A Cautionary Tale

Working in Washington on U.S. policy towards Colombia since 1998, we have been in ring-side seats observing and participating in debates on the U.S. aid program and policy known as “Plan Colombia.” As we watched another massive multi-year counternarcotics package, the Mérida Initiative for Mexico and Central America, and as we advocated for an approach that protected human rights, we wanted to share some of the lessons we have learned. Although there are some positive lessons, it is mainly a cautionary tale.

—Lisa Haugaard and Adam Isacson

The Mérida Initiative Launches

In December 2006, Felipe Calderón began his presidency with a virtual declaration of war. As the new President of Mexico, his electoral mandate was weak after having barely won a plurality of the vote, less than a single percentage point over his opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Seeking to bolster popular support and legitimacy, he seized on a political initiative engineered to take on one of Mexicans’ central concerns—violence linked to drug trafficking and the country’s deteriorating public security crisis.

More cocaine was transiting through Mexico from Andean source countries to U.S. drug users, and Mexican criminal organizations had taken over the highly lucrative business of transporting the drugs to the United States, supplanting Colombia’s weakened cartels. Violence between these organized crime groups, and their deep infiltration and corruption of government institutions, were approaching emergency levels in several regions of the country.

Drug and organized crime-related violence killed over 2,000 Mexicans in 2006, roughly doubling the annual number of killings attributed to organized crime just 5 years earlier.¹ Opinion polls routinely showed security outranking the economy and corruption among the Mexican people’s concerns.² The impact of drug and gang violence on people’s lives, and the likelihood of being extorted or kidnapped by criminal groups branching out from the drug trade, was growing rapidly.

President Calderón announced that his administration would turn to Mexico’s armed forces to fight the country’s criminal networks. Mexico’s military had been assigned this internal policing role decades ago, but its engagement had never been as far-reaching as what the new president proposed. Recognizing that Mexico’s federal, state and local police forces were outgunned and hobbled by their own corruption and lack of professional training, equipment, and capacity to carry out complex operations, Calderón’s government deployed what would grow to about 45,000 federal troops, supplemented by federal police, to the streets of cities and the roads of regions hard hit by drug trafficking-related violence. This was a dramatic expansion of the military deployment through Operativo Mexico Seguro (Operation Safe Mexico) initiated by Calderón’s predecessor, Vicente Fox.³

In Washington, the Bush administration applauded President Calderón’s effort. By the end of 2007, the U.S. and Mexican governments had agreed on a $1.4 billion, three-year package of U.S. aid, three-quarters of it for Mexico’s military and police forces. The package was called the “Mérida Initiative,” named for the southern Mexican city where the two presidents met in March 2007 to commit to deeper anti-drug cooperation. Due to long-standing sensitivities about sovereignty and distrust of U.S. intervention in Mexico, the Calderón and Bush administrations took pains to present this package not as U.S. meddling in Mexican affairs, but instead an acknowledgment of co-responsibility by the United States and a Mexican-initiated request for intensified cooperation.

Yet at first, the U.S. and Mexican media called the package “Plan Mexico.”⁴ They were referring to a 2000 aid package to Colombia, a contribution toward an anti-drug strategy known as “Plan Colombia,” which provided a framework for $8 billion in mostly military-police aid to that country over the following decade. Plan Colombia has been controversial because of its mixed results and the severe human rights abuses that Colombia’s U.S.-aided security forces committed. With another heavily military package on the way to Mexico, it looked like the Plan Colombia experience was about to repeat itself.

Indeed, both the Calderón and Bush administrations may have had Colombia in mind. The Mexican president was doubtless aware of the results that Colombian President Álvaro Uribe had achieved—on the battlefield and in the polls—with a military offensive he launched against guerrilla groups after his 2002 election. But the Mexican government and civil society groups alike were wary of a name that suggested direct U.S. intervention in Mexican affairs. In Washington, meanwhile, many officials and analysts portrayed Plan Colombia as a “success” to be replicated in U.S. policy toward Mexico.

Nearly four years after the “Mérida Initiative” launched, meaningful improvements in public security have not been achieved. Rather than stemming the violence, the capture or killing of dozens of major organized crime leaders has made violence more generalized. Organized crime groups, their numbers proliferating from approximately six national confederations to twelve today, have taken on the state and each other in a war of all against all.⁵ The removal of cartel leaders has caused the groups to fragment, triggering new power struggles that have multiplied the violence.

