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Title: The Colombia Plan
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: June 2000
Language: en
Topics: Colombia, US foreign interventions
Source: Retrieved on 22nd June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200006__/

Noam Chomsky

The Colombia Plan

In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of U.S. military and

police assistance, replacing Turkey (Israel and Egypt are in a separate

category). The figure is scheduled to increase sharply with the

anticipated passage of Clinton’s Colombia Plan, a $1.6 billion

“emergency aid” package for two years. Through the 1990s, Colombia has

been the leading recipient of U.S. military aid in Latin America, and

has also compiled the worst human rights record, in conformity with a

well-established correlation.

We can often learn from systematic patterns, so let us focus for a

moment on the previous champion, Turkey. As a major U.S. military ally

and strategic outpost, Turkey has received substantial military aid from

the origins of the Cold War. But arms deliveries began to increase

sharply in 1984 with no Cold War connection at all. Rather, that was the

year when Turkey initiated a large-scale counterinsurgency campaign in

the Kurdish southeast, which also is the site of major U.S. air bases

and the locus of regional surveillance, so that everything that happens

there is well known in Washington. Arms deliveries peaked in 1997,

exceeding the total from the entire period 1950–1983. U.S. arms amounted

to about 80 percent of Turkish military equipment, including heavy

armaments (jet planes, tanks, etc.).

By 1999, Turkey had largely suppressed Kurdish resistance by terror and

ethnic cleansing, leaving some 2–3 million refugees, 3,500 villages

destroyed (7 times Kosovo under NATO bombs), and tens of thousands

killed. A huge flow of arms from the Clinton administration was no

longer needed to accomplish these objectives. Turkey can therefore be

singled out for praise for its “positive experiences” in showing how

“tough counterterrorism measures plus political dialogue with

non-terrorist opposition groups” can overcome the plague of violence and

atrocities, so we learn from the lead article in the New York Times on

the State Department’s “latest annual report describing the

administration’s efforts to combat terrorism.”

Nevertheless, despite the great success achieved by some of the most

extreme state terror of the 1990s, military operations continue while

Kurds are still deprived of elementary rights. On April 1, 10,000

Turkish troops began new ground sweeps in the regions that had been most

devastated by the U.S.-Turkish terror campaigns of the preceding years,

also launching another offensive into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish

guerrilla forces—in a no-fly zone where Kurds are protected by the U.S.

airforce from the (temporarily) wrong oppressor. As these new campaigns

were beginning, Secretary of Defense William Cohen addressed the

American-Turkish Council, a festive occasion with much laughter and

applause, according to the government report. He praised Turkey for

taking part in the humanitarian bombing of Yugoslavia, apparently

without embarrassment, and announced that Turkey had been invited to

join in co-production of the new Joint Strike Aircraft, just as it has

been co-producing the F-16s that it used to such good effect in approved

varieties of ethnic cleansing and atrocities within its own territory,

as a loyal member of NATO.

In Colombia, however, the military armed and trained by the United

States has not crushed domestic resistance, though it continues to

produce its regular annual toll of atrocities. Each year, some 300,000

new refugees are driven from their homes, with a death toll of about

3,000 and many horrible massacres. The great majority of atrocities are

attributed to the paramilitary forces that are closely linked to the

military, as documented in detail once again in February 2000 by Human

Rights Watch, and in April 2000 by a UN study which reported that the

Colombian security forces that are to be greatly strengthened by the

Colombia Plan maintain an intimate relationship with death-squads,

organize paramilitary forces, and either participate in their massacres

directly or, by failing to take action, have “undoubtedly enabled the

paramilitary groups to achieve their exterminating objectives.” The

Colombian Commission of Jurists reported in September 1999 that the rate

of killings had increased by almost 20 percent over the preceding year,

and that the proportion attributable to the paramilitaries had risen

from 46 percent in 1995 to almost 80 percent in 1998, continuing through

1999. The Colombian government’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (De-

fensoria del Pueblo) reported a 68 percent increase in massacres in the

first half of 1999 as compared to the same period of 1998, reaching more

than one a day, overwhelmingly attributed to paramilitaries.

