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

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.