Drug War Capitalism (11 page)

Colombia and the United States enjoyed extremely close relations, while the Colombian army committed atrocities and paramilitary groups bought enough politicians to control Congress. Links between these paramilitary groups and members of Colombia’s Congress (a scandal known as
parapolítica
) became so prevalent that it to led to the investigation of 126 members of Congress, forty-one of whom were formally charged.[17] Regardless of the ongoing repression of opposition movements and illegalities in Congress and otherwise, Uribe was the closest US ally in the region and lauded as a partner and a true democrat. In Colombia, he was referred to as a “Teflon” president, as it appeared that none of the serious allegations made against him could stick, no matter what the proof.

In the years following Plan Colombia, foreign investment in the extractive industries soared and new trade agreements were signed, including the US-Colombia and the Canada-Colombia free trade agreements. The success of Plan Colombia in achieving US foreign policy goals—though not in meeting anti-narcotics targets—marked an important point in the evolution of decades of US experiments using anti-drugs policy to impact society, politics, and the economy in Colombia. It’s worth reviewing the factors that led the US and Colombia to make a pact and spend billions of dollars to supposedly fight drug trafficking.

More than twenty years after his murder, drug kingpin Pablo Escobar remains a household name. Leader of the Medellín Cartel, he was the US’s prime drug boogeyman through the 1980s and until his murder in 1993. His story reads like an early version of Mexico’s Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán: Escobar was the undisputed king of the drug world, a criminal wanted worldwide, his name listed among
Fortune
magazine’s richest people in the late 1980s. After the elimination of Escobar in 1993, the Cali Cartel would be credited with controlling the business, until it was attacked in a way that encouraged the formation of smaller clandestine groups devoted to the production and trafficking of narcotics. The US-backed assault against Escobar and its operations against the Colombian traffickers, particularly through the DEA’s Operation Snowcap in 1987, were what would end up putting Mexican traffickers on the map.[18]

“What happened was not the lesser of two evils: it was the greater. Our success with Medellín and Cali essentially set the Mexicans up in business, at a time when they were already cash-rich thanks to the budding meth trade in Southern California,” according to Tony Loya, the former DEA agent who ran Operation Snowcap.[19] Paramilitarization took place in two waves in Colombia, first as state-created and elite-supported groups formed in the 1960s and ’70s, later as elite-created, state-supported groups through the 1980s and ’90s.[20] In the 1960s, various guerrilla groups were formed in Colombia, and legislation was passed allowing for the creation of so-called self-defense groups. “In the framework of the struggle against the guerrilla groups, the State fostered the creation of said ‘self-defense groups’ among the civilian population, and their main aims were to assist the security forces in counterinsurgency operations and to defend themselves from the guerrilla groups. The State granted them permits to bear and possess weapons, as well as logistic support.”[21] By the mid-1980s it was no longer possible for the state to deny that these groups had turned to supporting organized criminal activity. Officials and lawmakers promised that these death squads would be repressed by the state, and they resisted the “paramilitary” label, insisting it was misused.[22] During this time, increasingly organized rural and urban groups were rising up for land re-distribution and the right to live in dignity, and not coincidentally, it was paramilitary forces, whose activities the state tolerated, that carried out repression against these organizations. Between 1988 and 1994, there were over 67,000 politically motivated assassinations in Colombia—or 23.4 per day.[23] “In an earlier period, repressive social control was administered abruptly by the Colombian armed forces, with institutional support from a Constitutionally mandated state of siege. Now, extra-official armed groups do the army’s job, though they seemingly have no organic links to the army.”[24]

The second wave of paramilitarization in Colombia took root as the cocaine industry began to reap previously unforeseen profits for local drug runners, an elite new group whose irregular forces were backed by the state. The panorama of the armed conflict began to change dramatically for Escobar and for all of Colombia in 1989. In August of that year, leading presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was shot to death as he and his entourage ascended a wooden platform to address 10,000 of his supporters outside of Bogotá. Galán, a progressive, had been in favor of an extradition treaty with the United States, and was vocal about drug money eroding democracy. His killing marked a pivotal moment in Colombia. “The 1989 assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, senator and primary Liberal Party candidate for the Colombian Presidency, made is clear that the Colombian-US war on narcotraffic had transformed the capitalist cocaine business into a mechanism of US control,” wrote Palacio Castañeda in 1991.