We may recall that in the early months of 1999, while massacres were

proceeding at over one a day in Colombia, there was also a large

increase in atrocities (including many massacres) in East Timor carried

out by Indonesian commandoes armed and trained by the U.S. In both

cases, the conclusion drawn was exactly as in Turkey: support the

killers. There was also one reported massacre in Kosovo, at Racak on

January 15, the event that allegedly inspired such horror among Western

humanitarians that it was necessary to bomb Yugoslavia 10 weeks later

with the expectation, quickly fulfilled, that the consequence would be a

sharp escalation of atrocities. The accompanying torrent of

self-congratulation, which has few if any counterparts, heralded a “new

era” in human affairs in which the “enlightened states” will selflessly

dedicate themselves to the defense of human rights. Putting aside the

actual facts about Kosovo, the performance was greatly facilitated by

silence or deceit about the participation of the same powers in

comparable or worse atrocities at the very same time.

R eturning to Colombia, prominent human rights activists continue to

flee abroad under death threats, including now the courageous head of

the Church-based human rights group Justice and Peace, Fr. Javier

Giraldo, who has played an outstanding role in defending human rights.

The AFL-CIO reports that several trade unionists are murdered every

week, mostly by paramilitaries supported by the government security

forces. Forced displacement in 1998 was 20 percent above 1997, and

increased in 1999 in some regions according to Human Rights Watch.

Colombia now has the largest displaced population in the world, after

Sudan and Angola.

Hailed as a leading democracy by Clinton and other U.S. leaders and

political commentators, Colombia did at last permit an independent party

(UP, Patriotic Union) to challenge the elite system of power-sharing.

The UP party, drawing in part from constituencies of the FARC

guerrillas, faced certain difficulties, however, including the rapid

assassination of about 3,000 activists, including presidential

candidates, mayors, and legislators. The results taught lessons to the

guerrillas about the prospects for entering the political system.

Washington also drew lessons from these and other events of the same

period. The Clinton administration was particularly impressed with the

performance of President Cesar Gaviria, who presided over the escalation

of state terror, and induced (some say compelled) the Organization of

American States to accept him as secretary general on grounds that “He

has been very forward looking in building democratic institutions in a

country where it was sometimes dangerous to do so”—which is surely true,

in large measure because of the actions of his government. A more

significant reason, perhaps, is that he was also “forward looking…on

economic reform in Colombia and on economic integration in the

hemisphere,” code words that are readily interpreted.

Meanwhile, shameful socioeconomic conditions persist, leaving much of

the population in misery in a rich country with concentration of wealth

and land-ownership that is high even by Latin American standards. The

situation became worse in the 1990s as a result of the “neoliberal

reforms” formalized in the 1991 constitution. The constitution reduced

still further “the effective participation of civil society” in

policy-formation, while, as in Latin America generally, the “neoliberal

reforms have also given rise to alarming levels of poverty and

inequality; approximately 55 percent of Colombia’s population lives

below the poverty level” and “this situation has been aggravated by an

acute crisis in agriculture, itself a result of the neoliberal program”

(Arlene Tickner, Current History, February 1998).

The respected president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human

Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa,

writes that it is “poverty and insufficient land reform” that “have made

Colombia one of the most tragic countries of Latin America,” though as

elsewhere, “violence has been exacerbated by external factors,”

primarily the initiatives of the Kennedy administration, which “took

great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency

brigades.” These initiatives ushered in “what is known in Latin America

as the National Security Doctrine,” which is not concerned with “defense

against an external enemy” but rather “the internal enemy.” The new

“strategy of the death squads” accords the military “the right to fight

and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who

are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be

communist extremists.”

