Pubdate: Thu, 05 Oct 2000
Source: New York Review of Books, The (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Review of Books, Inc.
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&CC to:   MARK DANNER

CLINTON & COLOMBIA: THE PRIVILEGE OF FOLLY

In foreign affairs, folly is the privilege of great powers, for they alone 
can be certain to survive it. Last month Americans embarked on a policy of 
exquisite folly: funding both sides of Colombia's civil war.

For more than a decade now, Americans have contributed to the financial 
support of Colombia's guerrillas. Each and every day in America, in New 
York and Los Angeles and other cities across the land, men and women 
carefully extract dollars from their wallets and purses and exchange them 
for plastic bags filled with cocaine and heroin.

Daily, these small tributaries of bank notes come together to form a 
torrent headed south: millions of dollars a day, billions of dollars a 
year, pouring into the hands of Colombia's drug traffickers and 
cultivators. And from that torrent a large stream is diverted, in the form 
of "taxes," into the coffers of the guerrillas who increasingly control the 
drug-producing regions.

These American dollars have made the Revolution-ary Armed Forces of 
Colombia--or FARC, as it is known--by far the richest insurgency in the 
world, providing them perhaps half a billion dollars a year, and have 
allowed Colombia's 20,000 guerrillas to pose a serious challenge to its 
elected government.

This August, another great river of dollars began flowing south, this time 
from Washington to Bogota. After President Clinton signed a waiver putting 
aside certain "human rights" requirements that the Colombians had not met, 
the first dollars of a $1.3 billion "Andean aid package" began flowing to 
the Colombian government, making Colombia, after Israel and Egypt, far and 
away the largest recipient of American aid. These dollars, which come from 
American taxpayers, will mostly be spent in the United States to purchase 
American military equipment, particularly helicopters, which Colombian 
soldiers will then use to fight the guerrillas, who are, of course, already 
well-armed with the weapons that American drug money has bought for them.

"This assistance," President Clinton announced in Cartagena, "is for 
fighting drugs, not for waging war." If the President's Colombian listeners 
found themselves puzzled by this assertion--how could hundreds of millions 
of dollars to arm and train soldiers engaged in a desperate civil conflict 
not be used for "waging war"?--they had made the mistake, as many in Latin 
America have done over the years, of thinking the American president was 
actually speaking to them. Mr. Clinton, of course, was addressing his 
remarks to those back home who might be worried about "another Vietnam" or 
"another Central America." The focus, as so often, was not on "the crisis" 
supposedly to be resolved but on something wholly other, something elusive 
and misleading. In such contradictions and deceptions the Colombia policy 
perfectly embodies the American solipsism so often demonstrated in the 
country's foreign policy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Of the dollars Americans will now give to Colombia, more than three out of 
four will go to the military and the police, and of that money most will go 
to purchase weapons, including eighteen highly sophisticated Blackhawk 
helicopters and forty-two "Super Hueys," and to train a special Colombian 
army battalion to carry out operations in the Amazon region where most of 
Colombia's cocaine is grown--and where the guerrillas hold sway. Five 
hundred American military advisers will be deployed "in-country," along 
with hundreds of privately contracted American technicians, to keep the 
equipment maintained and to train the new "elite" battalion.

According to one Pentagon official, "the focus of these operations" will be 
"everybody who's in the drug business--guerrillas, autodefensas, or drug 
traffickers." These American dollars, despite what Mr. Clinton has 
repeatedly said, will indeed be used for "waging war."

America's leaders, when they talk about foreign policy, increasingly find 
themselves telling lies in order to evade the shadows of the lies their 
predecessors told. Colombia resembles Vietnam and Central America most in 
the deceptions deemed necessary to any public discussion of "our policy" 
there; beyond that, it has been the very triumph of American power and 
American wealth to make the tasks of "fighting drugs" and "waging war" in 
Colombia inextricable. The insurgency that Colombian President Andres 
Pastrana faces may date back at least thirty-five years, but the insatiable 
appetites and inexhaustible wealth of American drug buyers were the "motor 
that jump-started the guerrillas into a new phase."[1] During the 1980s, 
when Americans learned to enjoy cocaine, and began consuming, year after 
year, several hundred tons of it, they set out on a path that finally 
threatened the Colombian state.

The solution to this problem, as devised by the Clinton administration, is 
to send American money to the Colombians so that they can buy American 
helicopters and hire American trainers to help their soldiers fight the 
guerrillas, seize territory where coca is being grown, and destroy coca 
plants, thereby reducing the amount of the drug available--which, 
supposedly, will increase the price of cocaine on US streets, persuading 
Americans to buy less of it, and thus reduce the flow of money returning to 
the guerrillas. This "solution" merits scrutiny not simply because its 
success seems so unlikely but also because it is on its face so outlandish, 
the foreign-policy equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

Its impracticality is evidenced by a few statistics: although during the 
half-decade "eradication programs" in Peru and Bolivia have been 
"successful"--that is, they have reduced by more than half the amount of 
cocaine being grown in those countries--"total production in the Andean 
area has held steady."[2] Colombia's production of coca leaf, during this 
time of intense eradication, more than doubled.

Meantime, during the last decade, the price of cocaine on American streets, 
which the eradication and interdiction efforts are meant to drive up, 
dropped by half.

