corn, ethanol
and other agricultural exports to Colombia under the FTA. In the three years
since the FTA was implemented, U.S. exports to Colombia have skyrocketed and
Colombia has seen its trade surplus
of $8.7 billion evaporate and balloon into a trade deficit of $2 billion. Unable
to compete with the flood of subsidized U.S. imports, small-scale producers have
been driven out of the market, prompting thousands
of Colombians to take to the streets in protest of the FTA and related
policies in 2013 and 2014.
Violent displacement, the proliferation of paramilitarism
via BACRIM, some of the highest
corruption in Latin America, widespread
impunity for human rights violations and one of the largest
gaps between rich and poor in the world continue to haunt Colombia as problems
that Plan Colombia successor programs and the FTA failed to address, or even exacerbated.
Implementing the same strategy in Central America — already reeling from high
violence and crime along with its own FTA with the U.S., DR-CAFTA — is unlikely to lead to better results. If the
Obama Administration wants to get serious about a plan for Central America, it should
pressure Congress to fund policies that address the true drivers of organized
crime and forced migration, like U.S. demand for drugs and harmful trade
agreements that privilege large corporations and the wealthy elite at the
expense of local economies and communities.
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