As part of its strategy of converting the Latin American military from

“hemispheric defense” to “internal security”—meaning war against the

domestic population—Kennedy dispatched a military mission to Colombia in

1962 headed by Special Forces General William Yarborough. He proposed

“reforms” to enable the security forces to “as necessary execute

paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known

communist proponents”—the “communist extremists” to whom Vasquez

Carrizosa alludes.

Again the broader patterns are worth noting. Shortly after, Lyndon

Johnson escalated Kennedy’s war against South Vietnam—what is called

here “the defense of South Vietnam,” just as Russia called its war

against Afghanistan “the defense of Afghanistan.” In January 1965, U.S.

special forces in South Vietnam were issued standing orders “to conduct

operations to dislodge VC-controlled officials, to include

assassination,” and more generally to use such “pacification” techniques

as “ambushing, raiding, sabotaging and committing acts of terrorism

against known VC personnel,” the counterparts of the “known Communist

proponents” in Colombia.

A Colombian governmental commission concluded that “the criminalization

of social protest” is one of the “principal factors which permit and

encourage violations of human rights” by the military and police

authorities and their paramilitary collaborators. Ten years ago, as

U.S.-backed state terror was increasing sharply, the Minister of Defense

called for “total war in the political, economic, and social arenas,”

while another high military official explained that guerrillas were of

secondary importance: “the real danger” is “what the insurgents have

called the political and psychological war,” the war “to control the

popular elements” and “to manipulate the masses.” The “subversives” hope

to influence unions, universities, media, and so on. “Every individual

who in one or another manner supports the goals of the enemy must be

considered a traitor and treated in that manner,” a 1963 military manual

prescribed, as the Kennedy initiatives were moving into high gear. Since

the official goals of the guerrillas are social democratic, the circle

of treachery targeted for terror operations is wide.

In the years that followed, the Kennedy- Yarborough strategy was

developed and applied broadly in “our little region over here,” as it

was described by FDR’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson when he was

explaining why the U.S. was entitled to control its own regional system

while all others were dismantled. Violent repression spread throughout

the hemisphere, beginning in the southern cone and reaching its awesome

peak in Central America in the 1980s as the ruler of the hemisphere

reacted with extreme violence to efforts by the Church and other

“subversives” to confront a terrible legacy of misery and repression.

Colombia’s advance to first-rank among the criminal states in “our

little region” is in part the result of the decline in Central American

state terror, which achieved its primary aims as in Turkey ten years

later, leaving in its wake a “culture of terror” that “domesticates the

expectations of the majority” and undermines aspirations towards

“alternatives that differ from those of the powerful,” in the words of

Salvadoran Jesuits, who learned the lessons from bitter experience;

those who survived the U.S. assault, that is. In Colombia, however, the

problem of establishing approved forms of democracy and stability

remains, and is even becoming more severe. One approach would be to

address the needs and concerns of the poor majority. Another is to send

arms to keep things as they are.

Quite predictably, the announcement of the Colombia Plan led to

countermeasures by the guerrillas, in particular, a demand that everyone

with assets of more than $1 million pay a “revolutionary tax” or face

the threat of kidnapping (as the FARC puts it, jailing for non-payment

of taxes). The motivation is explained by the London Financial Times:

“In the Farc’s eyes, financing is required to fight fire with fire. The

government is seeking $1.3 billion in military aid from the US,

ostensibly for counter-drugs operations: the Farc believe the new

weapons will be trained on them. They appear ready to arm themselves for

battle,” which will lead to military escalation and undermining of the

fragile but ongoing peace negotiations.

According to New York Times reporter Larry Rohter, “ordinary Colombians”

are “angered” by the government’s peace negotiations, which ceded

control to FARC of a large region that they already controlled, and the

“embittered residents” of the region also oppose the guerrillas. No

evidence is cited. The leading Colombian military analyst Alfredo Rangel

sees matters differently. He “makes a point of reminding interviewers

that the FARC has significant support in the regions where it operates,”

Alma Guillermoprieto reports. Rangel cites “FARC’s ability to launch

surprise attacks” in different parts of the country, a fact that is

“politically significant” because “in each case, a single warning by the

civilian population would be enough to alert the army, and it doesn’t

happen.”

