War On Drugs: that other disastrously misguided non-war …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 11:11 AM on December 20, 2006.

This is shaping up to be a huge scandal in Colombia, recipient of about $700 million dollars in U.S. military and economic aid in 2006:

Paramilitary Ties Implicate Colombia's Political Elite

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service

In what has been heralded as a decisive moment in Colombia's shadowy, decades-long conflict, a powerful paramilitary commander is to appear in a special court Tuesday to account for crimes that include massacres and assassinations. Salvatore Mancuso's testimony will be the first by a top death-squad leader in a Colombian courtroom, and it is being touted by the administration of President Álvaro Uribe as evidence that the wheels of justice are turning.

Rather than rejoicing, however, the Uribe government has found itself in the awkward position of being implicated in the wrongdoing. Over the past several weeks, Colombians have been gripped by revelations of ties between paramilitary fighters and several congressmen close to the president, as well as some officials in his administration. The scandal now threatens to unravel his authority.[snip]

"The government's smokescreen is becoming transparent," said Venus Albeiro Silva, a congressman from the left-leaning Alternative Democratic Pole party…

Vice President Francisco Santos said in an interview that the administration fully supports the investigations into ties with the paramilitary umbrella organization known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials, AUC…

So far, investigators from the Supreme Court and the attorney general's office have revealed case after case that not only expose friendly ties between officials and paramilitary fighters but also detail how lawmakers and others helped the fighters expand their hold over northern Colombia, liquidating opponents in the process.

Since three congressmen were jailed last month for collaborating with paramilitary groups, investigators have opened official probes into six more members of Congress and three former lawmakers…

The developments involving congressmen follow disclosures that a string of officials in the Uribe administration -- among them the former head of the intelligence service, the former head of the rural development agency and the former ambassador to Chile -- helped paramilitary groups by giving them classified information while orchestrating the takeover of land and the murder of the group's enemies. [snip]

[Vice President] Santos said that it was under Uribe's order that 59 paramilitary commanders were recently transferred to a prison…

But documents from the attorney general's office, as well as interviews with rights groups and opposition congressmen, show that as the government prepares to process paramilitary commanders, some of them are forming parallel drug-trafficking gangs. [snip]

Ranchers used to be able to appease the paramilitary forces by giving them support.

But those days appear to be over, said [one rural rancher]. "We all see now that the medicine was worse than the illness."

Human rights activists have long pointed to ties between the Colombian military and the right-wing paras -- "terrorists," if we were to apply the term with any consistency -- but it's something else to have prosecutors digging into links between the armed groups and elected officials. It's yet more evidence that at least some of the billions in aid we've sent to Colombia -- ostensibly for drug eradication but also to buy Colombian military protection for U.S. -owned oil pipelines -- ends up being controlled by figures with blood on their hands fom Colombia's decades-long civil war.

Our whole policy towards the region is really an epic disaster. In the late 1980s, the U.S. shifted its drug control strategy from interdiction to "source country" drug control. If you gathered together the finest minds and asked them to devise an approach to narcotics that's wrong on so many levels, it's the strategy they'd probably endorse.

What's most remarkable about the program is how closely it resembles the kind of agricultural policy used to support prices for domestic crops. We sponsor coca eradication throughout the Andes, but there's no hope of eliminating the crops entirely. Effectively, our tax dollars are used to wipe out a portion of the supply -- maybe a third, although estimates vary widely -- while, at the same time we skimp on treatment programs at home, meaning the demand remains relatively stable (I say "relatively" because illicit drug use has decreased modestly since the early 1980s). That means less supply for the same demand, and that keeps the price of raw coca leaves artificially inflated in some of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. That means that some of the poorest farmers in the poorest countries in the Americas have more incentive to grow the stuff (as they have for traditional medicinal use for centuries anyway).

Communities that rely on coca farming get crushed when they're targeted by these programs. In Bolivia, for example, U.S. loans have been contingent on compliance with deeply unpopular U.S. coca eradication programs since the late 1980s. Between that time and 2001, coca farming in Bolivia dropped from 48,000 hectares to around 14,000, costing the Bolivian economy between $150-500 million dollars in 1998 and 1999 alone, most of it from poor indigenous communities in the Highlands.

And while the removal of coca plants by hand has increased -- dangerous work that often requires the military to escort workers -- much of the eradication is still done by spraying defoliants from the air over large areas of cultivation. But, as you might expect, there are no "smart" defoliants. The Center for International Policy points to a University of Michigan study that found:

[A]erial spraying of defoliants under the US 'Plan Colombia' programme impacted broad swaths of the landscape and had the unintended consequence of defoliating contiguous and interspersed native plant and food crop parcels. … The complex spatial organization of the Colombian coca-producing landscape appeared to confound the spraying of defoliants, and as demonstrated here, many non-coca land cover classes have been affected adversely.

But -- and here's the rub -- coca production gets shifted around as drug eradication programs in one country force traffickers to diversify their supply. For example, Reuters reported that coca production in Colombia declined by about 30 percent between 2001 and 2002, and the BBC reported that it had increased in Peru during the same period "as efforts to eradicate the crop in neighboring Colombia pushed production south." So while the price of coca leaves in countries where we dedicate the most resources are artificially inflated, the street value here doesn't rise with it (this is also partly due to decentralization of trafficking). According to the Office of National drug control Policy, the wholesale cost of cocaine fell from $201.18 per gram in 1981 (I think they got ripped) to $37.96 per gram in 2003. The purity of cocaine also went up during that time.

This graph, based on State Department data and provided by the Center for International Policy, shows that while the percentage of coca grown in each of the three countries listed rises and falls, the overall supply has remained relatively stable, never falling to below around 160,000 hectares since 1988.


(click for larger version)

We've also offered aid for planting alternative crops as part of our strategy. An acquaintance of mine recently toured some of these programs in Colombia and found them to be a complete boondoggle, along the lines that we've seen in Iraq and elsewhere. Instead of designing programs with the input of the subsistence farmers who rely on the cultivation of coca to feed their families -- what's known as "local ownership," a key ingredient in successful development projects -- some schmuck at USAID decided that they'd have to switch to producing hearts of palm -- a nice, luxurious export-crop. So they hired a contractor to build a plant to process the swanky veggie. The problem is that palms are bulky and hard to transport and the rural roads are so bad that farmers can't get them to the processing plant and still turn a profit. The USAID-sponsored palm processing plant my source visited was operating at a fraction of its capacity.

The programs are so unpopular and the stakes so high that USAID personnel can't even inspect the projects they finance without a heavily armed escort, so by and large they make do with reports about the projects' success, or lack thereof, from the contractors themselves, with predictable results.

All of this is attributable in part to a domestic political culture that views drug use as a criminal act rather than a public health issue, and in the larger sense, our aversion to public health programs more generally. Treatment's been proven effective, but there isn't a city in America that isn't struggling for drug treatment funds.

Tagged as: cocaine, plan colombia, uribe

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.