Since Calderón launched the anti-cartel offensive in December 2006, drug and organized crime-related violence has killed about 40,000 people in Mexico. Organized crime has moved into other illegal activities for profit. Extortion of small and large businesses alike have skyrocketed, pushing many to close doors or, in cities like Ciudad Juárez, to flee. Kidnappings for ransom have exploded. Cartels have taken control of human trafficking in many border zones and migrant travel routes, kidnapping, extorting and murdering tens of thousands of migrants, many from Central America. Routes leading up to the U.S. border have become notoriously dangerous, and criminal groups now compete for control of cities ever more distant from the border.

The army, meanwhile, is the subject of an escalating number of reports of human rights abuses. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, or CNDH) received over 4,772 reports of human rights-related complaints committed by members of the military from when Calderón assumed the presidency in December 2006 until March 2011.⁶ These violations—which include arbitrary detention, torture and unlawful killings—reflect an increase of roughly 1000 percent in alleged abuses during the first three years of President Calderón’s administration. Moreover, impunity for security force abuses, whether by the army or by the police, is the norm. According to official data, only a single military human rights violation committed during this time period has resulted in a conviction, when a soldier was found guilty of killing a civilian who failed to stop at a military checkpoint and was sentenced in military court to nine months of prison.⁷

By 2011, Calderon’s drug-war approach had become unpopular in Mexico, as communities in the northern border region and central Mexico were suffering brutally escalated violence and increased citizen security force abuses without seeing an increase in citizen security. Growing frustration was reflected in opinion polls indicating 49 percent of Mexicans felt that the government’s efforts against organized crime had been a failure.⁸ A series of mass mobilizations in mid-2011 were spurred by the murder of seven young people in Cuernavaca, Morelos, one of whom was the son of acclaimed Mexican poet and author Javier Sicilia. Upon hearing the news that his 24-year-old son had been murdered, Sicilia called for nationwide demonstrations in a stirring open letter to Mexico’s “politicians and criminals,” declaring that “we will go out into the street: because we do not want one more child, one more son, assassinated.”

Sicilia’s grief and “cry of indignation” resonated with Mexicans across the country and proved to be a catalyst for unified action.⁹ A growing movement of Mexican civil society, ranging from business leaders to intellectuals, youth and women’s organizations to religious leaders, called for No Mas Sangre (No More Bloodshed). Victims groups, frustrated because their loved ones are too often framed by authorities as mere statistics or collateral damage, or blamed for being involved in drug trafficking themselves, are playing a pivotal role in this movement.

This anger was given an even more public stage when Javier Sicilia and other leaders from the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad) participated in a televised meeting with President Calderón in June 2011. Leaders and victims’ family members shared their personal stories of loss, anger and frustration—and urged the administration to shift its offensive on organized crime away from showy captures and dramatic actions towards a focus on protecting citizens.

The United States Weighs Its Options

The U.S. government’s concern with the violence in Mexico is growing. It continues to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of aid within the Mérida Initiative framework, and despite the U.S. budget crunch it appears that new aid will continue to be approved.

The U.S. government has not settled on one approach in terms of the kinds of aid provided. After a focus on big-ticket equipment such as helicopters in the initial aid package, FY2010 assistance placed more emphasis on rule of law, including judicial assistance, a shift for which our organizations advocated. But the final FY2011 package cut proposed nonmilitary assistance, shifting the balance back towards the military side of the scale while reducing overall amounts.

Beyond the assistance described in the accompanying chart, there also are intelligence and other kinds of security support that are not easily traceable in foreign aid budgets. The New York Times recently reported, “The United States is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.”¹⁰ The Times notes that the U.S. government is sending unmanned drones over Mexican territory to capture video of smuggling routes, and is flying manned planes with eavesdropping capacity. The Washington Post reports that “Mexico is at the top of its wish list” for the U.S. military’s Special Operations Joint Command, although “so far the Mexican government, whose constitution limits contact with the U.S. military, is relying on the other federal agencies—the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—for intelligence collection and other help.”¹¹

Some voices in the Washington debate want to ramp up military, police, and even counter-insurgency aid to Mexico. These include congressional Republicans and commentators who are pushing for a U.S. policy that treats Mexico’s criminal groups like “terrorists” or “insurgents.” Others distrust any non-military assistance, arguing that Mexico’s institutions are hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional, instead advocating more funds for U.S.-side border security efforts. As despair over Mexico’s lack of progress against violence mounts, those who liken its challenges to terrorism or insurgency—and thus favor a counter-terror or counterinsurgency approach—continue to point to Plan Colombia as a model for how to proceed.