On the same day that Rohter reported the anger of “ordinary Colombians,”

the Financial Times reported an “innovative forum” in the

FARC-controlled region, one of many held there to allow “members of the

public to participate in the current peace talks.” They come from all

parts of Colombia, speaking before TV cameras and meeting with senior

FARC leaders. Included are union and business leaders, farmers, and

others. A trade union leader from Colombia’s second largest city, Cali,

“gave heart to those who believe that talking will end the country’s

long-running conflict,” addressing both the government and FARC leaders.

He directed his remarks specifically to “Senor Marulanda,” the long-time

FARC peasant leader “who minutes earlier had entered to a rousing

ovation,” telling him that “unemployment is not a problem caused by the

violence,” but “by the national government and the businessmen of this

country.” Business leaders also spoke, but “were heckled by the large

body of trade union representatives who had also come to speak.” Against

a background of “union cheers,” a FARC spokesperson “put forward one of

the clearest visions yet of his organisation’s economic program,”

calling for freezing of privatization, subsidizing energy and

agriculture as is done in the rich countries, and stimulation of the

economy by protecting local enterprises. The government representative,

who “emphasized export-led growth and private participation,”

nevertheless described the FARC statement as “raw material for the

negotiations,” though FARC, “bolstered by evident popular discontent

with ‘neoliberal’ government policies,” argues that those who “have

monopolised power” must yield in the negotations.”

Of course, no one can say what “ordinary Colombians” (or “ordinary

Americans”) think, even under peaceful conditions, let alone when

extreme violence and terror prevail, and much of the population seeks to

survive under conditions of misery and repression.

The Colombia Plan is officially justified in terms of the “drug war,” a

claim taken seriously by few competent analysts. The U.S. Drug

Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports that “all branches of

government” in Colombia are involved in “drug-related corruption.” In

November 1998, U.S. Customs and DEA inspectors found 415 kg of cocaine

and 6 kg of heroin in a Colombian Air Force plane that had landed in

Florida, leading to the arrest of several Air Force officers and

enlisted personnel. Other observers have also reported the heavy

involvement of the military in narcotrafficking, and the U.S. military

has also been drawn in. The wife of Colonel James Hiett pleaded guilty

to conspiracy to smuggle heroin from Colombia to New York, and shortly

after it was reported that Colonel Hiett, who is in charge of U.S.

troops “that trained Colombian security forces in counternarcotics

operations,” is “expected to plead guilty” to charges of complicity.

The paramilitaries openly proclaim their reliance on the drug business.

However, the U.S. and Latin American press report, “the US-financed

attack stays clear of the areas controlled by paramilitary forces,”

though “the leader of the paramilitaries [Carlos Castano] acknowledged

last week in a television interview that the drug trade provided 70

percent of the group’s funding.” The targets of the Colombia Plan are

guerrilla forces based on the peasantry and calling for internal social

change, which would interfere with integration of Colombia into the

global system on the terms that the U.S. demands; that is, dominated by

elites linked to U.S. power interests that are accorded free access to

Colombia’s valuable resources, including oil.

In standard U.S. terminology, the FARC forces are “narco-guerrillas,” a

useful concept as a cover for counterinsurgency, but one that has been

sharply criticized on factual grounds. It is agreed—and FARC leaders

say—that they rely for funding on coca production, which they tax, as

they tax other businesses. But “‘The guerrillas are something different

from the traffickers,’ says Klaus Nyholm, who runs the UN Drug Control

Program,” which has agents throughout the drug producing regions. He

describes the local FARC fronts as “quite autonomous.” In some areas

“they are not involved at all” in coca production and in others “they

actively tell the farmers not to grow [coca].” Andean drug specialist

Ricardo Vargas describes the role of the guerrillas as “primarily

focused on taxation of illicit crops.” They have called for “a

development plan for the peasants” that would “allow eradication of coca

on the basis of alternative crops.” “That’s all we want,” their leader

Marulanda has publicly announced, as have other spokespersons.