At most a determined eradication policy will push some cultivation over 
Colombia's borders onto the territory of its neighbors; and indeed the 
Brazilian foreign minister recently warned of a "spillover" onto his 
territory from "a stepping-up of the level of conflict." President Pastrana 
himself remarked, on the eve of President Clinton's visit, that if 
Americans go on wanting drugs, "somebody else somewhere else in the world 
is going to produce them. We are already getting intelligence reports of 
possible plantings in Africa."

If interdiction and eradication seem doomed to fail as a "drug-fighting" 
policy, why have the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress 
joined together to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Colombia? Here 
again we enter into the realm of illusion.

Having for years treated what was in fact a domestic problem--Americans' 
fondness for cocaine and other drugs their government chose to forbid--as 
in large part a foreign-policy problem; and having succeeded, at great 
effort and expense, only in pushing heroin production from Turkey to Mexico 
and then to Colombia, and cocaine production from Bolivia and Peru to 
Colombia, Americans have now managed to create, in Colombia, a 
self-fulfilling prophecy--the domestic problem of drug use has indeed 
become a foreign-policy problem: "Colombia's democracy under siege." What 
better way to combat it than an aggressive foreign policy cloaked in a 
domestic one?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Clinton administration would never have proposed sending more than a 
billion dollars to the Andean region were not Colombia's government under 
great stress, and Congress would never have approved the money were its 
purpose--to support the Colombian government in its war against the 
guerrillas--frankly stated.

America's "war on drugs," whatever its effects on Americans who use drugs 
or on countries that produce them, has been good to American politicians. 
Since the time of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President 
Richard Nixon, taking a harsh line on drugs has been recognized as a 
lucrative political strategy: above all, a way for 
politicians--particularly national politicians, whose responsibilities have 
little effect on how local streets are policed--to demonstrate that they 
are "tough on crime." To support sending American money and American troops 
to help fight a murky foreign war remains risky and unpopular; to oppose 
sending help which will supposedly prevent drugs from reaching "our 
children" remains, especially during an election year, a very difficult 
vote for an American politician to cast.

If a vote to "fight drugs" is poli-tically popular, or at least difficult 
to oppose, why does the administra-tion need the Rube Goldberg machine of 
eradication, interdiction, and the rest? "Fighting drugs" abroad has always 
been the path of least resistance for American politicians. The "drug 
dealer" has served as the necessary evil genius, the "enemy" without which 
no metaphorical "war" can be convincingly constructed. Imposing longer and 
mandatory prison sentences, greatly expanding the "anti-narcotics" 
bureaucracy--these have succeeded in putting a great many Americans in 
jail, but they have not eliminated the taste of Americans for cocaine and 
heroin. And though there are signs that Americans have tired of punitive 
drug penalties, a vote to fully fund treatment programs--only one addict in 
three has access to a program now--is still thought to be politically risky.

Why face charges of "coddling criminals"? Better to send the money south, 
to fight the drug dealers in the jungle.

One might imagine the outlines of a wiser policy: building up the 
institutions of Colombia's government with the help of foreign aid; 
bolstering Colombia's legitimate economy by encouraging foreign investment 
and lowering barriers that keep its products out of United States markets; 
launching a serious, sustained diplomatic campaign (like the American 
efforts in the Middle East and Ireland) to bring Colombia's civil war to a 
negotiated solution; and greatly increasing money spent in the United 
States to reduce consumption of illegal drugs by treating drug users and 
persuading Americans of the harmful effects of drugs.

But such a policy, however effective it might be in reducing the violence 
in Colombia or Americans' consumption of drugs, would not attract enough 
votes in Congress--certainly not enough votes to pass a billion-dollar 
program, as "fighting drug dealers" in an election year still can.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Self-delusion and hypocrisy are poor bases on which to build a foreign 
policy. They may be useful, even seem necessary, for a time; but if the 
policy encounters difficulty, or goes wrong, the political support will 
prove as evanescent as the arguments that created it. Colombia's war is 
complex, many-sided; its government is weak and, in many areas where 
cocaine is cultivated, its authority nonexistent; its officers and soldiers 
are badly trained and compromised by their involvement with the 
paramilitaries, a force of more than five thousand who habitually massacre 
civilians and who are themselves often supported by drug money.

The United States is leaping into a war that is likely to be long, 
complicated, and bloody, without first offering its people a credible 
explanation of why they should support it.

If things go wrong--if an American soldier is killed, or kidnapped--this 
lack of explanation and lack of candor will be keenly felt. If a negotiated 
settlement might seem within grasp, the American rationale for funding 
Colombia's army--"fighting drugs, not waging war"--could well constrain US 
diplomacy, leaving those American politicians who support such a deal 
vulnerable to charges that they are "negotiating with drug dealers." And 
if, as is most likely, this American-funded war winds on and on, consuming 
more and more American aid and more and more Colombian blood, there may 
come a time when an American president will find it most expedient to turn 
and, with however great emotion, walk slowly away. Americans will survive, 
their folly visited, as so often before, on another people.

Footnotes

1. See Alma Guillermoprieto, "Our New War in Colombia," The New York 
Review, April 13, 2000.

2.  See Ricardo Vargas, "The Impact of US Fumigation Programs," in 
Counternarcotics Policy and Prospects for Peace: Eradication and 
Alternative Development in Southern Colombia (George Washington University 
Andean Seminar/Washington Office on Latin America, 1999).
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