U.S. policymakers’ desire for Mexico’s leadership to come together on a coherent, comprehensive strategy is understandable. But the idea of Colombia as an example to follow is troubling. The “success” of the past several years in Colombia is only a partial, and fragile, victory at best—and it has come at an unacceptably high human and institutional cost. Meanwhile the Colombian and Mexican contexts are wildly different. The blueprint and strategy behind the Colombia aid package makes little sense when applied to Mexico.

Plan Colombia does carry a host of lessons for U.S. policy toward Mexico, Central America and other areas of the world. These lessons, though, are not the ones that the “Plan Colombia is a model” crowd might expect to draw from the Colombia experience. Especially where human rights are concerned, it is mainly a cautionary tale.

Plan Colombia’s Results

In July 2000, the U.S. Congress approved the Clinton administration’s request for $1.3 billion in “emergency” aid to Colombia and its neighbors. Of the initial $860 million for Colombia, three-quarters went to the country’s security forces. Over the next ten years, successive U.S. administrations would provide Colombia with an additional $6.5 billion, with the same three-quarters going to Colombia’s army, navy, air force and police.

As the Clinton Administration launched U.S. support for Plan Colombia in 2000, Colombia was aflame. The government of President Andrés Pastrana was making no progress in talks with leftist guerrilla groups, whose combined strength exceeded 20,000. They and a similar number of pro-government paramilitary militias massacred, disappeared, displaced, and indiscriminately bombed tens of thousands of Colombian civilians each year, while the military and police stood accused not just of their own murders and tortures, but of widespread collaboration with the brutal, drug-funded paramilitaries. The likelihood of being one of nearly 3,000 yearly kidnap victims had made road travel between major cities impossible, while Colombia produced three-quarters of the world’s supply of cocaine and coca, the plant used to produce it.

By 2002, peace talks with the FARC and ELN guerrillas had fallen apart. Colombians elected a new president, Álvaro Uribe, who promised to take the fight to the guerrillas. His “Democratic Security” policy ratcheted up Colombia’s military budget, with a special tax on the wealthiest, increased the size of the security forces by about two-thirds, and sent them on a nationwide anti-guerrilla offensive. Non-combatants were encouraged to get involved in the conflict by providing intelligence about guerrilla activity in exchange for rewards. Uribe’s government negotiated a deal with the pro-government paramilitaries: if they agreed to demobilize, most would be amnestied and the worst abusers would have to confess and serve light sentences. President Uribe defended the military from all criticism. In the president’s discourse, those who denounced military human rights abuse were sympathizers of the guerrillas—words that put human rights defenders, journalists and opposition politicians in danger.

The Bush administration, which was in the process of delivering Plan Colombia aid, was delighted to have a partner who shared its goals. U.S. assistance paid for a massive campaign to eradicate coca by spraying herbicides from aircraft, as well as cocaine interdiction programs, an effort to protect an oil pipeline from guerrilla bombings, the creation of mobile military units, adjustments to Colombian doctrine and strategy, and—by the mid-2000s—accompaniment of large-scale anti-guerrilla military offensives. This aid included the delivery of about 90 helicopters, the spraying of 3.2 million acres of Colombian territory with herbicides, and the training of over 70,000 Colombian military and police personnel.

This massive investment’s results on reducing coca production are mixed. Though U.S. and UN estimates differ, both sources show a similar trend: coca and cocaine cultivation have been dropping in Colombia in the last several years, after several years of increases. The most important reductions have occurred since about 2007, however, after the fumigation program—the centerpiece of Plan Colombia at its outset—began to be scaled back in favor of efforts to increase the government’s on-the-ground presence in coca-growing zones. Still, Colombia remains the world’s number-one producer of coca and cocaine, and Mexican officials say publicly that the flow of cocaine from the Andes has not changed noticeably. While much of their product now ends up quickly in the hands of Mexican cartels, Colombia’s drug syndicates, which include “new” paramilitaries and guerrilla fronts as well as narco-criminals, continue exercising economic power, and corrupting the government, in much of the country.