B ut let us put these matters aside and consider a few other questions.

Why do peasants in Colombia grow cocaine, not other crops? The reasons

are well known. “Peasants grow coca and poppies,” Vargas observes,

“because of the crisis in the agricultural sector of Latin American

countries, escalated by the general economic crisis in the region.” He

writes that peasants began colonizing the Colombian Amazon in the 1950s,

“following the violent displacement of peasants by large landholders,”

and they found that coca was “the only product that was both profitable

and easy to market.” Pressures on the peasantry substantially increased

as “ranchers, investors and legal commercial farmers have created and

strengthened private armies”—the para-militaries—that “serve as a means

to violently expropriate land from indigenous people, peasants and

settlers,” with the result that “traffickers now control much of

Colombia’s valuable land.” The counterinsurgency battalions armed and

trained by the U.S. do not attack traffickers, Vargas reports, but “have

as their target the weakest and most socially fragile link of the drug

chain: the production by peasants, settlers and indigenous people.” The

same is true of the chemical and biological weapons that Washington

employs, used experimentally in violation of manufacturer’s

specifications. These measures multiply the “dangers to the civilian

population, the environment, and legal agriculture.” They destroy “legal

food crops like yucca and bananas, water sources, pastures, livestock,

and all the crops included in crop substitution programs,” including

those of well-established Church-run development projects that have

sought to develop alternatives to coca production. There are also

uncertain but potentially severe effects “on the fragile tropical

rainforest environment.”

Traditional U.S. programs, and the current Colombia Plan as well,

primarily support the social forces that control the government and the

military/paramilitary forces, and that have largely created the problems

by their rapacity and violence. The targets are the usual victims.

There are other factors that operate to increase coca production.

Colombia was once a major wheat producer. That was undermined in the

1950s by Food for Peace aid, a program that provided taxpayer subsidies

to U.S. agribusiness and counterpart funds for U.S. client states, which

they commonly used for military spending and counterinsurgency. A year

before President Bush announced the “drug war” with great fanfare (once

again), the international coffee agreement was suspended under U.S.

pressure, on grounds of “fair trade violations.” The result was a fall

of prices of more than 40 percent within two months for Colombia’s

leading legal export.

Other factors are discussed by political economist Susan Strange in her

last book. In the 1960s, the G77 governments (now 133, accounting for 80

percent of the world’s population) initiated a call for a “new

international economic order” in which the needs of the large majority

of people of the world would be a prominent concern. Specific proposals

were formulated by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),

which was established in 1964 “to create an international trading system

consistent with the promotion of economic and social development.” The

UNCTAD proposals were summarily dismissed by the great powers, along

with the call for a “new international order” generally; the U.S., in

particular, insists that “development is not a right,” and that it is

“preposterous” and a “dangerous incitement” to hold otherwise in accord

with the socioeconomic provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights, which the U.S. rejects. The world did move—or more accurately,

was moved—towards a new international economic order, but along a

different course, catering to the needs of a different sector, namely

its designers—hardly a surprise, any more than one should be surprised

that in standard doctrine the instituted form of “globalization” should

be depicted as an inexorable process to which “there is no alternative,”

in Margaret Thatcher’s cruel phrase.

One early UNCTAD proposal was a program for stabilizing commodity

prices, a practice that is standard within the industrial countries by

means of one or another form of subsidy, though it was threatened

briefly in the U.S. when Congress was taken over in 1994 by

ultra-rightists who seemed to believe their own rhetoric, much to the

consternation of business leaders who understand that market discipline

is for the defenseless. The upstart free-market ideologues were soon

taught better manners or dispatched back home, but not before Congress

passed the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act to liberate American agriculture

from the “East German socialist programs of the New Deal,” as Newt

Gingrich put it, ending market-distorting subsidies—which quickly

tripled, reaching a record $23 billion in 1999, and scheduled to

increase. The market has worked its magic, however: the taxpayer

subsidies go disproportionately to large agribusiness and the “corporate

oligopolies” that dominate the input and output side, Nicholas Kristof

correctly observed. Those with market power in the food chain (from

energy corporations to retailers) are enjoying great profits while the

agricultural crisis, which is real, is concentrated in the middle of the

chain, among smaller farmers, who produce the food.

