Julia Duranti, Witness for Peace Colombia
While the least-productive Congress in history went on vacation in August without addressing the Central American
child refugee crisis, others opined about possible solutions. In an August 5 op-ed
in the Los Angeles Times, Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development
Bank, suggested policymakers look further south to Colombia and use the $8
billion Plan Colombia aid package as a model for U.S. assistance to the
Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. On August
18, Daniel Runde of the Center for Strategic and International Studies echoed
the call in a blog
for Foreign Policy.
This is a deeply flawed recommendation for
a number of reasons. Plan Colombia was never intended to be a development aid
package, but rather a counternarcotics and counterinsurgency strategy at a time
when the largest guerrilla insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC), posed a serious risk to the Colombian state. At that time,
Colombia was also the world’s top producer of cocaine destined for the U.S. In keeping
with the War on Drugs supply-side reduction doctrine, policymakers claimed that
by eliminating coca crops—which contain the basic compound needed to process
cocaine— rather than reducing the demand for cocaine, they could eradicate the
drug problem in the U.S.
They were wrong. While coca production in
Colombia initially decreased after Plan Colombia took effect in 2000, it has
since stabilized
at close to 120,000 acres, and coca cultivation in the neighboring Andean
nations of Peru and Bolivia has increased.
Nearly fifteen years later, overall cocaine production between the three
countries has
dropped, but this is a complex phenomenon that also has to do with shifting
demand, like reduced cocaine
consumption in the U.S.—where heroin
use is on the rise. Colombia is still the top supplier of cocaine the U.S.,
with about 95 percent of the market. Violent groups continue to struggle over access to trafficking routes and
processing labs.
The military equipment and training
supplied to Colombian state security forces as part of Plan Colombia simply
added fuel to the fire in a half-century long conflict for land and natural
resources. This conflict involves other armed actors in addition to the
guerrillas: paramilitary death squads,
or what the Colombian government now calls “criminal bands.” The Colombian
military has a long and storied history of collaborating with these groups to
commit some of the worst human rights violations in the 50+ year war, including
murders, massacres, forced disappearances, torture and sexual assault.
In a particularly chilling practice known
as “false positives,” Colombian military systematically murdered innocent
civilians and then dressed them up in guerrilla fatigues, presenting them as
enemy kills in order to gain rewards like bonuses and extra vacation time. This
practice, it bears mentioning, was developed as part of the “body count”
mentality promoted through U.S.
training. The Colombian government has opened investigations into 5,000
such cases since the scandal broke in 2005.
It is true that homicides and violent crime
have decreased since Plan Colombia began, but only because the conflict has
been pushed to the most remote, rural areas of the country. Assassinations have
become more targeted as illegal armed actors increasingly rely on threats and
forced disappearances, which are harder to classify as politically-motivated
crimes. Periods of relative calm in historically violent cities like Medellín
and Cali are often the product of the victory of one particular criminal group
that then controls the area or truces
between rival gangs, rather than better work from law enforcement
structures, which continue to at least tacitly support criminal gangs in many
areas. Politicians at all levels,
from local to national, have been implicated in these narcoparamilitary
structures.
Taken together, the aggressive counternarcotics
and counterinsurgency agenda pushed by Plan Colombia and funded by U.S.
taxpayers has worsened, not improved, Colombia’s human rights crisis.
Colombia’s internally displaced population is 5.7 million
strong—second in the world only to Syria. The U.S. has never seen a flood
of Colombian refugees, but that is because of geographic barriers, not because
these refugees don’t exist.
The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with
Colombia, another much-touted growth strategy, has also done little to improve
the situation. Colombia´s trade balance with the U.S. has
plummeted 200 percent, down from a surplus of $950 million just last year.
Meanwhile, the economic growth that Colombia has seen recently is limited to
extractive industries, which have serious, destructive environmental impacts,
and were not even a target industry under the FTA. Despite stating a commitment
to improve Colombia´s abysmal labor rights record under the Labor Action Plan, Colombia is
still the most
dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, who continue to be
threatened and assassinated with impunity. Labor conditions remain precarious,
with 60 percent of the workforce employed informally and 30 percent of the
country’s population living in poverty.
Faced with these figures, it is hard to
argue that Plan Colombia is any kind of solution for the Central American
refugee crisis. But powerful defense lobbyists will certainly try; indeed, they
already have. U.S. military aid to Colombia has
decreased in recent years, first to increase military aid to Mexico to wage
a similarly fruitless War on Drugs as part of the Mérida Initiative, and then to
decrease aid to both countries in order to prioritize
the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). This shifting
production and trafficking of drugs and accompanying violence from Colombia to
Mexico to now Central America is the perfect example of U.S. whack-a-mole drug and
crime policy at work and illustrates much more failures than successes. Until
we hold our policymakers accountable to recognizing that, we will continue to
see thousands of migrant children arriving at our borders.
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