A few months after Galán was killed, a bomb exploded on Avianca Flight 203, killing all 107 passengers onboard. This attack was blamed on Pablo Escobar, and as there were US citizens on the flight, it provided the basis for then-president George Bush to argue that the United States take a more active role in the drug war. After that, the United States ratcheted up its fight against drug trafficking organizations, in the form of increased funding and manpower. Already “the war on drugs was being used to counter social turmoil in Colombia.”[25] By the early 1990s, it was clear that in Colombia, drug trafficking was “a political device used by governments, particularly though not solely the United States, to justify repressive disciplinary social control operations.”[26] The creation of Special Vigilance and Private Security Services (CONVIVIR) groups, which was encouraged by then-governor of Antioquia state Álvaro Uribe in the mid-1990s, laid the basis for the emergence of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the country’s largest and most articulated paramilitary group.[27] In the mid-90s, before tapping a formula later dubbed Plan Colombia, the United States applied narcotics-related sanctions against Colombia. The Council of American Enterprises—an American business consortium in Colombia—reported that in 1996 its member companies lost $875 million in sales because of the sanctions.[28] That same year, the State Department reported that the decertification decision required the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank to freeze about $1.5 billion in investment credits and loans. This included a $280 million loss in Colombia’s oil industry alone.[29]

Anti-drugs efforts that went against economic growth and the interests of US and transnational investors were destined to fail over the long term. Plan Colombia emerged in 1999 after the failure of the sanctions program. Even through the US government has spent over $8 billion on Plan Colombia and related initiatives, the flow of drugs to the United States has not been meaningfully reduced.[30] A US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Plan Colombia published in 2008 found that it failed to meet its targets for reducing drug production, and that the “estimated flow of cocaine towards the United States from South America rose over the period” from 2000 to 2006.[31] The GAO also found that, in 2006, coca cultivation was up 15 percent from 2000, the year Plan Colombia began.[32] Regardless of a donation of over seventy helicopters, police training, and other military aid, “Colombia remains one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of cocaine, as well as a source country for heroin and marijuana,” according to a State Department report released in 2012.[33] These statistics are what have led many commentators to declare Plan Colombia and the US-led war on drugs a failure, but, as we shall see, there are other ways in which US anti-drugs assistance to Colombia are considered a roaring success.

Colombia’s Paramilitary Problem

Though the anti-drugs component of Plan Colombia was an unabashed failure, the counterinsurgency segment, which some estimate to have cost upwards of half a billion dollars, reduced FARC numbers by half. Then there was the ongoing process of paramilitarization in the country, which was essentially funded by the war on drugs. It forced Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities, who for generations had defended their collective rights and/or title to their lands, off their territories and opened these lands up for corporate plunder.[34] In his excellent book
Colombia: A Brutal History,
English journalist Geoffrey Leslie Simons provides an example of how, in the early 2000s, paramilitary activity provided cover for oil giant BP after it took a 15 percent stake in a company called Ocensa, which built an 800 km pipeline from the Cusiana-Cupiagua oil fields to the port of Coveñas. “The construction of the new pipeline destroyed hundreds of water sources and caused landslides that ruined local farmers. To protect the pipeline an exclusion zone was created around it—denying the farmers more of their land. [Lawyer Marta Hinestroza] began to hear the complaints of many farmers, but it proved impossible to represent them effectively in the courts. Four of her colleagues—ombudsmen in neighboring municipalities—were assassinated by the paramilitaries. Then Hinestroza began to receive death threats. A short time later, the paramilitaries arrived at the home of her aunt, dragged her out, tied her hands behind her back, made her kneel down, and then in front of the villagers shot her in the back of the head. Hinestroza resigned but continued to represent her clients. BP has offered £180,000 to 17 families affected by the ODC pipeline, but offers of less than £100 per person to other claimants who have been rejected: some 1,600 people are holding out for claims worth a total of around £20 million.”[35]