One of the leading principles of modern economic history is that the

devices used by the rich and powerful to ensure that they are protected

by the nanny state are not to be available to the poor. Accordingly, the

UNCTAD initiative to stabilize commodity prices was quickly shot down;

the organization has been largely marginalized and tamed, along with

others that reflect, to some extent at least, the interests of the

global majority. Reviewing these events, Strange observes that farmers

were therefore compelled to turn to crops for which there is a stable

market. Large-scale agribusiness can tolerate fluctuation of commodity

prices, compensating for temporary losses elsewhere. Poor peasants

cannot tell their children: “don’t worry, maybe you’ll have something to

eat next year.” The result, Strange continues, was that drug

entrepreneurs could easily “find farmers eager to grow coca, cannabis or

opium,” for which there is always a ready market in the rich societies.

O ther programs of the U.S. and the global institutions it dominates

magnify these effects. The current Clinton plan for Colombia includes

only token funding for alternative crops, and none at all for areas

under guerrilla control, though FARC leaders have repeatedly expressed

their hope that alternatives will be provided so that peasants will not

be compelled to grow coca. “By the end of 1999, the United States had

spent a grand total of $750,000 on alternative development programs,”

the Center for International Policy reports, “all of it in heroin

poppy-growing areas far from the southern plains” that are targeted in

the Colombia Plan, which does, however, call for “assistance to

civilians to be displaced by the push into southern Colombia,” a section

of the Plan that the Center rightly finds “especially disturbing.” The

Clinton administration also insists—over the objections of the Colombian

government—that any peace agreement must permit crop destruction

measures and other U.S. counternarcotics operations in Colombia.

Constructive approaches are not barred, but they are someone else’s

business. The U.S. will concentrate on military operations—which,

incidentally, happen to benefit the high-tech industries that produce

military equipment and are engaged in “extensive lobbying” for the

Colombia Plan, along with Occidental Petroleum, which has large

investments in Colombia, and other corporations.

Furthermore, IMF-World Bank programs demand that countries open their

borders to a flood of (heavily subsidized) agricultural products from

the rich countries, with the obvious effect of undermining local

production. Those displaced are either driven to urban slums (thus

lowering wage rates for foreign investors) or instructed to become

“rational peasants,” producing for the export market and seeking the

highest prices—which translates as “coca, cannibis, opium.” Having

learned their lessons properly, they are rewarded by attack by military

gunships while their fields are destroyed by chemical and biological

warfare, courtesy of Washington.

Much the same is true throughout the Andean region. The issues broke

through briefly to the public eye just as the Colombia Plan was being

debated in Washington. On April 8, the government of Bolivia declared a

state of emergency after widespread protests closed down the city of

Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest. The protests were over the

privatization of the public water system and the sharp increase in water

rates to a level beyond the reach of much of the population. In the

background is an economic crisis attributed in part to the neoliberal

policies that culminate in the drug war, which has destroyed more than

half of the country’s coca-leaf production, leaving the “rational

peasants” destitute. A week later, farmers blockaded a highway near the

capital city of La Paz to protest the eradication of coca leaf, the only

mode of survival left to them under the “reforms,” as actually

implemented.