The U.S. and Colombian governments maintain that Plan Colombia has led to a reduction in violence. Comparing the violence now to the levels of the 1990s, it is evident that Colombia’s situation has improved in many areas of the country. Kidnappings have been deeply curtailed, and government statistics show that homicides were reduced by a third—though Colombia’s murder rate of 34 per 100,000 residents is still nearly double Mexico’s. The FARC and ELN have seen their numbers reduced by more than half, and their ability to abuse the population has been reduced as they have been pushed into more remote areas. The paramilitary umbrella organization dominant a decade ago, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), has disbanded.

But this simple before-and-after comparison is not the full human rights story. First, comparing the 1990s to today leaves out the violence and human rights abuses that took place during the U.S.-funded Plan Colombia. From 2000-2004, paramilitary violence, often with collaboration by the army, spiraled tragically upwards. These were nightmare years for many living in rural areas, with massacres, selected killings, and the high peak of forced disappearances.¹³ Between 2000 and 2010, over 3 million people were driven from their homes by violence.¹⁴ Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities were disproportionately affected by displacement and human rights abuses, to devastating effect: Thirty-two indigenous groups are on the verge of extinction, and Afro-Colombian communities make up a disproportionate share of the displaced and the dispossessed. An estimated 12,800 women may have been raped by illegal armed actors, over 1,900 of them raped by members of the army, according to one survey.¹⁵ Under pressure to produce high body counts, soldiers allegedly murdered more than 3,000 civilians, the vast majority between 2004 to 2008.¹⁶ In this “false positives” scandal, soldiers dressed their victims in guerrilla uniforms and claimed them as killed in battle. Institutions of government were corrupted and democracy undermined as members of Congress, many linked to the governing coalition, colluded with paramilitary leaders. The Uribe administration’s presidential intelligence agency spied on and threatened members of the Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, journalists, unions and human rights groups.

Second, some of the security gains may be transitory. While the guerrillas’ scope of operations has been reduced, both groups’ combined strength is still about 10,000 and they carry out attacks on a daily basis. In 2010, guerrilla actions killed over 450 Colombian military and police personnel, about the same number as 2002. Thousands of former AUC paramilitaries or new fighters have taken up arms again, in a proliferation of “new” paramilitary groups that kill and intimidate any who stand in the way of their narcotrafficking and large-scale theft of agricultural land. There are now five or six major groupings of “new” paramilitaries, totaling 4,000 to 10,000 members.¹⁷ Their increasing activity underlies a leveling-off or reversal in Colombia’s drop in violence. Many parts of the country, including major cities like Bogotá, Medellín and Cali, have seen murder rates creeping back up since 2008.¹⁸

The failure to achieve justice in these cases is one factor allowing violence to spiral anew. The Justice and Peace law governing demobilization of paramilitaries established reduced sentences for paramilitaries who confessed to major crimes, but only four leaders have actually been convicted for mass atrocities, receiving eight-year “alternative” sentences. Nearly thirty of the AUC leaders were extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges,¹⁹ undercutting efforts to have them face some limited justice for mass atrocities. The Colombian government failed to effectively use the demobilization to dismantle the paramilitaries’ political and financial support networks. While the Santos Administration that took office in August 2010 has acknowledged the expanding paramilitary successor groups as a problem, it has not yet been able to successfully direct the security forces to devote equal time to confronting these groups and protecting communities at risk from their violence.

As of 2011, the human rights situation is somewhat improved but still grim. While the “new” paramilitaries’ violence is increasing, it is not to the levels of the AUC, and guerrilla capacity to inflict damage to civilians is reduced. Extrajudicial executions allegedly committed by the army have been reduced. The Santos Administration has decidedly turned away from rhetoric that placed human rights activists in danger, and shepherded through Congress a landmark victims’ law that promises to provide reparations and land return to victims of all actors in the conflict.

Still, conflict-related violence kills nearly a thousand people each year and displaces hundreds of thousands from their homes, paramilitary successor groups have regrouped and continue to devastate communities, threats and attacks against human rights defenders and community leaders, especially land rights leaders, have escalated, and human rights abuses are still rarely investigated and punished. The civilian justice system’s efforts to investigate and punish extrajudicial killings have been slow, often facing fierce resistance from the U.S.-aided military.

