October 27, 2006
Counter-drug military construction projects in 2005
Here, thanks to a FOIA request, is a list of US-funded base construction projects paid for in 2005 with Defense Department counternarcotics funds.
It comes from a report, required by Congress in the 2006 Defense Authorization law, that was supposed to total Defense-budget counter-drug aid to every country in the world. For some reason, the report only includes Defense-budget counter-drug construction aid, which is only a fraction of what most countries' militaries get through the Pentagon's budget.
Nonetheless, the Western Hemisphere section below is worth a look.
SOUTHCOM
Bahamas (Caribbean Region) ($2.213M)
Company Housing and Furnishings/Facility Maintenance. Funding provided for company housing and the furnishings on an operating base in Georgetown, Greater Exuma Island. Also included is the maintenance of the operating facility. On this operating base, US. Army helicopter operations are conducted in support of Operation Bahamas Turks and Caicos Counter-drug. (PC2307) Total FY05 Funding: $2.213M Cost breakout is as follows:
- Base Construction funding ($1,400K)
- Operational funding ($312K)
- Furnishings ($441K)
- Facility maintenance/upkeep ($60K)
Bolivia ($0.590M)
Cochabamba Shoot House. Provided critical training facility for military and police CNT units undergoing U.S. training for operations. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.06M.
Caranavi Joint Task Force Base Camp. Project provided improved utilities, force protection, logistics support facilities and additional berthing to support establishment of a joint Bolivian CNT task force between national police, air force, and army engineer forces. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.45M.
Tocopilla Force Protection Improvements. Provided perimeter fence and lighting, guard posts, and other improvements to Bolivian navy outposts assigned riverine patrol missions. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.04M.
Colomi Army Camp Utilities Upgrade. Project provided water treatment and conditioning to domestic water supply to improve sanitation and health conditions at existing outpost. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.04M.
Colombia ($5.548M)
Training Facility located in San Andres, Colombia. Funding was provided to operate a training facility at the San Andres, Colombia radar site to train Colombian Air Force technicians in the skills needed to assume maintenance responsibilities for Hemispheric Radar System radar sites. FY05 funding supports English language training in Bogota and on-the-job training at each radar site and Bogota and associated force protection for supporting personnel. Funding also for the refinement of formal course training material, instructors, and development and implementation of on-job-training program. (PC4208) Total FY05 Funding: $1.08M
Puerto Leguizamo/La Tagua Road Improvements. Provided critical improvements to the only road link between these two forward outposts astride the Putumayo and Caqueta Rivers. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.800M.
Airfield Improvements to Tres Esquinas. Supported critical airfield used to support Plan Patriota operations. FY05 funds used to execute the design portion. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.150M.
Depot Level Maintenance Facility in Bogota. Supported establishment of a depot level riverine maintenance facility.
FY05 funds used to execute the design portion. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.080M.Improvements to CACOM 3 Apron and Taxiways. Supported the primary reception and staging site for U.S. units providing critical training to COLMIL forces and COLAF units supporting Plan Patriota IIB operations. FY05 funds used to execute the design portion. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.4M.
Ammunition Storage Point at Larandia. Provided critical ammunition storage capability for units assigned to JTF-Omega and directly supporting Plan Patriota. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.6M.
Runway Improvements at Juanacho. Project supported needed taxiway and ramp upgrades. Juancacho provides forward staging and support facility for JTF-Omega. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.3M.
Combat Training Center at Larandia. Provided a national training center for COLAR forces supporting Plan Patriota IIB and IIC operations. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.9M.
Riverine Facilities at Puerto Carreno. Project provided for extensive upgrades to include barracks, walkways, electrical, ramps, fuel storage, and maintenance. Project provided needed sustainment for Battalion 40 and COLMAR support to JTF-Omega. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.2M.
Electrical Upgrades at Larandia. Project completed upgrades to the Larandia electrical grid required as a result of the rapid expansion/growth of Larandia as a major technical/operationa1 base for the COLMIL. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.5M.
Tumaco Pier. Project provided essential staging and fueling point for COLMAR forces operating on the Pacific Coast. Project was primarily focused on the interdiction of drugs/arms traffickers using the river systems on the Pacific Coast as a staging base for illegal drug/arms movement. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.12M.
Puerto Leguizamo Airfield. Provided for critical repairs to the Puerto Leguizamo airfield. Repairs included runway,
taxiway, and tamp improvements needed to sustain this key forward operating base along the southern border of
Colombia. Puerto Leguizamo is the primary training and staging base for COLMAR operations in the Pase IIB area
of operations. Completed design work in FY05. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.08M.Tolemaida Force Protection Upgrades. Project provided for a perimeter fence to be constructed around the newly completed SF compound in Tolemaida. Project provided needed standoff distance and isolation from other facilities. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.2M.
4 Office Trailers/Facility Maintenance. Funding provided for 4 office trailers and the maintenance of the Forward Operating Site in Apiay, Colombia that conducts Joint ISR aircraft operations in support of Plan Colombia. (PC2416) Total FY05 Funding: $0.138M
Ecuador ($14.734M)
Forward Operating Location (FOL). Funding was provided to maintain and operate the FOL in Manta, which consists of 127 facilities of which 48 are buildings. FOL Manta provides a base of operations to facilitate counterdrug detection and monitoring operations within the USSOUTHCOM AOR. FOL Manta provides basing and logistical support for a steady state of six aircraft and 450 personnel with a capacity to surge to eight aircraft for two week periods. (PC9500) Total FY05 Funding: $14.134M. Cost breakout is as follows:
- Air Expeditionary Forces (Force Protection and Firemen) travel and per diem ($377K)
- Erosion project for runway required for CN missions ($607K)
- Supplies and equipment that can only be bought through the Standard Base Supply System ($233K)
- Communication personnel TDY from Headquarters ($54K)
- Procurement of AGE equipment ($142K)
- Base operating support contract ($12,721K)
Operational Support for the Northern Border. Project supported units assigned to Ecuadorian defense forces along the northern border with Colombia. Two projects programmed for design/construction in FY05. First project provided needed ammunition storage facility for the 39th Infantry Battalion in the Carchi Province. Second project provide critical force protection upgrades to the 55th Infantry Battalion assigned to the 19th Jungle Brigade. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.6M.
El Salvador ($0.925M)
Forward Operating Location (FOL). Funding was provided to maintain and operate the FOL in Comalapa. FY05 funding was provided for installation of water supply tank and fire pumps for autonomous fire suppression capability, procurement and installation of a generator and transfer switch for new warehouse/office building, electrical driveways to warehouse bays doors, upgrade pistol range, and lighting protection for the FOL. (PC9500) Total FY05 Funding: $0.925M.
Jamaica ($0.8M)
Pedro Cayes Water/Fuel Storage Facilities. Project provided for water/fuel storage facilities in support of Jamaican Coast Guard drug interdiction efforts against "go fast" targets. Supported both surface and helicopter assets directed against the "go-fast" threat. (PC9493) Total FY05 Funding: $0.8M.
Netherlands Antilles ($16.426M)
Forward Operating Location (FOL). Funding was provided to maintain and operate the FOL in Curacao. This FOL consists of 40 facilities of which 15 are buildings. FOL Curacao provides a base of operations to facilitate counterdrug detection and monitoring operations within the USSOUTHCOM AOR. FOL Curacao provides basing and logistical support for a steady state of six aircraft and 250 personnel with a capacity to surge to eight aircraft for two week periods. (PC9500) Total FY05 Funding: $14.892M. Cost breakout is as follows:
- Air Expeditionary Forces (Force Protection and Firemen) travel and per diem ($2,153K)
- Contract lodging permanent party ($266K)
- Supplies and equipment that can only be bought through the Standard Base Supply System ($220K)
- Engineering study for fire station shelter in Curacao ($77K)
- Contracting support for FOL oversight ($470K)
- Base Operating Support contract ($11,706K)
Forward Operating Location (FOL). Funding was provided to maintain and operate the FOL in Aruba. This FOL
consists of 1 facility which is a building. FOL Aruba provides an overflow capability to facilitate counterdrug detection and monitoring operations within the USSOUTHCOM AOR. FOL Aruba provides communication and contracting support to aircrews. (PC9500) Total FY05 Funding: $1.534M. Cost breakout is as follows:
- Bandwidth expense ($500K)
- Civil engineering/contracting support to building/ramp projects ($552K)
- Direct support to include Air Expeditionary Forces Communication person per diem and travel, lodging, environmental baseline study, and miscellaneous contracts ($430K)
- Air Combat Command Program Management System expense ($50K)
- Base operating support contract support ($2K)
Peru ($0.175M)
El Estrecho Navy Forward Operating Base. Project increased berthing and life support at remote outpost conducting riverine interdiction and joint operations with national police. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.1M.
Mazamari and Lima Small Arms Ranges. Project repaired and upgraded small arms ranges used to train counterdrug police conducting infiltration, interdiction, and associated counter-terrorism missions. (PC9201) Total FY05 Funding: $0.075M.
Posted by isacson at 04:47 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2006
10,393 Colombian military trainees in 2005
The State and Defense Departments have finally released, and posted to State's website, the Foreign Military Training Report covering 2005. There, you will find out that the United States gave military, police, or defense-policy training to 10,393 Colombians last year. That is over 1,500 more trainees than in 2004, though short of the 2003 high of 12,947.
The report's statistics portray Colombia as the number one recipient of U.S. military training in the world. The report, however, severely under-reports training in Iraq and Afghanistan - either because training of those countries' security forces is classified, or because budgeting does not separate such training from the cost of U.S. military operations in those countries. So Colombia was, in fact, the second or third largest U.S. training recipient last year.
Nonetheless, the report makes clear that no other Latin American country came close to Colombia in 2005 (in fact, no other country in the hemisphere even exceeded 1,000 trainees).
A big PDF file identifying courses given and recipient military units is available here by clicking on "Western Hemisphere."
Posted by isacson at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2006
Nicholas Burns: No cut in aid - but less "cheerleading"
In a sit-down last week with reporters, the outgoing head of U.S. Southern Command, Gen. John Craddock, said that reductions in aid to Colombia were on their way. Added the Associated Press, "Craddock said Colombia's defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, is in agreement with reductions in U.S. military funding."
This was the latest repetition of the idea that reductions in aid to Colombia - the first reductions in about fifteen years - would be forthcoming in the administration's 2008 budget request to Congress (which comes out next February). We have been told to expect less aid in the 2008 request during recent meetings with U.S. officials, and we have read it in recent press coverage, including a piece in Saturday's edition of El Tiempo:
An initial cut of a bit more than 50 million dollars is being discussed, which would go against accounts for the Police Carabineros program, the demobilizations and others. And while this is a small amount, compared to the annual total that is delivered (some 700 million dollars), it will increase with each passing year. In other words, from here to 2010 - the year in which Uribe will finish his second term - the country will be receiving a bit more than half of what it gets today.
And these are not speculations. The director of Narcotics Affairs at the Department of State, Anne Patterson, and the "drug czar," John Walters, said it in an interview with this newspaper. And the head of the Southern Command, John Craddock, repeated it this week.
The theory is that Colombia has begun "to turn the page," and that it is time for it to take on more responsibilities. "We have sustained aid levels for six years. It is logical to suppose, and this was the plan from the beginning, that we would arrive at a point where there would be reductions," says a source at the State Department.
Well, maybe not. It appears that plans to begin reducing U.S. aid next year have been shelved for now. That, at least, was the message of Nicholas Burns, the acting number-two official at the State Department, who is leading a seventeen-member delegation to Bogotá that arrived yesterday and leaves tomorrow. "'We intend to ask our Congress to maintain the current level of funding' for 2007 and 2008," Burns told reporters yesterday.
That apparent change of direction is the big story - so far - of the Burns visit, which is the biggest and highest-level U.S. delegation to visit Colombia in quite a while.
Also noteworthy are strong indications that Burns, Anne Patterson, Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom Shannon, Drug Czar John Walters and others are not in Bogotá just to praise and celebrate Uribe and Plan Colombia. The U.S. officials also appear to be voicing some serious concerns about the policy's results, the human-rights climate, and the paramilitary process. Note these excerpts from a Reuters interview with Burns, which went on the wires a couple of hours ago.
"We think the counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics efforts have been very successful but there could be further progress."
"If the military is responsible for human rights violations then those people need to be held accountable, they need to be prosecuted."
"We think this [the "Justice and Peace" Law] is a necessary law ... we are in favor of the effort but there are some questions about whether some of sentences are too lenient, whether people who are responsible for horrible crimes are getting off too easily. ... It is up to Colombia to work through that but as we are funding some of these programs these questions are being asked."
Especially significant is that the U.S. officials did not come to Colombia bearing a new certification of improvements in the Colombian military's human-rights performance. By law, the State Department must issue two such certifications each year; 25 percent of that year's military aid remains frozen - it cannot be spent - until the certifications occur (each one frees up half of the frozen aid). No certification for any 2006 aid has yet been issued, largely due to concerns about military abuses and the inability to punish past cases.
Posted by isacson at 12:47 PM | Comments (2)
September 28, 2006
"Elephant-sized worry" in Colombia
Dare we say it? Today's Robert Novak column is actually worth a read:
The situation is summarized in a Sept. 19 memo by a well-informed source: ''The Colombian Army is hemorrhaging with problems. The chief problem is that we took a very mediocre barracks-bound military force, gave it some little amount of training and lots of equipment but never demanded the structural reform like we did with the Colombian National Police some 12 years ago . . . Everyone seems incapable of seeing the 'elephant in the room' and realizing that years of cooperation with the paramilitary forces have corrupted the Colombian Army officer corps all the way up, and the institution requires a dramatic house cleaning and structural reform . . .''
Posted by isacson at 06:21 AM | Comments (2)
September 26, 2006
Some updated U.S. aid numbers
We've just posted a big and long-overdue update to our estimates of U.S. aid to every country in Latin America. To see aid broken down further, with explanations of what each program does, visit www.ciponline.org/facts/country.htm.
In 2005, these were the top five overall recipients of U.S. aid in the Western Hemisphere:
Colombia
Haiti
Peru
Bolivia
Mexico
The above charts include four of the five top military aid recipients as well. Here is the fifth:
Ecuador
Again, more information - including the numbers themselves - is at www.ciponline.org/facts/country.htm.
Here is what aid to Colombia looks like since 2004. This table includes how the House and Senate versions of the 2007 foreign aid bill would affect aid amounts. The House and Senate appropriations committees have finished work on the 2007 aid bill, and the House has passed it. The full Senate has yet to consider the bill and appears to be unlikely to do so before the midterm elections in early November. A table going back to 1997 can be viewed here.
| Military and Police Assistance Programs (millions of dollars; numbers underlined and italicized are estimates taken by averaging previous two years) |
| | | | 2007, request | 2007, House version of foreign aid bill | 2007, Senate version of foreign aid bill | |
| International Narcotics Control (INC) State Department-managed counter-drug arms transfers, training, and services | 0 | | | 0 | 18.9 | 0 |
| "Andean Counterdrug Initiative" Basically the same as INC above, but separated out for the Andes | | | | 366.6 | 384.1 | 369.6 |
| Foreign Military Financing (FMF) Grants for defense articles, training and services | 98.5 | 99.2 | 89.1 | 90.0 | 90.0 | 90.0 |
| International Military Education and Training (IMET) Training, usually not counter-drug | | | | 1.7 | 1.7 | 1.7 |
| "Section 1004" Authority to use the defense budget for some types of counter-drug aid | | | | 161.0 | 161.0 | 161.0 |
| Emergency Drawdowns Presidential authority to grant counter-drug equipment from U.S. arsenal | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Antiterrorism Assistance (NADR/ATA) Grants for anti-terrorism defense articles, training and services | | | | 3.1 | 3.1 | 3.1 |
| Demining (NADR/HD) Grants for landmine removal | | | | 0.8 | 0.8 | 0.8 |
| Small Arms / Light Weapons (NADR/SALW) Grants to assist in halting trafficking in small arms | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Counter-Terror Fellowship Program (CTFP) Grants for training in counter-terrorism through a Defense Department program established in 2002 | | | | 0.3 | 0.3 | 0.3 |
| Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (CHDS) Grants for education in defense management at a Defense-Department school in Washington | | | | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
| Excess Defense Articles (EDA) Authority to transfer "excess" equipment | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Discretionary Funds from the Office of National Drug Control Policy | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Subtotal | 555.6 | 642.5 | 590.9 | 623.6 | 660.0 | 626.6 |
| Percentage of total | 80.5% | 82.7% | 81.2% | 82.5% | 82.3% | 82.5% |
| Economic and Social Assistance Programs (millions of dollars) |
| | | 2006, estimate | 2007, request | 2007, House version of foreign aid bill | 2007, Senate version of foreign aid bill | |
| International Narcotics Control (INC) State Department-managed counter-drug arms transfers, training, and services | | | | 0 | 7.3 | 0 |
| "Andean Counterdrug Initiative" Basically the same as INC above, but separated out for the Andes | | | | 132.3 | 0 | 132.9 |
| Economic Support Funds (ESF) Transfers to the recipient government | | | | 0 | 135.0 | 0 |
| P.L. 480 "Food for Peace" Humanitarian deliveries of food | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Subtotal | | | | 132.3 | 142.3 | 132.9 |
| Percentage of total | 19.5% | 17.3% | 18.8% | 17.5% | 17.7% | 17.5% |
| | | |||||
| Grand Total | 690.1 | 777.2 | 728.1 | 755.9 | 802.3 | 759.5 |
Posted by isacson at 05:47 PM | Comments (3)
September 24, 2006
Notes from last week's hearings
On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee considered the nomination of Vice Admiral James Stavridis to be the next commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which governs the U.S. military's activities in nearly all of Latin America and the Caribbean. (Adm. Stavridis, today's New York Times informs us, has been a regular squash partner of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.)
On Thursday, meanwhile, two House subcommittees met jointly to discuss "The Need for European Assistance to Colombia for the Fight against Illicit Drugs."
CIP Intern Mariam Khokhar attended both hearings. Here are her notes.
Committee on Armed Services
Senate Hart Building
Tuesday, September 19, 2006 9:30 am
Vice Admiral James G. Stavridis, USN
(For appointment to be admiral and to be Commander, U.S. Southern Command)
Adm. Stavridis shared a panel with Gen. Bantz Craddock, the current chief of U.S. Southern Command, who has been nominated to head the European Command. Stavridis' responses to senators' written questions are available as a PDF file.
Stavridis's opening statement
Stavridis stated that it is an honor and privilege to be considered and thanked the committee for their time. If confirmed, he said that "this job will receive my full energy and attention."
Committee Chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Virginia) asked Stavridis to explain the importance of Panama today.
Stavridis replied that the canal is very important, as 65% of the ships passing through the canal go to U.S. ports. The Panamanian president is seeking the public's approval for a new referendum to expand the canal. The money for this project will come from public and private investors. The United States has to follow especially the private investment in order to be aware of Chinese economic and military connections in Panama.
Sen. Warner added that the United States has to respect Panama's sovereignty. Still, he highlighted the fact that the canal is of great importance to the United States.
Sen. Warner then asked Stavridis what he hopes to achieve in Venezuela.
Stavridis replied by stating that historically, the US has enjoyed good relations with Venezuela. Still, the country's recent ties with Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Belarus are "disturbing." There is concern that Venezuela is influencing a bloc of Latin American countries to be anti-U.S. Venezuela just purchased new arms, including rifles and jets, from Russia. Oil money is also a big concern in the region. Due to all this, Venezuela's actions "have to be of concern."
The ranking Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), attended the hearing but did not pose any questions to Stavridis.
Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) attended but did not pose any questions to Stavridis.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) did not pose any questions to Stavridis or the other nominee, General Craddock. He only stated his "disappointment" in Craddock's refusal to discipline Gen. Geoffrey Miller for detainee abuse that allegedly occurred while he commanded the Guantanamo prison facility.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) asked Stavridis to elaborate on the current situation in Cuba, particularly Fidel Castro's health and the probability of his brother, Raúl, might take power for good.
Stavridis replied that "Cuba is front and center" and it will be at the center of his work. He said he is hopeful of a peaceful transition to a democratic regime, but that he is not hopeful that this will happen anytime soon. Raúl will take the reins of power and "very little will change." Cuba is facing many problems. The country, he said, has a very weak economy that is only propped up by Venezuelan oil subsidies, there are over 800 migrants a year to the United States, and Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism. In taking action, the "U.S. will support the Cuban people."
Sen. Nelson then asked Stavridis to comment on Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega.
Stavridis stated that "I am not an expert at all" on Nicaraguan politics. But it is common sense to state that Ortega is an opponent of the United States. Although he conceded that the elections appear to be fair and that Nicaragua is a sovereign nation, he is "very concerned" about the linkage between Nicaragua and nations like Cuba and Venezuela, in what he referred to as an "anti-U.S. bloc."
Sen. Nelson posed a third question to Stavridis regarding the IMET program [International Military Education and Training, the main source of U.S. funding for non-drug military training in Latin America]. He stated that he initially thought that the United States was doing other nations a favor with the program. Now, he believes that the United States is the beneficiary of the IMET program. Furthermore, if the United States does not continue with the program - which has been suspended in twelve Latin American countries who do not exempt U.S. personnel in their territory from the International Criminal Court - then nations like China will step in and offer the training.
Stavridis responded to this question after Gen. Craddock already addressed it. Craddock stated that we want servicemen to be protected. The United States is losing engagement opportunities with other cultures, and that the United States benefits from foreign military personnel coming here to see our culture and our democracy. We are losing this in key countries. Stavridis stated that he "associates" himself with all of General Craddock's comments.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) raised a concern about Hezbollah being "in our backyard," asserting that the terrorist organization can easily expand its base of actions to the Western Hemisphere. What should we be doing?
Stavridis responded that he has read many reports, both classified and unclassified, about Hezbollah's presence in Latin America. It appears that "Hezbollah has a foothold" in the Southern Command's area of responsibility, especially in the tri-border area shared by Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. The organization is largely concerned with financing and fundraising in the region, but this could come to include human trafficking. There have been reports of surveillance at the Panama Canal. This is cause for "real concern." The United States' role is "to be plugged into intelligence," which means it has to work with partners, both on a one-to-one basis and regionally. The United States needs to fortify alliances and to be very aware of the situation.
Sen. Cornyn then asked about narco-trafficking and terrorism in Colombia. The FARC, he said, is setting up a safe haven in Venezuela. He asserted that the United States' aid, namely in coca eradication, has been very helpful. What should we do about these recent developments with Venezuela, a nation that associates itself with U.S. enemies?
Stavridis started by saying that "Colombia has made tremendous progress" over the past four or five years, adding that the military is handling the FARC, the AUC is demobilizing, and the economy is doing well. The United States has to support Colombia in strengthening its borders. The issue is "of concern." Stavridis stated that he could not say much more because much of the intelligence is classified.
Sen. Cornyn agreed with his comments, adding that the Department of Defense has to protect U.S. borders (with all of Latin America) by improving use of technology.
The Chairman concluded the panel by thanking both nominees for their "direct answers."
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Joint Oversight Hearing (Government Reform Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, and the International Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere)
House Rayburn Building
September 21, 2006 11:30 AM
"The Need for European Assistance to Colombia for the Fight against Illicit Drugs"
House Republicans, faced with continued high levels of coca cultivation and cocaine trafficking in Colombia, have not chosen to reconsider their strategy. Instead, they have begun to blame Europe, where demand for cocaine is rising. They charge that European donors have failed to match U.S. aid to Colombia, which is overwhelmingly military in focus, with similar levels of so-called "soft" aid to fight poverty and strengthen civilian institutions.
Opening Statements
Rep. Howard Coble (R-Texas), chairman of the Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee
Rep. Coble said it is believed that 40-60% of Colombian cocaine finds its way to Europe because it is more "geographically convenient" due to the European Union's open borders. The price of cocaine per kilo in Europe is three times that in the United States. The DEA reports that the FARC and the AUC are penetrating Spain. Europe needs to recognize the "imminent danger" of these groups. The chairman stated that he was "disappointed" that the EU members who were invited to testify did not come.
Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana), chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee
Rep. Burton stated that Colombia is at a "critical junction." Spain and Portugal have become "the portals" to Europe. The "drug flow to Europe is undermining" all of the United States' efforts in Colombia. "I hope somebody in Europe is listening, because they should be here today." Europe must begin to pay its pledges for "soft-side assistance" in Colombia.
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Virginia), ranking Democrat on the Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee
Rep. Scott stated, "My hope is that Europe will do a better job" than the United States has done. The United States has spent billions on security and the military instead of social programs, like education. The United States may have helped increase the supply of cocaine by breaking up large cartels into smaller, less detectable ones.
Rep. Eliot Engel (New York), ranking Democrat on the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee
Representative Engel stated that the United States needs to cooperate with Europe on many matters and current issues - Iran, Afghanistan, and Colombia. "I hope this hearing will be viewed positively on the other side of the Atlantic." The hearing should highlight commonalities instead of looking at differences.
Rep. Coble introduced the three witnesses - Michael A. Braun (Chief of Operations - DEA), Sandro Calvani (UN Office on Drugs and Crime), and, in absentia, Rosso Jose Serrano (Former head of Colombia's National Police, now Ambassador of Colombia in Austria)
Mr. Braun
Cocaine trafficking to Europe can be directly linked to Colombia. The single most important objective is to dismantle cartels. Cartels rule and operate like terrorist organizations, using fear, corruption, and violence. No state in the world has stronger laws than the United States. Because of this, the last thing a trafficker wants is "to face justice in U.S. courthouses." The United States should be proud of this.
Dr. Calvani
The lack of government control of territory allows for the continuing growing of coca. Eradication must be backed with strong economic incentives for farmers. A current project gives farmers $265 per month on a three year basis. The results have been very positive. 80% of the coca plants eliminated have been eliminated for good. Only 0.9% of these farmers say they will go back to cultivating illicit crops. Still, nations, especially in Europe, must work to reduce demand.
Major Lopez (speaking on behalf of Ambassador Serrano)
UN reports show there is an increase in cocaine consumption in Europe, especially in the UK and Spain. It is important to charge the EU to take action and recognize the "shared responsibility" of fighting cocaine trafficking.
Questioning
Rep. Coble: Portugal may surpass Spain as the port of Europe. Does the DEA have an office there?
Braun: The DEA is looking into it, but currently has a "hiring freeze." People from the Madrid office will visit Lisbon regularly.
Rep. Coble: How much does trafficking influence terrorism?
Braun: "Franchised terrorist cells" must fund their operations and many do it through the $322 billion drug industry. The Tri-Border Region is a "breeding ground for terrorism."
Rep. Scott: How much is the United States spending on source-control in Colombia?
Braun: A lot. (He was not aware of the exact numbers.)
Rep. Scott: What is the trend in the cocaine price on the streets of the United States?
Braun: It remains about the same while the purity has declined.
Rep. Scott: How much supply would we have to reduce to have an effect on the price on U.S. streets?
Braun: The DEA doesn't measure success in price. It measures success in the disruption of cartels. Mr. Braun stated that many reports would refute Mr. Scott's numbers.
Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio): Chabot stated that he went to Colombia and saw the military and police counter-drug units and was impressed with their work. European countries have opposed aerial spraying and have adopted an"environmental attitude." The spray is "'Round-Up,' so it's not like we don't know what it is." Manual coca "plucking" is very dangerous.
Lopez: In a national park, terrorists were killing individuals who were manually eradicating coca. 19 soldiers, 10, police officers, and 12 civilians were killed. In the end, the park had to be sprayed.
Rep. Engel: Is the U.S. counter-drug policy (Plan Colombia) working?
Braun: "When we hit the traffickers hard," they have the ability to bounce back. They have tremendous potential margin.
Engel: To what extent has Plan Colombia resulted in an increase of cocaine trafficking from Peru and Bolivia?
Braun: (He did not have any numbers).
Engel: Plan Colombia is controversial in Europe. What are the criticisms?
Calvani: They say the US and Colombia do not consult with them. They want to apply alternative development programs to Colombia (similar to those applied in Laos and Thailand).
Rep. Coble: Colombian cultivation has increased by 8%. Why has eradication become harder?
Calvani: There has been only a "very slight" increase after a reduction of 51% over the past few years. Alternative development programs have been reduced and demand for cocaine has not decreased. Production in Bolivia and Peru has gone up. Also, people are going into the forest and are planting smaller plots of coca.
Rep. Coble: Cocaine flow to Europe is massive. How many Spanish anti-drug police are in Bogota?
Lopez: There is one Spanish anti-drug police officer and 125 DEA agents.
Rep. Scott: Can you comment on the health implications of spraying?
Calvani: So far, it has not been possible to detect any effect. The product used to spray is widely used in Colombia and the United States.
Rep. Coble: What does organized crime in Russia have to do with the increase of cocaine in Europe?
Braun: It isn't a "significant threat."
Calvani: They are involved in other drugs, like heroin from Afghanistan.
Burton: Doesn't the increase of cocaine in Europe undercut the United States' work? What does the DEA have to say?
Braun: He would have to think about the question.
The Chairman adjourned the hearing.
Posted by isacson at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2006
Maps of poverty, coca, fumigation and alternative development
In a conversation today, a House staffer preparing for tomorrow's Colombia hearing asked, "wouldn't it be nice to see the following information side-by-side on a map?"
Yes, it would. Here are four graphics showing poverty levels, coca-growing, fumigation and alternative-development spending by department in Colombia. To see all four on one page, download this PDF file (106KB).
Posted by isacson at 04:03 PM | Comments (5)
September 19, 2006
Where in Colombia does U.S. military aid go?
| The map below shows the locations of the vetted recipient units from Colombia's army, navy and air force. |
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The so-called "Leahy Law" is a provision that has appeared in the U.S. foreign aid bill every year since 1997. Named for its principal proponent, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), its purpose is straightforward. It states that if a foreign military unit includes people who have committed gross human-rights violations, and they are not being credibly investigated, tried or punished, then that unit cannot receive U.S. assistance.
The Leahy Law is not frequently invoked, though it has on occasion forced the U.S. government to refuse aid to army units in Colombia, or to cut off aid to units already receiving it (as happened in January 2003, when an air force command saw its aid cut off for non-cooperation with authorities investigating the 1998 Santo Domingo massacre).
In order to comply with the Leahy Law, the U.S. embassy in Colombia (and, presumably, in every country that gets military aid) must keep a database of individual military personnel who face credible allegations of human rights abuse, and must ensure that none of these names appear on the roster of a military unit being considered for U.S. assistance. This process is called "vetting" the unit.
We had never seen a list of which units had been vetted and approved for U.S. aid - until now. Thanks to the efforts of the Fellowship of Reconciliation's Colombia Program, we now have recent lists of all Colombian military and police units:
- That have been vetted and approved for assistance, and
- That are using U.S.-provided helicopters.
A few quick notes about these lists:
- If a unit does not appear on the list of approved units, that doesn't necessarily mean that the U.S. government has refused aid for human-rights reasons. It does mean, however, that the unit is not getting U.S. aid.
- When the aid in question is training (as opposed to weapons, equipment or intelligence), the definition of "unit" becomes much more flexible. The U.S. government only considers the human-rights background of the individual who has been proposed for training. The individual is the "unit." It is conceivable, then, that an individual from a notoriously abusive unit can receive training, as long as his name does not appear in the vetting database.
- It was surprising to see the 11th Brigade listed. This unit is based in Montería, Córdoba, and its area of responsibility is one of the paramilitaries' principal historic strongholds. Yet the 11th Brigade has almost no record of combating the paramilitary groups that operate in its midst.
- For the most part, other units that operate in paramilitary-heavy areas - the 17th (Urabá), the 4th (Antioquia), the 5th (Magdalena Medio and Catatumbo), the 14th (Magdalena Medio), and the 10th (Cesar) - do not receive assistance. Exceptions include the above-mentioned 11th Brigade, the 16th Brigade (Casanare), and naval units in Sucre.
- Many recipient army units are concentrated in the southern Colombian zone where the "Plan Patriota" offensive has been occurring (Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare departments, including the former demilitarized zone where peace talks with the FARC took place between 1998 and 2002). Another zone of concentration are the oil-producing departments of Arauca and Casanare. (In 2002, the U.S. Congress approved a Bush administration request for $100 million in military aid to protect an oil pipeline in Arauca.)
- Surprisingly, none of the military units in the department of Putumayo - where Plan Colombia began in 2000 - is receiving aid, with the exception of the Navy Riverine Battalion and an Army Counter-Narcotics Brigade that only spends some of its time in Putumayo.
- In the list of units cleared to use helicopters, "TF Omega" is the task force involved in the Plan Patriota offensive. "PCHP" stands for "Plan Colombia Helicopter Program."
Posted by isacson at 07:16 PM | Comments (3)
September 11, 2006
Fumigation and "defoliation"
The International Journal of Remote Sensing is a periodical that you'll rarely find on our reading list. But we were very interested to read a paper recently published there about "Defoliation and the war on drugs in Putumayo, Colombia." An abstract of the paper is available here, but unfortunately you have to pay to read the whole thing.
Much of the paper looks like this:
Or like this:
But the authors' conclusion is easy enough to understand:
[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.
In other words, satellite imagery seems to vindicate all those Colombian campesinos claiming that the U.S.-funded herbicide fumigation, through inaccuracies and spray drift, destroys legal crops, alternative-development projects, and nearby forest.
This finding seems to contradict the State Department's regular certifications to the U.S. Congress that such environmental damage is not happening. The last certification, for instance, reads as follows:
The Government of Colombia regularly conducts studies to assess the spray program's environmental impact through ground truth verifications to estimate spray drift and the accuracy of the spray mixture application and during verification of all legitimate complaints about alleged spraying of crops or vegetation that are not coca or opium poppy. After one recent verification, the Government of Colombia’s Ministry of Environment, Housing, and Territorial Development characterized spray drift in the following fashion:
The drift effects that were observed in areas visited on a random basis were temporary in nature and small in extent, and basically consisted of partial defoliation of the canopy of very high trees. No complementary collateral damage from spraying activities was observed at the sites selected and verified. In sprayed areas that were subsequently abandoned, it was noted that vegetation was starting to grow again, the predominant types being grasses and a number of herbaceous species (Attachment 2, p. 4)
The Department of State believes that the program’s rigid controls and operational guidelines have decreased the likelihood of adverse impacts of the eradication program on humans and the environment and that the herbicide mixture, in the manner it is being used, does not pose unreasonable risks or adverse effects to humans or the environment.
