Just finished An American Addiction: Drugs, Guerrillas and Counterinsurgency by Noam Chomsky. It’s really just an old spoken-word, but we call those audio books now, I guess. Anyway, it’s a good review of the U.S. war on narco-terrorists in Colombia and an excellent counterpoint to the Bowden book, for several reasons. It was recorded in 2001, almost a decade after Escobar had been found and killed, and it makes very clear that the troubles did not stop — or start — with him.
According to Chomsky, the U.S. went into Colombia under the guise of fighting the narco-traffickers, but actually just funded a massive campaign of brutality against the peasant class. The country as a whole is (or was) profoundly unequal, with a high concentration of wealth and land ownership on one hand, and massive poverty (more than half of the population below the poverty line) on the other. That of course begot an endless cycle (for at least the past century) of uprising and violent suppression.
U.S. policy has tipped the scales heavily towards violent suppression in large part because its military aid goes to the same groups that are responsible for the biggest, most sustained human rights violations: the paramilitaries, which are essentially part of the military. Chomsky cites estimates of one massacre a day by early 1999. “These are not just killings,” he says. “They are brutal vicious atrocities.”
Not sure I agree with everything he says (feels like he gives way too much quarter to FARC, for one thing), but I agree with a lot of it — including the excerpts below, where he addresses questions that I have been grappling with.
How did Colombia become a top cocaine producer to begin with?
Colombia was a weak coca producer at one point. That ended in the 1950s because of a program that we are very proud of here, called Food for Peace. FFP is a program which compels U.S. taxpayers to pay U.S. agribusiness to flood poor countries with subsidized food, which drives out peasant producers and provides “counterpart funds.” Those funds go to government, which usually spends them to enrich the already wealthy, or for military forces that kill the same peasants who were driven off their land. That’s called Food for Peace. In the 1950s, it undermined and then destroyed Colombian wheat production.
In the 1960s, nonaligned countries [low-income, global south, 80% of world population] were strong enough to issue a call for a form of globalization that would respond to the concerns and needs of overwhelming majority of the people of the world. And in fact the U.N. instituted its main economic planning and development unit UNCTAD, in 1964 to develop programs for a new form of international integration. But by the 1970s, a different kind of globalization was instituted by western countries, which instead has incidental concern for 80% of the world population and great concern for private corporate power and elite elements that are connected to it.
One casualty of that shift was a program to stabilize commodity prices. For countries of the south, which are primary producers, that’s extremely important. If commodity prices oscillate wildly – take coffee, the second commodity in world trade after oil, and for Colombia a huge product – if coffee goes up and down sharply, it doesn’t affect agribusiness much. But if you are a small producer, you can’t survive.
The stabilization programs are not unusual. Every rich country has them. The U.S. has massive subsidies to agribusiness to keep prices stable. $25 billion this year [2001]. But the law of economic history is that economic development and growth depend very heavily on a massive state sector, which violates market principles but in a very carefully calculated direction: It provides support for the rich and powerful, but those devices are not available to the great masses of poor. This was a case in point. The UNCTAD program to stabilize commodity prices was destroyed with the immediate and understood consequence that it would drive poor people to produce something for which there is a stable market. And there is one. It’s called coca. And marijuana.
That’s gotten a lot worse in last 10-20 years under neoliberal globalization. Countries of the south – most of the world – are compelled to accept “rational economic programs” to open up their borders to imports from rich countries. To highly subsidized agribusiness exports, which will wipe out their agricultural systems, which is happening from Mexico to southern Latin America, to Africa. So you open up your borders under what’s ludicrously called free trade, to imports from highly subsidized western agribusiness. And then the peasants who are driven out of production by this, are taught that they are supposed to be rational peasants: they have to produce for agro-export, not local market, and they have to maximize profit. So if you live in Bolivia or Colombia the way to do that is to make drugs. And then, if you do that, you are rewarded by military and bio warfare, they kill your children, terror and so on.
You could stop it with commodity stabilization programs in the third world. You could provide a fraction of the money that goes to killing people to develop alternative crops instead. You could try to change internal structure of the country to follow programs that benefit instead of oppress the population. The other way is to kill them.
When and how did current U.S. policies in Colombia begin to take shape?
In the early 1960s, the U.S. moved into Colombia in force, under the Kennedy administration. This was Kennedy’s general program, which focused a lot of attention on Latin America. One of the most important things they did, with long lasting effect, was to shift the mission of the Latin American military, which essentially controlled by the U.S., from hemispheric defense to internal security. Hemispheric defense was a holdover from the second world war (nobody left to defend against except Washington). But internal security means war against your own populations. and the new policies and new armaments and training led to a major war against the populations of the western hemisphere from southern cone and Chile and Argentina up to the Caribbean and Mexico. These were terrible atrocities that peaked in the 1980s with wars in central America. And Colombia was one of the places targeted for these changes.
