In 1998, newly elected Colombian President, Andrés Pastrana, traveled to Washington D.C. in search of a solution. A civil war had been tearing apart his country for decades and the primary actors which included leftist guerillas and right-wing paramilitaries looked just as strong as ever due to the cocaine trade which funded their activities. By the late 90s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerilla group, had amassed significant political control over rural Colombia which was home to some of the region’s most abundant sources of coca. Pastrana had campaigned for president on the idea of a “Marshall Plan” which would provide economic development and alternatives to coca growing in rebel controlled territory for the poor and often indignenous farmers. This, he believed, would bring the rebels to the table for peace talks.[1] Funding from the United States was pivotal to this plan. Over the next two years, Pastrana met with President Bill Clinton and other U.S. politicians to gain support for what would eventually become Plan Colombia. On June 22, 2000, Clinton signed the bill guaranteeing U.S. funding of over $1.3 billion. [2]
A step away from Pastrana’s original ideas, the majority of U.S. dollars would be used for military operations.[3] This included the controversial policy of aerial fumigation with glyphosate, which is believed to be responsible for damages to the environment and human health. Aerial fumigation was supposed to deter farmers from planting more coca by stopping it at the source.[4] But by 2005, cocaine was still highly available in the U.S. and its main source was still Colombia.[5] The question that arises from this is why did these farmers continue to grow coca despite the consequences they were likely to face? This question is historically significant because it presents an angle of Plan Colombia and recent U.S. intervention in Latin America that focuses on the social impact policies have. This project utilizes archived reports from multiple major news outlets which allow us to see both the political and social impact through interviews with a wide variety of those involved. Additionally, archived government documents provide us with knowledge of what major actors understood during the implementation of the plan. I argue that the U.S. and Colombian governments criminalized the growers by militarizing the plan. From the grower’s perspective, elements of Plan Colombia, such as aerial fumigation, were more akin to an attack than an incentive. Farmers faced the choice of finding new ways to continue growing coca or engaging with a government that in many ways treated them like an enemy combatant; the growers chose to continue cultivation.
Aerial fumigation was not a new policy in the war on drugs. In interviews in 1998, coca farmers expressed doubt that Pastrana’s original plans would lead to more than increased fumigations.[6] They were not wrong. By 2005, fumigations occurred almost 4.5 times more than in 1998, and even more starkly, almost 28 times more than than in 1994.[7] The Consequences of this increase in fumigation soon became clear.
Glyphosate was harmful to human health. A public health official in La Hormiga, a town affected by the spraying said “There’s complaints about intoxication, diarrhea, vomiting, skin rashes, red eyes, headaches.”[8] One farmer interviewed by CBS referred to the spray as “poison”, he explained that a month after his area was sprayed “we started to see the rashes. About 40 percent of children have these rashes.”[9] Despite evidence that these rashes were similar to other examples of pesticide poisoning, the U.S. government was insistent that all studies pointed to glyphosate being safe.[10] For some, the fumigations left an even deeper wound. One man recounted when the planes came, “they fumigated the house, everything. Short afterwards we coughed up the fumigation. My little daughter died.”[11]
The spraying also took an economic toll on the farmers. While coca was the main target of glyphosate spraying, it was far from all that the herbicide hit. Coca was an important crop, but it was not all the farmers grew. One farmer complained “They killed our bananas, our yucca, corn, everything. Animals, our chickens. I had a whole bunch of chickens and they died.”[12] This was not just a matter of commercial interest, one public official from La Hormiga stated “We believe people will go hungry.”[13] The government did offer crop replacement programs, but sometimes the funds never reached the farmers, and often when they did and the farmers did replace their coca, they still were sprayed.[14]
An important reason farmers may have continued to grow coca was simply that demand for cocaine in the U.S. stayed high. While a broad majority of legislators supported this bill, some spoke out against its flaws. In an interview Senator Paul Wellstone criticized the militarism the bill took on and argued that the plan would not be successful unless it provided more treatment funding, “If we’re going to say this is a war on drugs, that’s one thing, then we ought to deal with the demand side in our country.”[15] Wellstone’s opinion was not radical. In 1994, RAND Corporation published a study arguing treatment programs would be the most cost effective way of reducing cocaine U.S. consumption.[16] These ideas fell on deaf ears.
The failures of Plan Colombia to address these issues became clear in 2002 when peace talks between the FARC and Pastrana broke down after a Colombian Senator was held hostage.[17] Pastrana may have advocated strongly for peace, but his failure to weaken the FARC stemmed from the inability to incentivize farmers to stop growing coca.
In interviews prior to the kidnapping, Colombian and U.S. officials indicated the U.S. would not become part of Colombia’s civil war, but in a post 9/11 world, the U.S. was looking to increase its role abroad as part of its war on terror. In a press conference with Pastrana and President George W. Bush, Bush said they were committed to “change the focus of our strategy from counternarcotics to include counterterrorism.”[18]
The election of Alvaro Uribe later that year was Colombia’s answer to the United State’s desire for the anti drug strategies to become part of the war on terror. Uribe brought an even more militarized plan which authorized all out spraying, a step further than Pastrana who would only spray farms with three or more hectares.[19] Uribe defended this saying “If we don’t destroy drugs, they will destroy our democracy and ecology.”[20] He was committed to an all out military defeat of the FARC.[21] The United States was willing to fund this despite its knowledge of human rights abuses committed by the military and worrying reports of connections between the Colombian military and right-wing paramilitaries.[22] While this ramp up in military intensity is attributed to weakening the FARC enough to get them to the peace table, it was also devastating for some non-FARC Colombian citizens who were in areas under their control. Often the military would use “false positives” in which recent evidence has shown that soldiers killed upwards of 2,248 civilians and put them in a FARC uniform to increase their body counts.[23] One example of this is Operation Orion, a successful counter-FARC insurgency at the beginning of Uribe’s presidency which is also now infamous for reports that many civilians were also disappeared.[24] Examples of human rights violations like this by the military show why Plan Colombia pushed coca farmers away from the government.