The International Journal of Remote Sensing paper charges that the problem is far more widespread than the U.S. and Colombian governments maintain, and that the environmental impact may indeed be quite serious.
The region is classic humid tropics, with cloud cover present almost every day. This has made both monitoring the situation more difficult and, conversely, hiding the effects from the public simpler. While this research should not be used to indict the UNODC or the organizations responsible for spraying, it should serve as a warning that the published reports on drug war results are open to interpretation and that some of the anecdotal, and usually dismissed, claims of misapplication of spraying may, in fact, be true.
Add to this the widespread anger and resentment in areas where development aid has failed to keep up with the spray planes. Yet even with all this collateral damage, the ends can't even be said to justify the means. The hugely expensive fumigation program has still failed to reduce coca-growing in Colombia.
Posted by isacson at 03:20 PM | Comments (2)
September 08, 2006
The paramilitary "extraditables"
Thanks to a communiqué [PDF] put out last week by the Colombian presidency, there is finally a public, more-or-less comprehensive list of paramilitary figures who face U.S. government extradition requests for narcotrafficking. It turns out that there are twenty-four of them.
Ten of them are still at large. Here they are, with photos where available.
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An August 30 article in El Tiempo adds the names of eight additional individuals facing extradition whom the paramilitaries have identified as members of the AUC. All of them already in Colombian jails.
- Álvaro Antonio Padilla Meléndez, alias "El Topo," Bloque Resistencia Tayrona;
- Álvaro Padilla Redondo, Bloque Resistencia Tayrona;
- Eduardo Enrique Vengoechea, Bloque Resistencia Tayrona;
- Fredy Castillo Carrillo, Bloque Resistencia Tayrona;
- Héctor Ignacio Rodríguez Acevedo, Bloque Resistencia Tayrona;
- Huber Aníbal Gómez, Bloque Resistencia Tayrona;
- Jhony or Jhon Eidelber Cano Correa, Bloque Resistencia Tayrona;
- Jhon Alexánder Posada Vergara, Bloque Norte.
Posted by isacson at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2006
If the Democrats take the House...
Front-page stories in yesterday's Washington Post and today's New York Times report that the Republican Party, dragged down by President Bush's unpopularity, is increasingly likely to lose its majority control of the House of Representatives when the United States elects a new Congress in November.
In the U.S. system, the party that holds a majority of a congressional chamber - even if it is just a one-seat majority - controls almost everything the chamber does. That party gets to name the speaker of the House and the chairmen of all committees. That party decides which bills get debated on the floor and sets the rules for debate. That party's committee chairmen decide which bills get considered, draft the text of appropriations bills, decide the subject matter for hearings and have the power to subpoena witnesses. The balance between parties makes an enormous difference in the U.S. congressional system.
The election is more than sixty days away, and it is entirely possible that the Republicans will manage to hold onto their majority. However, if the Democrats do manage to take back the House for the first time since 1994, U.S. policy toward Colombia could change significantly.
If the Democrats win back the House, the likely leadership of the chamber, and the chairmen of all committees with jurisdiction over Colombia policy, will be made up of people with long records of criticizing the current U.S. policy toward Colombia. (Skip down to see who they are and what their records are.)
Most have expressed concerns about the lack of results against drugs, the Colombian armed forces' human-rights record, the open-ended U.S. mission, and the need for more development assistance. Most have consistently supported legislative efforts over the past six years to reduce the amount of military aid going to Colombia and to do more to address poverty and human-rights abuse.
It has been reported that the Bush administration plans to begin reducing aid to Colombia in 2008 or 2009. Because a Democratic House would probably approve more money for foreign aid worldwide, it would be less likely to implement such cuts - or at least it would not cut aid as deeply as a Republican Congress might.
While the overall amount of aid from a Democratic House would likely be larger, though, the ratio between military to economic aid would probably be significantly different from the current 80 percent to 20 percent split. U.S. aid would become less military in focus, with more funding for priorities like alternative development, civilian governance, judicial reform, aid to the displaced and human rights. Aid would be more strongly conditioned on the Colombian military's human-rights performance, and the aerial herbicide fumigation program, which has not reduced coca-growing, will come up for particular scrutiny. A Democratic chamber would also increase investment in drug demand reduction at home, particularly treatment for addicts.
(The fate of the free-trade agreement the two countries have signed is harder to predict. However, it's worth recalling that CAFTA was barely ratified last year, passing the House by only one vote. And only 15 Democrats voted for it.)
Here are the House Democrats who would be likely to take over leadership positions if their party wins control of the House in November. In one of her last duties this summer, now-departed intern Christina Sanabria compiled each member's record on the ten Colombia-related amendments that have come to a vote since aid to Plan Colombia was first debated in 2000. (A description of each amendment is below, and all members' Colombia voting records are here.)
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Posted by isacson at 11:11 PM | Comments (2)
August 31, 2006
Still swatting flies in Caquetá
In a post to the Democracy Arsenal blog, I discuss USAID's plans to ignore Caquetá department completely, even while the "Plan Patriota" military offensive continues there. It seems to say a lot about how little the U.S. government understands the challenge of dealing with insurgencies.
Does USAID really mean to say that it will only invest in zones where the economy is already viable and where guerrilla presence is low? Does the United States make similar choices in Iraq, too? ("Forget about the Sunni Triangle, let's get the electricity flowing in the few towns where the locals are happy to have us.") If so, that would explain quite a bit.
Posted by isacson at 05:21 PM | Comments (1)
August 29, 2006
Putumayo's white elephant, or how not to win hearts and minds
While driving through the troubled department of Putumayo in southern Colombia late last month, our group decided to branch off the main road to pay a quick visit to Orito, the main town in the municipality (county) of the same name. We had heard that one of the largest projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Putumayo, an animal-food concentrates processing plant in the town, was having some difficulties, and we hoped to be able to find out what was going on.
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The plant's concept appeared to make sense: take crops that are easily grown in Putumayo, like yuca and corn, and turn them into food for cows, pigs, chickens and other livestock. USAID and its contractors helped to set up a publicly traded company to run the plant and invested somewhere in the neighborhood of US$2 million to build the facility, buy machinery and perform studies (feasibility, environmental impact, etc.).
This high-profile project, it was hoped, would help wean thousands of Putumayo's farmers away from coca-growing, while turning a profit for its shareholders. It greatly raised expectations among a population battered by massive coca cultivation, relentless fumigation, chronic government neglect and constant violence at the hands of illegal armed groups.
We found the concentrates plant easily enough, as it was located right next to Orito's oil refinery and the base of the local Army energy-infrastructure protection battalion. It is a great-looking facility, modern and clean, with intricate machinery, a cafeteria, meeting spaces, and a big plaque thanking USAID for making the whole thing possible.
Everything looked great, except the whole scene was strangely quiet. The expensive-looking machinery was idle. There were no animal-feed concentrates, yucca or corn to be seen anywhere. The plant was not functioning.
The big building was not empty, though. About forty people were using it as a meeting space. When we arrived, several people had gathered for a job-training workshop organized by a local non-profit. Others, including two Orito council members, were assembled elsewhere in the building. When they saw us arrive, all stopped what they were doing and gethered around us - and especially me, the lone gringo in the group.
Once I explained that I wasn't from the U.S. government, but an independent investigator trying to figure out what happened, everyone started talking at once. It was like being hit by a big wave of anger and frustration. Things soon calmed down, and I tried to take notes as quickly as I could. This is more or less what the residents of Orito told me.
- The concentrates plant cost about 6 billion pesos (US$2.5 million) to establish. It opened in late 2003 and shut its doors in mid-2005. There are no plans to re-open it. The plant's machinery is already being sold off, and some had already been carted away. Residents who had been convinced to invest in the plant had lost money.
- The main reason the concentrates plant failed was a lack of inputs. Nobody wanted to sell it yuca or corn because it offered to buy it at prices considered to be ridiculously low.
The plant offered to pay 120,000 pesos - about US$50 - for a ton of yuca. That's 5 U.S. cents per kilo or 2.2 cents per pound. The same kilo of yuca could be sold in local produce markets for about eight times as much money. I was told that the cost of renting a vehicle and transporting that ton of yuca through roadless Putumayo to the processing plant would eat up more than one-third of those 120,000 pesos.
It made no sense for local farmers to sell yuca or corn to the concentrates plant, when they were guaranteed to lose money at the prices offered. The plant's managers apparently took a "take it or leave it" attitude, not budging on the price (and it is possible that they could not make money at a higher price). The farmers, of course, were happy to "leave it," selling yuca at better prices elsewhere, or braving the U.S.-funded herbicide fumigations and re-planting coca. - The plant was plagued by other problems that should have been foreseen. The machinery, most of which was apparently used and refurbished, never worked at anywhere near top efficiency. Storage of yucca and seeds was a problem in Orito's very humid climate.
- Those with whom I spoke wondered how the idea of a concentrates plant was chosen, alleging that the community was never asked. Others wondered why it was located in oil-producing Orito, when better soils for growing yuca and corn were located in municipalities about an hour's drive to the south.
Since 2000, U.S.-funded planes have sprayed herbicides over 155,534 hectares (about 390,000 acres) of Putumayo, making it the second most-fumigated of Colombia's thirty-two departments during this period. The "stick" of fumigation has been strong and swift, but the "carrot" of development aid has not only been smaller - only 20 percent of U.S. aid to Colombia is non-military - but it has been slower to arrive, haphazardly planned, and has largely failed to improve lives and livelihoods. "Orito today is in its worst economic crisis," a councilmember told me.
After about half an hour, we left the plant and got back on the road. I lamely promised those assembled at the plant that I would at least inform my fellow citizens and my lawmakers about what I saw there.
My nauseating experience in Orito was made possible by one of the most frustrating things about watching U.S. policy unfold in Colombia over the past several years: its systematic undervaluing and neglect of all things non-military.
For planners of U.S. assistance to Colombia, non-military programs have always been an afterthought. Four out of five dollars in U.S. aid goes to Colombia's armed forces, police, and fumigation program. Policymakers have placed a far lower priority on the rest of the aid, which is intended to support governance and development.
Too often, these funds go to programs that are improvised, uncoordinated, left entirely up to contractors, carry high overhead costs, and appear to ignore completely the lessons of similar efforts taken elsewhere. Oversight is weak, dubious claims of success go unquestioned, higher-level officials show little interest. It's easy to get the impression that nobody in charge of these projects cares whether they succeed or not: the point is to spend the money and demonstrate that an objective was fulfilled. The Orito concentrates plant is a perfect example.
The U.S. and Colombian governments have claimed to be pursuing many goals in Colombia, from fighting drugs to fighting guerrillas to simply making Colombia a more just, lawful, prosperous society. To achieve any of these goals, a strategy will fail if it lacks a major investment in governance and development - especially in the vast, stateless rural areas where armed groups and drug crops thrive. Spray planes and military sweeps cannot do it on their own.
But look no further than Putumayo to see the tragedy of alternative development in Colombia. Plan Colombia began in 2000 with Putumayo in mind: at the time, this province of 350,000 people had more coca than any other in the country, and was overrun by guerrillas and paramilitaries. A U.S.-funded "push to the south" would insert new military units in Putumayo and initiate a massive campaign of aerial herbicide fumigation. Next would come aid to help the region's coca farmers to switch to legal crops.
Yet five years later, the United Nations found that Putumayo was still the country's number-three coca-growing department. Today, it is still overrun by armed groups, and it is safe to say that Putumayo's population has not experienced a flowering of affection for its government institutions.
It is not news that progress will be only temporary until Colombians who live in depressed rural areas like Orito - a minority of the population living in the majority of the country's territory - can trust their government to protect them, to enforce laws and to make a functioning legal economy possible. Counter-insurgency experts have said for decades that "the people are the center of gravity."
But in Orito, Putumayo - right in the middle of one of the main battlegrounds for the Colombian government's U.S.-aided counter-insurgency effort - the people I talked to are very, very angry. The angrier and more distrustful they get, the more likely it is that even the small security gains that the Uribe government has achieved will be reversed.
Posted by isacson at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)
August 23, 2006
Colombian contractors in Iraq
Here are some excerpts, translated into English, from the shocking and sad cover story in this week's edition of the Colombian magazine Semana. It tells of thirty-five retired Colombian military officers who were recruited to serve as security guards in Iraq.
A subsidiary of Blackwater USA, the major U.S. contractor whose private guards have even protected U.S. generals in Iraq, recruited the Colombians with promises of salaries of $4,000 per month - more than most doctors or lawyers earn in Colombia. After undergoing training on a Colombian military base (!), they were rushed off to Baghdad - where they found that their salaries would be only $1,000 per month. When they complained, the U.S. company took away their return tickets.
Here is the story. There is much more in the Spanish version that is worth a read as well, such as the reaction of these officers, all of them veterans of Colombia's violence, to the incomparably worse security situation in Iraq ("This is hell: there are bombings all the time, shots, helicopters near and far, sirens day and night. There is no rest. One feels a permanent tension in his chest.")
“The group of 35 of us, and another 34 that arrived about two weeks later, we want to return to Colombia, but they won’t let us. When they find out that we’ve talked about what they’re doing to us, we don’t know what could happen. But the truth is that the people here in Baghdad are desperate,” said Esteban Osorio, a retired captain of the National Army.
… Retired Army Major Juan Carlos Forero went to an office near downtown Bogotá to submit his resumé. “The company is called ID Systems… it’s the representative in Colombia for the American firm called Blackwater. It is one of the biggest private security contracting firms in the world and they work for the U.S. government,” said Major Forero.
“[At ID Systems] we were received by Captain (Gonzalo) Guevara, who works with that firm and is retired from the Army. He told us that basically we had to provide security for military facilities. He told us salaries were around $4,000 USD per month,” Forero said.
Finally, in early June of this year, the representatives of ID Systems told the recruited Colombians that the time had come. “On the evening of the first of June, they asked twelve of us to meet at the office and told us that we were leaving for Iraq the next day. There they told us that the salary wouldn’t be $4,000, but $2,700. We didn’t like that because we had always been convinced that it would be $4,000, but there wasn’t anything we could do at that point.” Why? Because by then none of them had jobs anymore (they had quit in anticipation of the trip) and were desperate to support their families.
At midnight of June 1, Forero and his companions were made to sign contracts, and were given a copy. “We weren’t able to read anything in the contract. We just signed and left in a hurry because when they gave us the contracts they told us we had to be at the airport in four hours and since everything was so rushed, we barely had time to say goodbye to our families, get our bags together and leave for the airport,” said Forero.
From Bogotá they left for Caracas, from there to Frankfurt, where they waited for twelve hours for a flight to Amman, Jordan, and from there a last plane to Baghdad. “Since in the Frankfurt airport we had to wait so long, we started reading the contract, and there we realized that there was something wrong because it said they would pay us $34 a day. That is, our salary would be $1,000 a month, and not $2,700,” recalls Forero.
… The mission of the group… consisted in replacing a group of Romanian contractors that had finished their contracts. “When we linked up with the Romanians they asked us how much we were being paid, and we told them $1,000.” They responded with mockery. “No sane person in the world comes to Baghdad for only $1,000,” they said.
The Romanians told them that for the same work they were being paid $4,000. That fact gave way to uneasiness among the other contractors on the base. The mood turned hostile against the Colombians because if each soldier establishes his own conditions for fighting in a foreign country, there is always a benefit because in the end they are risking their lives. No one spoke to the Colombians and when they did, it was to offend them and treat them like cheap labor.
On June 9th, before they had spent even a week in Baghdad, the 35 drafted and signed a letter addressed to the ID Systems and Blackwater representatives. In the letter, they said that if they didn’t pay the $2,700 that were promised, they wanted an immediate return to Colombia for the entire group.
The letter in which the Colombians demanded their rights was interpreted as rebellion, and the consequences were unexpected. “When we arrived at the base, they took away all our return flight tickets. After the letter they gathered us together and said that if we wanted to return, we should do it through our own means. Ironically, in a show of antipatriotism, one of the people who was most against us was a former captain of the Colombian Army, (Edgar Ernesto) Méndez, who is the link here in Iraq of the contractor in Colombia,” said retired Captain (Estaban) Osorio from Baghdad.
“To force us to comply with the contract, they began to pressure us. They threatened to kick us out of the base facilities to the streets of Baghdad, where you are exposed to being killed or, in the best of cases, kidnapped,” said Osorio.
…What’s more, when they were hired in Bogotá, the retired military men were told they would have eight-hour shifts. After the protest, the shifts became twelve-hour shifts. When the group complained, the response was that they would lose their potable water or that they wouldn’t receive the same food as the others on the base. At the time of recruitment in Bogotá, they were told that they would have medical insurance, dentists, and access to recreation zones within the base and life insurance for $1.5 million dollars. Just like the salary they were offered, nothing turned out to be true. Then came the health deterioration. “Several have gotten sick or have had accidents and it has not been possible for them to receive medical attention. When we asked for an explanation, the only thing we are told is that our contract does not cover that kind of services,” says Forero.
The contractors insist on the influence that the company has on the Army and the government, and that the company could close the doors for them to find jobs back in Colombia. And the threats go even further. “We are afraid for the consequences, not only that we risk being left without a job when we return to Colombia, but that they have also told us to remember that they have all the information about our families and children and that, simply put, is a threat,” said Forero.
Although the Ministry of Defense, the Army and the United States Embassy in Colombia are aware of the recruitment of retired soldiers, it has been a matter dealt with a low profile in which nobody accepts any responsibility.
The closest to it is that the Defense Ministry and Army staff accept that they’re “doing a favor” by lending (ID Systems) a Colombian military base for the training of retired soldiers that are sent to Iraq. “It’s a company endorsed by the U.S. government that asked the Army for cooperation, which consists of allowing them the use of the base, as long as they do not recruit active personnel. There is no agreement, contract or any other type of relationship with them, and therefore, the Colombian government has no responsibility. Whatever happens between retired soldiers and the company that recruits them is basically an agreement between an individual and a foreign company,” said a high-level government official.
For their part, an official from the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC, determined that “The State Deparment believes that this is a private commercial dispute between the Colombian employees and their employer.” The official said that any other comment should be made by Blackwater. Semana Magazine called Chris Taylor, vice president of that company, over ten times, and sent him a written set of questions but never received a response. It was also impossible to obtain a response from the representatives of ID Systems in Colombia, the retired captain Gonzalo Guevara or the owner of ID Systems, José Arturo Zuluaga.
(All the names have been changed for security reasons.)
Posted by isacson at 08:18 AM | Comments (2)
August 15, 2006
Notes from Putumayo
This was my third visit since 2001 to Putumayo, a small department in Colombia's far south, along the border with Ecuador. I've also taken two other trips very close to Putumayo, one to the Ecuadorian side of the international border, and one to a meeting of Putumayo community leaders just over the departmental border in eastern Nariño.
I keep coming back to Putumayo because there is no better place to gauge the impact, the success or failure, of U.S. policy in Colombia. This province of perhaps 350,000 people is where Plan Colombia basically got started, back in 2000-2001.
At that time, Putumayo had far more coca than any of Colombia's 32 departments, along with a very heavy FARC guerrilla presence, while its principal towns were being methodically, brutally taken over by paramilitaries. Putumayo was the focus of the military "Push to the South" that lay at the heart of the Clinton Administration's big 2000 aid package. Supported by U.S. funds, trainers and contractors, a new Colombian Army Counter-Narcotics Brigade, bristling with helicopters, would clear Putumayo's coca-growing zones of armed groups, while augmented counter-narcotics police would coordinate vastly increased herbicide fumigation. In their wake would come alternative-development programs to help Putumayo's farmers participate in the legal economy.
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A U.S.-donated Colombian Anti-Narcotics Police Blackhawk parked at the Puerto Asís airport. |
Six years and untold hundreds of millions of dollars later, did the strategy work in Putumayo? No, mostly not, though there are a few bright spots.
Like much else in Colombia, the results in Putumayo tell us that the strategy needs to be very long-term, must consult closely with local leaders and organizations, and must go way, way beyond military operations and fumigation. And by all appearances, these lessons haven't come close to sinking in yet.
Here is a closer look, based on my all-too-brief visit.
The security situation appeared to be better, for now at least, though the last few years have shown that levels of security tend to oscillate wildly between relative safety and extreme danger. Right now, travel along main roads is possible, with the likelihood of running into guerrillas considered to be low. Road travel at night is still inadvisable, though doable.
We passed through more army and police checkpoints than I had seen before, and the security forces' presence was greater in general. Small contingents of soldiers were reliably stationed at key infrastructure points, including the rebuilt bridge over the Guamués River, which the FARC had blown up before my last visit in 2004, forcing us to board canoes to get across. Many of the soldiers and cops we saw were clearly from elite units, judging from their physical size and the quality of their equipment. (The soldiers who patted us down at checkpoints, however, were generally smaller and younger.)
Some small towns along the main road that had no police presence before, such as El Tigre or Buenos Aires, now had police stations. Also notable, especially in the oil-producing town of Orito, was the presence of troops from a new energy and road infrastructure-protection army brigade. Soldiers and police in many posts sat behind bags of cement piled high into walls, a bulletproof defense that resembled preparations for a flood.
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Though I've never run into uniformed guerrillas on any of my visits to Putumayo, one usually sees evidence of their activity. Guerrilla graffiti - once so common that it was even spray-painted on the sides of tractor-trailers that had passed through FARC roadblocks - was faded, when visible at all.
There was abundant evidence, though, of the last flare-up of guerrilla violence in the department, at the beginning of this year in the run-up to the March legislative elections. A guerrilla "armed stoppage" (paro armado) halted road traffic between towns for weeks, bringing shortages, while attacks on power lines left much of Putumayo in the dark. Along the main road were burned patches from trucks that the guerrillas set afire for disobeying the stoppage. As on previous visits, blackened trees and pools of sludge indicated places where the guerrillas had recently blown holes in the oil pipeline that follows the main road for much of its length.
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Faded guerrilla graffiti. |
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A common sight on the main road - a recently blown-up patch of pipeline with a pool of oil sludge. |
The increased military and police presence - in part a response to the wave of violence at the beginning of the year - had made conditions more secure in general. However, several local leaders indicated, flare-ups of guerrilla activity were still common and could happen at any time. One likely reason was that a U.S.-supported military offensive immediately to the north of Putumayo, a two-year-old effort known as "Plan Patriota," had forced many guerrillas to relocate, increasing their numbers particularly in border departments like Putumayo, Nariño, Vaupés and Norte de Santander. By all accounts, the guerrillas' grip on Putumayo's rural zones - the majority of the department's territory, away from the principal towns, the main road and the most-traveled rivers - was unchanged.
While the frequency of FARC attacks in the department was reduced and limited to more remote areas, their intensity when they do occur has been greater. Body counts per attack have been much higher and damage to infrastructure has been more costly. Just before I arrived, guerrillas had kidnapped thirteen medical personnel in the rural zone of Puerto Asís municipality, eventually releasing all but one of them. While I was present, combat was taking place along the Ecuadorian border; one night in La Hormiga I could hear the periodic soft thud of what sounded like mortar rounds going off many miles away to the south.
For the most part, I heard few strong complaints about the increased military and police presence in Putumayo. Nobody with whom I spoke denounced cases of serious abuse or large-scale corruption at the hands of police or soldiers, with the exception of some instances of rough treatment or disrespectful language.
Two issues, though, require attention. First, several indigenous leaders expressed concern about the recent construction of a military installation, part of the government's larger Center for Attention to the Border Zone (CENAF), on land belonging to an indigenous reserve in San Miguel municipality. Though I've found little additional information about this new base, I heard numerous complaints about the way in which it was installed - with a refusal to dialogue and an insistence on national security priorities and the government's right to be present wherever it wishes - and concerns that the CENAF leaves the indigenous reserve more vulnerable than ever to guerrilla attack.
The other issue was a general consensus that military and police efforts against "former" paramilitaries in Putumayo are still minimal to nonexistent. Since 1999-2001, paramilitaries have dominated Putumayo's main towns and vied with the FARC for income from coca cultivation and processing. They have maintained this dominance through a combination of brutality (first massacres, then selective killings and "social cleansing" that continue today), providing security for urban residents and businesses, and a nearly complete absence of opposition from the security forces. (This absence was chillingly documented in Human Rights Watch's 2001 report, "The Sixth Division.")
At some point around 2002 or 2003, the leadership of the Putumayo paramilitaries shifted from Carlos Castaño's Córdoba and Urabá Self-Defense Groups (ACCU), which claimed to seek less involvement in the drug trade, to the powerful Central Bolívar Bloc (BCB), which actively sought narco funding. Though the BCB officially demobilized early this year, its Putumayo branch appears to have continued its activities with few changes. They still dispute control over drugs and territory with the guerrillas, and continue to carry out selective killings on a near-daily basis. "Macaco's guys are still everywhere," said one interviewee, referring to the BCB's most feared, if not most visible, leader.
While this was the first time I visited Putumayo without seeing uniformed paramilitaries, their plainclothes presence was still in evidence. "Paraco," mouthed a traveling companion as we sat in a Puerto Asís restaurant, nodding nervously toward two men passing slowly by on a motorcycle.
A few miles north of Puerto Asís, close to the large military base in the suburb of Santana, sits Villa Sandra, a large compound with a big house, a pond and recreational facilities. During the paramilitaries' bloody takeover of Putumayo's town centers, and then during the beginning of Plan Colombia's execution, Villa Sandra was the paramilitaries' center of operations. Everyone in Puerto Asís - except, apparently, the military and police - knew that the paras were headquartered there, and that many of their victims were taken there and never left.
During my 2001 visit to Putumayo, Villa Sandra was very much in use. When I returned in 2004, it was abandoned, and remains that way now, with its facilities in evident disrepair behind a high chain-link fence. Many in Putumayo believe that an inspection of the compound's grounds would reveal much about the paramilitaries' activities in the zone - including, in some likelihood, mass graves. That Villa Sandra remains untouched and uninvestigated is eloquent evidence of the paramilitaries' continued influence over Putumayo, despite the recent demobilizations.
If the security situation is mixed but trending slightly better, patterns of coca cultivation are mixed but trending worse. When I visited Putumayo in early 2001 after Plan Colombia's first round of spraying, the department was Colombia's undisputed coca capital - the UN measured 66,000 hectares of the plant there in 2000. Coca was in abundance, with large plots easily visible from the main road, especially in the Guamués River valley.
When I visited in April 2004, Putumayo had been hit with massive herbicide fumigation - over 125,000 hectares between 2000 and the end of 2003. Coca was no longer visible from the main road, while overgrown fields indicated where it had been before. Coca was still present - a short drive down any side road made that clear enough, where plots, most of them smaller than before and often newly planted, were easy to find - but the spray planes had deeply cut back cultivation. By the end of 2004, the UN's satellite data found only 4,400 hectares of coca in all of Putumayo.
This stunning reduction is proving to be temporary. As coca cultivation moved to other parts of the country, particularly the neighboring department of Nariño, the spray planes and counter-narcotics brigades left Putumayo to follow it.
In the absence of better economic options, the absence of massive eradication has had a predictable result: coca is returning to Putumayo, and it is doing so quickly. The UN noted a doubling of coca cultivation in the department between 2004 and 2005 (from 4,400 to nearly 9,000 hectares), and replanting continues. What I saw in Putumayo bears this out: unlike 2004, I was once again able to spot coca cultivation from the main road, in apparent defiance of the increased military and police presence along that same road. Plots are smaller than they were in 2001, and a bit harder to see - on hillsides or even amid overgrowth - but they are definitely back. Meanwhile, prices offered for coca paste remain low - about 1.6 million pesos or $650 - indicating that scarcity is not a problem for buyers.
While the recent increase in coca hasn't been great enough to bring a return to the late-nineties gold-rush boom years, there is money in Putumayo's economy - at least its illegal sector. The discos and boutiques in jungle boomtowns like La Hormiga and Puerto Asís remain open for business - I saw no empty storefronts, and the bars and billiard halls were overflowing in La Hormiga on Saturday night. Many people continue to be getting paid.
It is unlikely, though, that most are doing so legally. Many with whom I spoke used the word "depressed" to describe the state of Putumayo's legal economy. The reduction of coca-growing from 1999-2001 levels has meant less money circulating overall, a situation that has been compounded by a stagnation in prices offered for most legal crops.
A symptom of the department's rural economic crisis is a notable increase in migration from the countryside to town centers. A vivid example was on display from the road on the way into the town of Orito, where a large number of people from the municipality's rural zone (800 was the estimate I heard) had just invaded a patch of land whose ownership was unclear. Living out in the open under sheets of plastic, the settlers hoped to succeed in staking a claim on a bit of soil near the oil-producing town, where they believed that their economic prospects would be slightly better. It was a sight one would expect to find perhaps on the outskirts of Medellín or Cali - but not Orito, a town of perhaps 25,000 people.
Land-invasion tent city in Orito. |
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The state of Putumayo's legal economy has not been helped appreciably by the alternative development programs that were supposed to be the "soft" or "carrot" side of the fumigation strategy, helping sprayed coca-growers to find new ways to make a living. It is hard to believe that the U.S. and Colombian governments have invested well over $50 million - perhaps as much as $80 million - in Putumayo since 2000. While some projects appear to be having success and buy-in, particularly cooperatives, assistance to indigenous communities, and specialty crops like black pepper and vanilla, the overall reaction I heard was one of frustration.
A major frustration is the road network, a crucial priority if legal crops are to have any hope of making it to market. Lack of roads not only adds to the isolation of communities that remain in the grip of armed groups; it makes it very difficult to get any crops to market - with the exception of coca paste, which allows several hectares' harvest to fit in one bag.
Nearly six years after Plan Colombia began in Putumayo, even the main road between its capital, Mocoa, and its largest city, Puerto Asís - a stretch of less than 100 miles - has not been paved. The road is dirt. (However, paving is currently underway between Puerto Asís and Santana, covering about the first eight miles of the trip to Mocoa.) The segment of road that is paved, between Santana and La Dorada, was paved well before Plan Colombia began, funded by the state oil company in order to service the pipeline that runs along that section of road - and even this has deteriorated since my first visit to Putumayo. All other roads, including those leading to significant towns and villages off the main road, are unpaved and in bone-jarringly bad condition, if they exist at all.
Beyond the road network, I heard several complaints about alternative development projects' design and management. For the most part, these concerns are common to alternative development projects - indeed, rural development efforts - all over the world. People complained that their communities were not consulted in the projects' design, that outside experts unfamiliar with the region told them what crops were most promising, and were often wrong. (The bitter experience of a multimillion-dollar animal-feed plant in Orito, which opened in 2003 and closed in 2005, is an excellent example.) They cited a lack of help with marketing crops once they had been produced: transporting the product on the poor road network and making connections with buyers willing to pay enough for the farmer to clear a profit. Many said that credit was still impossible to come by, and even when it was available, lenders often failed to take into account that many crops take years to produce their first harvest.
Many with whom I spoke were particularly resentful of perceived layers of "middlemen" in the development assistance process. In their view, USAID's contractors, and their Colombian (and rarely Putumayo-based) subcontractors, have accrued the lion's share of development assistance for themselves. Each link in the chain, they assert, has squandered resources on overhead, salaries, consultants, and in some cases petty corruption, leaving only a trickle of investment for the recipient communities. Development practitioners who have worked in Putumayo may find this characterization to be unfair and even provably untrue; nonetheless it is a widespread, nearly unanimous perception. It is the most frequent response to the question, "Why is there so little evidence that many millions of dollars have been spent here on development?"
In defense of the alternative development programs, those I spoke with had few concrete suggestions for alternative crops that could prosper in Putumayo - at least in the absence of decent roads, reliable security, enforceable property rights, access to credit, and much else.
However, I did hear a good deal of interest in developing a market for the many Amazon-basin fruits that Putumayo produces in abundance but are rarely available elsewhere, even elsewhere in Colombia. I recall that ten or fifteen years ago in the northeastern United States, it was very unusual to find mangoes, papayas, or yuca in supermarkets, but now these and other tropical products are commonplace and profitable. If products like chontaduro, lulo, manzana de agua, tomate de árbol, arazá, or uchuva could catch on similarly, Putumayo's farmers would have a potential answer to the alternative development challenge. But right now, outside demand is so low that such fruits command rock-bottom prices. We shared a ride with a farmer who lost a pile of money trying to grow arazá last year, only to find that the prices were laughably low. He said he was thankful that he had kept a little bit of coca to give himself a financial cushion.
While in La Hormiga, I was able to attend a day-long meeting attended by governors of indigenous reservations. Most of the twelve indigenous nations found in Putumayo were represented: Cofán, Inga, Pasto, Nasa, Awá, Embera, Yanacona, and others. They had gathered to discuss Plan Colombia: how it has impacted them, what was to come and what they could do to prepare for it.
It was a great opportunity to listen to communities that had the deepest roots in Putumayo. For the department's indigenous residents, Plan Colombia is only the latest of several close encounters that has left them wary of western "modernity" and the global economy.
A century ago, Putumayo was at the center of a boom in rubber production, during which the region's indigenous people were enslaved and terrorized by the mostly foreign owners of rubber plantations. (Read a harrowing account of this period in anthropologist Michael Taussig's classic 1987 study Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man.) During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the discovery of oil led to another rush of investors and settlers. Today, Putumayo is number two, behind Arauca, among Colombia's oil-producing departments. [Correction as of 8/22: Putumayo's actually 3rd, I forgot Casanare.] As in Arauca, one sees little evidence of the oil wealth, and plans for new drilling continue to be frequent subjects of controversy. Twenty years ago, Putumayo played host to a new export-oriented bonanza that brought in even more settlers from elsewhere in Colombia: the boom in coca production that persists today and continues to make the department one of Colombia's most violent.
For Putumayo's indigenous communities, each of these events has meant an influx of outsiders, theft of land, displacement from territory, and a weakening of the social fabric and cultural traditions. It is unsurprising, then, that they discuss Plan Colombia as inseparable from Colombia's free trade agreement with the United States, big foreign investments (particularly in oil), and fears of massive "megaprojects" that would evict them from their land.