The Contexts

Plan Colombia’s mixed results should give pause to any who would view it as a “model” for application in Mexico or Central America. Still, Colombia is the only Latin American country to have significantly reduced violent crime in the past ten years, so the Plan Colombia and Democratic Security recipes may appear tempting to policymakers. The contexts are so different, though, that it would make little sense to prepare the same ingredients in the same way in Mexico or Central America.

Yes, there are some similarities. These countries have some of the world’s most unequal distributions of wealth. They suffer from a related phenomenon of chronic impunity: corruption, violence and human rights abuse have rarely been punished when committed by the powerful few; this low probability of punishment allowed the drug trade to take root with little initial resistance.

But the contexts’ similarities largely end there. The territorial nature of the violence, and its relationship to the government, are different. Colombia is a democratic state with a weak presence in much of the national territory. Since the mid-1990s—following the demise of the big drug cartels discussed below—its main security challenge has been a mostly rural conflict involving a leftist insurgency and rightwing paramilitary militia network, both funded by drugs and organized as military structures. The conflict is worst in rural territories and urban slums where national and local authorities never bothered to govern, leaving a vacuum that armed groups quickly filled.

By contrast, Mexico is emerging from 70 years of authoritarian rule by a one-party government that, through a combination of repression and co-optation, managed to be strongly present in most of the national territory. This presence was only rarely military: unlike their Colombian counterparts, Mexico’s secretive, aloof armed forces spent most of the 20th century out of the political and social arena, guarding their institutional prerogatives and, in most territories, interacting infrequently with citizens. Though the civilian state and police were physically present, they tended to be so easily corrupted that organized crime penetrated many institutions, especially along key trafficking corridors like main roads and population centers. As a result, organized crime’s power—and violence—is most keenly felt in areas, like major border cities, where the government is already present. While some parts of rural Mexico are dangerous, particularly trafficking corridors and zones of marijuana cultivation, the geographic coverage, participation and impact of Mexico’s insurgency or paramilitary networks have been far less than those of Colombia’s in recent decades, with a presence notable in only certain regions of central and southern Mexico.

If anything, levels of violence and entrenched corruption in regions of Mexico today bear some resemblance to Colombia long before the Plan Colombia years, during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is important to remember that “Plan Colombia,” the strategy launched in 2000, was not an anti-cartel effort. By the time Plan Colombia came about, Colombia’s era of big drug cartels was already over. Instead, Plan Colombia in its initial incarnation focused on eradicating illicit crop cultivation, increasing drug interdiction, and improving the security forces’ ability to confront guerrillas.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Colombia was experiencing levels of violence nearly as critical as those of the Plan Colombia period a decade later. During this earlier period, the worst of the violence was taking place in populated areas and key trafficking corridors, much like Mexico today.

At the time, guerrillas were viewed as a relatively low-level problem. The Soviet Union was collapsing, leftist guerrilla groups were negotiating peace deals throughout the Americas, and those that remained in Colombia’s countryside—the FARC and ELN, which got little money from drugs at the time—were expected to fade away. The most urgent problem on Colombian and U.S. leaders’ minds were the big drug cartels, which acted like illegal multinational corporations.

Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel and the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers’ Cali cartel amassed great wealth and power, operating brazenly in zones that appeared to be under the government’s control. They did so by corrupting government institutions: the security forces, the judiciary, and local officials. Elite, Bogotá-based police units hunting for fugitive Pablo Escobar went to great lengths to keep “regular” Medellín police at a distance, as they were widely viewed as controlled by the narcos (the police “Search Bloc” hunting Escobar, wrote journalist Mark Bowden in his 2001 book Killing Pablo, “didn’t dare ask the Medellín police for help, because it was known to be largely on the cartel’s payroll”).²⁰ The Calderón government has faced similar challenges in Mexico today, as many state and municipal police units appear to have been thoroughly penetrated (or outgunned and threatened into submission) by the country’s big trafficking organizations.

Violence levels steadily rose as the Medellín and Cali cartels fought each other. Then, as the United States prodded Colombia’s state to do more to confront them—and especially to extradite their leaders —the cartels began aiming their attacks at the state and civilians. Escobar’s anti-extradition campaign, which included terrorist acts ranging from car bombs to blowing up aircraft to assassinating leading presidential candidates, claimed thousands of civilian lives. As in Mexico today, the government’s decision to kick the hornet’s nest brought a sharp rise in violence.