Continuing to grow coca kept the farmers connected to FARC and likely to be attacked, but other options may have seemed less palatable. The choice was not moral, but material. The FARC no doubt committed their share of atrocities, including massacres of civilians[25], but in the end, the farmers felt better off continuing to grow coca under the guerillas than engaging with programs from the same government spraying them with glyphosate. In a 2001 interview, health department worker Nancy Sánchez explained the plight of the farmers, ”The guerrillas come and they threaten, they make them pay taxes. Then the paramilitaries come and they get assassinated and threatened, and now the government comes in and fumigates them.”[26] Sánchez draws equivalence between how each of these three groups treats the farmers. But it is hard to argue that fumigation or assassination is a preferable devil to unfair taxation.
Giving the Colombian military such a pivotal role in Plan Colombia meant that at worst, the farmers would be violently targeted and at best their wellbeing would be simply ignored. When examining those involved, the throughline between fumigations and more violent military operations is evident. In 2001, General Mario Montoya took a reporter on a helicopter ride over a formerly “bountiful coca-producing region.”[27] Montoya, who was in charge of the fumigation effort, admitted mistakes could be made, but explained the benefits outweighed the cost. In 2007, a leaked C.I.A. report implicated one of Montoya’s brigades in Operation Orion. He is known to have been a promoter of “False Positives” and is on trial for these crimes.[28] It is clear the costs he mentioned included people.
The militarization of Plan Colombia is the reason why farmers continued to grow coca through 2005 and beyond. As opposed to convincing the farmers that alternative forms of business were a good idea, the U.S. and Colombian governments tried to force this idea on them leading to devastating outcomes. Furthermore, U.S. funding gave more power to a military known for committing war crimes, which drew the poor farmers further away from government operations when they saw their neighbors extrajudicially murdered. As opposed to incentivizing farmers to seek legal means of commerce, Plan Colombia made it more likely that they would continue growing coca and fuel the cocaine trade.
Work Cited
C-SPAN. “U.S.-Colombia Relations.” C-span.org, April 18, 2002. https://www.c-span.org/video/?169684-1%2Fus-colombia-relations. [18]
“Colombia Farmers: AP ARCHIVE,” June 16, 2001. http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/54afe0249d5b23654055e652cf7268a0. [12]
Death by Coca. Journeyman Pictures. Icaro Productions, 1999. https://www.journeyman.tv/film/758. [11], [14]
The Economist. “The Weedkiller War.” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, September 5, 2002. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2002/09/05/the-weedkiller-war. [19], [20]
Forero, Juan. “No Crops Spared in Colombia’s Coca War.” The New York Times. The New York Times, January 31, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/31/world/no-crops-spared-in-colombia-s-coca-war.html. [8], [13], [26], [27]
Holman, Kwame, and Jim Lehrer. “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, June 22, 2000. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_507-js9h41kb5f. [15]
Kroft, Steve. Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company. Columbia Broadcasting System, 2002. https://video-alexanderstreet-jac.orc.scoolaid.net/watch/good-intentions-bad-results-columbia?context=channel:60-minutes. [4], [9], [10]
National Drug Intelligence Center , National Drug Threat Assessment 2005 § (2005). https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs11/12620/cocaine.htm. [5]
Palau, Mariana. “The ‘False Positives’ Scandal That Felled Colombia’s Military Hero.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, November 19, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/19/colombia-false-positives-killings-general-mario-montoya-trial. [21], [23], [24], [25], [28]
Rydell, C. Peter, and Susan F. Everingham. “Controlling Cocaine: Supply Versus Demand Programs.” Rand.org. RAND Corporation, May 26, 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20060526084433/http://www.fathom.com/media/PDF/2184_cocainess.pdf. [16]
Schemo, Diana Jean. “Coca Growers in Colombia Scorn New President’s ‘Marshall Plan’.” The New York Times. The New York Times, August 20, 1998. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/20/world/coca-growers-in-colombia-scorn-new-president-s-marshall-plan.html?searchResultPosition=96. [1], [6]
Suarez, Ray. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. American Archive of Public Broadcasting, 2002. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-1j9765b052?start=0&end=3853. [17]
Suarez, Ray. “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, August 7, 2002. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-959c53fn74?start=1695.6&end=2299.49.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2001, S.2522, 106th Cong., 2nd Sess. https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/senate-bill/2522?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22colombia%22%5D%7D [2], [3]
U.S. Department of State, “Paramilitary Ties of the Army’s 4th Brigade.” by Kamman,Curtis W., February 1, 2000.https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB266/20000208.pdf [22]
Wola. “The Costs of Restarting Aerial Coca Spraying in Colombia.” WOLA, February 28, 2020. https://www.wola.org/analysis/costs-restarting-aerial-spraying-coca-colombia/. [7]