The picture is more complicated than that, not least because several Putumayo indigenous communities have accepted, and benefited from, significant amounts of assistance through USAID-funded Plan Colombia programs. But these communities clearly fear that the "next phase" of Plan Colombia will involve "desterritorialización" - forced displacement from ancestral lands - in favor of foreign investment projects. The installation of the CENAF military base and recent disputes with a Canadian oil company are being viewed as harbingers of what is to come as Plan Colombia proceeds. The U.S. and Colombian governments must endeavor, through adherence to the rule of law and through non-military investments, to convince them that this is not the case.
Flying out of Puerto Asís, one can easily spot plots of coca carved out of Putumayo's swiftly disappearing jungle. One also sees evidence of the near-total isolation in which too many of the department's citizens live. Looking east to the edge of visibility are hundreds of parcels of land gouged from the surrounding forest, most with houses in the middle. No roads or rivers appear to penetrate anywhere near these landholdings. Pushed by a lack of opportunity elsewhere and pulled by the perverse incentives of the coca economy, a small but significant portion of southern Colombia's rural population continues to live far beyond the reach of its government (with the exception of the government's spray planes).
Whether viewed from the air or from the ground, Putumayo offers an abundance of reminders of how much needs to be done to make citizens out of millions of marginalized Colombians. And how little Plan Colombia - with its emphasis on military force and fumigation - has helped to achieve that goal.
No roads or power lines go anywhere near these houses, on one of many very isolated plots of land visible from the air. The light green vegetation in the top picture is probably coca. |
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Posted by isacson at 03:54 PM | Comments (4)
July 12, 2006
Leaving so soon?
Andrés Pastrana has left us, after less than a year as Colombia's ambassador in Washington. He quit in a storm of anger: the very moment that President Uribe named another former president, narco-money-tainted Ernesto Samper, to be ambassador in France, Pastrana canceled all his appointments, flew to Bogotá, held a long meeting with Uribe and quit his job.
Pastrana and Samper could not be worse enemies. After Samper defeated him in the 1994 elections, it was Pastrana who leaked evidence that Samper had received large amounts of campaign cash from the Cali cartel. This evidence did not lead to Samper’s impeachment or punishment, but the U.S. government found it sufficient to deny Samper a visa, and it touched off a huge scandal that essentially destroyed Samper’s presidency.
Naming Samper to the embassy in Paris was the latest of several moves the Uribe government has taken lately that no doubt displease the Bush administration. These include:
- Planning a visit to Cuba, inviting Fidel Castro to his inauguration in August, and entering into trade talks with his government.
- Making clear, as Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt said in a newspaper interview on Sunday, that paramilitary leaders wanted in the United States for drug trafficking will not be extradited if they stay within the lenient confines of the “Justice and Peace” law.
- Signing a deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for a trans-border gas pipeline.
- According to conservative columnist Robert Novak, refusing a request by George W. Bush last month to be “our man in the Andes,” backing the U.S. effort to isolate Chávez. Writes Novak, “Bush was dissatisfied with Uribe's noncommittal reaction in the Oval Office when the U.S. president said he was counting on him to lead the struggle against Chavez.”
Taken together, these moves indicate that Álvaro Uribe is willing to test the boundaries of his friendship with the United States. Realizing that the Bush administration lacks similarly close allies in Latin America, Uribe appears to be both seeking to demonstrate that (a) he is not a tool of the Bush administration and (b) he can get away with doing many things that make Washington uncomfortable, thanks to his privileged position as the United States’ chief partner in the volatile Andes.
But back to Pastrana. The former president’s sudden resignation leaves many of us here in Washington wondering what else is going on. The naming of a sworn political enemy and fellow ex-president to another ambassadorial post no doubt outraged Pastrana; he told reporters that it was a “moral impossibility” for him to serve in the same administration as Samper.
But it was not a “moral impossibility” for Pastrana to serve in the same Foreign Ministry as Jorge Noguera, the consul in Milan who allegedly placed the presidential intelligence agency (the DAS) at the service of paramilitaries and drug traffickers during his three-year tenure as its director. Nor was it a “moral impossibility” for Pastrana to serve a government that has given a most lenient treatment to paramilitary leaders involved in epic levels of criminality. Before being named to the ambassadorship, Pastrana had criticized the Uribe government’s talks with the paramilitaries as “improvised” and “hermetic,” and had voiced concerns about growing paramilitary power under Uribe and the effect it would have on the next elections.
Pastrana’s sudden exit has a whiff of pretext to it. It feels as if the ambassador was ready to leave Washington anyway, and Samper’s nomination gave him a reason. Keep in mind that:
- Pastrana was never an Uribe supporter. In fact, in 2004 and early 2005, the two leaders exchanged strong words on a few occasions. Pastrana accused Uribe of buying votes in the Congress in order to win the right to run for re-election. Uribe responded that Pastrana, during his failed attempt to talk with the FARC guerrillas, engaged in “flirting with violent groups to buy smiles for the cameras.” These two men are not good friends.
- Pastrana was likely bothered by Uribe’s style. He was rumored to be unhappy, for instance, that Uribe gave him only a few days to prepare for a sudden February 2006 presidential visit to Washington to give a push for free trade negotiations.
- Pastrana, an ex-president and one of Colombia’s most recognized politicians, may simply have grown a bit bored with a life in semi-exile in Washington, out of Bogotá’s political fray.
Pastrana has most likely left us for a combination of these reasons, and perhaps others. But the naming of Samper to the Paris ambassadorship is not, on its own, a satisfying explanation for why he would be leaving so soon, and so abruptly.
Posted by isacson at 03:14 PM | Comments (13)
July 11, 2006
Energy integration, seen from Washington
Here is an English translation of a column published on Sunday in Colombia’s El Espectador newspaper. While energy supplies are not a topic we’ve worked on closely, this is an important security issue.
Energy integration, seen from Washington
Adam Isacson
The U.S. government is not very worried about the construction of a new natural gas pipeline between Venezuela and Colombia. Likewise, Washington did not complain publicly about the gas-sector nationalization carried out by Evo Morales in Bolivia.
The reason is simple: the United States does not depend on natural-gas imports. According to the Natural Gas Supply Association, the United States only imports 15 percent of the gas it uses, and almost all of that comes from Canada. In fact, the United States is a net exporter of gas to Mexico.
So the Bush administration doesn’t have major reasons to complain about the building of a gas pipeline between Maracaibo and La Guajira. The greatest concern would probably have to do with the administration’s general aversion to any initiative that smells of Hugo Chávez. The dominant role of PDVSA (the Venezuelan state energy company) might make them uncomfortable.
The Bush administration might also be disappointed by this evidence that Álvaro Uribe does not wish to participate in the U.S. effort to isolate Chávez. Instead, the Colombian president has prioritized his commercial interests over serving as “our man in the Andes,” as George Bush asked of him during his last visit to Washington.
Gas deals don’t bother Washington much. But if the gas pipeline were an oil pipeline, the U.S. reaction would be quite different, and much stronger.
The United States imports 4 million barrels of Latin American oil each day, mainly from Venezuela, Ecuador and Mexico. This represents almost 30 percent of all U.S. oil imports, and more than 20 percent of all oil that the United States uses.
Washington is worried about the stability of petroleum flows from Latin America. At the end of June, the Financial Times of London ran a story about a recent internal report of the U.S. Southern Command expressing concern for the growth of “resource nationalism” in the region. The tendency toward nationalization, the military report claims, could “increase inefficiencies” and complicate petroleum supplies. In March, meanwhile, a House of Representatives committee hearing aired concerns about disturbances to the hemispheric oil market due to recent political tendencies.
Ecuador’s recent confiscation of Occidental Petroleum’s installations so angered the Bush administration that its representatives abandoned free-trade negotiations. The declared interest of Ecopetrol (the Colombian state oil company) in investing in these Ecuadorian oil fields earned Álvaro Uribe a rare scolding from Condoleezza Rice during his June visit to Washington.
Every time Hugo Chávez speculates about the possibility of boycotting oil sales to the United States, the U.S. government notices and becomes concerned. But cutting off sales to Venezuela’s largest customer is not a realistic option for Chávez.
Venezuela, without a port on the Pacific, cannot easily reach alternative markets in Asia, especially China’s increasing demand. Where oil is concerned, Hugo Chávez and George Bush need each other, at least for now.
This situation of co-dependency could rupture, however, if Colombia and Venezuela make progress toward another joint project that has been under discussion: the building of an oil pipeline from Venezuela and across Colombia, ending at a port on Colombia’s Pacific.
This pipeline would give Venezuela much greater access to Asian demand, and Venezuela would depend much less on the U.S. market. With Venezuela’s worldwide oil sales diversified by a trans-Colombian oil pipeline, Hugo Chávez would be much more able to consider the possibility of selling less oil to the United States – or of boycotting the “gringos” completely.
If the plans to build this oil pipeline grow closer to reality, then, we can expect some strong pressure from Washington to stop the project.
Posted by isacson at 11:36 PM | Comments (4)
June 28, 2006
Robert Novak's war
Once or twice each year, conservative syndicated columnist and TV pundit Robert Novak publishes a piece about Colombia. These are written with very heavy input from House Republican congressional staffers who, over the years, have played a leading role in making U.S. policy toward Colombia what it is today.
Hence the headline of Novak’s latest missive, which appeared in the Washington Post and elsewhere: “Dems balk at support for Colombia’s drug war.” Novak filed the column from Colombia, where he is paying a visit this week to vacationing President Álvaro Uribe at his ranch in rural Córdoba department (a zone so dominated by right-wing paramilitaries that it is practically an independent republic).
Recall that the Republicans are facing the possibility of losing control of the House of Representatives in November’s elections. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that Novak and others are reverting to the tired old tactic of tarring as “soft on drugs” everyone who opposes the present U.S. strategy in Colombia – in this case, congressional Democrats.
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| Novak's column came with this illustration in Rep. McGovern's hometown Boston Herald. |
But Novak’s latest column goes still further. Those who would cut funding from aerial herbicide fumigation, he argues, are delivering a slap in the face to hundreds of brave Colombian policemen risking their lives to stop cocaine and heroin from coming to the United States.
He cites the debate three weeks ago over Rep. Jim McGovern’s (D-Massachusetts) unsuccessful attempt to transfer $30 million out of the U.S.-funded fumigation program in Colombia. “Democrats in the House voted 161-28 for McGovern's disastrous cut in U.S. aid,” Novak writes. “The House Republicans saved Colombia, but ardent young officers of the national police are anxious to win this war.”
Novak doesn't ask why these brave police are being asked to risk their lives for a strategy that, after more than a decade of fumigation, hasn't done a thing about coca or opium in Colombia. Both the U.S. government and the UN tell us that Colombian coca cultivation increased last year, despite record levels of spraying, and that Plan Colombia, begun in 2000, has proved unable to alter supplies of cocaine. The price of the drug on U.S. streets is lower than it was when Plan Colombia began.
Novak also faults Democratic critics for being concerned about the May incident in Jamundí, south of Cali, in which a military patrol apparently in the service of drug traffickers massacred an elite police counter-drug unit. Novak cites as “evidence of Colombia’s escape from degradation as a narco-terrorist state” the mere fact that the colonel who headed the army brigade has been detained while the attorney-general investigates.
What does Novak propose to turn the tide and start showing results? Nothing more than the same strategy that has so far failed to show any results.
He quotes a police official who calls on the U.S. government to add 15 new fumigation planes to Colombia’s current U.S.-supported fleet of 21 planes. This 70 percent increase in capacity would allow fumigation to grow from the current 140,000 to about 240,000 hectares per year. Each plane would need at least two new escort helicopters, plus contractor pilots, maintenance, fuel and all other associated costs. Novak’s (and thus the House Republicans’) proposal would cost hundreds of millions more dollars per year.
We’ve been down this road before. Plan Colombia in 2000 made possible a tripling of fumigation in Colombia. $4.7 billion later, it didn't work. Why would a near-doubling be any different?
Instead of acknowledging real failures and joining the search for a policy that actually works, Novak and his congressional ghostwriters have decided that the best defense is a good offense. The column launches yet another desperate attack on the policy’s growing circle of critics.
In Novak’s worldview, those who dare to find fault with the current approach are soft on drugs, cruel to Colombia’s self-sacrificing police, “left-wing,” and perhaps even in thrall to narcotraffickers. He cites Rosso José Serrano, a former Colombian police chief who is a hero to U.S. drug warriors, who told him that claims of environmental damage from fumigation stem from “the campaign, all over the world, of the drug traffickers,” and that pressure from narco-terrorists is the only reason why European governments refuse to support fumigation.
Why is Novak recurring to such irresponsible and baseless attacks? Clearly, because his side of the discussion has lost the debate on its merits. They see no other way to defend their chosen strategy. They see no other way to avoid a turn toward governance and poverty reduction, and away from spray planes and helicopters.
Tactics like Novak’s are often successful in Washington, and can do much to forestall a revision of our failed anti-drug policy in Colombia. But it is vital that this revision come soon, despite the efforts of Novak and his allies. We owe it to the hundreds of Colombian police who continue to risk their lives for a strategy that simply isn’t working.
Posted by isacson at 07:12 AM | Comments (11)
June 27, 2006
Notes from a House hearing on Latin America
Colombia Program Intern Christina Sanabria attended last Wednesday's House International Relations Committee hearing on "Democracy in Latin America." Here are highlights from her notes.
Notes on Hearing before House International Relations Committee
“Democracy in Latin America: Successes, Challenges and the Future”
June 21, 2006
Panelists:
- Paula J. Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, US Department of State (Testimony – PDF)
- Adolfo Franco, Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, USAID (Testimony – PDF)
- Tom Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, US Department of State
- Christopher Sabatini, Ph.D., Senior Director of Policy, Council of the Americas/Americas Society (Testimony – PDF)
- Francisco Flores, former president of El Salvador (did not attend, but submitted testimony – PDF)
Opening statement, Tom Lantos (D-California, ranking Democrat on the committee):
- Latin American voters are angry, but their rage is directed against traditional systems, not democracy.
- Latin Americans prefer democracy and would not support a military dictatorship
- Lantos made his strongest public criticism to date of the Hugo Chávez government in Venezuela. He said he saw Venezuelan democracy at major risk – it is a “façade of democracy”
- Within Venezuela:
- Compromise of “democratic principles and fundamental freedoms”
- In recent Congressional elections, all the winning candidates were “candidates subservient to Chávez, just like the old Soviet elections”, and he has “packed the Supreme Court” with sympathizers
- The Law of Radio and Television restricts the media
- Venezuelan foreign policy:
- Chávez has actively campaigned in foreign elections, such as Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Nicaragua
- He is “actively courting Iran and North Korea, and Hamas terrorists”
- The “Caracas-Havana Axis” compromises the US’ security interests by financing terrorism and undermining counternarcotics efforts
- Within Venezuela:
Opening statements from other committee members:
- Barbara Lee (D-California): We cannot engage in some situations and look the other way in others. Approach should be symmetrical towards right- and left-leaning leaders.
- Gregory Meeks (D-New York): “Twin issues” of democracy and poverty; “poverty is democracy’s parasite.” We need to address poverty for there to be true democratic participation.
- Dana Rohrabacher (R-California): “China is playing a malevolent influence” in Latin America, including alliances with Chávez and Castro. A swing to the left in Latin American countries’ domestic politics is not helpful to their prospects for prosperity.
Questions of witnesses:
- Dan Burton (R-Indiana, Western Hemisphere Subcommittee chairman): Concerned that the US has invested a great deal of aid money in Colombia, but of about 40,000 FARC and ELN ex-combatants, fewer than 100 have been trained for other pursuits and many have returned to being armed and planting coca. “Time is of the essence” and the process needs to be sped up.
- Response from Adolfo Franco (USAID): The U.S. government plans to invest $48 million in demobilization programs. The process will take an estimated $190 million.
- Response from Adolfo Franco (USAID): The U.S. government plans to invest $48 million in demobilization programs. The process will take an estimated $190 million.
- Burton: “Populism issue is of concern.” Venezuelan president Chávez is sending money and other commodities for electioneering in other countries. For example, in Nicaragua millions and millions of dollars through diplomatic channels for the Sandinistas.
- Response from Paula Dobriansky (State / G): Populism in and of itself is not necessarily bad. We are responding by sending $13 million to Nicaragua for assistance to train poll workers and political parties.
- Response from Tom Shannon (State / WHA): Voters in many nations, like Peru for example, recognize that kind of assistance for what it is. What we can do is ensure that the vote is free and fair and highlight that our interaction is with the state to ensure credibility and strengthen institutions.
- Eliot Engel (D-New York, ranking Democrat on the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee): 41% of the region’s population is in poverty. How can you justify three consecutive years in cuts to core development accounts?
- Dobriansky: We using a “transformational diplomacy” approach, looking at countries in greater need. Overall assistance has increased from 2001 to the present from about $800 million to $1.7 billion.
[Note: Secretary of State Rice’s “transformational diplomacy” approach has generally meant aid cuts for Latin America. The claim that development aid has more than doubled since 2001 is extremely deceptive, as this analysis (PDF) from the Latin America Working Group explains.]
- Dobriansky: We using a “transformational diplomacy” approach, looking at countries in greater need. Overall assistance has increased from 2001 to the present from about $800 million to $1.7 billion.
- Engel: about 12 countries have refused to sign article 98 agreements exempting U.S. personnel from the International Criminal Court, and are seeing cuts to their non-drug military aid as well as Economic Support Funds (ESF). What are you doing about it?
- Dobriansky: The sanctions do not curtail ESF to NGOs and civil society, and since a big part of our aid goes through those channels, the sanctions currently do not present a tremendous concern.
- Dobriansky: The sanctions do not curtail ESF to NGOs and civil society, and since a big part of our aid goes through those channels, the sanctions currently do not present a tremendous concern.
- Meeks: There are countries in the region where half of the people are poor. Democracy doesn’t make a significant change in the day-to-day lives of people who are poor. Why cut aid three years in a row?
- Dobriansky: Much of that poverty is due to corruption and mismanaged government. We are looking to work on “accountable governments.”
- Shannon: “We want this money to be catalytic.”
- Rohrabacher: China is buying port facilities in Panama and making oil deals with Chávez and Castro.
- Shannon: We believe China has a legitimate interest in raw materials, not in politics. Unethical actions and our concern for them are not exclusive to China.
- Shannon: We believe China has a legitimate interest in raw materials, not in politics. Unethical actions and our concern for them are not exclusive to China.
- Jerry Weller (R-Illinois): There is $3-17 billion in Venezuelan oil money “sloshing around.” (The congressman showed photos from the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, dated March 16 and June 5, of helicopters and rolls of fertilizer, sent by the Chávez government to the Sandinistas on the eve of presidential elections.) There are reports of 20 thousand tons of fertilizer, one-third of a typical year’s use, and three helicopters sent to the Sandinistas.
- Shannon: “I think (voters) understand what this is.”
- Shannon: “I think (voters) understand what this is.”
- Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado): Minimizing poverty “is a task greater than the imposition of democracy.” Corruption is endemic – what to do?
- Dobriansky: Strengthening the judiciary, e.g. training judges and lawyers, exchanges, like when the Panamanian Supreme Court met with the US Supreme Court. In Colombia, program called “Culture of Lawfulness” works for a better understanding of the role of law enforcement, incorporating mothers, lawyers, educators and others. Also, helped in the transition to an accusatorial judicial system.
- Dobriansky: Strengthening the judiciary, e.g. training judges and lawyers, exchanges, like when the Panamanian Supreme Court met with the US Supreme Court. In Colombia, program called “Culture of Lawfulness” works for a better understanding of the role of law enforcement, incorporating mothers, lawyers, educators and others. Also, helped in the transition to an accusatorial judicial system.
- Burton: Concern with Venezuela’s influence in other countries. US-trained poll workers cannot counteract Venezuelan helicopters and fertilizer in Nicaragua.
- Chris Sabatini (Council on the Americas): we should find ways to introduce our principles and introduce other countries to the global economy, with scholarships, for example, for Latin Americans to learn English. Venezuelan donations of fertilizer are violations of international norms, and we need more international awareness.
- Chris Sabatini (Council on the Americas): we should find ways to introduce our principles and introduce other countries to the global economy, with scholarships, for example, for Latin Americans to learn English. Venezuelan donations of fertilizer are violations of international norms, and we need more international awareness.
- Meeks: is it useful to have trade capacity-building provisions on trade agreements?
- Sabatini: useful and essential. Latin American countries do not have true market economies; we must address endemic and internal race – and geography-based distortions as part of our trade agenda.
- infrastructure, like roads and wells: for lack of them, 40% of Peruvians not engaged in market economy
- education, especially basic literacy and English
- judiciary and labor rights.
- Sabatini: useful and essential. Latin American countries do not have true market economies; we must address endemic and internal race – and geography-based distortions as part of our trade agenda.
- Meeks: despite Plan Colombia, certain sectors in Colombia are not seeing benefits.
- Sabatini: Plan Colombia has been successful in demobilizing paramilitaries and lowering violence, not successful in narco reduction. We need a “second-generation Plan Colombia” that will focus on establishing justice, roads and a stronger economy.
- Sabatini: Plan Colombia has been successful in demobilizing paramilitaries and lowering violence, not successful in narco reduction. We need a “second-generation Plan Colombia” that will focus on establishing justice, roads and a stronger economy.
- Burton: countries with which the United States has trade agreements should have a strong educational infrastructure so that the greatest possible number of their citizens can participate in the global economy.
Posted by isacson at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2006
The UN's data on Colombian coca-growing
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual Andean Coca Survey on Tuesday. It found an 8 percent increase in the amount of coca grown in Colombia in 2005. Similarly, U.S. estimates released in April found either an increase in 2005, or an adjustment to reflect more area under measurement.
If you want to know about drug-crop cultivation in Colombia and the rest of the region, this document is absolutely required reading. How much coca was grown in each department of Colombia last year? How much land was fumigated in each department? How extensively do alternative development programs cover affected populations? What prices are coca-growers are being paid for their product? For answers to these and many other questions that an informed counter-drug strategy must answer, this report is the only source available.
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The U.S. government, by contrast, just provides an overall number of hectares of coca estimated to have been grown in each country, and little else. The State Department's annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports, released each March, are not useful for discerning trends, since they either omit or play down information that might indicate that the strategy is not working.
For its part, the UNODC provides its own coca-growing estimates for Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Like the U.S. numbers, these estimates are based on satellite data. The divergence between U.S. and UN numbers is increasing, however: the U.S. estimate for Colombia is now two-thirds higher than the UN number, and while UN figures showed decreases in Bolivia and Peru last year, the U.S. data show coca cultivation on the rise in both countries. If this makes anything clear, it is the fact that we have only a vague idea of how much coca is being grown in the Andes.
Because the UN document makes it easier to discern trends, it is hard not to notice one in particular: the current anti-drug strategy, which favors forced eradication over governance and development, has failed utterly.
Of course, the UNODC - which gets much funding from the United States, and whose crop-monitoring program works in tandem with Colombia's National Police - is not going to argue that aerial fumigation has failed. In fact, the UN agency contends that fumigation has somewhat reduced Andean coca-growing over the past five years (a contention that U.S. statistics, which show coca acreage holding steady throughout the Andes, do not uphold).
However, its latest report offers abundant evidence that the current strategy is no longer reducing coca-growing in the Andes, and is unlikely to do so in the future. "Coca Cultivation in Andes Stabilizes in 2005," reads the UNODC press release accompanying the report. Their point is that current massive levels of U.S. aid for fumigation and interdiction are able to bring only stability at current levels of coca cultivation. More reductions in coca-growing are unlikely, and a region-wide increase is a distinct possibility.
What is needed now, the UN agency argues, is much more donor-country investment in rural development. "Our aid efforts need to be multiplied at least tenfold in order to reach all impoverished farmers who need support," says UNODC Director Antonio Mario Costa.
Here are some of the report's most interesting findings.
- In response to fumigation, coca cultivation continues to move geographically within Colombia. As fumigation intensified in Nariño and in the "Plan Patriota" zone in southern Colombia, coca-growing increased elsewhere. Putumayo department, which was the epicenter of coca cultivation when "Plan Colombia" began in 2000, registered its first increase in coca-growing since that year. Paramilitary-controlled zones in Córdoba, northern Antioquia and southern Bolívar all increased, as did zones under guerrilla influence such as Meta's Macarena National Park and the Uva River basin in Vichada, the sparsely populated department near the Venezuelan border. In all, the UN survey detected coca in 23 of Colombia's 32 departments.
- Massive amounts of spraying in a single department appear to achieve short-term reductions, which don't appear to be sustainable without a government presence on the ground.
Large-scale spraying in 2001-2002 reduced coca-growing in Putumayo. Once spraying declined in this poor, neglected department, reductions ceased, and coca-growing in fact doubled last year in Putumayo. The amount of coca remains far below 2000-2001 levels, though, largely due to the presence of alternative-development programs. The new Putumayo coca, according to UNODC, is being planted in the department's far western foothills, near the borders with Nariño and Cauca - a region that had little coca before, but has little state presence or alternative development investment. 
In vast, sparsely populated, nearly ungoverned Vichada, far-flung coca cultivation has made spraying difficult, and measures of the crop have increased. A similar dynamic has happened in Meta, though some of the increase there owes to planting in the Macarena National Park. 
In Nariño and Antioquia, increased spraying has yet to affect coca-growing significantly. 
In Caquetá, Guaviare and Norte de Santander, coca has been reduced. Some of this owes to high levels of spraying, though these have been tapering off. Much credit in fact goes to a greater presence of government personnel on the ground. In Caquetá and Guaviare, those personnel are mostly soldiers participating in the "Plan Patriota" military offensive; their presence is temporary, and we can expect coca to increase if their numbers are drawn down. In Norte de Santander, the UNODC gives robust alternative-development programs the credit for the sharp reduction in coca cultivation. 
- Farmers have been re-planting coca at a staggering rate. Fumigation, in the absence of other alternatives, is not deterring coca cultivation. 44 percent of the coca fields the UNODC satellites detected in 2005, making up 61 percent of all coca detected, did not exist in 2001-2004.
- Coca fields are getting even smaller. The average coca plot that UNODC detected last year was 1.13 hectares, down from 1.3 in 2004 and 2.05 in 2000. "A possible explanation," according to the report, "could be that farmers are reducing the size of their coca fields to avoid detection and aerial spraying."
- Polling of coca-growers makes apparent that spraying is merely an inconvenience, disrupting but not stopping their income stream from coca. According to the report, "Once their fields have been sprayed, the farmers responded that in 45% of the cases they would just wait for the coca plants to recover, in 20% of the cases they would cut the damaged coca plants, in 12% of the cases they would re-plant their fields, while the remaining 23% adopted for a combination of these solutions." According to UNODC, farmers can prune sprayed coca bushes to a height of one foot "to obtain a renewal of the bush in about six months." The report also notes that "when heavy rain occurs or bushes are washed by the farmers immediately after the spraying, the loss in coca leaf can be reduced and the crop recovered quickly."
- New UNODC research indicates that more cocaine is being extracted from the same amount of coca. The UN had previously estimated that a hectare of coca yielded about 4.7 kilograms of pure cocaine each year. They have revised this estimate to 7.7 kilograms. "Based on this data, the total cocaine production in Colombia for 2005 reached 640 metric tons cocaine," reads the report; this is higher than the U.S. government estimate of 545 tons. Increased yields, the UNODC indicates, "may help to explain why the price and purity of cocaine have remained steady on the streets of consuming countries despite the overall reduction in world supply."
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Prices paid for coca paste in Colombia are not rising, which means that fumigation is not reducing coca-leaf supplies. Prices in 2005 rose in dollar terms, but shrank in peso terms (the dollar weakened against the peso last year). "After a sharp increase in 2001, which can be seen in connection with the successful efforts of governments to stop the trafficking of cocaine base from Peru to Colombia, prices for coca paste in Colombia tend to oscillate around 2,100,000 Colombian Pesos (US$ 900) per kilogramme."
- Coca farmers - who are hit hardest by the U.S.-supported focus on eradication - are not rich. The UNODC estimates that 68,600 families grow coca, a total of about 336,150 people (0.8 percent of Colombia's population). Each family takes in about $12,300 per year, minus all production costs (herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, wages for coca-pickers, and of course extortion payments to armed groups). Notes the report, "It seems that even the gross per capita income derived from coca cultivation is well below the average GDP per capita, confirming that coca farmers belong the economically worse off part of the population. The figures for Peru and Bolivia show a similar scenario." The UNODC adds, "In most cases, the emergence of illicit crops does not significantly increase peasants’ income, but can improve their basic subsistence when other income generating activities are not present."
- Rural development offers the only way out. The UNODC makes this point in every one of its annual coca surveys: "There is evidence that giving farmers alternative sources of income so they do not have to grow coca can work…. However, the scale is still very small and needs to be multiplied at least tenfold in order to reach all impoverished farmers who need support. This is a major undertaking, but it could reduce poverty and the world supply of cocaine at the same time." Despite this evidence, alternative development is underfunded and opportunities are scarce. "In Colombia, a study by the Colombian government and UNODC revealed that only 9% of the coca farmers interviewed reported having received any kind of assistance to stop growing coca plants."
The present mix of policies - heavy eradication, little development aid - has brought such a persistent and frustrating lack of results, common sense would dictate that the United States and other donor countries immediately shift their strategies and boost alternative development. Common sense, however, has not driven this policy.
The UN's estimates tell us that between 1999-2000 and 2003-2004, a tripling of fumigation cut Colombian coca cultivation in half. (Fumigation went from about 40,000 hectares per year to 130,000; coca went from about 160,000 hectares to 80,000.)
In the absence of alternative development, then, what would it take to reduce Colombian coca by half again, to 40,000 hectares? Another tripling of fumigation, to 400,000 hectares (and well over half a billion dollars) per year? Would it take a further tripling (1.2 million hectares sprayed, $1.5 billion) to halve it again, to 20,000 hectares?
This strategy has run its course. Rural development, with a state presence in neglected areas - along with more demand-reduction in consuming countries like the United States - offers the only way out of the dead end that U.S. fumigation has proven to be.
The UNODC's report won't say that. But its findings point pretty clearly in that direction.
Posted by isacson at 07:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 16, 2006
A mysterious drop in cocaine seizures
Colombia's security forces interdicted 48.5 tons of cocaine between January and May of this year, according to a press release that appeared Wednesday on the Colombia's presidency's website.
This sounds impressive, but it actually puts Colombia on a pace to interdict one-third less cocaine than it did in 2005. In 2005, Colombia seized 171 tons - a record, though merely a fraction of the 545 tons that were produced in Colombia last year, according to the U.S. Drug Czar's conservative estimate.
At this year's rate, Colombia will have seized about 116.4 tons of cocaine by December 31. After years of increased interdiction levels, this would represent a drop to 2003 levels. 116.4 tons is only slightly more than Colombia seized in just the first seven months of last year (108.3 tons between January and July of last year, according to an August 2005 communiqué from the Colombian presidency).
Why is so much less cocaine being seized, especially when U.S. anti-drug military aid to Colombia remains constant or even increasing? We don't know, but there are three leading explanations. Two of them are obvious and one is alarming, though impossible to dismiss.
1. Colombian authorities are simply finding less of the product. It is possible that Colombian traffickers, after years of increasing losses, have adapted and are using new routes and new methods of getting cocaine out of the country.
2. Colombian coca-growers are producing less of the product, thanks to eradication. This outcome is unlikely, though, since U.S. governmnent figures show that coca-growing has been steady, if not increasing, for many years now.
3. The big paramilitary pre-demobilization "sell-off" is over. Last year, Colombian officials speculated that the cocaine market was being flooded by paramilitary leaders who, facing imminent demobilization, were selling off their cocaine stockpiles, rushing to convert it to cash before being amnestied. This could explain the spike in cocaine seizures in 2005 - including a surprising number of multiple-ton finds - though it is less likely to explain a similar spike in 2004, when a final agreement with the paramilitaries was still far off.
If this hypothesis is true, however, it might explain why less cocaine might be "in the pipeline" now that the paramilitary leadership is officially "demobilized." And more disturbingly, it means that top paramilitary leaders, who appear likely to avoid extradition to the United States for sending drugs here, successfully managed to cash in one last time. They may have gotten away with sending even more tons of drugs here just before the final deadline for submitting to the "Justice and Peace" law.
Posted by isacson at 04:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 14, 2006
Rural development, in 400 words or less
Last year, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee wanted to improve the balance between military and economic aid on the 2006 foreign aid bill.
Committee members like Sam Farr (D-California), who was once a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia, wanted to see more U.S. investment in rural Colombia, where drug crops and armed groups are as pervasive as ever. Instead of an 80 percent military strategy, Farr and others argued, more must be done to address the total absence of civilian government from much of Colombia’s territory. Colombia’s problems will continue to bedevil us, they argued, as long as state absence continues to go hand-in-hand with very high rural poverty rates. (Colombia’s Comptroller’s Office estimated in 2004 that 85 percent of rural Colombians live below the poverty line.)
The Democrats’ appeals for more rural development aid hit a brick wall of Republican opposition. Majority-party appropriators refused to budge on aid priorities or to provide more non-military money. They had plenty of funds available, of course, for fumigation and other military efforts.
The most that the Democrats managed to do was add language to the non-binding narrative report that the Appropriations Committee writes to accompany the foreign aid bill. They inserted the following sentences recognizing the importance of development aid in Colombia, and asking the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide a report.
The Committee strongly supports USAID’s continuing alternative development strategy that focuses on the historic underdevelopment of Colombia’s outlying regions. The programs concentrate on local infrastructure needs (roads, electricity, water) and delivery of services at the community level. This focus on an entire community increases the social pressure for eradication and also helps organize the community to identify and prioritize local needs. It is the Committee’s view that alternative development integrated with the presence of the state and the presence of law enforcement and security are fundamentally the key to long term peace and security in Colombia.
The Committee directs USAID to report back to the Committee no later than 60 days after enactment of this Act what detailed steps the Government of Colombia is taking to develop a comprehensive rural development strategy.