Reporting on the protests over water prices and the eradication

programs, the Financial Times observes that “The World Bank and the IMF

saw Bolivia as something of a model,” one of the great success stories

of the “Washington consensus.” But after the April protests we can see

that “the success of eradication programmes in Peru and Bolivia has

carried a high social cost.” The journal quotes a European diplomat in

Bolivia who says that “Until a couple of weeks ago, Bolivia was regarded

as a success story”—by some, at least; by those who “regard” a country

while disregarding its people. But now, he continues, “the international

community has to recognise that the economic reforms have not really

done anything to solve the growing problems of poverty”; a bit

euphemistic. The secretary of the Bolivian bishops’ conference, which

mediated an agreement to end the crisis, described the protest movement

as “the result of dire poverty. The demands of the rural population must

be listened to if we want lasting peace.”

The Cochabamba protests were aimed at the World Bank and the San

Francisco/London-based Bechtel corporation, the main financial power

behind the transnational conglomerate that bought the public water

system amidst serious charges of corruption and give-away, and then

immediately doubled rates for many poor customers. Under Bank pressure,

Bolivia has sold major assets to private (almost always foreign)

corporations. The sale of the public water system and rate increases set

off months of protest culminating in the demonstration that paralyzed

the city. Government policies adhered to World Bank recommendations that

“No subsidies should be given to ameliorate the increase in water

tariffs in Cochabamba”; all users, including the very poor, must pay

full costs. Using the Internet, activists in Bolivia called for

international protests, which had a significant impact, presumably

amplified by the Washington protests over World Bank-IMF policies then

underway. Bechtel backed off and the government rescinded the sale. But

a long and difficult struggle lies ahead.

As martial law was declared in Bolivia, a press report from southern

Colombia described the spreading fears that fumigation planes were

coming to “drop their poison on the coca fields, which would also kill

the farmers’ subsistence crops, cause massive social disruption, and

stir up the ever-present threat of violence.” The pervasive fear and

anger reflect “the level of dread and confusion in this part of

Colombia” as the U.S. carries out chemical and biological warfare to

destroy coca production.

Another question lurks not too far in the background. Just what right

does the U.S. have to carry out military operations and

chemical-biological warfare in other countries to destroy a crop it

doesn’t like? We can put aside the cynical response that the governments

requested this “assistance”; or else. We therefore must ask whether

others have the same extraterritorial right to violence and destruction

that the U.S. demands.

The number of Colombians who die from U.S.-produced lethal drugs exceeds

the number of North Americans who die from cocaine, and is far greater

relative to population. In East Asia, U.S.-produced lethal drugs

contribute to millions of deaths. These countries are compelled not only

to accept the products but also advertising for them, under threat of

trade sanctions. The effects of “aggressive marketing and advertising by

American firms is, in a good measure, responsible for…a sizeable

increase in smoking rates for women and youth in Asian countries where

doors were forced open by threat of severe U.S. trade sanctions,” public

health researchers conclude. The Colombian cartels, in contrast, are not

permitted to run huge advertising campaigns in which a Joe

Camel-counterpart extols the wonders of cocaine.

We are therefore entitled, indeed morally obligated, to ask whether

Colombia, Thailand, China, and other targets of U.S. trade policies and

lethal-export promotion have the right to conduct military, chemical and

biological warfare in North Carolina. And if not, why not?

We might also ask why there are no Delta Force raids on U.S. banks and

chemical corporations, though it is no secret that they too are engaged

in the narcotrafficking business. And why the Pentagon is not gearing up

to attack Canada, now replacing Colombia and Mexico with high potency

marijuana that has already become British Colombia’s most valuable

agricultural product and one of the most important sectors of the

economy, joined by Quebec and closely followed by Manitoba, with a

tenfold increase in just the past 2 years. Or to attack the United

States, a major producer of marijuana with production rapidly expanding,

including hydroponic groweries, and long the center of illicit

manufacture of high-tech illicit drugs (ATS, amphetamine-type

stimulants), the fastest growing sector of drug abuse, with 30 million

users worldwide, probably surpassing heroin and cocaine.

There is no need to review in detail the lethal effects of U.S. drugs.