By 1995, however, Escobar and most of his top henchmen were dead or in jail, and the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers had been captured. The Medellín and Cali cartels were decapitated and dismantled.

What took the cartels down was not the Plan Colombia model of crop eradication combined with “shock and awe” military offensives. Dozens of helicopters were not needed. All of that came much later. What did the job in the early 1990s was:

Intelligence work carried out by heavily vetted police units, almost a “police within a police” due to a lack of trust in the larger, corrupted “regular” security forces. Colombia’s National Police underwent a major purge later, in the mid-1990s. This improved its reputation and lowered corruption levels, though police corruption at the local level remains a very serious challenge today.

Units within the justice system, including a prosecutor-general’s office (Fiscalía) empowered by a new (1991) constitution, played an instrumental role in building cases and unraveling networks.

Colombia’s armed forces, which strongly preferred to focus on the guerrilla war, played only a minimal role, devoting only a small share of their resources to the cartel fight. Unlike Mexico today, Colombia never sent the soldiers into the streets with the same policing powers, or with the goal of supplanting local police.

Of course, as Mexico may yet find, bringing down the cartels proved to be a hollow victory for Colombia. The Medellín and Cali cartels’ mid-1990s disappearance registered as little more than a blip on cocaine supplies, prices or purity levels in the U.S. drug market. U.S. addicts’ voracious demand for cocaine persisted, as access to drug treatment remained insufficient at home. The absence of Colombia’s state, and its corruption at the local level, persisted as well. As a result, smaller drug-trafficking structures, plus guerrillas and paramilitaries, rushed to fill the vacuum.

Colombia found itself confronting dozens of “baby cartels,” small trafficking organizations that, while lacking the fallen cartels’ multinational reach, maintained violent control over production or trafficking in specific zones. Today, Mexico may be on the verge of its own “micro-cartel” phenomenon as big criminal syndicates, their top leaders arrested or killed, are fragmenting. Analyst Eduardo Guerrero counted six principal cartels in Mexico in 2007; by 2010, as cartels suffer schisms between mid-level leaders, he found twelve major groups and a host of smaller bands.²¹ Journalist Patrick Corcoran calls it “the dominance of a handful of hegemonic groups replaced by a criminal free-for-all.”²²

With the cartels gone, Colombia’s violence took on a whole new form as the FARC and the paramilitaries got more deeply involved in the more lucrative parts of the drug trade, production and transshipment. They encouraged coca-growing in the territories they controlled, and gained control of processing laboratories and shipping routes. This quickly brought them a torrent of cash; both the FARC and AUC roughly quadrupled in size during the 1990s. The decades-old conflict escalated sharply, taking violence levels to new heights and spurring the hemisphere’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Plan Colombia was developed to take on that form of the problem, and as we’ve seen, it achieved only mixed results. The strategies that Colombia pursued in its earlier cartel period—specialized police units, intelligence improvements, efforts to increase police and judicial capacities, and a minimal military role—achieved their immediate goal of toppling the big drug organizations, but failed to reduce either drug supplies or levels of violence.

Instead of a model to be emulated, Colombia—whether in its “Plan Colombia” phase or its earlier anti-cartel phase—is an experience from which to draw lessons. Often, we would do well to learn from something that was not done, or that had a damaging impact, in Colombia.

Several of these lessons have to do with the overall strategy:

1. Clean your own house.

2. Ensure that every element of an aid strategy seeks to strengthen civilian government, curtail impunity, or create opportunity for excluded sectors.

3. Know whom you are working with.

4. Know whom you are opposing.

5. Don’t militarize.

6. Measure the results that matter.

Several more have to do with the strategy’s impact on human rights:

7. Know this: With U.S. military aid, human rights abuses may increase.

8. Strengthening justice is essential, but pay attention to political will.

9. Human rights conditions are a flawed but useful tool.

10. Even positive human rights and development activities can get subsumed to military goals.

11. U.S. intelligence assistance, even when provided for legitimate purposes, may be used for criminal ends.

12. First and foremost, protect the population.

The rest of this publication will discuss these lessons.