USAID produced this report in February, and we obtained a copy today (PDF).
“Disappointing” doesn’t even come close to describing the product that was turned over to Congress. How seriously does the Bush administration take congressional concerns about development and governance in rural Colombia? Your answer is evident in the length of this report: less than 400 words.
And most of those words are generalities, statements of principles and aspirations lifted from official Colombian government text. Concerned members of Congress can learn, for example, that “the government of Colombia’s agricultural policy is guided by the principles of equity, competitiveness, sustainability and decentralization.” Or that “the strategy will lead to a more competitive agricultural sector, capable of generating rural employment through combined public and private efforts.”
What rural development strategy doesn’t share such objectives? (North Korea’s, maybe.) A reader of this report will learn almost nothing about Colombia’s rural plans, and will more likely come away concerned that Colombia in fact has no coherent strategy, and the U.S. government has no intention of supporting these goals.
The report fails to answer even very basic questions like these:
Who in rural Colombia is being most heavily targeted by this strategy? Agribusiness? Small farmers? Cooperatives? Displaced and other vulnerable groups? People in drug-producing areas? Producers for export or for the domestic market? Light industry or services enterprises in rural towns?
Who is making decisions for the design of development projects? Do communities themselves get to participate, or is it a statist, top-down approach?
What Colombian government agencies are carrying out this strategy? How does USAID evaluate their efficiency and effectiveness?
What crops, beyond the fruit, cacao, cassava, rubber, fisheries and controversial African palm the report alludes to, are being encouraged?
Where in rural Colombia is this strategy being carried out? What parts of the country are getting the most public resources, private investment and U.S. aid? Is the strategy reaching inhabitants of historically neglected zones with little state presence, where need is greatest, or is it principally benefiting people in territories that are already more integrated into the national and global economies?
When does this strategy expect to achieve its benchmarks and goals, such as number of jobs created or reduction of poverty rates to a certain percentage of the rural population? Do such benchmarks and goals exist? They don’t appear in the report.
Why did the report not even touch on specific concerns the committee listed in its report, like infrastructure, work with entire communities, and integration with security and law enforcement? What is being done in those areas, if anything?
How much does this strategy cost? How much would come from Colombian government resources, whether new spending or incentives to private investment, and how much from international donors? How is the U.S. government specifically supporting this strategy?
How is the rural development strategy being coordinated with security efforts, in order to avoid having some regions militarized but otherwise forgotten, and other regions with well-funded projects vulnerable to guerrilla attack or extortion?
What is the U.S. government’s opinion of this strategy? Is it viable and sufficiently resourced? Are there elements that USAID feels are less deserving of support than others?
A real report to Congress would have made at least some effort to address questions like these. But the brief, vague, and useless document the appropriators received doesn’t even come close.
Let’s hope this 400-word brush-off is not a true reflection of the importance that the U.S. government places on Colombia’s rural development challenges. If it is, then we are doomed to be confronting drug trafficking, violence, and other by-products of Colombia’s rural poverty and statelessness for many years to come.
The Appropriations Committee should demand a genuine explanation of rural development strategy in Colombia, with specific recommendations for how the U.S. government could be more supportive. It should also actively discourage the executive branch from responding in this fashion to its requests for information.
Posted by isacson at 05:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 12, 2006
In harmony, for the moment
Here is a translation of a column which appeared in yesterday’s edition of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. This version is a bit longer than what appeared in print, due to a small snafu (they had asked for 900 words, then determined that they couldn’t fit that much).
In harmony, for the moment
It shouldn’t surprise us that the Bush administration and the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress were very pleased with Álvaro Uribe’s reelection. They can now be sure that, for four more years, they can remain in harmony with one of the few unconditional allies they still have in Latin America, and one of the few loyal adherents to the “Washington Consensus.”
The State Department’s happiness was evident. Within 48 hours it announced a much-delayed “certification” of Colombia. Twice each year, the law requires a certification that the Colombian armed forces are improving their human-rights performance; each certification frees up approximately $35 million in “frozen” military aid. This process has been controversial, because it has been difficult to show improvements.
The House Republicans have sought even closer relations with Uribe. In mid-May, the House Appropriations Committee changed the structure of aid to Colombia for 2007, transferring economic aid (about $140 million) from the counter-narcotics program to “regular,” non-drug economic aid. “It is time to move away from treating Colombia as a narcostate,” said Rep. Jim Kolbe, the committee’s Republican chairman.
The Bush administration and the Republican legislative majority, which dominate Washington right now, continue to seek perfect harmony with Colombia, and we will hear them all singing together when Uribe visits the United States next week.
But there is a minority that has not lost the ability to express doubts and ask questions. While it is politically difficult to challenge someone who just won an election with 62 percent of the vote, the message from the Democrats and some less-right-wing Republicans is: Colombia has not been written a blank check.
On the Democratic side, several important legislators are concerned about the human-rights climate in Colombia, which they see as worsening quickly. They have noted the serious trends documented in the UN High Commissioner’s annual report and other new accusations of military participation in abuses. They have noted the increases in displacement, forced disappearances, and the wave of threats against unionists, journalists, and human-rights defenders. Key Democratic senators know about the murder of Jaime Gómez and the massive use of force against indigenous protests in Cauca three weeks ago. They have strong doubts, to say the least, about the ongoing process with the paramilitaries. And they are upset about scandals like the infiltration of the DAS, the torture of recruits in Tolima, and the military massacre of a police counter-drug unit in Jamundí.
The Democrats are taking action. As I write this, Rep. Jim McGovern is promoting an amendment in the House to cut funding from fumigations. Three weeks ago, three prominent senators – Patrick Leahy, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama – wrote a strong letter [PDF] to Nicholas Burns, the number-three official at the Department of State, criticizing a blindly optimistic column he wrote about Colombia in the Miami Herald. “There are reasons to be seriously concerned about whether our current policy can achieve its goals,” they warned.
This week, Sen. Leahy disputed the human-rights certification that had been issued after Uribe’s reelection. As the Senate’s ranking Democrat in charge of foreign aid, he took the unusual step of temporarily halting the military aid that had just been “unfrozen.”
Meanwhile, some Republicans are unsatisfied with the results of the drug war under Plan Colombia. The revelation in April that there was more coca measured in Colombia in 2005 than in 2000 – the year Plan Colombia began – dropped like a bomb on the current policy. Important senators and representatives from the moderate wing of Republicanism (Charles Grassley, Richard Lugar, Jim Kolbe) have expressed unhappiness with the evident failure of fumigations as the strategy’s principal axis. But most Republicans remain firmly in support of glyphosate.
The current panorama in Washington, then, involves on one side, those who hold power and support Uribe almost unconditionally, and on the other side, a minority that – while it does not oppose such a popular president – is uncomfortable and wants to see changes.
This panorama could change significantly this November, when the United States elects a new House and one-third of its Senate. Uribe’s allies in Washington are awaiting this date with some apprehension, because at the moment their popularity is at its lowest point. Polls indicate President Bush’s approval ratings at around 30 per cent, and there is a growing possibility that the Democrats might win a majority in the House, and perhaps the Senate, in November.
If the Democrats win in November, the new speaker of the House will be Nancy Pelosi, and the new chairman of the Appropriations Committee will be David Obey; both are critics of Plan Colombia. And Rep. McGovern, who tries every year to amend the law to reduce military aid, would be one of the chief members of the powerful Rules Committee. In the Senate, Patrick Leahy – who is currently holding up military aid funds – would be the senator who writes the basic draft of the foreign aid bill each year.
Putting them in charge of the Congress would not mean an immediate end to fumigations or Plan Patriota. But there would be much more human-rights scrutiny and concern about the quality of Colombia’s democratic institutions. There would be less emphasis on fumigation, and more resources to strengthen governance and fight poverty, priorities which today account for less than 20 percent of U.S. aid to Colombia.
Even with a strengthened Democratic congressional bloc, though, Álvaro Uribe would still be the closest U.S. ally in Latin America. The Bush administration, which is in power through 2008, will see to that. But the embrace would be less close, and criticisms and conditions would be stronger.
Of course, it remains quite possible that nothing will change in November. It is hard to bet against the Republicans, who have won every legislative and presidential election since 2000. If everything remains the same after November, Washington and Bogotá will continue to sing the same tune, in perfect harmony.
Posted by isacson at 08:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 09, 2006
Holding ground in the House
This afternoon, after an hour of lively debate, the House of Representatives defeated an amendment that sought to reduce military and police aid to Colombia by $30 million. The measure, introduced by Reps. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), Jim Leach (R-Iowa), and 5 other members of Congress, sought to transfer that $30 million to emergency refugee-assistance programs worldwide.
It lost by a vote of 174 to 229, with 43.2 percent of those in attendance voting in favor.
Votes on amendments similar to today's measure have happened at least once every year since 2000 (with the exception of 2004). During this period, nine amendments seeking to cut or limit U.S. military aid to Colombia have been defeated, and a tenth seeking to increase military aid succeeded.
This gives us a list of ten votes which we can use as a rough gauge of how supportively or skeptically the House, which has been dominated by Republicans during this entire period, has viewed the U.S. strategy toward Colombia.
Though no amendment has succeeded, congressional skepticism has been strong and steady. On average, amendments seeking to cut or limit military aid to Colombia have had the support of 43.8 percent of representatives who voted.
Today's vote was no exception. A 174-229 margin means that, of those who voted, 43.2 percent supported the McGovern-Leach-et.al. amendment.
To be only 0.6 percent below average is a perfectly acceptable result, if not a big step forward. To have held the same ground is an achievement in the wake of Alvaro Uribe's resounding re-election, and in the 109th Congress, which is the most conservative in the period being measured.
Today's vote shows that the U.S. Congress has not given an unconditional green light to the Bush and Uribe administrations. Many members of Congress are concerned about the lack of results against the drug trade, the grave human-rights situation, and the unbalanced U.S. strategy, which favors military aid over economic aid by a 4-to-1 ratio. The vote on today's amendment shows that, despite official claims of the policy's success, congressional skepticism remains healthy and robust.
Many thanks are due to the amendment's sponsors: Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts); Jim Leach (R-Iowa); Donald Payne (D-New Jersey); Zoe Lofgren (D-California); Raúl Grijalva (D-Arizona); Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois); and Betty McCollum (D-Minnesota). Thanks are due as well to those who spoke on behalf of the amendment: Reps. McGovern, Leach, Schakowsky, and Lofgren; plus Ike Skelton (D-Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee); Sam Farr (D-California); Barbara Lee (D-California); and David Obey (D-Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee).
| Vote | Yea | Nay | Percentage of those voting |
| mar 00 (obey) | 186 | 239 | 43.8% |
| mar 00 (ramstad) | 159 | 262 | 37.8% |
| jul 01 (mcgovern et al) | 179 | 240 | 42.7% |
| jul 01 (lee-leach) | 188 | 240 | 43.9% |
| may 02 (supp) | 192 | 225 | 46.0% |
| apr 03 (supp) | 209 | 216 | 49.2% |
| jul 03 (for ops) | 195 | 226 | 46.3% |
| jun 05 (for ops) | 189 | 234 | 44.7% |
| mar 06 (supp, burton - reverse yea and nay) | 172 | 250 | 40.8% |
| jun 06 (for ops) | 174 | 229 | 43.2% |
| Average | 184 | 236 | 43.8% |
Key:
mar 00 (obey): Amendment introduced by Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin) to delay consideration of military aid during the March 29-30, 2000 debate on the "Plan Colombia" supplemental appropriation.
mar 00 (ramstad): Amendment introduced by Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-Minnesota) to cut all aid to Colombia during the March 29-30, 2000 debate on the "Plan Colombia" supplemental appropriation.
jul 01 (mcgovern et al): Amendment, introduced by Rep. Jim Mcgovern (D -Massachusetts) and several others, that would have cut $100 million from the Andean aid to pay for increased assistance for anti-tuberculosis programs during the July 24, 2001 debate on aid for 2002.
jul 01 (lee-leach): Amendment, proposed by Representatives Barbara Lee (D -California) and Jim Leach (R -Iowa), to shift funding from the Andean Counter-drug Initiative to the Global AIDS Trust Fund during the July 24, 2001 debate on aid for 2002.
may 02 (supp): Amendment, introduced by Reps. Jim Mcgovern (D -Massachusetts) and Ike Skelton (D-Missouri), that would have cut language broadening the mission of U.S. military assistance in Colombia to include combat against illegal armed groups, during the May 22-23, 2002 debate on supplemental appropriations legislation.
apr 03 (supp): Amendment, introduced by Reps. Jim Mcgovern (D -Massachusetts), Ike Skelton (D-Missouri), and Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), that would have cut military aid for Colombia that was included in a supplemental appropriation, April 3, 2003.
jul 03 (for ops): Amendment, introduced by Reps. Jim Mcgovern (D -Massachusetts) and Ike Skelton (D-Missouri), that would have cut military aid for Colombia and transferred it to HIV-AIDS programs, July 23, 2003 debate on foreign aid for 2004.
jun 05 (for ops): Amendment, introduced by Reps. Jim McGovern (D -Massachusetts), Betty McCollum (D-Minnesota) and Dennis Moore (D-Kansas), that would have cut military aid for Colombia, June 28, 2005 debate on foreign aid for 2006.
mar 06 (supp, burton - reverse yea and nay): Amendment, introduced by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana) that added $26.3 million in military aid to Colombia to a supplemental appropriations bill, March 17, 2006. Yeas and nays are reversed on this table, because opponents of the current policy voted against this amendment.
jun 06 (for ops): Amendment, introduced by Reps. Jim Mcgovern (D -Massachusetts), Jim Leach (R-Iowa), and several others, seeking to transfer $30 million in military aid to Colombia to refugee programs worldwide, in debate on the 2007 aid bill, June 9, 2006.
Posted by isacson at 03:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 08, 2006
"Stay the Course?" No thanks
Here is a point-by-point response to a letter being circulated in the House of Representatives by four Republican congressmen who are considered the House's leading proponents of the current policy toward Colombia.
The letters' authors are:
Dan Burton (R-Indiana, the chairman of the House International Relations Western Hemisphere Subcommittee),
Henry Hyde (R-Illinois, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee),
Tom Davis (R-Virginia, the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee), and
Mark Souder (R-Indiana, the chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources).
Congress of the United States
Washington, DC 20515
Stay the Course in Colombia!
Dear Colleague,
This week we will take up consideration of the Appropriations Foreign Operations Bill with provisions relating to Colombia and the Andean Region where critical campaigns in the Global War on Drugs and Terrorism are being waged. As we prepare to take up H.R. 5522 (Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2007), let us draw your attention to the critical need to maintain our support for the newly re-elected President Uribe and bilateral cooperation against the scourge of narco-terrorism. Below are excerpts from House Report 109-486.
Excerpts from the Appropriations Committee Report accompanying H.R. 5522 Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2007
"...It is the Committee's view that the time has come to transition from assistance directed at counter-narcotics programs, to assistance designed to develop and promote the stable democracy that Colombia has become."
It is time to provide Colombia with assistance to develop and promote a stable democracy. But our current aid to Colombia doesn't do that.
77.4 percent of the aid to Colombia in the Foreign Operations bill (and about 82 percent of overall aid) will go to Colombia's security forces. This is the same as in previous years - there is no "transition" to speak of.
Over $200 million will go simply to maintain planes and helicopters given to Colombia in the past; plans to have Colombia assume more of the maintenance costs have gone nowhere. Still more will go to an aerial herbicide fumigation program that, after more than 10 years and almost 3,000 square miles sprayed, has not reduced the amount of coca grown in Colombia by one acre.
Only 22.6 percent of the aid in the foreign ops bill will pay for the kind of assistance we usually think of when we talk about "developing and promoting democracy." This includes efforts to create a legal economy in poor, violent parts of Colombia; to strengthen civilian governance where none exists; to help Colombia's beleaguered judicial system; and to assist Colombia's huge and growing population of victims displaced by the violence.
These needs are urgent, and they deserve far more assistance than they are getting. But the military component of the aid package continues to predominate.
"The Committee has noted the successes of Plan Colombia and the measurable improvements that have resulted in the everyday lives of the Colombian people. Some have declared Colombia the `greatest success story in Latin America.' In fact, the Colombian Government's success in combating the cultivation of drugs and in restoring democracy can be measured in may ways:
- Coca eradication through spraying has gone from 47,000 hectares the first year of Plan Colombia to 138,775 last year;
Eradication has increased - but has achieved absolutely no results. There is even more coca in Colombia today than there was in Plan Colombia's first year.
In 2000, the year in which Plan Colombia began, the U.S. government measured 136,200 hectares (336,500 acres) of coca in Colombia. In 2005, the U.S. government measured 144,000 hectares (355,800 acres) - an increase of 6 percent!
(Plan Colombia's original goal was to decrease coca-growing by 50 percent by 2005.)
- By regaining sovereignty over most of its air space, Colombia has decreased by 56 percent suspected drug trafficker flights;
- Drug flow to the United States has dropped by 7 percent;
Despite this rough figure based on coca cultivation estimates, the supply of Colombian cocaine in the United States appears to be all too stable. A key measure of that is the price of the drug on U.S. streets.
In 2000, the U.S. government estimated that a gram of cocaine sold for an average of $161.28 on U.S. streets. In September 2005, using a different methodology, the Drug Czar's office estimated the price of a gram at about $170.
There has been no statistically significant change in the price, purity or availability of Colombian cocaine since Plan Colombia began.
- Kidnappings are down 51 percent and homicides 13 percent;
Some violence statistics are going in the wrong direction.
- The International Committee of the Red Cross found a 13.6 percent increase in forced disappearances between 2004 and 2005.
- According CODHES, the Colombian non-governmental organization that maintains data on forced displacement, the number of people forced from their homes by violence increased by 8 percent from 2004 to 2005.
- "Recorded cases of harassment against trade unionists increased" in 2005, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
- The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported "an increase in allegations of actions attributed to members of the security forces, particularly the army," in 2005.
- All 1098 Colombian municipalities have a permanent government presence;
Unfortunately, in too many of these municipalities (or counties), that presence amounts to little more than a few dozen police or military personnel charged with securing vast areas.
Consolidating a real government presence - with civilian government officials building infrastructure, resolving disputes, guaranteeing property rights, teaching children and providing other basic services - should be the central goal of U.S. aid to Colombia. But it is not. Our main focus continues to be on military assistance and on drug-fighting methods that have proven not to work.
- Over 30,000 paramilitary have been demobilized;
To be more precise, as of April 30,150 paramilitaries had laid down 16,077 weapons (0.52 guns per person).
Their "former" leaders, who sent many tons of drugs to the United States, have no fear of being extradited to face justice here. Meanwhile, the OAS observer mission warns that new paramilitary groups are forming in areas where demobilizations took place.
- 200,000 acres of legal crops have been planted and 64,000 farm families have a `legal' farming option;
This is an important and worthwhile program. And it needs more funding so that rural development, and rural governance, can bring permanent reductions in coca cultivation.
Today, the spray planes are far ahead of the development effort: of the nine provinces of Colombia that were sprayed the most between 1999 and 2004, only two have received more than $15 million in development assistance from all international donors during that same period.
- Unemployment has dropped from 20 percent to an estimated 11 percent;
This is an important gain. However, underemployment – the percentage of workers who do not have full-time jobs in the formal economy, and thus are probably not even earning minimum wage – has actually increased since 2004, from 31.8 to 32.6 percent of the workforce at the end of 2005.
Add that to the 11 percent who are unemployed, and over 2 out of 5 Colombians who want a full-time job in the formal economy are unable to find one.
- In December, implementation of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States is expected to drop unemployment even more.
Clearly, Colombia has made remarkable progress. The Committee believes it is time to fund assistance to Colombia through the same mechanisms used to fund other strategic partners."
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June 06, 2006
Colombia debate coming soon in Congress
It’s that time of year again: the House of Representatives will begin considering the 2007 foreign aid bill as early as Thursday. The House bill includes $641 million in new aid for Colombia, about $496 million of it military/police assistance. (An additional $160 million or so in military/police aid will go through the Defense budget.)
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) plans to introduce an amendment that would cut $30 million from Colombia’s counter-drug military/police aid – aimed particularly at the failed fumigation program – and transfer it to refugee assistance programs worldwide. (The House rules of debate simply don’t allow a cleaner transfer specifically to aid Colombia’s displaced population.)
This is not a huge transfer of funds. The amendment’s main purpose is to send a strong signal that the U.S. Congress is concerned about the counter-drug strategy’s lack of results, and that assistance for refugees and displaced people must be a higher priority.
Here is the Latin America Working Group’s action alert on the amendment. If you are a U.S. citizen and want to send a message about the need to reconsider the current U.S. policy toward Colombia, please follow these guidelines and contact your House representative today.
There are unlikely to be any similar opportunities this year.
Taken from http://www.lawg.org/countries/colombia/fy07action.htm:
Below is an action for refugees and displaced people fleeing from violence around the world. Congress has begun work on the foreign aid bill for 2007, and it’s time for us to demand that U.S. aid help the victims of conflict instead of aiding the abettors.
The foreign operations appropriations bill, which dictates how much Colombia receives from the United States each year, will reach the House floor for a vote this week. Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) will offer an amendment to the bill to transfer $30 million from funds for aerial fumigation of drug crops in Colombia to emergency humanitarian relief efforts for refugees around the world. U.S. assistance abroad should generate goodwill by helping those suffering most from famine, war and natural disasters, and should reflect our belief in the right to human life and dignity. This is one of the key congressional actions relating to Colombia that we expect to see this year.
Take Action! Beginning tomorrow - Tuesday and Wednesday - call your member of Congress in the House. Ask that s/he vote YES on the McGovern amendment to the foreign operations appropriations bill transferring $30 million in military aid for Colombia to humanitarian assistance for refugees of political violence and natural disaster. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 to be connected with the office of your representative. Speak with – or leave a message for – the foreign policy aide. Here’s the basic message:
”I urge my representative to vote YES on the McGovern Amendment to the foreign operations appropriations bill, which transfers funds from aerial spraying in Colombia to aid for refugees and emergency humanitarian relief around the world. I want my tax dollars to help people fleeing war and natural disasters, not spent on harsh aerial spraying programs in Colombia that do nothing to stop the problem of drug abuse at home.”
In the past few years we’ve witnessed all too many major humanitarian crises caused by political violence and natural disaster. We continue to hear about millions of refugees and displaced people in Sudan and millions more fleeing from violence in other parts of Africa. We’ve seen refugees forced to abandon their homes after destructive natural disasters, like the colossal tsunami in South Asia, the earthquake in Pakistan and last fall’s Hurricane Stan which caused mudslides and devastation in Central America. Not to mention the suffering that we’ve experienced here at home due to Hurricane Katrina.
We see that there is a need for greater response to humanitarian crises worldwide, and we know that this need far outweighs the desire of the Colombian military to receive more helicopters and spray planes from the United States. The Colombian military has received $3.8 billion since 2000, which has largely supported the purchasing and maintenance of military helicopters, spray planes and related accessories. This equipment is used in Colombia for aerial fumigation of drug crops – a strategy that is failing miserably – and for the war effort.
The War on Drugs in Colombia is a failure. Aerial fumigation of coca plants has proved to be one of the most ineffective ways of reducing coca production in the Andes and the availability of cocaine on U.S. streets. When one area is destroyed by fumigation, farmers simply move to another. Moreover, aerial spraying is inhumane. The chemicals sprayed from planes contaminate water sources, are harmful to human skin and routinely destroy farm families’ food crops.
Here are some talking points for your call:
U.S. Priorities Abroad.
- I believe that my tax dollars should be used to promote goodwill abroad by addressing human suffering and humanitarian crises. Refugees fleeing from political violence and natural disaster deserve greater aid from the United States.
- Humanitarian crises around the globe demand international aid for emergency relief. The U.S. should be at the forefront of the efforts. We need to prioritize assistance to refugees and others suffering from large-scale disasters and intense political violence.
We should not continue to throw our money at a failing drug strategy in Colombia.
- Plan Colombia fails dramatically to achieve its top goal: to curb drug production and abuse. Over $4.7 billion later, the amount of coca produced in Colombia is more than when this massive aid program began in 2000, and the availability of cocaine on U.S. streets has not changed. Our aid money can be put to better use, which is why I support transferring these funds to help refugees.
- Aerial fumigation is both inhumane and ineffective. Coca farmers replant rapidly and relocate to other zones, spreading coca production from one area to the next. Aerial spraying destroys food crops along with coca planted by small farmers with no alternatives. U.S.-funded alternative development programs only reach a fraction of Colombian farmers.
o We need to invest in drug treatment and prevention programs here at home, and in the Andes, in alternative development programs that help small farmers transition permanently from growing illicit crops.
Humanitarian crisis.
- Colombia is facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the worst in the world. According to the UN, 2 to 3 million people have had to flee their homes from violence in recent years, making Colombia second only to Sudan in its number of internally displaced persons.
- This amendment reflects how I would like to see U.S. funds spent in Colombia. The U.S. has provided nearly $5 billion to Colombia since 2000, yet only a shamefully small percentage of it has aided victims of the conflict, including vulnerable Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities.
Human rights in Colombia.
- The human rights situation remains grave due to violence from all armed actors. Despite massive U.S. aid, the human rights record of Colombia’s military has worsened. The UN reported that the number of grave violations of human rights by Colombian security forces was higher in 2005 than any year prior. The U.S. should not turn a blind eye to these abuses by an army partially funded by our tax dollars. Refugees around the world are more deserving of our aid than the Colombian military.
- In 2005, 70 trade unionists were murdered, exceeding the number of those murdered in the rest of the world combined.
- Paramilitary and drug trafficking networks retain a powerful hold over Colombian society. Despite the paramilitary demobilization process that has taken place over the last year, the OAS has documented that these combatants have formed criminal groups which are often still armed and are involved in extortion, drug trafficking, arms sales and intimidation of civilian populations.
Posted by isacson at 11:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 01, 2006
Another human-rights certification
The State Department waited until after Colombia’s elections to announce its latest certification of the Colombian military’s human-rights performance. That is, it waited until the morning of the first working day after the elections to announce that it had made the certification decision late last week.
The Colombia human-rights certification requirement has been part of foreign aid law, in varying forms, every year since Plan Colombia began in 2000. The current version freezes 25 percent of Colombia’s military aid (not police aid, and not aid in the defense budget, leaving about $80 million frozen).
This aid can only be “unfrozen” twice each year, whenever the State Department issues a document to Congress certifying that Colombia has met six conditions having to do with progress on investigations of past human rights violations, cutting ties to paramilitaries, and respecting indigenous populations. Each time the State Department sends a certification document, half of that year’s frozen military aid (12.5 percent of the total, or about $40 million) is made available to Colombia. (To see the text of the Colombia certification requirement, read the 2006 foreign aid law here and find Section 556.)
There are no doubt many in the Bush State Department who despise this procedure; on several occasions we’ve heard comments like “you know, human rights is just one of many interests the United States has in Colombia” or “of course, we would rather not have any conditions attached to what we do.” But the whole State Department bureaucracy clearly does not feel that way. Some, particularly the Democracy, Human Rights and Labor bureau, have taken the legal conditions quite seriously, and the last few certifications have been delayed amid internal discussions.
The certifications have been delayed for so long that the decision announced this week frees up only the remaining 12.5 percent of 2005 military aid; all 25 percent of 2006 aid remains in the freezer. And in fact, the last two certifications appear to have been shaken loose only by important events unrelated to human rights. The last certification, in August 2005, coincided with President Álvaro Uribe’s visit to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The current one coincides with Uribe’s re-election.
But the delays owe to more than just bureaucratic disagreements. More importantly, the Colombian government has not been making it easy for the State Department to certify. Though punishment of past abuses would seem to be a fundamental element of the rule of law, the Uribe government has shown very little willingness to make it happen. Dozens of cases of alleged military human-rights abuse seem to exist only as piles of files in prosecutors’ offices. The few cases that come to trial are stuck in Colombia’s slow-moving courts, while others are quietly archived or never seem to leave the preliminary investigation stage.
Impunity is the rule, but there are also strong pressures to keep the military aid flowing. In order to issue some kind of certification – even one that does not pass the laugh test – State Department officials find themselves repeatedly asking the Colombians for some evidence of progress on a few key “benchmark” cases of human rights abuse.
Under President Uribe, who views military officers as heroes who must use all necessary means to protect the patria, the Colombian government has fiercely resisted the State Department’s entreaties to try or punish a few of the worst offenders. It has offered only the scarcest possible evidence of progress in punishing past abuses, and forced State Department officials to be very creative when drafting their justifications to Congress of how exactly Colombia has improved.
The latest justification document is not yet available (see the last few here, here and here), so we do not yet know what improvements in the Colombian military’s performance the State Department was able to cite. However, two very recent events probably made the certification possible.
- Colombia’s Procuraduría (sort of an internal-affairs agency that can fire or dock the pay of government employees, but not put them in jail) decided to fire seven army personnel, including four officers, tied to the August 2004 murder of three union leaders in Arauca.
- Colombia’s Fiscalía (the attorney-general’s office, which prosecutes criminal cases) has moved forward with arrest warrants for an officer and a soldier involved in a 2003 massacre in Cajamarca, Tolima.
It’s not clear what other cases the State Department can cite, beyond these two examples from the past week or two. The investigation into the February 2005 massacre of two families in San José de Apartadó, Antioquia, remains stuck (though the community’s refusal to talk to the Fiscalía offers the Colombian government a handy excuse to do nothing). Gen. Jaime Uscátegui’s trial for allowing the 1997 paramilitary massacre in Mapiripán continues to drag on. Nobody has been punished for the 1998 bombing of civilians in Santo Domingo, Arauca. The investigation of Operation Dragon, a plot against union leaders and other Cali activists revealed in 2004, has not moved a bit. The list goes on.
Worse, Colombia’s human rights climate appears to be getting more serious, which makes the decision to certify “improvements” especially poorly timed. The past two months have seen repeated e-mail threats sent to human-rights groups, break-ins at several human-rights defenders’ offices and homes, the murder of one human-rights activist’s bodyguard, the murder of an advisor to a senator who opposes Uribe, and iron-fisted responses to protests from indigenous groups and coca growers. Not to mention scandals surrounding paramilitary infiltration of the president’s security and intelligence service (the DAS), and the massacre of an entire police anti-drug unit at the hands of a military patrol.
The human-rights certification process is frustrating. It puts a “seal of approval” on a human rights record that is not improving, and may in fact be going the wrong way. It simply ignores the majority of outstanding cases of past abuse, cases that have gone nowhere. The focus on “benchmark cases” has put U.S. diplomats in an uncomfortable position – at times they appear to be demanding the heads of a few military personnel in exchange for aid money.
Nonetheless, the certification process is necessary. Lately, it seems to be the only bit of leverage available to bring past human-rights abuses to justice. By requiring some evidence of progress, each certification brings at least a few cases closer to judgment and punishment.
Moreover, the mere fact that the past few certifications have been delayed for so long shows why they are necessary. The delays reveal some important truths about the Colombian military’s commitment to human rights.
The failure to move forward on investigations and prosecutions reveals that when it comes to punishing abuses, Colombia’s security forces have yet to internalize human rights as an important value. The certification delays put a badly needed spotlight on that problem. They make painfully obvious how troubled the Colombian military’s human-rights performance remains. Despite improvements in training and some officers’ positive efforts, the overall record remains so bad that even the military’s main foreign benefactor, the U.S. government, cannot approve of it without a long, drawn-out argument.
The certification process is messy and pleases nobody. But as abuse investigations become ever more stuck and the overall climate worsens, it’s more necessary than ever.
Posted by isacson at 08:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 26, 2006
From southern Colombia to northwest Washington
Washington DC has one of the United States' most inflated real-estate markets. So when my wife and I decided in 2003 to buy a home, we found our choices limited by our two non-profit salaries. We ended up in a neighborhood that is "transitioning," as they say in the real-estate business.
"Transitioning" means that even as houses get renovated and new condo buildings sprout up, there's still quite a bit of crime, most of it drug-related. We have a crew of tough-looking kids (late teens-early twenties) who camp out on our corner every few weeks for several days at a time. Addicts from nearby neighborhoods, and lots of cars with Maryland and Virginia plates, come by to do furtive business. Calling the cops is almost useless, even if we do see a "transaction" take place - response times tend to be poor, the dealers are always on the lookout for a coming police vehicle, and they are usually careful to keep their drug stash hidden nearby, not on their persons.
For their part, the dealers leave the neighborhood's residents alone, and some neighbors even argue that having them there makes us a bit safer because it keeps out other undesirables. (Just as many Colombians in dangerous zones profess gratitude for paramilitaries' protection.) Some even seem angrier at the local liquor store that sells single cans of beer.
They're wrong of course - nobody is safer, least of all the dealers themselves. Yesterday evening, as I was putting our one-year-old to bed, we heard a series of loud shots outside. Within a minute or two, the police were on the scene and a helicopter was overhead, its spotlight illuminating our back alley and nearby streets.
 |
| The view from our bedroom window last night. |
As more cops arrived and began putting up yellow crime-scene tape, I went outside to find out what happened - as did almost all of our neighbors, some of whom I hadn't seen in months. (A neighbor from around the corner has posted her account of the incident, which seems to have been a drive-by, to her excellent blog about the neighborhood.)
Across the intersection, which was full of police cars, I could see one of the corner guys doubled over in pain, being held upright by two companions. Word is he was hit in the groin, which is painful but not fatal. An ambulance quickly came and wheeled him away.
Police stayed in the area for a couple of hours, talking to us about what we heard, looking for stray bullet casings, and who knows what else. Safe in our house, we got on with our evening. The baby to sleep, we answered some e-mails, talked a bit and went to bed.
As the police vehicles' lights flashed outside, I couldn't help thinking about Colombia. After all, the shooting outside likely had something to do with drugs, and those drugs may have been produced in Colombia.
But it's more than that. Between my job and my neighborhood, I regularly get to see both ends of the drug production and distribution chain. I see the coca plants in the fields in Colombia, and I see the dealers on the corners in the United States. And I'm really struck by the similarities between the poor Colombians who make a living growing or picking coca leaves, and the dead-end U.S. kids who spend their days selling the finished product to addicts.