In rural areas, the presence of armed actors representing state, guerrilla, narco, or other interests severely impacted people’s daily lives. “Peasants and rural inhabitants have been deliberately terrorized by these uniformed, armed groups of men,” wrote María Victoria Uribe about the army, paramilitaries, and guerrillas.[36] Violence in Colombia, as manifested during La Violencia of the 1950s and the war between uniformed armed factions today, has taken the form of acts of terror against the population, including mass killings and the public display of mutilated and tortured bodies. “In these massacres, perpetrators carry out a series of semantic operations, permeated with enormous metaphorical force, that dehumanize the victims and their bodies. These technologies of terror seek to expel rural inhabitants from their homes in order to consolidate territorial control.”[37] Of all of the armed actors, it is the paramilitaries, operating with complicity and support from the army, that are the most effective at carrying out displacement, and it is they who are responsible for the lion’s share of attacks.[38] By 2014, the total number of people displaced in Colombia was estimated at 5,368,138, and the total number of victims of the conflict over the past fifty years reached 6,073,437.[39] In a 2014 piece about memory, which criticizes Colombia’s national cinema institute for not distributing the trailer of a film about the war in Colombia, Colombian-Mexican writer Camilo Olarte writes, “The blood of fiction is fine. It’s acceptable. What’s real, no. And this isn’t fiction: 220,000 assassinations, 81.5 percent of them civilians, almost all
campesinos
; 25,007 disappeared, more than double the dictatorships of the Southern Cone; 1,754 victims of sexual violence; 6,421 children recruited by armed groups; 27,023 kidnappings associated with the armed conflict between 1970 and 2010; 10,189 people mutilated by antipersonnel mines, almost the same number as Afghanistan, 8.3 million hectares dispossessed and abandoned.”[40]

In Colombia, in addition to fortifying the national army, paramilitarization has been beneficial to transnational corporations wishing to dissuade labor organizing. “As part of the protracted US-supported counterinsurgency campaign, paramilitary-state violence continues to systematically target civil groups, such as trade unions organizations, which are considered a threat to the political and economic ‘stability’ conducive to the neo-liberal development of Colombia. This has made Colombia very attractive to foreign investment as poor working conditions and low wages keep profit margins high.[41]” According to a 2010 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, “Recent developments in Colombia [indicate] the deteriorating situation of human rights defenders in recent months, in particular the killings, harassment and intimidation of civil society activists, trade-union leaders and lawyers representing victims.”[42] The well-documented cases of Chiquita Brands, mining company Drummond, and BP have shown the links between paramilitary groups and US and transnational corporations.[43]

Making the link directly between payments from multinationals to paramilitaries and the violence and massacres that displaced thousands is dangerous and complicated. To learn more about the relationship between displacement caused by state and paramilitary violence and the operations of transnational corporations I met with Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, a spirited Colombian lawyer and former president of Colombia’s National Mineworkers’ Union (Sintraminercol). Today, Ramírez is the head of the Funtraenergetica, the United Federation of Miners, Energy, Metallurgical, Chemical and Allied Industries union, and maintains a practice in Bogotá. Ten years ago, he co-wrote a book about paramilitary activity and corporate gain, which was translated into English as
The Profits of Extermination
.

After a typical meal of sancocho and fish, during which a clever thief pretending to sell football memorabilia stole his cell phone, Ramírez and I sat down in a Bogotá cafe, where his voice boomed above the busy coffeeshop talk. I asked him what has changed since he wrote the book. “We intuited the use of paramilitary groups by corporations, but we couldn’t openly say it because we didn’t have convincing evidence. Well it turns out that it wasn’t just true, but that it was a permanent practice of, according to my calculations, 96 to 98 percent of the companies that are operating in this country.… In fact, after investigating in detail, we found that the paramilitaries created something called the North Bloc, and we calculate that 80 percent of the money to create the paramilitary North Bloc was provided by mining and oil companies, who produce coal and exploit gas and oil in the whole northern and Caribbean zone of Colombia.”