Six Lessons for the Overall Strategy

1. Clean Your Own House.

The United States’ domestic drug demand-reduction efforts were always viewed as peripheral to Plan Colombia. Though an increasing body of studies tells us that access to drug treatment is the most cost-effective way to reduce demand, the Bush administration oversaw a slight reduction in the federal drug-treatment budget during the Plan Colombia years.²³ While policymakers routinely acknowledged the necessity of drug treatment programs, these are administered by an entirely different bureaucracy (Health and Human Services) and funded by entirely different congressional committees. Plan Colombia and drug treatment were never combined as components of a coherent approach. And policymakers have never seriously considered the advantages of moving towards a public health, rather than a criminal justice, approach towards illicit drug users.

As a result, while cocaine use in the United States has declined over the past 20 years as users’ preferences have shifted, the United States is still the number-one consuming country. U.S. users consumed approximately 36 percent of the world’s supply of cocaine in 2010, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime—more than all of West and Central Europe.²⁴

America’s failure to “clean its house” is perhaps even more evident in the non-response to one of Mexico’s chief requests: that the U.S. government do more to control the southbound flow of firearms trafficked from the United States into criminals’ hands in Mexico. When President Calderón addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress in May 2010, he underscored that “there is one issue where Mexico needs your cooperation. And that is stopping the flow of assault weapons and other deadly arms across the border.” He urged legislators to renew the federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004.

U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) data revealed in June 2011 tell us that 70 percent of guns that Mexican authorities captured at crime scenes in 2009 and 2010 came from the United States, most of them purchased at gun shops and gun shows in border states.²⁵ The Obama administration finally took a small step forward to address this critical issue, with President Obama announcing in July 2011 a new requirement that obligates firearms dealers in the four southwest border states to report to the ATF if an individual tries to purchase two or more semi-automatic rifles over a five-day period. The outcry from Mexico in response to the controversial ATF gun trafficking sting, Operation Fast and Furious,²⁶ has drawn attention to not just the staggering number of firearms that flow over the U.S. southwest border, but to loopholes and shortcomings in U.S. policies regarding firearms purchases that have enabled straw purchasers and other gun traffickers in the United States to channel thousands of weapons to organized crime in Mexico. However, the political fallout over the highly flawed Operation Fast and Furious and the NRA’s reaction to the Obama Administration’s modest step illustrate how difficult it will be to muster the political will in the United States to tackle its contribution to Mexico’s devastating gun violence.

The United States also falls short in the effort to stop Mexican traffickers from laundering money. The U.S. Justice Department estimates that Mexican groups manage to bring between $25 billion and $40 billion in proceeds from the United States to Mexico every year, an amount similar to Mexico’s oil revenues. As much as two-thirds of that may go simply as bulk cash transfers, of which the United States has detected perhaps 3 percent. Though the United States has strong laws like the Bank Secrecy Act and the Patriot Act, enforcement is modest. Money-laundering convictions average no more than 2,000 annually, according to a study by Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland and former U.S. Treasury official Edwin Truman. “Given the suspected scope of the activity,” say the authors, “this suggests that money-laundering is not a very risky activity.”²⁷

The United States is letting Colombia, Mexico and Central America down when it fails to act on drug treatment, arms-trafficking control, and money laundering. Yet U.S. politicians have shown themselves unwilling to take steps necessary to address these three areas. That is mainly because “cleaning our house” is politically more difficult than sending aid packages.

Increasing access to drug treatment means challenging not only budget hawks opposed to domestic spending, but running afoul of constituents who don’t want treatment centers bringing undesirable addicts to their neighborhoods. Proposing anything that sounds remotely like gun control means taking on the powerful U.S. gun lobby. (Witness the anger of Republican legislators after President Calderón’s 2010 address; “It was inappropriate for President Calderón to lecture Americans on our own state and federal laws,” said Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas). “Moreover, the Second Amendment is not a subject open for diplomatic negotiation, with Mexico or any other nation.”) Finally, increasing money-laundering enforcement will mean taking on the banking sector, another powerful lobby.

U.S. politicians have avoided these hard choices. Sending helicopters and spray planes is a far easier choice politically, even if the net impact is far smaller. The United States is asking authorities in Colombia, Mexico and elsewhere to take a number of politically difficult, even widely unpopular, steps in the name of fighting drugs and organized crime. We should lead by example and take more politically difficult steps at home.

2. Be guided by three goals: strengthening the civilian government, curtailing impunity, and creating opportunity for excluded sectors.