Now, I'm not talking about the people in the middle of the chain, where the big money is. Most of the drug trade's profits end up in the hands of the narco (or armed-group member) who buys the coca-growers' crude paste, the criminal who distributes the finished product to street dealers, and everybody in betweeen.
On either extreme, though, the grower and the dealer are basically exploited. A coca-grower with a hectare of the plant, the UN has estimated (big PowerPoint file), ends up netting only about $199 per month, or just over $6 per day. As for the small-time dealers on the corner - the bestselling book Freakonomics, which has a chapter entitled "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?," accurately describes what a lousy deal they have. These kids spend all day in the heat or the cold, dealing with a rather unpleasant customer base, and end up with so little money that they don't even have cars - they ride off on bicycles.
Not only do they see very little money, both the coca-grower and the street dealer are the most exposed to the violence that accompanies the drug trade. Colombia's coca-growing regions are war zones in which extrajudicial executions are the order of the day. For their part, the foot soldiers on the corners of neighborhoods like mine never know when someone might drive by and shoot them in the groin.
At the same time, both the coca-grower and the street dealer are hit hardest by their governments' horribly failed policies. In rural Colombia and urban America, chronic misgovernment - or a total lack of governance - has reduced opportunities in the legal economy. Residents of both areas live in poverty, with little or no access to education (Washington, for instance, is notorious for having one of the nation's worst public-school systems), chronic insecurity and a weak social fabric. To many in both rural Colombia and urban America, the drug trade simply appears to be a rational way to make a living, despite the obvious risks.
But neither coca-growers nor small-time dealers are exactly ignored by their governments. In fact, both are by far the most likely to bear the brunt of law enforcement efforts. Coca growers are being fumigated on a massive scale, in the majority of cases with no offers of alternative development opportunities. In the United States, over 500,000 non-violent drug offenders are behind bars, about a quarter of the entire prison population.
In both Colombia and the United States, the small-timers - the growers and the dealers on the corner - have become the main target. And the result is an utter failure whose consequences are plainly visible not just in rural Colombia, but outside my bedroom window last night.
Posted by isacson at 01:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 21, 2006
Congress begins considering 2007 aid
The House Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee met early on Friday morning to approve their version of the 2007 foreign aid bill. This bill’s text is not yet available – there isn’t even a bill number assigned yet – and we probably won’t see it until after the full Appropriations Committee, which now must consider the bill, gives its approval. That is scheduled to happen before the end of the week, since Congress goes away Friday for a week-long Memorial Day recess.
We do know, though, that the House bill would make several changes to next year’s U.S. aid to Colombia. Right now, the best overview of these changes can be found in Sergio Gómez’s reporting in the Colombian daily El Tiempo (here and here in Spanish).
We know of three changes in particular.
1. Military and police aid to Colombia would increase by $29 million over the Bush administration’s request. The State Department’s request to Congress included about $477 million in military assistance to Colombia through the foreign aid bill. (Approximately $150-160 million more will go to Colombia through the Defense Department budget, which would make a total of about $630-640 million in military and police aid next year, similar to the past few years.)
The request, submitted in February, looked like this:
- $381 million through Andean Counter-Drug Initiative (including $41 million through a regional “Critical Flight Safety” program and $26 million in “rule of law” programs that are mostly police assistance).
- $90 million through Foreign Military Financing, the main non-drug military aid program in the foreign aid budget.
- $1.7 million through International Military Education and Training, the main non-drug military training program in the foreign aid budget.
- $3.9 million in Anti-Terrorism Assistance, a relatively small program that provides mostly training.
- $200,000 for Small Arms and Light Weapons control.
(Note: the true amount of military aid could in fact be $5-10 million lower, depending on how much “rule of law” assistance goes to civilian institutions within the Colombian government.)
At the insistence of Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana), the chairman of the House Western Hemisphere International Relations Subcommittee, the House bill increases military aid by $29 million more, in order to pay for upgrades to Colombian helicopters, spray planes and other aircraft. This $29 million would be added to the “Critical Flight Safety” program within the Andean Counter-Drug Initiative account.
The House bill, then, would give Colombia $506 million in military and police aid. Add approximately $160 million from the Defense budget bill, and Colombia would get over $660 million in military and police aid next year – the highest amount since 2000, the year that Plan Colombia’s launch gave aid levels a one-time boost.
2. Economic aid to Colombia would increase by $10 million over the Bush administration’s request. The State Department’s request to Congress included $125 million for “alternative development and institution-building” – that is, rural development aid, assistance to displaced people, judicial reform and human-rights efforts. The House bill would make that $135 million.
(Note: the true amount of economic aid could in fact be $5-10 million higher, depending on how much “rule of law” assistance goes to civilian institutions within the Colombian government.)
That’s a very positive change, as non-military governance desperately needs more emphasis in Colombia. But it does not change the overall proportion of military to economic aid. The House bill would provide Colombia with a total of $641 million in aid; only 21 percent of that would be economic aid.
Including funds through the Defense budget, the House bill could result in Colombia getting over $800 million in U.S. aid next year. Of that amount, only 17 percent would be economic aid.
3. Colombia’s economic aid would no longer go through counter-narcotics programs. All economic aid to Colombia since 2001 has gone through the State Department-managed “Andean Counter-Drug Initiative” account, the largest single source of Colombia’s aid, which mixes military and economic aid together with the drug war as its main purpose.
Subcommittee Chairman Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona), with the apparent agreement of the State Department, has decided to change that, moving Colombia’s $135 million economic aid appropriation into a non-drug funding category. That program, Economic Support Funds or ESF, is an account managed by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Though ESF programs are still often micro-managed, this program does offer much more flexibility than the Andean Counter-Drug Initiative. Aid doesn’t necessarily have to be farmed out to companies and non-profits who bid for USAID contracts; in some cases, it can even be in the form of cash payments to governments. ESF recipient governments generally get to play a leading role in determining how the aid is to be spent, rather than having those decisions largely made in Washington. “If Colombia wants to build a bridge and demonstrates to the U.S. government that this is good for its development,” a U.S. government source told El Tiempo, “they can do it with those funds.”
If the House gets its way, Colombia would become the only country outside the Middle East to receive more than $100 million per year from the ESF account. While not an earth-shaking change in the makeup of U.S. assistance, releasing economic aid from the constraints of the drug war is a positive step. It is also a big step away from the failed counter-narcotics architecture that underlay Plan Colombia six years ago.
Because we haven’t seen the aid bill’s text yet, a few things remain unclear. Is Colombia’s extra $39 million in aid ($29 million military plus $10 million economic) new assistance, or did it have to come from cuts in aid to other countries? Does the bill still include cuts in aid – both military and economic – to many of Colombia’s neighbors, like Peru, Ecuador and especially Bolivia? Beyond amounts, does the bill include any other surprising stipulations, like a further broadening of the aid mission or a tweaking of the human-rights conditions?
We simply don’t know yet, but we will post information as it becomes available.
Posted by isacson at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 14, 2006
U.S. military aid: the Pentagon’s role keeps growing
On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed its version of the 2007 Defense Authorization bill (H.R. 5122). In addition to approving a budget of more than half a trillion dollars for the Pentagon next year, this bill solidifies the Defense Department’s role as a major and growing source of military assistance to Latin America and the rest of the world.
Two Defense Department counter-narcotics aid programs begun on a temporary basis in the 1990s would be made permanent and expanded in scope. The bill would also expand a counter-terror training program begun in 2002.
Why does this matter, you might ask? Shouldn’t the U.S. military budget provide U.S. military aid?
The answer to that question is forty-five years old. Back in 1961, U.S. foreign aid was growing as the cold war intensified. But it was a mess. Military and economic aid were divided among many overlapping programs carried out by different departments of the government, and overseen by different congressional committees. With every department doing its own thing, there was no coordination, poor accountability, and little congruence with U.S. foreign policy goals. Nobody was in charge, and nobody was minding the store.
“No objective supporter of foreign aid can be satisfied with the existing program – actually a multiplicity of programs,” said the new president, John F. Kennedy. “Bureaucratically fragmented, awkward and slow, its administration is diffused over a haphazard and irrational structure covering at least four departments and several other agencies.”
The fix came with the September 1961 passage of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA), which created a legal framework to put all foreign aid programs under the same umbrella. The FAA put the State Department in charge of all aid programs, both military and economic. This increased civilian diplomats’ control over arms transfers and training programs for the world’s militaries. A new U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was created to manage economic aid.
Legislatively, all foreign aid came to be funded through one single budget bill, the annual appropriation for Foreign Operations. Oversight of all aid became the responsibility of the congressional foreign relations committees and foreign operations appropriations committees. Since foreign aid is unpopular in some quarters and doesn’t send funds to legislators’ own districts, these committees usually pay strict attention to how these funds are being spent.
Over the years, amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act have sought to keep aid from going to militaries that grossly abuse their own citizens. Other amendments banned aid to countries “decertified” for failing to cooperate in the drug war, or to countries that fail to exempt U.S. personnel on their soil from the International Criminal Court. Still other amendments have required detailed reporting to Congress and the public about foreign aid. The resulting transparency allowed citizens to have at least a rough idea of how much aid every country received and what it provided.
Not everyone was happy with this arrangement, though. Conservatives complained that human-rights protections in the FAA made it difficult to send weapons to allies who happened to be dictators. Public reporting revealed some inconvenient truths about who was receiving lethal aid. Skepticism about foreign aid made it difficult to create new programs or increase funding within the annual Foreign Operations appropriations bill, which was always small (around 1 percent of the federal budget).
Pressures built to find ways to aid the world’s militaries without dealing with the foreign aid bill’s “impractical” human-rights conditions, “burdensome” reporting, and stingy proportions. The most obvious way around these limitations was to fund some military assistance through the Defense Department’s massive budget.
Since the defense budget is governed by a separate section of the U.S. Code, none of the human-rights conditions and other protections in the Foreign Assistance Act can touch it. Reporting to Congress is not compulsory unless otherwise specified. Congressional oversight of military aid in the defense bill is almost nonexistent: a few hundred million dollars hardly demand the attention of the few dozen Armed Services Committee staffers who must oversee a $500 billion-plus budget. (Three years ago a House Armed Services Committee staff member told me that, to oversee the entire Pentagon, the committee had a bipartisan staff of 45 people, including administrative support staff.) Besides, since much of the defense budget creates employment in their own districts, committee members feel far less incentive to question every dollar that is spent.
Moving military aid back into the defense budget, out of the jurisdiction of the State Department and the congressional foreign relations committees, represents a big step back from the reforms of 1961. It means a return to the time when our overseas assistance was “fragmented, awkward, slow, diffused, haphazard and irrational.”
But the lure of the Pentagon budget is proving to be irresistible. Certainly, joint military exercises and Special Forces training deployments have always occurred with defense funds (the excuse being that their “primary purpose” was to train U.S. forces involved). But the first major foray beyond the Foreign Assistance Act and into the defense bill took place fifteen years ago, as the drug war intensified in Latin America.
The progression since then has been inexorable. The following timeline tells the story of the Pentagon’s increasing role in funding and managing military aid. Above all, note the impossibility of ending a program once it has begun. Once a military-aid program gets a toehold in the defense budget, it grows and grows, even if – as is the case with counter-drug programs – it consistently fails to achieve its stated goals.
- 1989: As the Bush 41 administration ratchets up the drug war in Latin America, Congress designates the Defense Department as the “lead agency” for the detection and monitoring of illegal drugs coming from overseas.
- 1991: Congress clarifies the Pentagon’s new role, interpreting it to mean that the Defense Department may use its counter-drug budget to provide several kinds of non-lethal aid to foreign militaries and police forces. Section 1004 of the 1991 Defense Authorization law allows defense funds to pay for training, equipment upgrades, construction, intelligence and a few other types of assistance. What comes to be known as “Section 1004” aid is now a principal source of military funding for Latin America. Today, more Latin American military personnel are trained by Section 1004 funds than by any other military-aid program. Section 1004 is not permanent law, however; it is envisioned as a temporary authority set to expire in 1995.
- 1995: The 1995 Defense Authorization law renews Section 1004 until 1999.
- 1997: Section 1031 of the 1997 Defense Authorization law allows up to $8 million in non-lethal counter-drug military aid to Mexico. “Section 1031” aid expires at the end of 1998 and is not renewed.
- 1998: Section 1033 of the 1998 Defense Authorization law creates yet another parallel counter-drug military-aid program for Latin America. Also known as the “Riverine Program,” Section 1033 allows the Pentagon to use its budget to give boats and other non-lethal equipment to Colombia and Peru, to help both countries’ navies and police fight drug trafficking on rivers. It provides for a combined $9 million in 1998 and $20 million for each following year. Section 1033 is set to expire in 2002.
- 1998: A series of articles in the Washington Post reveals that, under the Special Forces’ Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, defense-budget funds are being used to train with militaries, and units of militaries, that are banned from receiving U.S. aid through the Foreign Assistance Act. The series notes, “JCETs often appear to bring America's premier soldiers into conflict with aims of American diplomacy enunciated in Washington.”
- 1999: The 1999 Defense Authorization law renews Section 1004 for a second time, until 2002.
- 1999: Following a December 1998 agreement between U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen and Colombian Defense Minister Rodrigo Lloreda, Section 1004 funds are used to train and partially equip a new Counter-Narcotics Battalion within the Colombian Army. This is the first significant counter-narcotics aid to the Colombian Army in many years, but few congressional oversight personnel on the foreign relations committees are aware of it. Also in 1999, Section 1033 funds help the Colombian Navy to establish a Riverine Brigade.
- 1999: The 1999 Defense Appropriations law includes the first human-rights condition on Pentagon military aid: a version of the “Leahy Law” (named after Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy) prohibiting aid to foreign military units that commit gross human-rights violations with impunity. This version of the Leahy Law is weaker than that found in the regular foreign aid bill, however: it allows the Secretary of Defense to waive the conditions entirely, and allows aid to flow freely as long as undefined “corrective steps” are taken. Because it is on an appropriations law, the Leahy Law, just like its counterpart on the foreign aid bill, must be renewed every year.
- 2000: Congress passes a special $1.3 billion “emergency appropriation” for Plan Colombia. Of the $642 million in military and police aid for Colombia in the bill, about $155 million is appropriated through the Defense Department.
- 2001: The 2001 Defense Authorization law slightly scales back the Section 1033 Riverine Program, cutting out Peru and effectively making it a Colombia-only program. However, it extends the program – which was to expire in 2002 – through 2006.
- 2001: The 2001 Defense Authorization law also requires, for the first time, a report on Section 1004 expenditures for the previous year. For the first time, Congress gets a country-by-country breakdown of Section 1004 aid and a rough idea of what it paid for.
- 2002: The 2002 Defense Authorization law renews Section 1004 for a third time, until 2006.
- 2002: The 2002 Defense Appropriations law creates a new Counter-Terror Fellowship Program (CTFP) to provide non-lethal training and education in counter-terrorism doctrine and techniques. Though the program closely resembles training programs that already exist in the Foreign Assistance Act, the CTFP is given an initial $17.9 million.
- 2002: Language in a supplemental appropriation for the “war on terror” expands the purpose of counter-drug aid to Colombia, whether through the foreign aid law or the defense budget law. From now on, aid to Colombia through counter-narcotics programs (such as Section 1004 and Section 1033) may now be employed in a “unified campaign” against drugs, the FARC, the ELN and the AUC.
- 2003: The report on Section 1004 aid disappears from the 2003 Defense Authorization law.
- 2004: The 2004 Defense Authorization law expands the Section 1033 Riverine Program. The word “riverine” is removed to make it a more general-purpose counter-drug aid program. The list of eligible countries is expanded from the existing one (Colombia) to nine: Peru is reinstated and joins Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and five Central Asian states (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan). The maximum annual budget for Section 1033 is increased from $20 million to $40 million.
- 2004: The Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program begun in 2002 is made permanent by the 2004 Defense Authorization law, which includes it as Section 2249c to Title 10, U.S. Code. The annual budget of the CTFP is raised to $20 million per year, and it is permitted to provide lethal training. The program went from training 431 students from four Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2003 to 1,107 students from 22 countries in 2004.
- 2004: As it does every year, the Pentagon submits a draft Defense Authorization bill for 2005, presenting its idea of “ideal language” for the annual legislation. Its draft includes an attempt to allow all defense-budget counter-drug aid to be used to combat terrorism in every country in Latin America, from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. Neither congressional armed-services committee adopts this audacious proposal in its version of the 2005 bill.
- 2006: Section 1206 of the 2006 Defense Authorization law allows up to $200 million from the defense budget to be used as aid to foreign militaries, completely outside the Foreign Assistance Act framework. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had originally wanted $750 million for this military-aid “slush fund,” and had strong-armed the State Department into offering its assent, but resistance from some legislators (notably Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar) reduced the amount. Because it is so general – not specifically tied to the drug war, for instance – this “authority to build the capacity of foreign military forces” represents the biggest shift of military-aid authority to date from the State Department to the Defense Department.
In a May 5 memo, the White House determines that the recipient militaries will be those of Algeria, the Bahamas, Cameroon, Chad, Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Indonesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, and Yemen.
- 2006: The 2006 Defense Authorization law reinstates the report on Section 1004 aid that appeared in 2001 and 2002. It was to be submitted by April 15; we have yet to see a copy.
- 2006: The House approved its version of the 2007 Defense Authorization bill on May 11; the Senate Armed Services Committee sent its version to the full Senate on May 9. The bills break still more new ground for defense-budget military assistance.
- The Senate bill would renew Section 1004 for a fourth time, until 2011, even though the program, after fifteen years, has utterly failed to affect the supply of drugs on U.S. streets. The House bill would go still further by making Section 1004 permanent, enshrining it as a new Section 383 of Title 10, U.S. Code.
- The Senate bill would renew Section 1033 (the ex-Riverine Program) for a second time, until 2011. It would also expand it, doubling its budget to $80 million per year and making it available to twenty-four countries: the current nine plus Belize, Guatemala, Panama and twelve others (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chad, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Philippines, and Thailand). The House bill would make Section 1033 permanent, as a new Section 384 of Title 10, U.S. Code. The House would also expand the program’s budget to $60 million while adding six new eligible countries – Belize, Guatemala, Panama and three central Asian countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) – for a total of fifteen.
- Both houses’ versions of the 2007 Defense Authorization bill would increase the annual budget of the Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program, from $20 million to $25 million.
- The Defense Department’s draft “ideal language” for the 2007 Defense Authorization bill includes an attempt to revive the “Section 1031” program, which benefited Mexico in 1997 and 1998 and was thought to be long since dead (see 1997 above). This time, it would be a non-country-specific counter-drug program. Neither house of Congress includes this proposal in its version of the 2007 bill.
- The Senate bill would renew Section 1004 for a fourth time, until 2011, even though the program, after fifteen years, has utterly failed to affect the supply of drugs on U.S. streets. The House bill would go still further by making Section 1004 permanent, enshrining it as a new Section 383 of Title 10, U.S. Code.
As this long story makes clear, when it comes to Defense Department authority to provide military aid, if you give them an inch, they take a yard, then a mile. The amount of foreign military assistance falling under the Defense Department’s sole jurisdiction keeps growing each year.
The reasons given are familiar – “the defense bill is where the money is,” “the foreign aid process is too cumbersome and bureaucratic,” “the cold war is over, we’re in the 21st century now” – but the consequences are the same. U.S. military assistance – a risky foreign policy tool in the developing world, even at the best of times – is increasingly responding to narrow defense priorities, while our diplomats and our congressional overseers, who are charged with guarding our larger national interest, simply stand by.
CIP is not the only organization sounding the alarm about this trend. George Withers, a Fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America and a former House Armed Services Committee staffer, wrote an excellent memo on the subject [PDF] back in January.
Why are Latin America-focused programs making the most noise about the Defense Department’s growing military-aid role? In large part because the trend began in Latin America, with the drug war fifteen years ago. But this problem is too important to be left up to regional specialists at non-governmental organizations.
Those being steamrolled by the Defense Department’s yearly power grabs need to start sticking up for themselves. The State Department must defend the central role that the Foreign Assistance Act gives it in guiding military-aid priorities. The congressional foreign relations and foreign operations appropriations committees must defend their turf, lest the programs they fund continue to shrink in relative size and influence.
The Defense Department should not be given the right to manage military aid as it sees fit, with few safeguards and minimal legislative oversight. Back in 1961, the Foreign Assistance Act and its State Department-managed architecture were put in place for a reason. It is important to recall that reason and to get U.S. military aid programs back under control.
Posted by isacson at 11:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 02, 2006
Sen. Grassley takes on the drug czar
“[W]e have seen for the first time a decline in the purity of cocaine in the United States and an increase in price at the retail level … Roughly, in February of this year, cocaine availability in the United States, as measured in terms of purity and price, purity has gone down and price has gone up.”
Those were the words of White House Drug Czar John Walters six months ago, when he pulled together a press conference to announce new data showing that cocaine prices, as of September 2005, had risen to levels last seen in early 2004. Since then, Walters and other Bush administration officials have repeated that claim. (Recent examples include assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Anne Patterson [PDF format], Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) official David Murray).
The price rise, they say, is a proud achievement of Plan Colombia and the U.S. counter-drug strategy in the Andes. This strategy, of course, devotes much more resources to military force, eradication and interdiction than to development or rule-of-law improvements. Groups like CIP and WOLA voiced strong doubts about the November cocaine-price figures, which only showed a small short-term gain and ran counter to many other indicators that supplies of the drug are stable or even increasing.
But when it comes to calling into question the Drug Czar’s triumphal claims, nothing we can say will ever carry as much weight as the words of a Republican senator with a long track record as an architect of U.S. drug policy.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has raised his voice to charge, essentially, that the Drug Czar’s office is cooking the books. In a strongly worded letter to John Walters dated April 26, Grassley charges him with using tentative and incomplete information to show progress where none may exist, and then to base policy decisions on what may be inaccurate claims.
Grassley’s letter deals another strong blow to the current anti-drug policy in the Andes; it shows that the strategy’s failure is becoming ever more obvious to everyone. Here are a few excerpts.
On Walters’ trumpeting of higher cocaine prices: “My principal concern is that these statements are based not only on data from sources that were never intended for such purposes, but that they also utilize data from different selected sources to provide a rosier but not necessarily more accurate, picture of the current situation.”
“I believe that these assumptions may be premature and perhaps even unfounded. Furthermore, these statements raise serious concerns within Congress about our ability to effectively combat the narco-traffickers.”
On the strange discrepancy between 1981-2003 cocaine-price data, which show 22 years of steady price decreases, and the 2003-2005 data presented at Walters’ November press conference: “I am also concerned about the reliability of these statements because, according to the 2004 report ‘Price and Purity of Illicit Drugs: 1981 Through the Second Quarter of 2003’, which is based on STRIDE [DEA “System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence”] data and is currently available on the ONDCP website, the price of a pure gram of cocaine during the first two months of 2003 was $106 (for less than 2 grams) and had not been above the $200 mark since 1990.”
Here, Grassley refers to a weird hiccup in official U.S. data. While DEA statistics were showing cocaine available on U.S. streets for about $106 per gram in mid-2003, the graph Walters presented at his press conference showed cocaine at over $200 per gram in July 2003. Here it is side-by-side:
(from page 58 of “Price and Purity of Illicit Drugs”)
(from Walters’ November press conference)
On the drug czar’s April announcement that coca cultivation was higher in Colombia in 2005, but lower in areas of Colombia that were previously measured: “ONDCP's April 14th press release regarding coca cultivation in Colombia references an eight percent reduction in those areas in 2005 that also were imaged in 2004. This is potentially misleading since it includes the areas that were heavily sprayed, which likely resulted in growers leaving those areas and moving to others. Research shows that those in the drug trade adapt to pressure to eradicate and interdict their product.”
“We have been concerned about the accuracy of the numbers for years due to their methodology. How do we even know that these numbers are accurate?”
Unrelated postscript added at 5:15 PM EDT: This, from yesterday's "In the Loop" column in the Washington Post, is too remarkable not to share.
Try Some Chips on Immigration?
The focus on immigration has sparked creative ideas on how to deal with the issue. Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), on their recent trip to Latin America, picked up some unusual suggestions in a chat with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe .
The senators, according to an account Specter put in the Congressional Record, asked Uribe about seasonal workers who don't return home. Uribe had a nifty solution.
"President Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted into their bodies before they are permitted to enter the United States to work on a seasonal basis," Specter reported.
"I doubted whether the implantation of microchips would be effective," Specter reflected, "since the immigrant worker might be able to remove them."
Posted by isacson at 02:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 30, 2006
"People shouldn't be living there"
Go hiking in Shenandoah National Park, about an hour and a half west of Washington, and you might come across foundations or other remains of old houses. It turns out that the heavily forested spot on which you are enjoying scenery and wildlife was once cleared farmland where rural families scratched out a living.
A National Parks Service website explains the history:
In the 1930s, Shenandoah National Park was pieced together from over 3,000 individual tracts of land, purchased or condemned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and presented to the Federal Government. In the process, at least 500 families – described as “almost completely cut off from the current of American life” – were displaced in what was considered by some to be a humanitarian act.
Archeologists in the park have since found “an array of kitchen and dining wares, pharmaceutical glass, military items, mail order toys, 78 RPM record fragments, specialized agricultural tools, store-bought shoes, and even automobiles.”
I was reminded of this by a debate Monday night before a George Washington University class. I was paired with Jaime Ruiz, a principal author of Plan Colombia who is now Ambassador Pastrana’s number-two at the Colombian embassy in Washington.
I made the argument (often expressed in this weblog) that Colombia will not resolve the twin challenges of insurgency and illicit crops until it is able to govern – to enforce laws and provide services – in the remote, neglected areas where both thrive. Ruiz disagreed strongly, using an argument that I’ve heard before and have found difficult to dispute.
While I’m paraphrasing, the argument runs along the lines of “Colombia is far too vast to expect the government to be present in every last corner of the country where a few people decide to live. Many of these ungoverned spaces are dense jungles that were only settled because of the coca economy. The soils are terrible, and markets are very far away. People should not be living in these areas to begin with.”
Never mind that there are many places with near-zero government presence where people have been living for generations (think afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast, or the paramilitary-dominated towns across northern Colombia). For many areas, Ruiz’s argument applies, and the population’s isolation is a big challenge.
But these people are there now. As much as 3-4 percent of Colombia’s population are newcomers to areas that were largely empty before the 1960s or 1970s. Many participate in the coca economy, and many form the “social base” of armed groups active in these regions. What should the Colombian government be doing for these forgotten citizens?
The United States, which also has huge expanses of nearly empty territory, offers an interesting counterexample. According to the House of Representatives’ Committee on Resources, 29.6 percent of U.S. national territory is owned by the federal government. (This includes 91.9 percent of Nevada, over 66 percent of Alaska, Utah and Idaho, and half of Wyoming and Arizona.) A smaller but significant number is in the hands of state, county and municipal governments.
On this land, you can’t just settle in and plant crops (legal or illegal) and try to make a living. (Though as we’ve noted before, that doesn’t stop everyone from trying to grow marijuana in national parks and reserves.) You can’t build a vacation home either (though some permits for doing that in national forests were issued until the 1960s). And even if you have a clear claim to private land, there’s always the possibility – however remote – that the government, citing the “greater good” and the need to bring you out of isolation and into modernity, could leave you in the same situation as the former inhabitants of Shenandoah National Park.
In Colombia’s ungoverned zones, of course, land tenure is more ambiguous. The Colombian government is generally unable (and at times unwilling) to evict colonos (“colonizers”) from national parks, indigenous reservations and public lands, much less empty wilderness zones.
And it’s not clear whether it should be doing so. To begin evicting people and relocating them closer to the country’s core would be a huge, costly and complicated effort. It would face legal and human rights challenges. It would have to grant concessions to indigenous groups – including nomadic, barely contacted tribes – who were in these areas first. For Colombia to approach the U.S. model of government dominion over unused land would be a long and painful process.
What to do, then? The 1999 “Plan Colombia” document, written largely by Jaime Ruiz, offers the outlines of a solution.
It is estimated that as much as 60 percent of the coca-producing areas are far from potential markets and in areas that are poorly suited to any sort of sustained agricultural production. To offer legal income opportunities to small farmers and laborers in such areas, the Colombian Government envisions three possible responses: First, farmers and others with an agricultural vocation will be offered the opportunity to move from the coca-producing areas and resettled on land that has been seized from narcotics traffickers or provided by the land reform institute, INCORA; second, economic opportunities in small- and micro-enterprise will be offered in the urban areas of origin for migrant coca farmers, to remove the economic incentive for that migration; third, the Colombian Government will work with indigenous groups and local governments to launch economically feasible environmental protection activities that conserve the forested areas in an effort to slow the advance of the agricultural frontier into inappropriate areas.
Very little of this has happened, needless to say. There have been some efforts along these lines: USAID has supported the second idea with productive projects to generate employment in some small cities near coca-growing zones, while the third idea is reflected in the Uribe government’s “forest-guard families” program, which pays about 30,000 families in several dozen municipalities to keep forests from being felled.
If you’re not one of the lucky few rural Colombians to benefit from these small programs, however, the U.S. and Colombian governments have probably already made it clear to you that they don’t want you to be living where you’re living. You may have been fumigated, perhaps several times. Military offensives and other combat may take place nearby, though these efforts to push out guerrillas have not included any attempt to win your support by providing you with basic services.
Fumigation and military pushes into these zones usually cause de-population as residents are displaced. U.S. and Colombian officials consider this de-population to be a sign of progress toward their goals. The Colombian government estimated that Putumayo’s population declined from about 320,000 in 2000 to about 270,000 by the end of 2002. It’s considered good news that Plan Patriota has turned several coca boomtowns in southern Colombia – Peñas Coloradas, Caquetá, Miraflores, Guaviare – into near-ghost towns.
Where did these tens of thousands of people go? Did they give up the coca economy, or have they re-planted the crop elsewhere? (Statistics show that re-planting has been very robust.) Have they made common cause with an armed group? How are they and their children feeding themselves? Can they really be considered citizens of Colombia?
It is entirely unacceptable that the U.S. and Colombian governments can only answer these questions with a big “I don’t know.”
Even a mass relocation – loading people and their belongings on trucks and giving them land titles in more-governed areas – would be more humane than the current policy. Even the Shenandoah solution would be an improvement. Not only is the current strategy inhumane, it’s ineffective if the goal is truly to reduce coca-growing and strengthen the Colombian state.
Posted by isacson at 09:44 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 26, 2006
“Mission Accomplished,” says State’s Nicholas Burns
The Bush administration’s ability to portray failure as success – and to believe its own spin – is by now so legendary that it barely needs to be acknowledged here. From Tim Russert to Jon Stewart, commentators repeatedly note the yawning gap between perception and reality in current U.S. policymaking.
We know all about the divorce from reality in Iraq (“Mission Accomplished,” “pockets of dead-enders,” “last throes”), the blindness to Hurricane Katrina’s urgency (“Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job,” “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,”), the denial of a human role in global warming (“There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming”), and the list goes on.
But this willful blindness to bad news – and resulting failure to change course – never ceases to amaze. Today’s exhibit A is an op-ed about Colombia that appears in today’s Miami Herald. Its author is Nicholas Burns, who as undersecretary for political affairs is the third highest-ranking official in the State Department.
“Stunning recovery warrants continued U.S. support” is the title. Burns argues that since Plan Colombia got underway five years ago, “the Colombian people have produced the single greatest success story in Latin America.” Arguing that “Colombia is clearly a better place than it was before we embarked on our joint undertaking,” Burns enumerates several claims for the success of Plan Colombia and U.S. policy, while speaking in the vaguest possible terms about remaining challenges (“there is still a war to be won in this strategically important country”).
Now, every government in the world tries to put the best possible face on its policies. And the Bush administration is probably concerned that a distracted U.S. Congress might be losing interest in funding Colombia to the tune of more than $700 million per year. And indeed Colombia has made some achievements, particularly in the area of citizen security – though that owes mainly to the Colombian government’s use of its own resources. (Most U.S. funds have instead gone to counter-drug programs, which protect nobody and haven’t even reduced drugs.)
Of course U.S. officials will do their utmost to put the most positive spin on something for which they’ve spent $4.7 billion since 2000. Of course they will try to play down failures and disappointments when communicating with the media or Congress (neither of which is paying very close attention anyway).
The danger here is that, as in Iraq and elsewhere, these officials actually believe their own spin, and then go on to make their decisions based on a highly distorted version of reality.
Let’s hope, for instance, that Nicholas Burns and others are not right now making policy decisions based on these arguments from today’s op-ed.
- “Less than a decade ago, Colombia was a country under siege. Guerrillas on the left and paramilitaries on the right controlled wide swaths of its territory. Political institutions were corroded by drug money. And drug trafficking to the United States was at an all-time high.”
If U.S. government officials fail to recognize that guerrillas and paramilitaries still control wide swaths of territory, that political institutions are still corroded by drug money (have they missed the DAS scandal?), and cocaine is even cheaper on U.S. streets than it was when Plan Colombia began, then they are designing a policy for a version of Colombia that only exists in their own fevered imaginations.
- “Last week yet another murderous paramilitary organization laid down its weapons. More than 30,000 ''paras'' have done so over the past two years.”
To be more precise, 30,150 paramilitaries laid down 16,077 weapons (0.52 guns per person). Of those, all but 604 (2 percent) are automatically exonerated for any previous crimes. Worse, new paramilitary groups are forming in areas where demobilizations took place. The head of the OAS observer mission, Sergio Caramagna, said just yesterday, “We know so far that new groups are emerging in regions like Norte de Santander, Nariño, Antioquia and in rural zones like Puerto Libertador and Tierra Alta in Córdoba.”
- “More than 300 criminals have been extradited to the United States during the Uribe administration.”
However, some of the biggest drug traffickers – the AUC paramilitaries’ top leadership – will avoid extradition, thanks to the deal they struck with the Colombian government. It remains to be seen whether or not these individuals have actually stopped sending drugs to the United States. Meanwhile, during the past month witnesses have alleged that the Colombian Presidency’s own intelligence service, the DAS, has been helping some of the country’s most-wanted drug traffickers to avoid capture.
