by Garry M. Leech
In January 2000, when President Clinton proposed a two-year $1.6 billion aid package as part of Plan Colombia, critics warned of potential “mission creep.” Washington dismissed criticism that the mission would shift from fighting drugs to fighting rebels, and Congress, with minimal debate, approved $1.3 billion in mostly military aid in July 2000, making Colombia the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid behind Israel and Egypt.
However, the critics now appear to be vindicated. The White House has recently asked for tens of millions of dollars to train and equip Colombian forces to combat leftist rebels attacking oil pipelines used by U.S. corporations. President Bush is also demanding a lifting of all restrictions on aid to Colombia, so Washington can fully support the counterinsurgency war as part of the war on terrorism.
The $7.5 billion plan was conceived by Washington and Bogotá in 1999, with claims that its successful implementation would end Colombia’s civil war, revive the nation’s economy, and drastically curtail cocaine production and its flow into the United States.
President Clinton visited Cartagena, Colombia, on Aug. 30, 2000, to symbolically deliver the U.S. aid package to President Andrés Pastrana. The same day, more than 20 U.S. corporate executives arrived in Cartagena to meet with U.S. and Colombian government officials. Among the executives were representatives of companies that lobbied for the bill and were some of its direct beneficiaries — United Technologies, paid $228 million for 18 Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters; and Textron of Texas, paid $60 million to upgrade Vietnam-era Huey helicopters.
The helicopters and other weaponry, as well as three new Colombian army battalions being trained by U.S. Special Forces, are being used against the guerrillas, and in the hope of providing a more favorable business environment for U.S. corporations.
U.S. business leaders eager to profit from a more hospitable climate traveled to Cartagena to show their support for the economic component of Plan Colombia, essentially a continuation of neoliberal economic measures imposed on Colombia by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In 1999, after almost a decade of neoliberal programs, the relatively stable Colombian economy sank into its worst recession in more than half a century as the nation’s unemployment rate climbed to almost 20 percent. In December of that year, in a desperate attempt to stimulate the economy, the government agreed to a $2.7 billion loan from the IMF. Tragically, this new dose of economic globalization has only exacerbated the miserable conditions of the 55 percent of Colombians living in poverty.
The adjustment conditions laid out in the IMF loan require Colombia to further open its economy, privatize public companies and cut social spending. The IMF’s policies demand that Bogotá, despite financial hardships resulting from the civil conflict and economic recession, reduce its budget deficit in order to make funds available for foreign debt payments.
The privatization of state-owned entities, such as banks, utilities, communications and mining companies will be a bonanza for those who can afford to purchase them — namely, multinational corporations and Colombia’s economic elite. But privatization will likely reduce government revenue, hurt businesses and result in massive lay-offs as private investors streamline in order to maximize profits without regard for the public’s welfare.
Privatization has met some obstacles, namely the guerrillas, trade unions and the Colombian courts. In September 2000, the sale of the city-owned Bogotá Telecommunications Company was abandoned after potential Spanish and Italian buyers pulled out of the deal due to increased guerrilla kidnappings and violence. The same month, Colombia’s Constitutional Court suspended the sale of the nation’s second-largest electric company, state-owned Isagen, after another Colombian utility company, the Medellín Public Company, complained it had been unfairly excluded from a bidding process that favored multinational corporations.
The Colombian government has attempted to sell another state-owned electricity company, Interconexion Eléctrica (ISA), along with Isagen, but the privatization of ISA has been repeatedly suspended because of rebel attacks against its installations.
As a result, the Colombian government continues to collect the profits made by both Isagen and ISA. Isagen posted a $2 million profit in 2000, while ISA pocketed $60 million in profits during the first nine months of 2001.
Why is the government so eager to unload these revenue-producing entities? It has no choice. Despite the March 2002 concession from Colombia’s labor minister, Angelino Garzón, that the policies of the IMF “have contributed to the impoverishment of large sectors of the population,” the Colombian government has to abide by the IMF’s stringent demands or face a backlash from international lending institutions, multinational corporations and the governments of developed nations, especially the United States.
Poverty and unemployment have led many marginalized Colombians to turn to armed groups or the drug trade for alternative means of survival. At the same time the IMF was imposing neoliberal economic policies on the Colombian people, Plan Colombia’s U.S.-sponsored aerial fumigation campaign was being launched against coca growing peasants in southern Colombia.
Plan Colombia will not drastically affect the availability of narcotics in the United States. The history of cocaine production in South America has shown that when production is eradicated in one area, it moves to another, like the squeezing of a balloon.
In the early 1990’s, eradication of coca crops in Peru and Bolivia resulted in cultivation moving to Colombia. It has more than doubled over the past five years, much of it in southern Colombia, controlled by the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and especially in the department of Putumayo.
A dramatic increase in war taxes collected from coca growers and drug traffickers has enabled the FARC to become the largest and best-equipped guerrilla army in Latin American history. Consequently, Putumayo was selected as the initial target of Plan Colombia’s new U.S.-trained army battalions.
But critics of Plan Colombia noted the army’s relationship in Putumayo with the paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). The AUC is responsible for more than 70 percent of Colombia’s human rights violations. The paramilitaries announced their arrival in the region in 1998 with a series of massacres that left more than 100 dead.
The death squads have not only worked closely with the army’s Putumayo-based 24th Brigade, a local AUC leader known as Comandante Wilson admitted in April 2000 that the paramilitaries and the army routinely exchange coordinates of their fighters’ whereabouts. He also claimed that the AUC and the army formulated Plan Colombia’s long-term strategy together because “Plan Colombia would be almost impossible without the help of the [paramilitary] self-defense forces.”
Even though the paramilitaries, as AUC leader Carlos Castaño has admitted, are largely funded through the drug trade, they have been willing to sacrifice some of this income in support of Plan Colombia as long as FARC remains the target.
But while the FARC and AUC have continued their activities, Campesinos who had agreed to switch to alternative crops in return for not being fumigated have stood by helplessly when aerial defoliation killed their newly planted fields.
While the Bush administration’s $625 million Andean Regional Initiative promises to further expand the scope of Plan Colombia, recent requests by the White House for additional counterterrorism and counterinsurgency funding could dramatically expand Washington’s role in Colombia’s civil conflict. There is little doubt regarding the global reach of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, but there is little evidence that the FARC is anything more than one of the armed actors in Colombia’s domestic conflict.
Therefore, the recently proposed $98 million counterterrorism aid package to help the Colombian military protect Occidental Petroleum’s pipeline from rebel attacks is nothing more than a taxpayer subsidy for a multinational corporation’s risky foreign investment.
If the Bush Administration requests that Congress cut all strings on aid, U.S.-supplied military hardware and U.S.-trained Colombian forces would be permitted to engage rebels throughout the country whether or not they are involved in drug-related activities. Such an escalated U.S. role in Colombia’s counterinsurgency war would only further fuel an already violent conflict that no side is militarily capable of winning.
But this may be of little consequence to Washington politicians and corporate executives seeking to consolidate U.S. hegemony in order to complete the globalization of Colombia.
Garry M. Leech is the editor of the online journal, Colombia Report. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, Killing Peace: Colombia’s Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention, which will be available at: www.colombiareport.org.