The Supreme Court recently concluded that it has been “amply

demonstrated” that tobacco use is “perhaps the single most significant

threat to public health in the United States,” responsible for more than

400,000 deaths a year, more than AIDS, car accidents, alcohol,

homicides, illegal drugs, suicides, and fires combined; the Court

virtually called on Congress to legislate regulation. As use of this

lethal substance has declined in the U.S., and producers have been

compelled to pay substantial indemnities to victims, they have shifted

to markets abroad, another standard practice. The death toll is

incalculable. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimated

that in China alone, among children under 20 today 50 million will die

of cigarette-related diseases, a substantial number because of highly

selective U.S. “free trade” doctrine.

In comparison to the 400,000 deaths caused by tobacco every year in the

United States, drug-related deaths reached a record 16,000 in 1997.

Furthermore, only 4 out of 10 addicts who needed treatment received it,

according to a White House report. These facts raise further questions

about the motives for the drug war. The seriousness of concern over use

of drugs was illustrated again when a House Committee was considering

the Clinton Colombia Plan. It rejected an amendment proposed by

California Democrat Nancy Pelosi calling for funding of drug demand

reduction services. It is well known that these are far more effective

than forceful measures. A widely-cited Rand corporation study funded by

the U.S. Army and Office of National Drug Control Policy found that

funds spent on domestic drug treatment were 23 times as effective as

“source country control” (Clinton’s Colombia Plan), 11 times as

effective as interdiction, and 7 times as effective as domestic law

enforcement. But the inexpensive and effective path will not be

followed. Rather, the drug war targets poor peasants abroad and poor

people at home; by the use of force, not constructive measures to

alleviate problems at a fraction of the cost.

While Clinton’s Colombia Plan was being formulated, senior

administration officials discussed a proposal by the Office of Budget

and Management to take $100 million from the $1.3 billion then planned

for Colombia, to be used for treatment of U.S. addicts. There was

near-unanimous opposition, particularly from “drug czar” Barry

McCaffrey, and the proposal was dropped. In contrast, when Richard

Nixon—in many respects the last liberal president—declared a drug war in

1971, two-thirds of the funding went to treatment, which reached record

numbers of addicts; there was a sharp drop in drug-related arrests and

number of federal prison inmates, as well as crime rates. Since 1980,

however, “the war on drugs has shifted to punishing offenders, border

surveillance, and fighting production at the source countries,” John

Donnelly reports in the Boston Globe. One consequence is the enormous

increase in drug-related (often victimless) crimes and an explosion in

the prison population, reaching levels far beyond any industrial country

and possibly a world record, with no detectable effect on availability

or price of drugs.

Such observations, hardly obscure, raise the question of what the drug

war is all about. It is recognized widely that it fails to achieve its

stated ends, and the failed methods are then pursued more vigorously

while effective ways to reach the stated goals are rejected. It is

therefore natural to conclude that the drug war, cast in the harshly

punitive form implemented since 1980, is achieving its goals, not

failing. What are these goals? A plausible answer is implicit in a

comment by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the few senators to

pay close attention to social statistics. By adopting these measures, he

observed, “we are choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated

among minorities.” Criminologist Michael Tonry concludes that “the war’s

planners knew exactly what they were doing.” What they were doing is,

first, getting rid of the “superfluous population,” the “disposable

people” (“desechables”), as they are called in Colombia, where they are

eliminated by “social cleansing”; and second, frightening everyone else,

not an unimportant task in a period when a domestic form of “structural

adjustment” is being imposed, with significant costs for the majority of

the population.

“While the War on Drugs only occasionally serves and more often degrades

public health and safety,” a well-informed and insightful review by

Partners in Health researchers concludes, “it regularly serves the

interests of private wealth: interests revealed by the pattern of

winners and losers, targets and non-targets, well-funded and

underfunded,” in accord with “the main interests of U.S. foreign and

domestic policy generally” and the private sector that “has overriding

influence on policy.”

One may debate the motivations, but the consequences in the U.S. and

abroad seem reasonably clear.