- “Both common crime and human rights abuses are declining.”
The claim about human rights abuses is simply inaccurate. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported last month that its Bogotá office last year “observed an increase in allegations of actions attributed to members of the security forces, particularly the army.”
- “Together we seized more than 223 metric tons of cocaine in 2005 alone and more than 700 tons since 2001.”
That is impressive, but is only 40.9 percent of the 545 tons that the U.S. Drug Czar’s office conservatively estimates were produced just last year in Colombia.
- “We helped the government of Colombia eradicate more than 340,000 acres of coca and 3,900 acres of opium poppy in 2005.”
Yet the U.S. government found more coca in Colombia last year than it found in 2000, the year Plan Colombia began.
- “We have provided humanitarian assistance to more than two million people displaced by the conflict.”
The U.S. government has spent about $210.1 million on assistance to displaced persons since this aid first began flowing in 2000. This impressive amount, if truly distributed among two million people, adds up to only about $105 per person – a few weeks’ worth of food. The figure of 2 million, incidentally, gives credibility to Colombian NGOs’ estimates of Colombia’s displaced population. The Colombian government contends that only 1.8 million people have been displaced by the conflict – less than the segment of the population that the United States claims to have aided – while non-governmental organizations insist that the number is much higher.
Burns ends his piece with a call on the U.S. Congress to maintain current assistance to Colombia. “We seek the support of the U.S. Congress to finish the job we embarked on together -- creating a secure and peaceful Colombia for the benefit of both the American and Colombian peoples.”
We share this goal, and we hope that Congress does not cut aid to Colombia in 2007. But Congress should look beyond the inflated claims coming out of the State Department and consider a change in strategy. The policy’s results are much more disappointing than Burns’ piece indicates, and they demand a shift toward development, institution-building, citizen security and humanitarian assistance.
This Congress may simply respond to Burns’ appeal by applauding his “stunning” success and writing another big check for the same old strategy. (“You’re doing a heck of a job, Burnie.”) That would be another big mistake. If the U.S. government ends up making its decisions based on a version of events as wildly optimistic as this, blithely believing that big changes are unnecessary, then the policy will crash into cold, hard reality sooner rather than later – and the consequences will be disastrous for Colombia.
Posted by isacson at 01:49 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 15, 2006
Colombian coca cultivation in 2005
Here is a memo (PDF format) CIP is sending out to media, congressional staff and other colleagues this morning.
At 5:00 yesterday, Good Friday, the U.S. government announced that coca cultivation in Colombia last year totaled 144,000 hectares, a level not seen since 2002. While this appears to be a 30,000-hectare increase over 2004 levels, the White House Drug Czar’s press release cautions that much of the increase owes to newly discovered coca in areas that U.S. satellites were not monitoring before.
No matter what the reason for the huge increase measured in 2005, the following points are indisputable.
1. According to an October 2000 White House report, “The goal of President Pastrana’s Plan Colombia (October 1999) is to reduce Colombia’s cultivation, processing, and distribution of drugs by 50 percent over six years.” The 2005 coca-cultivation figures reported yesterday show that Plan Colombia has demonstrably failed to reach that goal. It hasn’t even come close.
The figure of 144,000 hectares in 2005 exceeds the U.S. government’s measures of Colombian coca-growing in 1999, the year before Plan Colombia began (122,500 hectares), and 2000, the plan’s first year (136,200 hectares).
Even if we accept the U.S. government’s argument that the high 2005 estimate owes to measurement in new areas, it is impossible to claim that Plan Colombia has brought a 50 percent reduction in coca-growing in six years. It cannot plausibly be claimed that better measurement would have shown coca-growing to be twice as extensive – 288,000 hectares – in 1999 and 2000.
|
| 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 |
| Colombia | 79,500 | 101,800 | 122,500 | 136,200 | 169,800 | 144,400 | 113,850 | 114,000 | 144,000 |
| Peru | 68,800 | 51,000 | 38,700 | 34,100 | 34,000 | 36,600 | 31,150 | 27,500 | 38,000 |
| Bolivia | 45,800 | 38,000 | 21,800 | 14,600 | 19,900 | 21,600 | 23,200 | 24,600 | 26,500 |
| Total | 194,100 | 190,800 | 183,000 | 184,900 | 223,700 | 202,000 | 168,200 | 166,100 | 208,500 |
|
| 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 |
| Colombia | 34,000 | 42,400 | 40,100 | 37,500 | 37,100 | 39,700 | 44,700 | 50,900 | 57,200 |
| Peru | 115,530 | 121,685 | 121,300 | 120,800 | 129,100 | 108,800 | 108,600 | 115,300 | 94,400 |
| Bolivia | 48,925 | 52,900 | 50,300 | 47,900 | 45,500 | 47,200 | 48,100 | 48,600 | 48,100 |
| Total | 198,455 | 216,985 | 211,700 | 206,200 | 211,700 | 195,700 | 201,400 | 214,800 | 199,700 |
2. The figure of 144,000 hectares in 2005 represents the most coca measured in Colombia since 2002, when the U.S. government reported 144,400 hectares. That was the second-highest year ever.
Either Colombia has returned to this level of cultivation, or the “reductions” reported in 2002 and 2003 were false due to poor measurement. If the reductions were false, then U.S. officials for several years have unwittingly made false and misleading claims about the success of aerial fumigation in Colombia. Three of many examples:
o Testimony of Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Robert Charles, October 29, 2003: “One of Plan Colombia's goals was to reduce coca cultivation by 50% by 2005. President Uribe's aggressive support for spraying, and the professionalism and efficiency of State Department contractors may well have put us ahead of that mark.”
o February 27, 2003 press release from the Drug Czar’s office regarding 2002 coca reduction: “These figures capture the dramatic improvement attributable to activities to control coca production that commenced in August with the inauguration of President Uribe. … ‘Our anti-drug efforts in Colombia are now paying off, and we believe that this represents a turning point,’ said John Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy.”
o Testimony of Assistant USAID Administrator for Latin America Adolfo Franco, May 11, 2005: “The reduction of coca cultivation in the region has been most significant in Colombia. Aerial eradication has impressively reduced regional production capacity and has raised pressure on traffickers to bear the cost of replanting and field reconstitution. … As the final year of Plan Colombia comes to an end, however, success is measurable and is a good reason to redouble efforts on programs that have caused traffickers the greatest damage.”
3. The U.S. government’s 2005 estimates for the three principal Andean coca-producing countries – Colombia, Bolivia and Peru – show that 208,500 hectares of coca were grown in the Andean region last year. That is the highest estimate since 2001. It is the sixth-highest estimate in the 18 years since 1988.
4. 2005 was the first year since 1995 that U.S. data showed coca increasing simultaneously in all three Andean countries.
5. Attempted coca production in Colombia – defined as eradicated plus uneradicated coca – has surged from 183,500 hectares in 2000 to 315,400 hectares in 2005. That’s a five-year increase of 72 percent. In response to fumigation, growers have cut down forests and planted coca in 72 percent more territory last year than they did in 2000, including in national parks. That – more than the effects of glyphosate – is the real environmental disaster brought by fumigation.
The Andean region as a whole has seen attempted coca cultivation increase 62 percent, from 246,124 hectares in 2000 to 398,100 hectares in 2005.
|
| 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 |
| Uneradicated Coca Colombia | 57,200 | 79,500 | 101,800 | 122,500 | 136,200 | 169,800 | 144,400 | 113,850 | 114,000 | 144,000 |
| Eradication Colombia | 5,600 | 19,000 | 31,123* | 43,246 | 47,371 | 84,251 | 122,695 | 132,817 | 136,555 | 171,400 |
| Uneradicated Coca Peru | 94,400 | 68,800 | 51,000 | 38,700 | 34,100 | 34,000 | 36,000 | 31,150 | 27,500 | 38,000 |
| Eradication Peru | 1,259 | 3,462 | 7,825 | 13,800 | 6,200 | 3,900 | 7,000 | 11,313 | 10,339 | 12,200 |
| Uneradicated Coca Bolivia | 48,100 | 45,800 | 38,000 | 21,800 | 14,600 | 19,900 | 24,400 | 28,450 | 24,600 | 26,500 |
| Eradication Bolivia | 7,512 | 7,026 | 11,621 | 16,999 | 7,653 | 9,435 | 11,839 | 10,000 | 8,437 | 6,000 |
| Total | 214,071 | 223,588 | 241,369 | 257,045 | 246,124 | 321,286 | 346,334 | 327,580 | 321,431 | 398,100 |
6. A dozen years of aerial herbicide fumigation in Colombia has shown one thing clearly: spraying people who have no other economic alternatives is effective only at reducing coca-growing in a specific zone for a specific period of time. (In fact, we are surprised that the Drug Czar’s press release indicated only a 10 percent coca reduction last year in areas that were being sprayed; we would have expected that figure to be higher.)
But people with no economic alternatives have not been deterred by fumigation. They replant rapidly (the UN reported last year that 62 percent of the coca plots their satellites detected in 2004 did not exist in 2003), and they relocate to other zones – including zones that U.S. government satellites apparently had not bothered to measure before.
The 2005 coca data show that six years after Plan Colombia, coca-growers are still several steps ahead of the spray planes. Colombia has no shortage of remote, hard-to-reach jungle and savannah where few people live, government presence is zero, and coca can be planted and harvested. These zones, taken together, are at least the size of California – yet since 2000 the U.S. spray fleet has only been able to cover an area a bit larger than Delaware.
A few more spray planes will not make any difference. Doubling the current fleet of about twenty planes (which nobody proposes due to the cost) would make little difference.
7. The real lesson we can draw from the 2005 coca numbers is that fumigating an area is no substitute for governing it. Aerial herbicide fumigation appeared to be a shortcut, a cheap way to reduce drug supplies without having to engage in “nation-building,” establishing a government presence and a legal economy in Colombia’s vast, neglected, impoverished rural zones. Only governance – which will require a costly, long-term political and military effort with mostly Colombian funds – will bring real reductions in Colombia’s coca crop. Fumigation is a poor substitute. Instead of a shortcut, fumigation has proven to be a dead end.
8. CIP has been predicting the 2005 outcome for several years:
- March 22, 2004: One thing the drug war has shown us over the past twenty years is that drug crops move around. The common response to eradication in one zone is new cultivation in other areas. … Though U.S. statistics are showing less coca, there are several reasons why supply has continued to meet demand so effectively. It is possible that new coca cultivation is appearing in areas not measured by satellite imagery.
- February 27, 2003: While supporters of the program will laud the findings as evidence of the effectiveness of fumigation, the numbers cannot be taken to reflect a country- or region-wide decrease, as they were not designed to measure the replanting of coca in areas outside of the target areas that were fumigated. … We’ve seen that fumigation is able to reduce coca-growing temporarily in a limited area, but re-planting in new areas will occur as quickly as the laws of supply and demand dictate.
- April 11, 2002: It is obvious to all that Colombia’s problems go well beyond narcotics, and we have argued for years that our emphasis on military responses and fumigation would do little more than push drug cultivation around the map of South America.
- September 10, 2001: Instead of reducing coca-growing, fumigation has only proven able to move the plants around geographically. Spray in one place, and coca appears elsewhere. This sort of cat-and-mouse game can go on indefinitely: all coca planted in South America in 2000 could fit in a land area two-thirds the size of Rhode Island. Colombia’s Amazon-basin jungles and plains alone are the size of California.
- April 2000: Colombian peasants will continue growing coca and heroin as long as U.S. demand exists and rural Colombia lacks economic opportunity. It's a matter of survival. Aerial fumigation won't change that - if anything, it will push coca-growing into more remote guerrilla-controlled areas.
Posted by isacson at 09:55 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
April 02, 2006
Demilitarizing foreign policy - but calling it "counterinsurgency"
Greetings from Bogotá, where I’m on a quick trip to take part in a meeting of social organizations from several conflictive regions of Colombia (Meta, Caquetá, Nariño, Arauca, Putumayo, Cauca, Guaviare and others), plus Peru and Ecuador. [Update as of Saturday morning: I’m now in the Bogotá airport with no Internet access. I’ll post this as soon as I can and apologize for the lack of posts this week.] I’ve learned a lot and am still digesting what I’ve heard, so I’m not going to write about that yet.
Instead, I want to draw attention to this op-ed in Tuesday’s Boston Globe about a “global counterinsurgency” to guide U.S. foreign policy. This sounds horrible on the surface: “let’s do what we did in El Salvador all over the world!” And the authors – one from the U.S. Institute of Peace and one from the Joint Special Operations University – make their case by using language that a group like CIP would never use. (Example: “In Iraq and around the world, we will never peacefully dissuade those dedicated to violence against us. They must be captured or killed.”)
But reading further, the authors make several points that (a) make a lot of sense and (b) are perfectly applicable to Colombia.
- “We have to convince those who passively support the insurgency that we are not their enemy. Unfortunately, our current strategy overemphasizing military force drives undecided millions into the insurgents’ arms. Not only are we fighting the war wrong, we are fighting the wrong war.”
- “Overwhelming firepower is often counterproductive.”
- “Comprehensive reconstruction and information efforts win hearts and minds.”
- “Those who prioritize national missile defense over either special-operations capabilities or non-military tools of foreign policy understand neither the nature of our greatest threat nor how to defeat it.”
- “We must promote America's charity, while exposing the enemy's hypocrisy. Civil affairs, ''development" in non-military terms, is aggressive economic and political development as well as cultivation of civil society institutions and human rights. Only when populations in the developing world obtain genuine economic opportunity, social dignity, and political empowerment will they no longer incubate the global insurgency.”
That’s good stuff. But these seem like such basic pieces of advice: Economic development is important. Winning populations’ trust is important. Treating civilians well and respecting their human rights is important. Sweeps, raids, large-scale bombing and other military “shock and awe” tactics drive the local population into the insurgency’s arms. “Non-military tools of foreign policy,” like economic aid, are neglected at one’s peril. You mean we don’t know that?
These seem like such elementary suggestions that an op-ed making them would seem unnecessary. Yet the U.S. government has failed to follow them in Iraq, and the U.S.-aided Colombian government has failed to follow them in its own conflict. The extreme distrust for the U.S. and new Iraqi forces among residents of places like Anbar province is mirrored by the extreme distrust for the Colombian state in places like Caquetá department.
The most interesting thing about this op-ed is the language it uses. Though it advocates elements of the sort of less-military approach that is usually associated with peacenik liberals, it omits catch-phrases that would make a Republican or Pentagon audience shut down and stop listening. Terms like “nation-building,” “inequality,” “governability,” or “human security” do not appear (though “human rights” does sneak in). Instead, there’s lots of muscular talk of “severing insurgents’ connections to populations,” “isolat[ing] and smother[ing]” the “enemy,” “effective police operations,” and, of course, “counterinsurgency.”
I’m not recommending inserting tough-sounding language into everything we say and write. In particular, there is a huge gap between counterinsurgency as a doctrine and counterinsurgency as the United States and its proxies have disastrously practiced it. But some familiarity with this defense-and-security argot can ease communication with many who don’t automatically see things our way.
Like the U.S. strategy in Iraq, Plan Colombia is proving to be hugely ineffective and in need of drastic revision and de-militarization. As that becomes increasingly evident to all, people and groups on our side of the debate will have much more opportunity to propose changes. When we do, we will sometimes – not all the time, but sometimes – have to use language like that seen in Tuesday’s Globe.
Posted by isacson at 09:18 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
March 28, 2006
The FARC indictments
There was little surprising about last week’s indictment of fifty FARC leaders for drug trafficking. It is not news that the FARC raises much of its funds by processing and transshipping cocaine, and that many of its top leaders have played a role in it, or at least explicitly approved it. If you don’t understand that much of the fighting in Colombia lately has been concentrated in drug-producing areas and drug-trafficking corridors, then you don’t understand Colombia’s conflict.
So it’s not surprising that the U.S. government would eventually get around to indicting more than the handful of FARC leaders already accused of sending cocaine to U.S. shores. As in the case of paramilitary leaders who face similar indictments and extradition requests, the argument can be made that these individuals conspired to violate U.S. law on U.S. soil.
Some elements of the indictment were surprising, though.
- The allegation that the FARC now controls 50 percent of the drug trade, and 60 percent of drugs entering the United States, was brand-new. Even the Colombian military has never publicly used such a large figure. U.S. Ambassador William Wood said in 2004 (cited in this ICG report) that the AUC controlled 40 percent of the drug trade. Does this mean that the FARC has since increased its share at the paramilitaries’ expense? What about the hundreds of smaller drug organizations, sometimes called cartelitos, that continue to traffic drugs independently of armed groups?
- Also new was the allegation that the FARC has made $25 billion from cocaine trafficking in the United States alone, nearly all of it in the past ten to fifteen years. (DEA Administrator Karen Tandy said, “Americans are responsible for giving the FARC their lifeblood to the amount of $25 billion for 2,500 metric tons of cocaine.”) This would place the guerrillas’ annual income at $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year, plus whatever they gain from cocaine sent to other countries, plus whatever they make through kidnapping and extortion. This blows away all previous estimates of the FARC’s annual income (such as this one, this one, this one and this one), which were usually within the $200 to $600 million per year range, with only outliers estimating it at as high as a billion dollars. Tandy’s estimate of 2,500 tons of cocaine was also new; if accurate, it would represent over 160 tons of cocaine per year over the past fifteen years, or somewhere between one-quarter and one-half of all cocaine sent to the United States during that period. That sounds rather high.
- Also surprising, of course, was the decision to include 50 individuals in the indictment, including the entire FARC leadership. Though it’s entirely possible that the entire FARC Secretariat and Estado Mayor has had a hand in the drug trade, it’s surprising that the Justice Department believes it has evidence pointing to this many individuals’ specific involvement in shipments of drugs to the United States. It could be that merely holding a leadership position in the FARC is being considered evidence enough of responsibility for narcotrafficking; if so, however, a similar standard has not been applied to paramilitary leaders, whose indictments have proceeded on a case-by-case basis.
Despite these new allegations, there is no reason to expect the indictment to make much difference. Don’t expect a wave of extradited FARC leaders coming to the United States. Of the fifty individuals listed, forty-seven are still at large. The three in Colombian government custody – including one who was captured last year in Venezuela and extradited by the Chávez government – are relatively low-ranking.
In order to extradite the “big fish” and the others on the list of forty-seven wanted individuals, one must catch them first. That will be exceedingly difficult: to apprehend the FARC’s top leadership would require a massive, complex and expensive intelligence operation, involving sophisticated technology and generous incentives to informants. Yet, other than an offer of reward money, the indictment came with no announcement of increased funding to locate and arrest wanted guerrilla leaders.
Mark Bowden’s 2001 book Killing Pablo noted that, during the 1992-93 manhunt for drug boss Pablo Escobar, “there were so many American spy planes over Medellín, at one point 17 at once, that the Air Force had to assign an airborne command and control center to keep track of them.” That manhunt, including a special unit (“Bloque de Búsqueda”) and an aerial intelligence operation (“Centra Spike”), was a huge effort to capture a target who mainly kept to an urban setting, Medellín and its suburbs, protected by bodyguards and bribes. By contrast, the FARC’s “fugitives” move throughout Colombia’s vast jungle, command armies and are protected by rings of security.
Such an ambitious manhunt would be difficult and expensive – and to be credible it would also have to target indicted “former” paramilitary leaders who are still involved in the drug trade. Unless the U.S. or Colombian governments are about to assume the large expense that this would require – which doesn’t appear to be the case – last week’s indictment is just a piece of paper.
The indictment would also become worthless should the FARC ever agree to negotiate with the Colombian government at some point in the future. As the paramilitary talks have shown us, the “Justice and Peace” law will shield a group’s leaders from extradition – even if these leaders include narcotraffickers with little or no experience as members of an armed group, and even if the leaders’ organization has not truly dismantled itself and continues to traffic drugs even today.
So if it is neither surprising nor likely to lead to extraditions, why did the U.S. government choose to issue this indictment now? A few reasons come to mind.
- It offers a low-cost way – without increasing the U.S. financial or military commitment – to declare that the Bush administration now considers the FARC to be its main target in Colombia.
- It offers a low-cost way – without facing charges of electioneering – to support President Uribe as he heads for re-election, endorsing his hard line against the guerrillas.
- By referring to the group as the “Farc Drug Cartel,” it strikes a blow against the FARC’s claims to status as a political organization or a belligerent party in Colombia’s conflict.
- It offers a distraction from coming bad news on coca cultivation in Colombia. We expect the Bush administration to be forced to announce in April that coca did not decrease in 2005, for the second year in a row.
- It offers a distraction from the very bad news coming from the paramilitary demobilization process, including evidence that groups have not fully demobilized, that some groups’ members are re-arming, and that nearly all demobilized paramilitary members are still unemployed. The OAS mission’s March 1 report [MS Word (.doc) format] on the demobilization process offers numerous reasons to be very alarmed about where it is headed.
Finally, here are four pieces of advice, lest U.S. officials really believe that their indictment signals “the beginning of the end of the FARC,” in DEA Administrator Karen Tandy’s tough-sounding words.
1. Don’t forget about the “former” paramilitaries. It was very disturbing that none of the officials at last Wednesday’s press conference even mentioned the words “paramilitary,” “self-defense group” or “AUC.” (When asked about paramilitary drug traffickers, Attorney-General Gonzales ducked the question.) This left the impression that the U.S. focus is now entirely on the FARC, and not on the dozen or so indicted paramilitary leaders who now need not fear extradition because they have “demobilized” from the AUC.
In fact, the at-large paramilitary leaders should be an even greater concern. There is no evidence that top paramilitaries have in fact pulled out of the drug trade. In fact, since the current demobilization process is unlikely to dismantle AUC leaders’ criminal networks, they could well be sending cocaine to U.S. shores right now. Yet while the Colombian authorities are presumably doing all they can to capture FARC leaders, very little effort is being made to monitor, much less capture, paramilitary leaders who may still be exporting drugs.
2. Don’t confuse the FARC with a cartel. The “decapitation” methods used to take down the Medellín and Cali drug cartels – arrest top leaders and watch the organization disintegrate – will not work against the FARC. Instead of a mafia led by a few individuals who use most of their gains for personal enrichment, the FARC continues to be a military organization that controls territory and has a (small, perhaps enthusiastic) base of support among the inhabitants of Colombia’s most neglected rural zones. As far as we can tell, the FARC is plowing its drug money back into guns, not swimming pools and Swiss bank accounts.
If top leaders are captured, then, the group’s fragmentation and demise are far from guaranteed. In fact, it can have a galvanizing effect on the organization’s members as mid-level leaders rise to take the captured ones’ place. While calling the FARC a “cartel” may be a useful rhetorical device, it is not a good guide for a strategy. Try to fight the FARC using methods used against cartels, and you’ll lose.
3. You’ll also lose if you think that the FARC is your principal target, as the State Department’s Anne Patterson indicated in this interview with El Tiempo. Yes, the FARC are brutal, abusive, and most Colombians despise them. But a strategy that holds up their defeat as an ultimate goal – most likely through a war of attrition against a guerrilla rank-and-file that is more than half women and/or children – will not end Colombia’s larger problem of endemic violence and ungovernability.
If the FARC disappeared tomorrow, most of Colombia’s populated territory would still be lawless and impoverished, with inhabitants forced to protect themselves against threats to their security. It wouldn’t be long until something came along to take the FARC’s place. The U.S. government’s principal target, then, should not be defeating the FARC. It should be helping Colombia’s government to protect its own citizens from all threats, to win the trust of citizens of long-neglected zones, and to bring the law and civilian governance to thousands of communities that know no state presence. Make progress in those areas, and the FARC will lose both strength and relevance.
4. Remember that if the FARC’s leadership were arrested tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect the flow of cocaine to the United States. It could cause a hiccup in the market, but just as we saw after the demise of the Medellín and Cali cartels, the drug trade will easily adjust to new management. Whether the FARC Secretariat ends up behind bars or not, torrents of cocaine will continue to flow northward as long as these other trends continue:
- U.S. demand remains strong, thanks to a population of hard-core addicts with little access to treatment;
- Potential profits remain astronomical, due to the “price support” that our supply-side anti-drug strategy provides;
- The law still fails to reach into much of Colombia’s territory, making the risk of getting caught low enough to tempt new “kingpins” into the drug trade; and
- A lack of rural economic opportunity continues to push poor farmers into growing drug crops.
As long as those problems remain unaddressed, a few dozen indictments against guerrilla leaders who are nowhere near capture is simply, to borrow from Macbeth, “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Posted by isacson at 02:30 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack
March 08, 2006
What’s happening in Congress
A few weeks ago, we noted that no money for Colombia was in the White House’s latest supplemental funding request to Congress [PDF format] for Iraq and the “war on terror.” Once again, the Colombian government had failed to get Washington to say “yes” to its year-old proposal for as much as $150 million worth of new spray planes, helicopters and other military equipment.
We weren’t the only ones to notice this “oversight.” Yesterday’s Washington Times reports that some of the House Republicans’ leading drug warriors plan to add almost $100 million in new military and police aid to Colombia when the supplemental budget bill comes under consideration.
Some members of Congress, angry that appeals by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for help in rebuilding his depleted and aging fleet of surveillance and interdiction aircraft have been ignored, plan to bypass the White House by dipping into a $72.4 billion supplemental appropriation for the war on terrorism to fund $99.4 million in military and police aid to Colombia.
An amendment to the pending emergency supplemental bill likely will be offered by Republican Reps. Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, and Dan Burton of Indiana, a member of the House Government Reform Committee. It would pay for three DC-3 marine patrol aircraft for the Colombian navy and two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and 10 Huey II helicopters for the Colombian national police.
“Just because Hyde and Burton propose it doesn’t mean it will happen,” a colleague at another organization cautions. However, they and their allies have had some past success in getting helicopters and weapons to Colombia, at least when they have had the House Republican leadership on their side. We don’t have a sense yet whether the House Republican leadership supports this proposed amendment, which would require $99.4 million in cuts from the war effort in Iraq and other programs in the Middle East.
The Washington Times article portrays the Hyde-Burton request as focused on stopping the maritime flow of smuggled drugs near Colombia’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Unlike past proposals from Uribe via Hyde and Burton, the article makes no mention of money for new spray planes to expand herbicide fumigation.
This is surprising. Sometime this month, several sources have strongly hinted, the U.S. government will be forced to announce that Colombian coca cultivation failed to decrease in 2005, despite record levels of fumigation, for the second consecutive year. (It may have even increased.) When that happens, we expect the Bush administration to respond by arguing for even more spraying capacity. Yet no fumigation planes seem to be in Hyde and Burton’s proposal.
If they’re not calling for more spray planes, how will the House Republicans respond if the 2005 Colombia coca numbers turn out to be dismal? One possibility: we may see a renewed push to begin spraying mycoherbicides – coca-killing fungi, a terrible idea for a host of reasons – in Colombia.
H.R. 2829, the Office of National Drug Control Policy Reauthorization Act, which is being debated on the House floor Thursday, already includes text requiring the Drug Czar to come up with “a plan to conduct controlled scientific testing in a major drug producing nation of mycoherbicide naturally existing in the producing nation.” (See Section 106(m).) Who added this text? Rep. Burton once again, this time along with Rep. Mark Souder (R-Indiana).
We’ll be watching the supplemental funding request, the coca numbers and the possibility of a renewed push for mycoherbicides. Stay tuned.
Posted by isacson at 11:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 03, 2006
A "unified campaign" to contain Venezuela?
In 2002, at the Bush administration’s request, the U.S. Congress broadened the purpose of U.S. military assistance to Colombia (despite an unsuccessful 192-225 House vote to stop it). Ever since then, each year’s foreign aid bill has included a sentence permitting all aid given through counter-narcotics programs – including helicopters, boats, and other lethal equipment – to be used in a “unified campaign” against both drugs and the three Colombian groups on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations (the FARC, ELN and AUC).
This year, the Bush administration wants to expand the military-aid mission yet again. And this time it appears to have more than just drugs and guerrillas on its mind.
The proposed mission expansion is buried deep within the appendix to the proposed 2007 budget, available on the website of the White House Office of Management and Budget. (Go here, click on “Department of State and Other International Programs,” then find “Andean Counterdrug Initiative” on the resulting PDF file. A major hat-tip goes to the congressional staffer who pointed this out to me yesterday.) This is where the Bush administration tells Congress what its ideal foreign aid bill for 2007 would look like – basically, they take the text of the previous year’s bill and show what wording they would cut and what they would insert.
The proposed language would expand the purpose of U.S. military aid to Colombia in three ways.
- Instead of a “unified campaign” against drugs and specifically against the FARC, ELN and AUC, it would strike the armed groups’ names and replace them with the blanket term “terrorist activities.”
- It would add a new, rather vague purpose for the use of U.S. counter-drug military aid to Colombia: “to address other threats to Colombia’s national security.”
- It would allow all U.S. funds to be used for this expanded mission, “notwithstanding any other provision of law” – that is, any previous limits on the purpose of drug-war funding for Colombia (including past years’ “unified campaign” clauses) would disappear.
The administration might defend the first proposed change by arguing that the AUC could cease to exist this year, and though we don’t know what might replace it, the United States must help Colombia to combat re-constituted or un-dismantled paramilitary structures. However, the term “terrorist activities” is not sufficiently specific; as we have seen in Bolivia and elsewhere, the “terrorist” label is too often used against social movements. If the “unified campaign” sentence must stay in the law, better language would read “against the FARC, ELN, AUC and any paramilitary successor groups.”
Even more worrisome is the wording calling for counter-drug aid to be used “to address other threats to Colombia’s national security.” This definition is so broad that you can drive a truck through it. What “other threats,” beyond guerrilla and paramilitary activity, does the administration have in mind? Common crime and gangs? Street protests?
We all know what the most likely answer to that question is. The “security threat” the White House probably has in mind wears a red beret, has a big mouth, and runs the country just to Colombia’s east. It could only be Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.
It’s hard to imagine Colombia needing to repel a Venezuelan invasion force, of course. But this may be the White House’s attempt to respond to Caracas’ large (and admittedly worrisome) recent arms purchases from Europe. It also would fit into the administration’s declared intention to isolate or contain Venezuela by partnering more closely with pro-U.S. governments in the region.
If Venezuela is indeed the rationale for this proposed legislative change – and that is certainly how Caracas will perceive it – it represents an unwise and irresponsible escalation of tensions in the Andean region. Venezuela could use it as a pretext to ratchet up its weapons-buying spree, bringing with it the specter of a destabilizing regional arms race.
Worse, it will be the first example since the Cold War of U.S. military aid being used explicitly to counter a political tendency in the Americas. We have said it before, and we will say it again and again: Confronting the spread of leftist politics in Latin America should not be a mission for U.S. military assistance to the region. The U.S. government must not view Latin America’s militaries as a bulwark or counterweight against leftist political movements. We have made that mistake before with tragic consequences, and it must not be repeated.
This proposed military-aid mission expansion is dangerous and unhelpful, and Congress should scrap it.
| The “Andean Counterdrug Initiative” section of the 2006 foreign aid law says: | In fiscal year 2006, funds available to the Department of State for assistance to the Government of Colombia shall be available to support a unified campaign against narcotics trafficking, against activities by organizations designated as terrorist organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), and to take actions to protect human health and welfare in emergency circumstances, including undertaking rescue operations. |
| The Bush administration wants to change that language to: | Assistance provided to the Government of Colombia with funds appropriated under this or any prior appropriations act may be used, notwithstanding any other provision of law, to support a unified campaign against narcotics trafficking and terrorist activities, to protect human health and welfare in emergency circumstances, and to address other threats to Colombia’s national security. |
Posted by isacson at 12:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 02, 2006
What a difference a year makes
Continuing the theme of yesterday's post:
- March 4, 2005: “[T]he balloon effect, the notion that somehow, when you win in one country, which we saw over the last 15 years -- I've watched this evolution up and down and when we won in Peru and Bolivia, to a large extent, it somehow moved us over into Colombia. What's fascinating on the metrics is that we are really not seeing the balloon effect. In terms of the entire region in 2003, there was an overall regional reduction of 16 percent of cultivation. That's a remarkable thing by itself.”
– Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Robert Charles
- March 2, 2006: “Tony Arias, director of the Americas program at the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told The Miami Herald the balloon effect is ‘frankly … evident.’
‘You're successful in one part and then the traffickers will look wherever they can to continue their business,’ he said.”
– The Miami Herald
Posted by isacson at 12:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 01, 2006
Andean coca increases, while Andean aid drops
The State Department’s annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, released today, includes some seriously bad news about drug production in the Andes.
While data for Colombia are still forthcoming, the report shows a sharp increase in the production of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, elsewhere in the Andes last year.
- Bolivia: “Overall coca cultivation increased 8 percent from 2004 to 2005, to 26,500 hectares.”
- Peru: “The USG estimates there are 38,000 hectares of coca cultivation in Peru, including 4,000 hectares in new areas.” This represents a stunning 38 percent increase from 2004 to 2005. The combined one-year increase in Peru and Bolivia was 12,400 hectares, or 24 percent.
- Ecuador: “Ecuadorian security forces located and destroyed about 36,160 cultivated coca plants in small, scattered sites in 2005. While not commercially significant, the extent of cultivation was about double that of 2004. Together with the discovery of a small, partially harvested opium poppy plantation, they suggest that growers are testing the feasibility of drug crop cultivation in Ecuador.”
Colombia’s coca-cultivation estimate for 2005 has not yet been made public, and probably will not be for a few more weeks. If it ends up revealing that eradication failed to reduce coca cultivation in Colombia last year – as was the case in 2004 – then official U.S. statistics will show a 7.5 percent increase in coca cultivation throughout the Andean region.
Such a result would be a stark admission of failure, since Washington has spent more than $6 billion on counter-narcotics in the Andes since “Plan Colombia” began in 2000.
If Colombia is found to have registered some coca reduction in 2005, the 12,400-hectare increase in Bolivia and Peru will almost certainly prove to be big enough to wipe it out. Official data are unlikely to show Colombian coca cultivation dropping by that much. To do so would mean a one-year reduction of 11 percent, after a slight net gain in 2004.
