Since the early 1980s, the United States has waged war on coca crop cultivation in the Andean countries of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia in an effort to reduce the supply of cocaine in the United States. Consecutive administrations have provided massive aid packages to foreign governments to purchase equipment and logistical tools, and to contract personnel to train police and military units in counter-narcotics operations. The policy has largely failed to stem cultivation or cocaine production. Since 2000, the U.S. government has spent more than $5 billion fighting this “War on Drugs” with the same ineffective policy. The bulk of the money funds Plan Colombia, a bilateral counter-narcotics program to curb coca cultivation.

The plan provides Colombia billions of dollars in U.S.-manufactured equipment, chemicals, and weapons for its military’s counter-narcotics operations. This model focuses on eliminating the supply of drugs but neglects to address the demand-driven source of the problem: consumption in the United States and Europe, the drug’s largest markets. One of Plan Colombia’s most controversial elements is the aerial crop eradication campaign by which herbicide is sprayed on coca crops. Despite the fumigation of 2 million acres of Colombian territory between 2000 and 2006, there has been virtually no change in the quantity of coca cultivation. When the military fumigates one area, new crops pop up in others. Fumigation has instead displaced small subsistence farmers who depend on the sale of coca to support their families, and although Plan Colombia promises to supply alternative crops for small farmers, the funding for such alternatives has been insufficient.

The fumigation campaign, which uses the defoliant glyphosate, has devastated the local environment by contaminating the water supply and causing serious health problems to local residents, like gastrointestinal disorders, respiratory ailments, and rashes. Reports of human illness resulting from the Cosmo-Flux 411F additive even caused U.K.-based Imperial Chemical Industries, which produces a key ingredient in the additive, to terminate its participation in the Plan Colombia fumigation campaign.

While Plan Colombia was initially limited to fighting drugs, after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration expanded the mission to include counter-insurgency operations by designating as terrorist organizations the country’s two guerrilla groups, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces (AUC). This policy shift further broadens the role of the Colombian armed forces. Despite the Colombian military’s record of chronic and severe human rights violations, the State Department has repeatedly certified it as meeting legally mandated human rights conditions required to receive military aid.

Plan Colombia has failed to reduce cocaine supply and resulted in the militarization of Colombian society. Nonetheless, the Bush administration recently struck a new $1.4 billion, multi-year agreement with the Mexican government to provide military and police training in intelligence gathering, investigation, and aerial monitoring along much the same model. Another $50 million will go to Central American countries. Mexican critics have denounced the intervention of U.S. personnel in Mexican national security and critics of the “War on Drugs” model warn that another enforcement-oriented drug war will ultimately lose—at great cost to civil liberties and social peace.

News reports of the U.S. “War on Drugs” usually take for granted the U.S. government’s strategy of targeting coca cultivation, cocaine production, and drug trafficking. Missing from reporting and analysis of the U.S. anti-drug policy are basic questions on how effective and appropriate this approach really is, compared to other strategies that have been shown to have better results, like expanding rehabilitation and public education programs. Other questions worth asking: How can we focus on reducing the U.S. market for illegal drugs? What more can be done to control money laundering and arms trafficking to drug cartels within our own borders? Who benefits from policies that expand taxpayer-funded military equipment and services abroad instead of public health programs at home?

MORE RESOURCES

Report on the Americas

Biowarfare in Colombia? A Controversial Fumigation Scheme By Ricardo Vargas Meza
NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept. 2000

Washington’s ‘New War’ in Colombia: The War on Drugs Meets the War on Terror By Adam IsacsonNACLA Report on the Americas, March 2003

The Beat Goes On: The U.S. War on Coca By Linda Farthing and Kathryn Ledebur
NACLA Report on the Americas, Nov. 2004


Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Mexican Drug Policy: Internal Corruption in an Externalized War, June 2007
http://www.coha.org/2007/06/26/mexican-drug-policy-internal-corruption-i...

Venezuela: Holding the Line Against Drug Trafficking, June 2006
http://www.coha.org/2006/06/13/venezuela-holding-the-line-against-drug-t...

Drug Wars: Bush Launches Attack on Venezuelan Anti-drug Effort, June 2006
http://www.coha.org/2006/10/06/coha-opinion-drug-wars-bush-launches-atta...


Washington Office on Latin America

Reality Check on Coca in the Andes (June 11, 2007)
http://www.wola.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=viewp&id=457&Itemi...

Drugs and Democracy in Latin America: the Impact of U.S. Policy
Edited by Coletta A. Youngers and Eileen Rosin (November 4, 2005)
http://www.wola.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=viewp&id=47&Itemid...


NACLA News

Plan Mexico and the Billion-Dollar Drug Deal by Laura Carlsen
October 5, 2007

Democracy and Plan Colombia by Héctor Mondragón
January, 25 2007


Others

COLOMBIA'S KILLER NETWORKS: The Military - Paramilitary Partnership and the United States http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/killertoc.htm

“Plan Colombia Killing Fields”
by Gary M. Leech (Sept. 9, 2002)
http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/732