In 1962, a U.S. military mission went to Colombia headed by General Yarborough, a special forces general. And he gave advice to the Colombian military about how to deal w internal problems. His advice was to develop paramilitary and terrorist activities against known communist proponents – meaning priests nuns human rights workers journalists, anybody not supporting the current brutal system. And this was not just advice, it went along with military missions, training, armaments, and it changed significantly the modalities and level of atrocities, and turned it into a war of terror, largely through paramilitary organizations against elements of society which were trying to change these brutal and vicious conditions.
How central is the war on drugs to the U.S. presence in Colombia, truly?
The drug war is not taken seriously by any competent analyst. One reason is that narcotrafficking is part of elite culture in Colombia. The D.E.A. had a major report a year or so ago where they said at every level of Colombian government, there is full, direct, extensive involvement in narcotrafficking. That includes the military — and paramilitaries, who have announced publicly that 70% of their funding comes from narcotraffickers, and they are also direct producers. Remember that is where the anti-drug money is going. This is so extensive in Colombia that it reaches to the U.S. mission as well: The wife of Colonel Hyatt, who trains the counter-narcotics brigades, was just arrested and jailed for bringing drugs into the U.S. And the Colonel will have to plead guilty on complicity charges.
So the sectors of the population to which the arms are going are up to their necks in narcotrafficking, and that’s no secret. They are furthermore not being targeted. And there’s good reasons for that. They are the armies of the landowners, narcos, oil companies, and so on. The Colombia Plan is specifically directed against areas under guerrilla control. Peasant areas, which have been calling for a long time for programs to develop alternative crops.
That’s not part of Colombia Plan. Clinton’s plan has a few dollars out of the $1.7 billion for new crops, but excluding the guerrilla controlled [peasant] areas. So not a penny goes there. U.S. insists on measures that even Colombian government is opposed to, including experimental bio and chemical warfare programs that are now being carried out. That’s a U.S. program, not a Colombia program. They have to go along, they haven’t got any choice. The Clinton administration was particularly impressed w president Gaviria who was presiding over most of these atrocities. Described him as very forward looking in promoting democracy under conditions of great danger (didn’t add that most of the danger came from his admin and our support of it). Also forward looking in carrying out economic reforms and incorporating Colombia into the international economy. And as a result of these forward looking attitudes, Clinton said he should be appointed assistant secretary of Organization of American States, which he then was.
So what even is the point of U.S. involvement?
It’s well known how to deal with the drug problem. It’s not a small problem: the worst is tobacco, next is alcohol, and then lots of other drugs. The way to deal with it is treatment, and prevention, which means alleviating the conditions out of which it arises. Treatment is effective. A major study by RAND compared prevention and treatment to criminal justice in terms of cost-effectiveness. It was about 7X as effective. They compared it w interdiction: 11X as effective. And 23X as effective as source-country control. But Nancy Pelosi put in an amendment to the Colombia plan, for a small amount of money for treatment, and it was killed.
Why no Delta force raids on U.S. chemical companies in New York, or U.S. Banks in New York and Boston? It’s well known they are heavily involved in narcotrafficking. In the 1980s, the CIA published a report on chemical exports to Latin America, pointing out that they are way in excess of industrial needs, and that the ones that are sent are the ones used for drug production. So what about that? Nobody knows how much money goes into narcotrafficking, but it’s estimated somewhere on order of $500 billion a year. Estimated that over half of it passes through U.S. banks. That is not very hard to monitor. The federal reserve system is so well organized that any deposit over $10k is registered. It was monitored in late 70s and early 80s, when drug production was picking up really fast in Colombia. Federal prosecutors in Florida detected sharp increases in deposits in Florida banks, and began operation greenback to determine what it was, though everyone knew, and bring criminal charges against the people involved. But it was called off by the drug Czar of the Regan administration – George Bush – and that was the last time there was an attempt to look at that.
The plan is not to end drug use, it’s to kill peasants. For years critics have noted that these programs completely fail to meet their stated objectives, and it’s widely acknowledged on all sides. Criminalization at home and mass murder abroad are the methods. So you intensify those and do none of the things that would actually meet stated objectives. So what does that tell us? That the true objectives are being met. They are just different than the stated ones. So what are the true objectives? To make sure that social change of the wrong kind doesn’t take place in Colombia, and to get rid of the superfluous population in the United States. It’s a war against poor and minority communities. And secondarily, to terrify everyone else.