The new data show that the “balloon effect” is alive and well in the Andes. (The term refers to squeezing one part of a balloon, only to see it bulge out elsewhere, the way that drug crops respond to forced eradication.) Andean cocaine supplies are likely to be sustaining current levels, or even increasing.
The strategy, once again, is not working. But not only is the Bush administration contemplating no changes, it is also planning a deep cut in counter-drug aid to Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru in 2007. The president’s 2007 foreign-aid request to Congress contemplates a two-year overall cut of 21.4 percent in these three countries’ “drug war” aid through the State Department’s Andean Counterdrug Initiative account. Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru will see a 17.5% cut in military aid and a 25.8% cut in economic aid (see table).
While drug-crop cultivation increases rapidly, U.S. aid – whether to help destitute rural producers, to interdict drug flows, or even just to eradicate crops – is dropping precipitously.
Andean Counterdrug Initiative (the principal anti-drug aid program for the Andes)
(Thousands of dollars)
|
| 2005 | 2006, estimate | 2007, request | Aid cut from 2005 to 2007 |
| Bolivia military / police | $48,608 | $42,570 | $35,000 | -28.0% |
| Bolivia economic / social | $41,664 | $36,630 | $31,000 | -25.6% |
| Bolivia subtotal | $90,272 | $79,200 | $66,000 | -26.9% |
| Peru military / police | $61,504 | $58,410 | $56,000 | -8.9% |
| Peru economic / social | $53,866 | $48,510 | $42,500 | -21.1% |
| Peru subtotal | $115,370 | $106,920 | $98,500 | -14.6% |
| Ecuador military / police | $10,912 | $8,375 | $8,900 | -18.4% |
| Ecuador economic / social | $14,880 | $11,425 | $8,400 | -43.5% |
| Ecuador subtotal | $25,792 | $19,800 | $17,300 | -32.9% |
| Military / police subtotal | $121,024 | $109,355 | $99,900 | -17.5% |
| Economic / social subtotal | $110,410 | $96,565 | $81,900 | -25.8% |
| Total | $231,434 | $205,920 | $181,800 | -21.4% |
Coca cultivation in the Andes
(Hectares)
|
| 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 |
| Colombia | 57,200 | 79,500 | 101,800 | 122,500 | 136,200 | 169,800 | 144,400 | 113,850 | 114,000 | ? |
| Peru | 94,400 | 68,800 | 51,000 | 38,700 | 34,100 | 34,000 | 36,000 | 31,150 | 27,500 | 38,000 |
| Bolivia | 48,100 | 45,800 | 38,000 | 21,800 | 14,600 | 19,900 | 21,600 | 23,200 | 24,600 | 26,500 |
| Total | 199,700 | 194,100 | 190,800 | 183,000 | 184,900 | 223,700 | 202,000 | 168,200 | 166,100 | ? |
|
| ||||||||||
| 2005 total if Colombia unchanged: | 178,500 | |||||||||
| which would be a regional increase of: | 7.5% | |||||||||
Posted by isacson at 05:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 25, 2006
A good consultation with USAID; if only they had money
CIP was among several NGOs invited to spend a few hours yesterday afternoon in a “consultation” with officials in charge of USAID’s human rights program in Colombia. Part of USAID’s $20 million-per-year “democracy” program area in Colombia [PDF format], the human-rights section supports Colombian government agencies, civil-society human rights groups, and a government “early warning system” to prevent abuses. It overlaps closely with other USAID programs like judicial reform, physical protection of human-rights defenders, and support for displaced people and ex-combatants.
The meeting was quite detailed and frank. There was general consensus about what wasn’t working – the early-warning system, and especially the costly and utterly results-free work of the Colombian vice-president’s human rights program. There was praise for what was working – assistance to the Procuraduría human-rights unit and the Defensoría, the flawed but necessary Interior Ministry protection program, and efforts to ensure that human-rights groups critical of U.S. policy may still receive assistance, despite a past controversy.
Though the meeting was positive, it was marked throughout by an air of frustration. Our frustration wasn’t aimed at the USAID officials, most of whom are top-notch public servants trying to do a difficult job under very challenging circumstances. In fact, they no doubt share our dismay at a theme that kept coming up: the chronic lack of resources available to carry out these critically important programs, and the likelihood that no increases will be forthcoming.
We had a long “wish list”: more assistance to groups and government agencies fighting impunity; more aid to the Defensoría and Procuraduría, especially in conflictive regions, as well as the human-rights unit of the Fiscalía; funding for agencies responsible for identifying and seizing demobilized paramilitaries’ stolen land and assets; more focus on gender, race, and economic, social and cultural rights; and many others.
You can guess the response our “wish-list” items received. There’s no money. Resources are tight. We have to make do with what we have.
There's no money, even though for every dollar USAID gets, four go to military and police programs, from fumigation to “Plan Patriota,” most of which are yielding few if any results.
There's no money, even though the “Andean Counterdrug Initiative” (ACI) account – which provides USAID with all the money it gets for work in Colombia, and within which money can be moved around without an act of Congress – gives USAID only about $135 million, while military and police efforts get 2 ½ times as much (about $340 million).
There's no money, even though just a ten percent cut in what the ACI spends on fumigation, or in what it spends to maintain aircraft given to Colombia in past years, could free up enough funding to double the size of USAID’s democracy program in Colombia, more than fulfilling the items on our wish list.
Yesterday’s meeting was very useful for us, and we hope for USAID as well, and we hope to do it again sometime soon. CIP laments the resource scarcity that became a recurrent theme in the meeting, and which forces USAID to make such hard choices.
The frustrating part is, we know that the money is actually there, it’s being appropriated for Colombia already – but that it’s going to weapons and herbicides, not for human rights. We will continue to channel our frustration: not by complaining to USAID, but by helping those in Congress who are trying to change U.S. priorities in Colombia.
Posted by isacson at 01:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 23, 2006
CIP doesn't invite terrorists to the United States
Leonida Zurita is a cocalera peasant leader, a close ally of Bolivian President Evo Morales, and now an alternate senator in Bolivia’s Congress. She has published an op-ed in the New York Times, spoken at Harvard University and several other U.S. schools, and is by far one of the most prominent women in Bolivian politics.
Senator Zurita is supposed to be in Florida right now, on the first leg of a three-week speaking tour that would take her to Florida International University, the University of Florida, Stanford University, the University of Vermont, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. She was to be in Washington two weeks from now, and the Center for International Policy was helping to organize a public event and a few meetings for her on Capitol Hill.
We at CIP have never met her, though we have heard much about her, and we were looking forward to hearing what she would have to say about U.S.-Bolivian relations, now that Evo Morales has assumed the presidency in La Paz.
We will have to wait a while longer to have that opportunity. Senator Zurita was to visit the United States on a ten-year, multiple-entry visa she obtained in 1998 and has used several times. However, when she came to the American Airlines check-in counter in Santa Cruz three days ago, she was told that the U.S. embassy had called specifically to warn them not to honor her visa, which had been revoked.
 |
| Leonida Zurita shows her canceled U.S. visa. (From La Razón) |
“At the airport, we were told that we could not travel, by order of the ambassador,” Zurita told Bolivia’s daily La Razón. “Later, Ms. Julie [Grant], the consul [in La Paz], gave me a letter explaining that my visa is suspended or canceled because of involvement in terrorism and some other things.”
The letter, according to La Razón, informed Sen. Zurita that her visa was revoked on May 27, 2004 under Section 212(a)(3)(B) of the USA-PATRIOT Act. This section prohibits entry to the United States of foreigners whom the consul believes to have “engaged in a terrorist activity,” incited terrorist activity “under circumstances indicating an intention to cause death or serious bodily harm,” or “used [his or her] position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity, or to persuade others to support terrorist activity or a terrorist organization, in a way that the Secretary of State has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities,” among other criteria.
Let’s be clear here. The Center for International Policy doesn’t invite terrorists to the United States. Neither do Stanford, Harvard or other U.S. universities. So what is the State Department talking about?
In Bolivia, where the word “terrorism” is too often used to brand one’s political opponents, Sen. Zurita has been arrested on at least two occasions for alleged incitement of terrorist activity. Like all of the cocalero movement’s most prominent leaders, Zurita has organized many protests. Authorities tried unsuccessfully in the past to punish her for some of the rare occasions when such protests involved outbreaks of violence. Zurita has never been found guilty, and she currently faces no charges.
In one case from 2000, Zurita was accused of a protest-related murder that in fact took place when she was in Prague. In another case, Zurita was among 43 cocalero leaders detained in relation to the 2003 arrest of Francisco “Pacho” Cortés, a Colombian peasant leader accused of trying to expand ELN guerrilla activity into Bolivia. Colombia’s human-rights community considers these charges to be baseless, and indeed they do seem ridiculous given the ELN’s precarious state within Colombia. Following a detention determined to be arbitrary by the UN Human Rights Commission’s Arbitrary Detentions Working Group, Cortés was recently released from house arrest, as prosecutors determined that insufficient evidence exists to keep him in custody.
If the terrorism label does not stick – and we strongly believe it does not – the reason for the visa decision must be politics. Sen. Zurita is a strong critic of U.S. policy toward Bolivia, and – like most MAS candidates, including Evo Morales – campaigned under the slogan “Long live coca, death to the Yankees.” (A Reuters piece about Zurita’s visa cancellation identifies her as “a close ally of President Evo Morales known for her raucous chanting” of that slogan.)
Those words are repugnant and unhelpful, of course. But moderating that attitude has been a central goal of the U.S. government since Evo Morales’ stunning election victory. The Bush administration’s praiseworthy decision to seek dialogue with the new government in La Paz – at least for now – appears to be bearing fruit, as the Washington Post’s Pamela Constable noted on Tuesday: “Morales, 46, has already toned down the harsh anti-American rhetoric that peppered his campaign speeches. Most significantly, he has backed off from a blanket condemnation of U.S. anti-drug programs as an excuse for military intervention and has said he will allow such operations to continue if they abide by Bolivian law.”
In this context, it makes no sense to close the door on Zurita, one of Morales’s closest political allies. Actions like these, which appear petty and vindictive before a Bolivian audience, will serve only to radicalize, not moderate, Bolivia’s new leadership.
If Zurita’s visa was indeed canceled because of her political views – which she planned to express in university settings – then the revocation, as a squelching of freedom of expression, is more un-American than merely chanting “death to the United States.” This embarrassing decision must be reversed now.
Posted by isacson at 02:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 19, 2006
WOLA's John Walsh: what the drug czar didn't say
Even while funding for fumigation and counter-drug military aid to Colombia remain constant, the Bush administration's 2007 budget request includes deep cuts in funding for domestic drug treatment. This, even though study after study has found treatment to be the most effective way of reducing drug abuse in the United States.
One of the officials most responsible for this bizarre mismatch in priorities, Drug Czar John Walters, testified in the House on Thursday. Here is an account of Walters' performance from John Walsh, who works on drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America. John notes that the drug czar failed even to mention the supposed increase in U.S. cocaine prices that his office documented, with much fanfare, back in November. Nor did Walters even hint that coca cultivation in Colombia might have decreased last year.
ONDCP Director John Walters testified yesterday (2/16/06) before the House Government Reform Committee’s Drug Policy Subcommittee. His written statement included passages on Colombia and Bolivia below (with my comments in parentheses). Just as noteworthy is what Walters did not say.
Walters made no reference in either his written statement or in his oral remarks to the price and purity figures that he has recently been citing as evidence of drug war progress, and which are featured prominently in the new national drug control strategy. This may suggest Walters’ wariness over inviting closer scrutiny of the data he has cited (which are clearly at odds with the RAND data posted by ONDCP just last February).
Walters’ written statement mentions that the Colombian government “reported spraying more than 138,000 hectares of coca and manually eradicating more than 31,000 hectares in 2005.” But Walters gave no hint that the net coca cultivation estimate for 2005 – which is likely to be made public within the next several weeks – will be significantly lower than the 2004 estimate, which was itself virtually the same as the 2003 figure. The sense that fumigation is no longer achieving reductions in net cultivation, despite new spray records each year, is reinforced by recent off-the-record comments by other U.S. officials, and by Walters’ own insistence on the need for increased spray capabilities (see below). If the U.S. estimate of the net area under cultivation for 2005 is not significantly lower than in 2004, it will be especially noteworthy given the sharp increase in manual eradication (up from 10,279 hectares in 2004 to 31,000 hectares in 2005). Alternatively, if the 2005 estimate is appreciably lower than the 2004 figure, it could be attributable to the increase in manual eradication. As underscored by a recent GAO report [PDF format], all of these figures need to be taken with a grain of salt, and should be considered understatements of the true extent of coca cultivation and potential cocaine production.
Walters on Colombia:
“Increased aerial eradication capability is necessary to attack replanting efforts more swiftly. Additional focus must be placed on identifying new cultivation of coca and opium poppy, particularly in more remote areas.”(Despite this stance, the administration’s FY2007 request does not appear to seek to increase eradication capability.)
Walters on Bolivia:
President Morales has “expressed concern with the military’s participation in eradication operations and has talked of removing them from the process. This would further undermine containment [of coca], as their experience and equipment make them mission-essential to any and all eradication efforts.”(It would be nice to know whether Assistant Secretary Shannon and Ambassador Greenlee also consider the Bolivian military to be “mission-essential.”)
Posted by isacson at 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 17, 2006
Washington says "no" to President Uribe
Álvaro Uribe is having a difficult time on his visit to Washington this week. Not only is he suffering from a high fever even as he goes from meeting to meeting, he can’t seem to get much of what he is asking for.
He has so far been unable to get the Bush administration to budge on the agricultural component of free trade talks, the main purpose of his visit. Today’s editorial in the Washington Post goes embarrassingly far in its hero-worship of Uribe, but its main argument is right on: the U.S. government must give significant ground to Colombia on agricultural trade in order to avoid dealing a strong blow to a countryside already ravaged by coca and conflict.
Uribe’s pleas appear to be going unheard. He was unable to get President Bush to say that the U.S. government is committed to reaching a trade agreement soon (“espero que sí” and “vamos a ver” were Bush’s Spanish replies). Upon emerging from his White House meeting, noted the Associated Press, “The jovial and even joking Uribe of the past had been substituted by an evidently tense Uribe.”
Meanwhile, despite the protestations of House International Relations Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Illinois), Uribe has been unable to convince the Bush administration to increase military and police aid to Colombia beyond current levels. Since at least the middle of last year, Uribe has been asking for $150 million in new assistance, in the form of spray planes and facilities, helicopters and boats. That additional funding appeal did not make it into the 2006 foreign aid funding bill, nor does it appear in the administration’s 2007 aid request to Congress, which would basically hold aid to Colombia at approximately the same level as it has been since 2003.
With no additional aid foreseen in the regular 2006 or 2007 budgets, Uribe’s only hope would have been to have his package of planes and helicopters put in an additional, or “supplemental,” funding request. Usually, such supplemental requests are submitted to Congress once or twice a year, for unforeseen “emergency” expenses like the “war on terror,” Iraq, or Hurricane Katrina; funding for additional priorities, like aid to Colombia, is sometimes thrown in. (Back in January 2000, Plan Colombia began as a supplemental budget request to Congress.)
Yesterday, the White House sent to Congress its latest supplemental request for Iraq and the terror war [PDF format]. Despite President Uribe’s efforts, this request does not include any new funding for Colombia. (Or anywhere else in Latin America, as far as I can tell from reading it.) That pretty much closes the door on the possibility of any new money for Colombia in 2006.
The failure to secure new U.S. aid goes beyond spray planes. It also means no significant U.S. funding will ever go toward Colombia’s paramilitary demobilization process.
The 2006 aid law allows the State Department to spend up to $20 million this year on the reintegration of ex-paramilitaries, but only (1) if it finds that money by cutting other existing aid programs – no new money was appropriated; and (2) if the State Department certifies that the Colombian government is cooperating with paramilitary narcotraffickers’ extraditions, and asking demobilizing paramilitaries for information necessary to dismantle their networks. (Neither condition appears to be being met.) The 2007 aid request includes no increase in assistance to Colombia, which means little new money for the paramilitary process. And no demobilization money is in yesterday’s supplemental request.
With only a trickle of U.S. money forthcoming, Colombia will have to look elsewhere to pay for a demobilization and reintegration process that is appearing to be ever more expensive. Nobody really knows how expensive, but here is a back-of-the-envelope estimate that probably misses much:
- Income support, job training, psychological counseling and other aid to demobilized individuals: perhaps $8,000 each for 26,000 people = $208 million
- Disarmament, background checks, legal processes, monitoring and location of arms caches, investigation into asset holdings, and verification to ensure that individuals remain outside of paramilitarism: $2,000 each for 26,000 people = $52 million
- Reparations to victims who come forward, in excess of whatever assets are recovered: $1,000 each to 500,000 people or more = $500 million or more
- Providing security in zones previously dominated by paramilitaries: add 10 percent to Colombia’s defense budget, $400 million x 2 years = $800 million
This gives a very rough, very preliminary, very conservative total of $1.56 billion, $260 million without reparations and security. Obviously, $20 million per year from the U.S. government hardly makes a dent.
Does the U.S. human rights community get the blame for the lack of U.S. funding for the paramilitary process? Only to the extent that we have raised strong concerns about the process (and the UN has been at least as effective in expressing the same concerns). More credit goes to the Uribe government for passing a “Justice and Peace law” that displeases even many conservative U.S. legislators. Most were unenthusiastic about giving leniency to people who may even now be sending tons of drugs to our shores, while depriving Colombian authorities of the tools needed to guarantee that paramilitary criminal networks are disappearing.
As a result, the Bush administration did not push hard to get Congress to be generous. Nor is it responding to President Uribe’s appeals in Washington this week.
The outcome is that Colombia will have to pay most of the demobilization and reintegration costs itself, by collecting more resources from its wealthiest citizens. They can bear these costs by organizing a well-planned, well-financed program of job creation, asset seizure and reparations (and soon – time is running out). Or, they can bear these costs by seeing investors scared away, local economies depressed, and the judicial system overwhelmed by tens of thousands of unemployed, low-skilled young men experienced in the use of violence – as well as their impoverished, embittered victims.
Posted by isacson at 04:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 14, 2006
Manual eradication in parks: set up to fail?
Years of U.S.-supported aerial herbicide fumigation have caused thousands of Colombian coca-growing peasants, presented with no viable legal alternatives, to plant coca in Colombia’s national park system. More than 10,000 hectares of coca are now planted in national parks, out of approximately 80,000-115,000 hectares planted nationwide. While fumigation is currently prohibited in parks, Colombians have been debating whether to expand the spraying of “Round-Up” into these natural reserves.
Those who are horrified by this idea cite the potential damage that the glyphosate-based herbicide could do to fragile ecosystems. They point out that fumigation elsewhere has caused a huge increase in “attempted” coca-growing – the area sprayed plus the area left over – which means that hundreds of thousands of additional acres of forest, much of it in parks, could disappear.
On the other side of the debate is the U.S. government, which spends nearly $200 million each year on the spray program (the cost of contractor pilots and mechanics, plane maintenance, herbicides, and protection provided by Colombian national police and army anti-narcotics units), and doesn’t want to see any Colombian territory declared off-limits to spraying. Most officials in the Uribe government want to spray the parks, though those in charge of environmental protection are objecting. Colombian environmental experts and activists, as well as several influential columnists in the national media (most notably El Tiempo pundit Daniel Samper) have vocally opposed any Roundup in the parks.
Opponents of fumigation insist on manual eradication – sending in people to pull the plants out of the ground, as is done in Peru and Bolivia. This is slower and more dangerous than spraying from overhead. On the other hand, it doesn’t involve chemicals, it actually removes the plants for good, and – if done right – it puts the government on the ground, in contact with forgotten, isolated segments of a population that it’s supposed to be governing.
In 2005, the Colombian government dramatically expanded manual eradication in Colombia; the president’s “Advisor for Social Action” (which is also in charge of alternative development and aid to the displaced) deployed nearly 2,000 eradicators who pulled up more than 31,000 hectares of coca. (A hectare is 2.5 acres.) This was nearly triple the 11,000 hectares manually eradicated the year before. Meanwhile, nearly 140,000 more hectares were sprayed last year.
Most of this manual eradication went on without incident. This changed on December 28, when FARC guerrillas killed twenty-nine Colombian soldiers guarding the perimeter while eradicators destroyed coca in the Macarena National Park.
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 (Photos from El Tiempo; maps from www.invias.gov.co) |
By all accounts Macarena, in western Meta department, is a strikingly beautiful place, a standalone ridge of mountains in the middle of otherwise flat jungle. Though it is only about 170 miles south of (and a very long day’s drive from) Bogotá, it is a park that few Colombians have seen. La Macarena and its environs have long been a FARC stronghold. It was part of the despeje zone that President Andrés Pastrana temporarily ceded to the guerrillas so that peace talks could take place. Today, La Macarena is a key battleground in “Plan Patriota,” the Colombian government’s two-year-old, U.S.-backed military offensive to “re-take” the FARC’s longtime jungle rearguard.
Two years into Plan Patriota, however, El Tiempo estimates that between 500 and 700 guerrillas remain in La Macarena and its vicinity. The authorities contend that the park contains over 4,500 hectares of coca crops, scattered in innumerable small plots throughout a total area of 630,000 hectares.
President Uribe could have reacted to the FARC’s December 28 attack by halting the manual eradication effort in La Macarena and sending in the spray planes for their first use in a park. This would have been a politically unpopular step to take in the midst of a re-election campaign, however, and his opponents would have made much of it. Instead, Uribe ordered a manual-eradication offensive of unprecedented proportions.
Operation “Colombia Verde” (Green Colombia) was launched on January 20, with the participation of 930 hired coca-eradicators, protected by 1,500 police and some military elements, along with a huge logistical effort to keep everyone fed, sheltered and transported. President Uribe helicoptered into Macarena to launch the effort; he pulled up 40 coca plants himself in front of the cameras.
Sending 900 civilians into a FARC-controlled park is dangerous, even with police protection. But for President Uribe, it’s a win-win proposition. If the eradicators manage to destroy 4,500 hectares of coca, then they’ve disrupted an income stream for the FARC and shown that the government can stop illegal coca-growing in parks. On the other hand, if they fail in the face of guerrilla violence and logistical snafus, then Uribe can cite this experience as proof that fumigation is the only answer for the national parks. The U.S. government – which has indicated no enthusiasm for Operation “Colombia Verde” – would likely be pleased with the latter outcome.
If the goal were to prove that manual eradication in parks can work, then one would have expected to see an all-out security effort, ensuring that eradicators could do their job without risk of exposure to guerrilla attack. We have not seen such an effort. While the deployment of up to 1,500 police agents is a good step, there has been much less involvement from the army, which is in fact trained to confront guerrillas, and already has a strong presence in the Plan Patriota zone.
In particular, why did Operation “Colombia Verde” begin without protection from elements of the Colombian Army’s 2,300-man Counter-Narcotics Brigade, which was created at much U.S. government expense when Plan Colombia began in 2000? An elite mobile unit with three battalions and access to lots of helicopters, the Brigade’s original purpose, in the words of Clinton administration State Department official Thomas Pickering, was to “accompany and back up police eradication and interdiction efforts” and to “provide secure conditions for the implementation of aid programs, including alternative development and relocation assistance.”
One of the Counter-Narcotics Brigade’s most basic purposes is to create security conditions for eradication. Normally, this unit coordinates closely with the fumigation program, ensuring that there are fewer guerrillas or paramilitaries on the ground to shoot at the spray planes. (When the brigade has failed to coordinate well with the spray program, as in the Catatumbo region in 2003, planes have been shot down.) Improving security conditions for Operation “Colombia Verde” appears to be an ideal mission for the Counter-Narcotics Brigade. Why, after spending so much money on this Brigade (with so few results from fumigation), was it not sent immediately to La Macarena? Did the U.S. government object, perhaps?
With insufficient security, this operation in the FARC’s backyard has run up against fierce guerrilla resistance. In its first two weeks, security forces faced eight guerrilla attacks. Six police were killed in a firefight on February 6. Three soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb on February 8. The eradicators must work with extreme caution, since the fields are planted not just with coca, but with land mines. The FARC have further complicated efforts by declaring an “armed stoppage,” prohibiting road traffic, throughout the nearby municipality (county) of Macarena.
The number of eradicators in the zone has dropped rapidly, from 930 at the beginning to only about 310 today. Fear of guerrilla attack is one reason, but the Colombian media have also reported extensively on the workers’ complaints about poor conditions. They cannot listen to radios or smoke at night, in order to avoid revealing their positions to guerrillas. They have faced chronic shortages of food and other supplies. Payments have been delivered very late, if at all.
The eradication operation is hanging by a thread. Nearly a month after its start, only 400 hectares of coca, less than 10 percent of the total, have been pulled up. The operation’s timeframe has been extended from 3 to 6 months. President Uribe is now promising housing subsidies for those eradicators who stick it out.
This experience so far raises many questions. Here are five:
1. Was the Macarena eradication project programmed to fail, in order to provide a rationale for fumigation in parks? “I suspect that the program is a smokescreen to justify herbicide fumigation,” a “local official” in Macarena said to the Associated Press last week. Indeed, the inadequacy of the security provided – especially the absence of the Counter-Narcotics Brigade – arouses suspicions that not all has been done to ensure the operation’s success.
On the other hand, this operation has received a lot of high-profile support from President Uribe, and if it fails due to poor execution it might reflect badly on him, in the middle of an election campaign. It’s also possible that the Uribe government – believing that Plan Patriota has hit the guerrillas harder than it has – simply underestimated the security risk in the zone.
2. Does the FARC prefer that the Colombian government spray? Spraying often has only a short-term impact on coca cultivation. Colombian Counter-Narcotics Police chief Col. Henry Gamboa recently told Cali’s El País, “What happens is that each hectare of coca has a productive potential of four harvests per year [some say up to six]. That is, when we spray we are only eliminating one harvest.” Manual eradication, on the other hand, is permanent: it removes the coca plants completely, and the growers must start over with seedlings. Manual eradication may be slow and labor-intensive, but it likely does much more to disrupt the FARC’s income stream.
Plus, unlike fumigation, manual eradication involves a long-term presence of government security forces (and, hopefully, civilian government representatives) on the ground. The government is placed in contact with population – often for the first time – in a previously abandoned zone that the guerrillas have become accustomed to controlling.
For these reasons, manual eradication may in fact hurt the guerrillas much more than fumigation. By responding aggressively to Operation “Colombia Verde” and perhaps inviting fumigation in the park, then, the FARC could be acting very much in its own interest.
3. Is the U.S. Government – which wants badly to fumigate everywhere – quietly opposed to Uribe’s manual eradication offensive in La Macarena? It could be that U.S. support is simply invisible, but there have been no celebratory announcements from the U.S. embassy, and no sign of U.S. officials accompanying President Uribe on his trips to the zone. Is Colombia on its own here? Has the U.S. embassy decided not to lend Operation “Colombia Verde” its resources and logistical expertise?
4. Won’t fumigation cause even more parkland to be destroyed for further coca-growing? Visit this page from the State Department’s last annual “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.” Scroll down to the Colombia drug statistics table (or search for the words “Colombia Statistics”). Note that the amount of coca estimated in Colombia (“Potential Harvest”) has shrunk slightly from 122,500 hectares in 1999 to 113,850 in 2003 (it was 114,000 in 2004). However, note that the total amount of coca planted in Colombia (“Estimated Cultivation”) has exploded, from 167,746 hectares in 1999 to 246,667 hectares in 2003 (and a similar amount in 2004). That’s a four-year increase in “attempted” coca growing of 47 percent!
The conclusion is that vastly increased fumigation is not dissuading Colombia’s economically desperate coca-growers. Instead, it’s leading them to grow more coca. This means they are cutting down more forest, moving into new areas, and polluting more ecosystems. If eradication fails to come with economic alternatives – and if the Colombian government still cannot control its nature reserves – won’t coca growers, following the same pattern, simply respond by destroying more parkland?
5. Most importantly, what about the approximately 11,000 impoverished human beings who live in the Macarena park? The conditions of the park’s colonos are an old problem, as columnist and author Alfredo Molano wrote in last Sunday’s El Espectador. “Twenty-five years go, the colonos of La Macarena marched to San José del Guaviare to demand an effective and permanent solution to their problems: land titles, credit, roads, health, access to markets. The government responded that as long as they occupied land inside the park, there would be no aid at all. Some protesters were wounded, and several were murdered afterward. There was no solution.”
Only a very desperate person would move himself and his family into a remote, guerrilla-controlled park, to grow or pick coca in primitive, off-the-grid conditions, often to be paid only in guerrilla scrip instead of real currency. A government that actually intended to govern areas like La Macarena – to truly wrest them from guerrilla control – would recognize this desperation and help those who live there to establish themselves in the legal economy.
That is not happening. While some wish to spray these people from overhead, never to be in contact with them at all, the reigning policy is to send teams of eradicators, accompanied by security forces, to destroy their illegal crops. No effort is being made to make these people true citizens of Colombia; in fact, the majority are abandoning the zone for economic or security reasons, adding themselves once again to Colombia’s population of over three million internally displaced people.
If the current plan seeks merely to forcibly eradicate and displace people – whether by coca-pullers or by spray planes – without asserting a real state presence or providing the most basic of services, it will fail miserably. There will still be plenty of coca in La Macarena a year for now. And there will still be plenty of guerrillas, too. As Cambio magazine columnist María Elvira Samper notes, “It is a temporary operation, and as a result the most likely outcome is that, once the coca is eradicated, the situation will go back to what it always was: the state absent and the FARC present.”
Posted by isacson at 02:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 08, 2006
Aid to Latin America in the 2007 request
Here are a few quick observations on the Bush administration’s proposed aid to Latin America in 2007. Don’t expect too much detail because at this early stage, we only have information from one document: the State Department’s bare-bones summary of its “Function 150” (foreign affairs) request.
(If you’re interested, more detailed information will be available in about a week when the State Department issues its 1,000-page Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations; then in April, when the State Department’s narcotics bureau releases its own detailed budget justification; on April 15, when the Defense Department must submit a newly required report on its own counter-narcotics aid; and in April or May when the State and Defense Departments release a detailed report on foreign military training in 2005. Links to these and other reports will always be here.)
1. Aid to Colombia will be largely unchanged in 2007, as expected. We estimate that Colombia would get about $724 million under the Bush administration’s plan for 2007. This would be about $17 million less than what Colombia received in 2006 – but since this is an estimate, we could be off by about that much. It is nonetheless safe to say that aid to Colombia is not growing.
The most notable things about the Colombia request are those that do not appear. Funding for the so-called “airbridge denial” program – the effort to interdict suspicious aircraft, which had been given its own budget line in the 2005 and 2006 requests – has been “zeroed out” for 2007, and probably lumped together with Colombia’s existing aid. Non-military aid money does not increase, which means that no big plans are afoot to fund paramilitaries’ demobilization and reintegration. President Uribe’s mid-2005 request for $150 million in additional aid for spray planes, helicopters and boats seems to have been all but forgotten.
2. Elsewhere in the Andes, the drug war is in full retreat. Colombia’s neighbors are to see a 23% cut in their “Andean Counterdrug Initiative” aid, both military and economic, from 2005 levels:
Andean Counterdrug Initiative aid to Colombia’s neighbors (millions of $)
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| 2005 | 2006, estimate | 2007, request | Change 2005-2007 | |
| Bolivia military/police | 48,608 | 42,570 | 35,000 | -13,608 | -28% |
| Bolivia economic | 41,664 | 36,630 | 31,000 | -10,664 | -26% |
| Bolivia total | 90,272 | 79,200 | 66,000 | -24,272 | -27% |
| Brazil total | 8,928 | 5,940 | 4,000 | -4,928 | -55% |
| Ecuador military/police | 10,912 | 8,375 | 8,900 | -2,012 | -18% |
| Ecuador economic | 14,880 | 11,425 | 8,400 | -6,480 | -44% |
| Ecuador total | 25,792 | 19,800 | 17,300 | -8,492 | -33% |
| Panama total | 5,952 | 4,455 | 4,000 | -1,952 | -33% |
| Peru military/police | 61,504 | 58,410 | 56,000 | -5,504 | -9% |
| Peru economic | 53,866 | 48,510 | 42,500 | -11,366 | -21% |
| Peru total | 115,370 | 106,920 | 98,500 | -16,870 | -15% |
| Venezuela total | 2,976 | 2,229 | 1,000 | -1,976 | -66% |
| Total | 249,290 | 218,544 | 190,800 | -58,490 | -23% |
The Andean Counterdrug Initiative account is the main source of drug-war aid to Colombia’s neighbors. All of these countries have seen their counter-drug assistance rise steadily since the mid-1990s. It is remarkable, then, to see their aid levels decrease so rapidly.
The cut owes chiefly to the lack of money in the U.S. budget, as the federal deficit approaches 4 percent of GDP. However, some countries – including Colombia – have been saved from the ax because the Bush administration feels they are essential to the “war on terror” or other key interests. It speaks volumes that these countries’ importance to U.S. counter-narcotics efforts is not enough to save them from across-the-board cuts. The drug war – which wasn’t working anyway – is being put on the back burner.
Yesterday, Bolivia’s Evo Morales called on Washington to reconsider, saying “I want to ask publicly that the U.S. government revise its position and join together to try for zero drug trafficking.” It is not clear yet exactly which programs for Bolivia are to be cut, though eradication (which Morales opposes) and alternative development are good guesses.
Though Colombia is not increasing and the rest of the Andes is getting cut, the State Department will insist that the overall request for the Andean region remains almost unchanged. Indeed, they are seeking $721.5 million for the Andean Counterdrug Initiative in 2007, only $13 million less than what Congress appropriated for this account in 2006. But the State Department has chosen to cut aid to Colombia’s neighbors in order to make room for a $65.7 million “Critical Flight Safety Program.”