Strengthening the civilian government means making sure that, for the first time, none of the population lives without a government. Stateless areas are not a vacuum: they get occupied by violent groups that menace the population.

The experience of Colombia has made clear that “government” must mean far more than “military or police.” While security is arguably the most basic public good the government can provide, a military occupation cannot create the conditions for economic prosperity or the exercise of basic freedoms. Military occupations of ungoverned areas fail if the rest of the government—teachers, health care workers, road-builders, judges, police—doesn’t arrive quickly.

In its first years, Plan Colombia badly neglected civilian governance. The emphasis was instead on military operations and aerial eradication. Eighty percent of U.S. aid went to those priorities; most of the rest went to hastily arranged, geographically limited crop-substitution programs managed by contractors. Many—likely most—rural inhabitants saw little more than army patrols and spray planes. The coca-growing zones where Plan Colombia began a decade ago, like Guaviare, Putumayo, Caquetá and Nariño, remain as violent and poor as they were then.

In 2004-2006, a large-scale military offensive, with U.S. advice and logistical support, allowed the military to occupy towns throughout a vast region that had been the FARC’s principal stronghold. This offensive, known as “Plan Patriota,” came with no plan to bring in the rest of the civilian government. Military personnel found themselves on their own, playing governance roles for which they had no training. Years later, with a lack of investment leaving the state presence uncertain, this zone is among those in which the FARC remains most active.

During the second half of the decade, some officials began to realize that the civilian governance element was missing. By 2008 the prevailing strategy had shifted toward a concept called “Consolidation.” In several conflictive zones of Colombia, the plan is now for security operations to give way quickly to other, civilian government agencies. Where it has been attempted—and at great cost— “Consolidation” certainly represents learning over what came before. However, in no zone has the military yet given way to a functioning civilian government. Instead, soldiers are carrying out a host of untraditional, non-combat roles, from paving roads to holding community development meetings.

Bringing in a state presence, meanwhile, can do more harm than good if the government’s representatives can act with impunity. Curtailing impunity is vital, and it requires a well-resourced justice system but also political will. Whether they are military or civilian, if officials know they will not be punished for violating human rights, abusing their power, engaging in corruption or working with organized crime, they will be far more likely to do so. Unless it is investigated, tried and punished with swiftness and transparency, abuse or corruption can undermine the entire strategy.

A population that knows no government presence may want to be governed, but a population that sees the security forces colluding with armed groups and criminals may want no part of the state in their territory. That lack of trust is one of the tragic results of Colombia’s unpunished human rights abuses.

Creating opportunity for excluded sectors of the population is also vital to the strategy’s success. Smallholding farmers, forcibly displaced people, and unemployed urban youth are unlikely to emerge from poverty through market forces alone. Those with no marketable skills will be ignored by the legal market, but not by the illegal market. It is up to governments to invest in their people, building capacities and encouraging local, small-scale enterprise, to ensure that organized crime no longer appears to be a rational economic choice for so many.

Above all, governments must avoid policy choices that do harm to economically vulnerable populations. Favoring capital-intensive agribusiness, forcibly eradicating coca without alternatives, failing to prevent displacement or help its victims, or neglecting the “ni-ni” population (young people who neither study nor hold jobs) can undermine any effort to reduce violence and illegal activity.

A strong state, in more than just the military sense; a justice system that can punish wrongdoing; and an effort to create legal ways to make a living. If an element of the strategy is not supporting these goals, it should be reconsidered. Aerial fumigation, 80-percent-military/police aid packages, downplaying of human rights abuses, and insufficient attention to displaced populations were all hallmarks of Plan Colombia. They did not support these goals, and should have been changed from the start.

The Obama administration’s framework for Mexico aid, based on “four pillars,” appears to recognize the importance of these goals. (These “pillars” are “Disrupt Capacity of Organized Crime to Operate,” “Institutionalize Capacity to Sustain Rule of Law,” “Create a 21st Century Border Structure,” and “Build Strong and Resilient Communities.”) This is a significant shift, especially after the conspicuous emphasis on military hardware during the Mérida initiative’s first years. However, only time—and close citizen and legislative oversight—will tell whether the framework will in fact guide U.S. assistance, or whether the highest profile will be given to strengthening the uniformed part of Mexico’s state. The same concern is paramount for Colombia’s “Consolidation” program.

3. Know whom you are wor

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