This program will pay for repairs to over 200 planes and helicopters that State’s anti-drug bureau uses for its operations, such as fumigation and transportation. It is not really aid to the Andes, since the State Department (with its contractors) owns and operates the planes. State had sought $40 million for the “Critical Flight Safety Program” in its 2006 request, but it was not popular in Congress. The Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee refused to fund it at all. (“The Committee provides no funding for the Critical Flight Safety Program,” reads its June 2005 report.) The full Congress ultimately recommended $30 million for 2006, which State plans to spend. But they want to more than double that amount in 2007, without increasing their overall request for the Andes. The result is seen in the cuts to Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.
The Andean Counterdrug Initiative is not these countries’ only source of aid. However, nearly all of Colombia’s neighbors – Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela – are subject to a total cutoff in non-drug military aid because of the “American Servicemembers’ Protection Act.” This 2002 law cuts off much military and economic aid to countries that do not grant U.S. soldiers on their soil immunity from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. In all, at least twelve countries in Latin America currently have aid frozen for this reason.
3. Mexico is the latest country to have its non-drug military aid slashed by the “American Servicemembers’ Protection Act.” In 2006, Mexico was to receive $1.1 million in military-training funds through the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, making it one of Latin America’s top six IMET recipients. For the first time, Mexico was also to get $2.5 million in 2006 military aid through the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, which provides grants of weapons and equipment. But in October 2005, Mexico ratified the Rome Statute, making it a signatory to the International Criminal Court. So until Mexico grants immunity from the ICC to U.S. soldiers – which is hugely unlikely, given Mexican sensitivities about U.S. bullying – its IMET and FMF funds are frozen. Indeed, they are “zeroed out” in the 2007 request. Add this to a rapidly growing list of grievances currently roiling U.S.-Mexican relations.
4. The State Department isn’t even trying to get Foreign Military Financing for Guatemala this year. In its 2006 request, the State Department included $500,000 in FMF for Guatemala. This would have been the first time Guatemala had received military aid through this account since 1990, when it was cut off after Guatemalan troops killed a U.S. citizen. Congress shot down this request last year, however, citing the Guatemalan military’s lack of progress in complying with its commitments under the 1996 peace accords. This year, Guatemala does not appear in the 2007 FMF request.
5. Aid to Latin America through the three main traditional economic-aid accounts is to drop 17 percent from 2005 to 2007, from 555 million to 462 million. These economic-aid programs – Development Assistance (DA), Child Survival and Health (CSH), and Economic Support Funds (ESF) – are designed to help the poorest citizens of the poorest countries. (Colombia, for instance, is usually considered too high-income to receive DA, CSH or ESF.) But as the table below indicates, these programs are being slashed heavily as the Bush administration moves its priorities elsewhere.
Two big, new economic-aid programs do benefit four countries in the hemisphere: Haiti and Guyana are to get over $80 million in funding to fight HIV-AIDS, and Honduras and Nicaragua are receiving big multi-year economic-aid packages through the “Millennium Challenge” program, which offers assistance to poor countries that are at least minimally well-governed. However, note in the table below that Honduras and Nicaragua are to see deep cuts in their “traditional” economic aid in 2007, which will undercut much of what they gain from the new “Millennium Challenge” money.
Combined totals, DA / CSH / ESF (thousands of dollars)
| Country | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | Change 2005-2007 | |
| Dominican Republic | 23,447 | 21,766 | 29,347 | 5,900 | 25% |
| Brazil | 12,189 | 11,076 | 13,985 | 1,796 | 15% |
| Guyana | 3,572 | 3,960 | 4,000 | 428 | 12% |
| Guatemala | 28,087 | 26,194 | 31,353 | 3,266 | 12% |
| Paraguay | 7,907 | 9,249 | 8,236 | 329 | 4% |
| Cuba opposition | 8,928 | 10,890 | 9,000 | 72 | 1% |
| Bolivia | 32,617 | 32,510 | 30,689 | -1,928 | -6% |
| Peru | 30,002 | 26,618 | 25,736 | -4,266 | -14% |
| Haiti | 103,930 | 99,001 | 88,955 | -14,975 | -14% |
| Honduras | 34,048 | 31,964 | 25,460 | -8,588 | -25% |
| Ecuador | 18,510 | 9,548 | 13,644 | -4,866 | -26% |
| El Salvador | 34,230 | 30,655 | 24,905 | -9,325 | -27% |
| Mexico | 31,681 | 27,083 | 22,002 | -9,679 | -31% |
| Venezuela | 2,432 | 0 | 1,500 | -932 | -38% |
| Jamaica | 16,761 | 14,051 | 10,201 | -6,560 | -39% |
| Nicaragua | 38,228 | 31,908 | 22,657 | -15,571 | -41% |
| Panama | 8,101 | 5,325 | 3,180 | -4,921 | -61% |
| Regional programs | 120,216 | 124,253 | 97,130 | -23,086 | -19% |
| Total | 554,886 | 516,051 | 461,980 | -92,906 | -17% |
Posted by isacson at 03:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 04, 2006
A visit to Southern Command
I spent most of last week in Miami, where I paid a visit to Southern Command and some of a conference on security in the Americas, along with colleagues from several other NGOs. We discussed and debated topics ranging from Colombia to terrorism to "populism" to gangs to Guantánamo, and much else. There were strong disagreements and concerns, of course, but also some areas of agreement. I've posted my trip report as a sort of "encore post" to Democracy Arsenal. It discusses three new things I learned, three things we agreed on, three things on which we disagreed, and three things about which I'm not sure whether we agreed or not.
Posted by isacson at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 28, 2006
Notes on a Senate staff trip to Colombia
Carl Meacham, a staffer for Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, paid a visit to Bogotá on December 11-14. A moderate Republican (one of a disappearing breed), Sen. Lugar has been generally supportive of Plan Colombia. However, he has been one of the U.S. Congress’ chief critics of the paramilitary demobilization process. As the chairman of the committee, he plays an important role.
Meacham’s report (big PDF file) is a worthwhile read. I disagree with his analysis of Plan Patriota’s “success” and his recommendations for continued aid in its present form. I also wish he had taken the time to meet with representatives of Colombia’s human rights community and with other centrist analysts who hold a less sanguine view of Colombia’s security situation (such as CERAC and the Security and Democracy Foundation).
Nonetheless, the report differs strongly from the reigning view that everything is going wonderfully in Colombia. And it does contain some information that I hadn’t heard before, or at least hadn’t seen in writing before.
For example, the Colombian government has submitted a draft request for a five-year aid package to succeed Plan Colombia, from 2006-2010. The request was turned over to the State Department back on September 23, and the Uribe government calls it “Plan Colombia Consolidation Phase (PCCP).”
Though the U.S. Congress hasn’t been given a look at it yet, the draft document apparently includes four “pillars.”
The PCCP envisages four programmatic pillars that roughly correspond to the areas the USG supported through Plan Colombia (Pillars I-III), with the addition of the peace process (including demobilization and reintegration) as pillar IV. These pillars are:
- Fight Against Terrorism, Narcotics Trafficking, and International Organized Crime
- Strengthening Governmental Institutions and the Justice System
- Economics and Social Revitalization
- Process for Peace and Re-Integration
Meacham doesn’t recommend buying into the whole five-year “Plan Colombia II.” Instead, he recommends going one year at a time while keeping a close eye on Colombia and its neighbors.
In order to remain flexible, staff strongly recommends that USG [U.S. Government] support for Plan Colombia be extended on a year to year basis. … Policies toward the GOC [Government of Colombia] must be continually evaluated, given very fluid circumstances inside Colombia and its neighboring countries.
“Failure to address Congress’ concerns,” Meacham adds, “could weaken support for future extensions of Plan Colombia in the U.S. Congress.”
The report expresses disappointment in the lack of progress Plan Colombia has made against drugs and paramilitaries, given the size of U.S. investment.
The lack of reliable evidence of well-documented progress in the war against drugs and neutralizing paramilitaries is disappointing considering the billions of dollars the U.S. Congress has appropriated to finance drug interdiction and eradication since 2000.
Meacham sees a lack of consensus on whether drug supplies have been affected at all by Plan Colombia. While the Drug Czar’s office is claiming success, he notes, a recent report [PDF format] by the Congress’s independent Government Accountability Office casts doubt on the reliability of their measurements.
[S]ome Colombian officials have cautioned that while the statistics presented by the UN and White House are encouraging, more time is needed to determine if current efforts will yield real progress. They refer, for instance, to the impact of possible drug warehousing in Venezuela and Mexico on price and supply. However, given the absence of a consensus from respected organizations on the success of Plan Colombia in stemming the flow of cocaine to the United States, this does not bode well for efforts to push for its extension, at least at its current funding levels, without policy changes.
The report includes the following two maps, produced by the Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force in Key West. The first shows the paths of suspected drug-smuggling boats detected during 2005. The second shows the paths of suspected drug-smuggling aircraft detected during 2005.
While the first shows most boats leaving Colombia, the second, surprisingly, shows most planes leaving Venezuela. Also surprisingly, both show no boats and very few planes landing in Cuba – Castro’s island appears here as an impenetrable barrier blocking drug smugglers’ progress toward the United States.
The report makes clear that Sen. Lugar continues to maintain a critical posture toward the paramilitary negotiations and demobilization. It notes that “the Uribe administration’s own study on demobilization, prepared two years ago, concluded that paramilitaries are responsible for at least 40 percent of the cocaine trafficking in Colombia.”
It makes clear that Colombia’s so-called “Justice and Peace Law,” passed in mid-2005 to govern paramilitary demobilizations, is inadequate and will allow paramilitary leaders to continue to enjoy great power as mafia-style bosses.
Staff’s opinion is that the law will be ineffective because it relies on the AUC’s willingness to co-operate in the implementation of its own demise. In addition the GOC has not built a strong framework for the law’s implementation. … Under the law there is a very real possibility that Commanders convicted of atrocities will receive very short sentences, even if it becomes clear that they have lied to prosecutors, kept most of their illegal assets, drug labs and wealth, or continued to engage in illegal paramilitary activity after they have ‘‘demobilized.’’ When these leaders re-enter society, their wealth, political power, and criminal networks will have remained intact, allowing them to replace their weapons and troops with ease if they choose, or form their own laundered and ‘‘legitimate’’ narco-gangs.
Meacham also worries that the “Justice and Peace Law” will make it impossible to extradite paramilitary drug traffickers to the United States.
[O]f particular concern to the United States under the new ‘‘Peace and Justice Law’’ is its ambiguity regarding the extradition of paramilitary commanders who have been indicted in the United States. It appears they can escape extradition by serving reduced sentences for their crimes in Colombia and then claim double jeopardy.
The committee report recommends that strong conditions be applied to any future aid for the paramilitary demobilization process.
The report expresses a surprising level of optimism about the progress of “Plan Patriota,” the Uribe government’s mostly military effort to re-take guerrilla-held territory with tens of thousands of troops and much U.S. aid. It reproduces a series of statistics about the offensive’s results (guerrillas killed, arms recovered, FARC encampments found) that the State Department has obtained from Colombia’s Defense Ministry.
According to the report, “The Colombian military claims that Plan Patriota has reduced the FARC ranks from 18,000 to 12,000 in the past year.” The past year? In September 2004 – fifteen months before Meacham’s visit – Gen. Carlos Ospina, the head of Colombia’s armed forces, cited the same statistic to me in answer to a question at a Georgetown University conference.
The report does include some new information (new to me at least) about “Plan Patriota.” For instance, a third phase of the military offensive (technically, a “Phase 2C”) is soon to be launched in Colombia’s populous department of Antioquia, whose capital is Medellín.
Plan Patriota, the GOC’s military campaign to extend government control and security presence throughout the national territory, is composed of two major phases: Phase 1, the planning and preparation for the forceful removal of armed groups; and Phase 2, which was divided into three components: 2A, 2B, and 2C, to implement Phase 2. Phase 2A, which took place from June to December 2003, resulted in the removal of the FARC from Bogotá and Cundinamarca Department. Phase 2B, which began in February 2004 and continues, includes Meta, Caqueta, and Guaviare Departments, involved the removal of the FARC from those areas. This is a large part of the area that comprised the “despeje,” or the area President Pastrana had conceded to the FARC. Phase 2C, which is the forceful removal of FARC from Antioquia Department, was scheduled to begin late in 2005, but has been postponed.
CIP has frequently criticized “Plan Patriota” for relying so heavily on military force, failing to address neglected regions’ extreme poverty or to establish a presence of the rest of the government. Meacham’s report discusses efforts so far to address non-military needs in the “Plan Patriota” zone through a so-called “Center for Coordinated Integral Action,” a military-led plan to bring in social services and civilian government institutions.
In addition, with support from the U.S. Military Group (MILGRP), the Colombia Government formed an interagency center to facilitate social services in seven areas that have traditionally suffered from little state presence and pressure from illegal armed groups. The “Center for Coordinated Integral Action” focuses on providing immediate social services, including documentation and medical clinics, and establishing longer term projects, such as economic reactivation. Approximately 40,000 individuals have been enrolled in state health care, judges, investigators, and public defenders have been placed in all 16 municipalities of the Plan Patriota area, and a public library was recently opened in the town of San Vicente del Caguan.
With the “Center for Coordinated Integral Action,” the planners of “Plan Patriota” at least acknowledge the need for non-military investment in the “re-taken” zone. But Meacham’s report does not give us a sense of the effort’s scale. Where statistics are elsewhere in evidence, we don’t know how many medical clinics or documentation projects have been established, much less how many exist outside of the “Plan Patriota” zone’s largest towns. Enrolling 40,000 individuals in health care is important, but over 1 million people live in the “Plan Patriota” zone, and there is a difference between enrolling people in the system and actually providing doctors, hospitals, medicines and access to care.
Meanwhile, a public library in San Vicente is great, but it really only benefits the people who live very close to the town center. I’ve been to San Vicente and can attest that the surrounding roads are so lunar-surface poor that those who live even 15 miles from the town would have to drive for an hour, in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, just to take out a book.
Posted by isacson at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 18, 2006
Did Plan Colombia work? A look at the numbers
In another guest-post to Democracy Arsenal, I commemorate the 6th anniversary of Bill Clinton's introduction of the "Plan Colombia" aid package. Perhaps too predictably, the article finds that "the results of U.S. aid to Colombia have been remarkably disappointing."
But "rather than explain why with an exhaustive, point-by-point disquisition," the post borrows heavily from the Harper's Index, with 69 different arguments in numerical form. Draw your own conclusion.
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January 17, 2006
The Kent memo and oversight of the DEA
Narconews.com is an informative website that performs a very aggressive brand of investigative journalism. Their radical politics and their willingness to take risks can put them on the leading edge of important stories, though at other times it can lead them down a blind alley. (Would-be blockbusters that went nowhere include the 1,100 U.S. Marines allegedly inserted in southern Colombia three years ago, or the U.S. contractors in Peru being paid to kill guerrillas crossing the border from Colombia.)
This time, though, Narconews may be on to something big. Reporter Bill Conroy has obtained a December 2004 Justice Department memo alleging massive, murderous corruption in the Bogotá office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and a cover-up by DEA and Justice Department internal-affairs officials. The memo is written by Thomas M. Kent, an attorney in the wiretap unit of the Justice Department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs Section (DEA is part of the Justice Department). It makes four allegations that are summarized here as briefly as possible. (For more detail, see the memo itself [PDF format] or – with more context – Conroy’s piece.)
First allegation: informants from the drug underworld who had begun cooperating with the DEA in Florida alleged that DEA agents in Bogotá were helping them with drug shipments. Specifically, the Bogotá agents were providing them with information about U.S. and Colombian law enforcement operations. The informants were even able to provide Florida agents with confidential reports that the Bogotá DEA agents had given them. One Bogotá agent was put on administrative leave. During that time, an informant was killed as he left a meeting with DEA agents in Bogotá. Other informants who worked with the Florida DEA were also murdered. “Each murder was preceded by a request for their identity by an agent in Bogotá.”
Second allegation: informants were to bring a sample of cocaine infused in acrylic plastic from Colombia, in order to show DEA chemists in Florida how the cocaine could be extracted. This was agreed with the Bogotá DEA office. But when the informants ended up being arrested in the Bogotá airport, the Bogotá DEA told the Colombian authorities to “lock them up and throw away the key.” The informants spent nine months in jail before it was determined that the Bogotá agents were lying. After his release, one of the informants was kidnapped and murdered in Bogotá.
Third allegation: Bogotá agents “identified as corrupt” by the first two allegations repeatedly frustrated contact between the Florida DEA and an informant who claimed that he (a) had been approached by the FARC to provide communications equipment and (b) had information about weapons-grade nuclear material for sale in Spain. Finally it was agreed that the informant would provide the FARC with communications equipment that the U.S. government could intercept. Wiretaps appeared to reveal that several DEA agents based in Bogotá and perhaps Washington were on the payroll of narcotraffickers. The informant was intimidated by an anonymous fax of a document identifying him as a DEA informer on the FARC.
Fourth allegation: an internal investigation into money-laundering by corrupt agents was shut down under unclear circumstances. “The same agent connected to the murders of the informants described in the first allegation then began to call my case agent to learn the identity of his informants.”
The problem continues today, Kent indicates. “One of the corrupt agents from Bogotá, who was central to the second and third allegations, was recently intercepted over a wiretap. … [I]n it he discusses his involvement in laundering money for the AUC. That call has been documented by the DEA and that agent is now in charge of numerous narcotics and money laundering investigations.”
The Narconews allegations, which Conroy writes were corroborated with unnamed law-enforcement officials, are starting to find their way into more mainstream media. The Miami Herald’s Gerardo Reyes got a former DEA official – albeit one who has a grievance against the agency – to go on record.
Sandalio González, former deputy director of the DEA in Miami and former chief of the agency’s El Paso bureau, told El Nuevo Herald the memo is accurate and reflects the state of moral decay of some departments in the agency. “The information contained in the memo is accurate as far as I know, because I was involved in some of those cases,” said González, who is suing the DEA for discrimination. “The DEA is unable to police itself.”
Semana, Colombia’s most-circulated newsmagazine, put the story on its cover. It added two more allegations of DEA corruption in Colombia.
In 1999, during Operation Millennium, one of the largest antinarcotics operations in the history of the drug war, some DEA agents and Colombian investigators who carried out a series of recordings in the office of drug lord Alejandro Bernal Madrigal, alias “Juvenal,” documented … a conversation with several of his partners, in which the capo told them that DEA agent Richard Meyer had given him a million dollars to leave him alone. “The recording with the drug lord’s statements launched an internal investigation in the DEA, but nothing happened. In order to avoid problems, the only thing they did was transfer the agent. When ‘Juvenal’ was extradited to the United States and began to collaborate with U.S. justice, they made him retract those statements,” one of the officials who participated in Operation Millennium with the DEA told Semana….
One of the most common complaints has to do with what some call “the extradition business.” This basically means that when a narcotrafficker is arrested and is going to be extradited, he receives a visit in prison from a DEA agent. “What he does is tell the narco: your situation is very difficult and in the United States many years in jail await you. Then the agent tells the narco that he knows a very good lawyer who could help him to negotiate. These lawyers are called ‘fixers.’ The agent puts the narco in contact with the lawyer, and the lawyer gives a percentage of what he charges his client to the DEA agent,” says the official, who knows several of these cases closely and who works with the DEA in Colombia.
A Justice Department official told the Associated Press that further investigation into Kent’s allegations “found no wrongdoing.” That should not be enough to stop reporters from asking many more questions, nor should it stop Congress from performing its oversight role, including requesting access to some of the extensive evidence to which Kent’s memo refers.
Whether these allegations are just the tip of the iceberg or an exaggeration of a smaller problem, one thing is clear: oversight of the DEA is atrociously bad. While it’s easy to appreciate why its agents need to operate in secrecy, somebody has to be minding the store. Secrecy without accountability leads too easily to situations like the one the Kent memo describes.
DEA’s internal-affairs office, or Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), appears to be dysfunctional. “When confronted with the allegations,” Kent writes, “the investigators at OPR treated the reporting agents as if they had a disease and did not want to have anything to do with them or the evidence they amassed.”
The internal-affairs structure at the Justice Department (which includes DEA) also appears to be unable to do its job. Kent’s memo states that an investigator at the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector-General “was advised up front that the allegations would make his career, but the process of holding those responsible accountable may destroy his career. … He was recently removed from the investigation for reasons that still remain a mystery.”
Outside the executive branch, things aren’t much better. Congress goes years at a time without holding hearings on the DEA’s performance, and oversight staff rarely ask tough questions. Reporters rarely look into DEA’s operations, and even when they attempt to do so they find it difficult to get information out of the agency. The experience of CIP and other NGOs seeking to monitor DEA’s relationship with Latin America’s security forces has been similarly frustrating. (A common joke is that DEA stands for “Don’t Even Ask.”)
Congratulations to Narconews for breaking this story. While we hope that the mainstream media follows this lead and investigate it further, we especially urge Congress to do its job and find out what is really happening at DEA. Legislative staff need to be asking questions and holding hearings to determine whether criminal behavior and a cover-up have been undermining the Bogotá office’s work, and whether people whose salaries are paid by U.S. taxpayers are perversely helping to bring drugs to the United States, with impunity.
Posted by isacson at 02:41 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
January 11, 2006
The Latin Americanist's lament
Over the next ten days or so, I'll be dividing my blogging time between "Plan Colombia and Beyond" and a more generalist (and highly recommended) foreign policy blog, the Security and Peace Initiative's "Democracy Arsenal," where I'm filling in as a guest contributor. When I post there and not here, I'll put a link from this site to that one.
My inaugural post to that blog notes that a frustration of being a Latin Americanist "is watching the United States today repeating mistakes worldwide that it used to make only in Latin America." It's even got a multiple-choice quiz.
Posted by isacson at 10:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 09, 2006
U.S. aid to Colombia today: a quick walk-through
Right now, here are our best estimates of the aid Colombia has received from the United States since 2004. (For estimates going all the way back to 1997, visit this page.)
2004: $690.1 million ($555.1 million, or 80 percent, military and police aid; the rest economic and social aid).
2005, estimate: $774.6 million ($643.3 million, or 83 percent, military and police aid; the rest economic and social aid).
2006, request: $751.0 million ($612.5 million, or 82 percent, military and police aid; the rest economic and social aid).
The 2004 number is pretty solid. The 2005 number reflects what, as of several months ago, the U.S. government estimated it might spend; actual amounts for 2005 won’t be available for another month or so. The 2006 number reflects what the Bush administration asked Congress to fund for this year.
Where do these numbers come from? What do they pay for? Here, as briefly as possible, is a walk through U.S. aid to Colombia. We hope to provide a more detailed overview in February, after the Bush administration makes its 2007 request to Congress.
I. Military and police aid
(2004: $555.1 million / 2005 estimate: $643.3 million / 2006 request: $612.9 million)
I.A. Andean Counterdrug Initiative (ACI)
(2004: $332.1 million / 2005 estimate: $336.1 million / 2006 request: $344.6 million)The biggest single source of funding for Colombia comes through the ACI, managed by the State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, or INL. (The INL bureau is now headed by Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia.) It is the only program in the U.S. budget that can pay for both military and economic aid, ranging from crop eradication to drug interdiction to alternative-development programs to demobilizing combatants, among others. (For ACI economic-aid amounts, see II.A. below.)
INL’s budget funds aid to many countries worldwide, especially Afghanistan. In 2001, however – after Plan Colombia’s passage – the State Department chose to request aid to Colombia and six of its Andean neighbors as a separate account: the ACI. The message to Congress, essentially, was “the Andes are a priority region for us, do not cut this aid.” For 2006, Congress has approved $734.5 million for the ACI; most of this military and economic aid (we estimate $483.1 million) will go to Colombia, the rest will go to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, Brazil, and (to a lesser extent) Venezuela. Some explanation of what ACI pays for is available in the annual INL Congressional Budget Justification documents.
Though ACI is a counter-drug funding account, the law since 2002 has allowed counter-drug funds to pay for Colombia’s fight against guerrilla (and presumably paramilitary) groups. For the most part, though, ACI aid is still mainly counter-drug aid.
It pays for the aerial herbicide fumigation program – the upkeep of aircraft, the contractor pilots, mechanics, logistics and search-and-rescue personnel, the cost of Colombian police involvement (including police helicopters that escort the spray planes), and the herbicides themselves. It pays for much of the Colombian military’s aerial interdiction or “Air Bridge Denial” program (that is, detecting and forcing down aircraft suspected of carrying drugs). It also funds much of the cost of efforts to stop drugs being smuggled on river and roads. Each year, $200 million or more of ACI aid to Colombia’s military and police goes simply to "aviation": maintaining all of the planes and helicopters that Colombia has been given over the past several years. (Recall that it costs nearly $3,000 to operate a Black Hawk helicopter for one hour.)
- ACI military aid (2004: $159.4 million / 2005 estimate: $144.5 million / 2006 request: $152.8 million). Most ACI aid to Colombia’s armed forces pays for the Colombian Army’s Aviation Brigade, which manages and flies all of the planes and helicopters used by all of the army’s other units. Smaller amounts support the 2,000-man Counter-Drug Brigade that was initially formed with Plan Colombia funds, the “Air Bridge Denial” program, and naval drug interdiction (mainly in the ocean, since river interdiction is funded elsewhere). A small amount pays for “institutional reform for the Ministry of Defense.”
- ACI police aid (2004: $173.2 million / 2005 estimate: $191.6 million / 2006 request: $191.9 million). The fumigation program makes up the bulk of ACI police aid – in 2005, $82.5 million was to go to “support for eradication,” and much of the $70 million “aviation support” category was to maintain police aircraft involved somehow in the fumigation effort. (An additional cost of fumigation comes from the operations of military units, such as the Counter-Drug Brigade mentioned in the previous paragraph, which secure conditions on the ground before spraying begins.) Much of this aid in fact goes straight to private contractors – pilots, mechanics and the like – who are “supporting” the police-led fumigation effort. Other police aid paid for river and road drug interdiction, bomb squad units, and support for the Uribe government’s effort to station police in zones with little or no police presence.
ACI military aid pays for much training; in 2004, it paid for 903 out of the 8,801 Colombians trained by the U.S. military. (To find out what courses were offered and what units were trained by this or any other program, visit the website of the State and Defense Department’s Foreign Military Training Report, choose a year, click on “Country Training Activities” and click on “Western Hemisphere” to download a big PDF file.)
Twenty-five percent of ACI military (not police) aid ($38.2 million in 2006) is frozen until the State Department certifies that Colombia is properly investigating and punishing military human-rights violations and paramilitary collaboration. Eighty percent of funding for herbicides is frozen until the State Department certifies that fumigation “does not pose unreasonable risks or adverse effects to humans or the environment,” people are being compensated for damage to legal crops, and alternative-development opportunities exist in spraying zones.
I.B. Defense Department counter-drug aid (“Section 1004”)
(2004: $122.0 million / 2005 estimate: $200.0 million / 2006 request: unknown; average of previous two years is $161.0 million)The second-largest source of military-aid funds to Colombia cannot be found in foreign-aid legislation, and is not overseen by the State Department. Since 1991 the law has allowed the Defense Department to use its $400 billion-plus budget to provide its own military and police aid for counter-drug purposes. The 1991 law in question was Section 1004 of that year’s Defense Authorization bill, as a result, the Pentagon’s anti-drug aid is generally referred to by the rather innocuous-sounding name “Section 1004.”
“Section 1004” cannot pay for helicopters, weapons or, in general, other items that can kill people. It can pay for training, however – and the Defense Department's counter-drug aid is now by far the number-one source of funding for training of Colombian military and police personnel (it paid for 6,472 of Colombia’s 8,801 trainees in 2004).
It also pays for “establishment and operation of bases of operation;” maintenance, repair or upgrading of equipment; intelligence and “aerial and ground reconnaissance.” Since 1998, a similar Defense Department provision (known as “Section 1033”) has allowed the Pentagon to help Colombia interdict drugs on rivers, providing boats, training, and helping to build bases. And since 2002, all of this aid may be used not just to fight drugs, but to fight guerrillas and paramilitaries.
“Section 1004” funded much of the creation of the Colombian Army’s Counter-Drug Brigade. It is very likely that this account has since helped the Colombian military to create new mobile and Special Forces brigades throughout the country, as well as to upgrade some of its facilities. The three U.S. contractors who have been FARC hostages since 2003 were likely on a Section 1004-funded aerial reconnaissance mission.
Because it is in the Defense budget, this aid is not subject to the human-rights and other conditions that apply to programs in the foreign aid budget. For instance, none of this military aid is “frozen” pending a State Department human-rights certification. (The Defense budget does have a version of the so-called “Leahy Law” that cuts aid to military units that violate human rights with impunity, but the provision is significantly weaker than the Leahy Law in the foreign aid bill.)
It is difficult to get detailed information about what “Section 1004” aid pays for in Colombia. Most years, the law has required no public reporting or reporting to Congress. As a result, in some years it has been very difficult for us to get a decent estimate even of the overall amount of aid Colombia has received.
It follows that this is the part of our aid estimate in which we have the least confidence. The $200 million figure we cite for 2005 comes from the Congressional Research Service (PDF format), whose researcher was only able to obtain it in a phone conversation with a Defense Department counter-narcotics official. Thankfully, we should be able to get a more solid dollar figure for 2005, and perhaps more detail, by April 15 of this year. Congress wisely approved a new reporting requirement for “Section 1004” aid in its 2006 Defense Authorization bill (section 1021 of H.R. 1815, which President Bush just signed into law).
I.C. Foreign Military Financing (FMF)
(2004: $98.5 million / 2005 estimate: $99.2 million / 2006 request: $90.0 million)Let’s leave the defense budget and move back to the foreign aid process, in which programs are managed by the State Department and congressional oversight is more thorough. After the ACI, the foreign aid bill's second-largest source of military aid is Foreign Military Financing.
FMF is the largest military-aid program in U.S. law. It can buy weapons or defense services for any purpose – it’s not limited to counter-narcotics, for instance. It was used heavily in Central America twenty years ago, and most of it goes to the Middle East today.
Colombia got almost no FMF during the 1990s, when the focus of U.S. aid was counter-drugs only. That changed in 2003, after the Bush administration asked for (and received) a big package of FMF to help the Colombian military protect the Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline in the northeastern department of Arauca. FMF paid for helicopters and other equipment, weapons, training and improvement of facilities, among other things, for Colombian military and police units in Arauca, especially the army’s 18th Brigade. (See the recent report on this program [PDF format] by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, of the U.S. Congress.)
Today, FMF is the main source of aid specifically for the Colombian military’s fight against armed groups, supporting many specialized and mobile units with training, parts, and equipment like weapons and night-vision goggles. It funds a host of initiatives, from medical evacuation, improved logistics, boats and aircraft for the navy and air force, and above all, support for “Plan Patriota,” the Uribe government’s effort to re-take guerrilla-held territory by military force. FMF probably does not pay for any police aid.
FMF generally does not pay for training; in 2004, it funded only 58 Colombian trainees. Twenty-five percent of FMF military aid, about $22.5 million in 2006, is frozen until the State Department certifies that Colombia is properly investigating and punishing military human-rights violations and paramilitary collaboration.
I.D. Anti-Terrorism Assistance (NADR/ATA)
(2004: $0 / 2005 estimate: $3.9 million / 2006 request: $3.9 million)Though one might expect a program called “Anti-Terrorism Assistance” to be one of the biggest accounts in the entire foreign aid budget, it is actually a rather small program that mainly provides training and minor equipment. It is a subset of the State Department’s Nonproliferation, Antiterrorism, Demining and Related Programs (NADR) funding account. In Colombia, it has chiefly paid for an “anti-kidnapping initiative.” According to the 2006 Foreign Assistance Budget Justification [PDF format], this has meant giving “tactical and investigative training and equipment to the Colombian Government's military and police anti-kidnapping units (Unified Action Groups for Personal Liberty-Spanish acronym ‘GAULA’.)” Twenty-five percent of ATA military aid (not police aid) is subject to human-rights conditions; this amount, however, is probably quite small, less than half a million dollars.
I.E. International Military Education and Training (IMET)
(2004: $1.7 million / 2005 estimate: $1.7 million / 2006 request: $1.7 million)IMET is the main military-training program in the foreign aid budget. Like FMF, ACI and ATA, it is overseen by the State Department. For the most part, it pays for training in non-drug subjects. It is usually the main source of funding, for instance, for students at the successor to the U.S. Army School of the Americas, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) at Fort Benning, Georgia. IMET paid for the training of 704 Colombians in 2004. Twenty-five percent of any IMET for the Colombian military is subject to human-rights certification.
I.F. Smaller programs
(2004: $0.8 million / 2005 estimate: $2.4 million / 2006 request: $2.3 million)Smaller amounts of aid sometimes trickle through the following accounts.
In foreign aid legislation and overseen by the State Department:
- Excess Defense Articles (EDA): Transfers of equipment and weapons considered to be “surplus” or excess.
- Emergency Drawdowns: Presidential authority to take non-excess defense articles from existing stocks and give them to other countries to address a “counter-narcotics emergency.” This authority has not been used since 1999.
- Small Arms / Light Weapons (NADR/SALW): Grants to assist in halting trafficking in small arms.
In the Defense Department’s budget:
- Counter-Terror Fellowship Program (CTFP): sort of a Pentagon clone of IMET, for counter-terror purposes. Established in 2002, the CTFP funded the training of 542 Colombians in 2004.
- Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (CHDS): Grants for education in defense management at a Defense-Department school in Washington. Many of the 30-70 Colombian students each year are civilians.
II. Economic and social aid
(2004: $135.0 million / 2005 estimate: $131.3 million / 2006 request: $138.5 million)
II.A.Andean Counterdrug Initiative (ACI)
(2004: $135.0 million / 2005 estimate: $131.3 million / 2006 request: $138.5 million)The largest source of military aid to Colombia also accounts for nearly all economic aid to Colombia. Colombia is considered too “wealthy” for the development programs that USAID normally administers (compared to Nicaragua, Bolivia or Haiti, it is wealthy). As a result, funding for priorities like alternative development, aid to displaced people, judicial reform and human rights goes to the State Department’s narcotics bureau, which then passes much of it on to USAID. This arrangement has been the source of endless bureaucratic battles, which Congress has sought to address by requiring that a minimum of ACI money go straight to USAID.
The aid that goes to USAID is divided into three categories. See USAID’s 2006 Budget Justification for more