The Drug War's Southern Front

Colombia, cocaine, and U.S. foreign policy.

Timothy Pratt from the April 2000 issue

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Last October, at an environmental conference in Bogota, sociologist Ricardo Vargas unveiled a study titled "Spraying and Conflict." According to Vargas, the government's efforts to spray away marijuana, coca, and poppies have produced some rather dubious results. Colombia's coca and poppy fields, he notes, "have grown most in total area in the last five years--exactly when spraying has been done." In 1994, Colombia had 40,000 hectares of coca. In 1998, there were "at least 100,000." (A hectare is equal to about 2.5 acres.)

In this scenario, the growers are caught between a rock and a hard place. The government has made attempts to encourage "crop substitution" to legal commodities, such as plantains, rubber, and hearts of palms. But these have generally been bungled. To make them work, the authorities would have to coordinate a host of international and state agencies, mobilizing everything from farm credit to road-building. For now, the drug war is propping up the prices peasants can get for their illicit products: They can earn up to $500 per month for every hectare planted with coca, while the crops the government favors would fetch only half that in the best of circumstances. No coca farmer is going to invest in developing a different crop that brings such a lower return, especially with guerrillas and paramilitaries, working with traffickers, offering growers steady buyers at high prices and eliminating problems like transportation.

Meanwhile, the government's efforts to crack down on drugs are only alienating farmers. Several years ago, hundreds of thousands in the coca-growing region of Putumayo marched in protest against the spraying, alleging that their livelihoods were being threatened and that no serious alternatives were being offered. Some in the Colombian government countered that FARC was behind the marches--a charge that, if true, only underlines the ways the drug war has driven peasants into the arms of the guerrillas.

On top of that, some are accusing Roundup--the herbicide the government is spraying--of causing health problems. "Everywhere there's been spraying, there's been complaints," notes Vargas. Eider Meneses Papamija, governor of the Yanacona tribe, has convinced President Pastrana to let his people pull up thousands of poppy plants bare-handed, in order to avoid further contact with the herbicide. He blames the spraying for respiratory, eye, and skin infections in the Yanacona community.

The scientific auditor for the police anti-narcotics program, Luis Eduardo Parra, says the Yanaconas' charges are "without basis," noting that Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, have undergone decades of safety studies in the U.S., many of them conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency. "Roundup isn't exactly water, but it's also not the worst thing in that world," he argues.

At the same time, Parra is critical of the Colombian and U.S. governments' overall drug strategy. "There needs to be more work on prevention, since supply will never go down unless demand does," he says. "We don't have an integrated vision, which is what the problem requires."

Up in Washington, Michael Shifter echoes Parra's critique. Shifter is a senior fellow at Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank devoted to the Americas. "Nobody here on Capitol Hill thinks that the war on drugs is going well," he says. "Data show that it's not getting better, that production is going up. There's a sense it's not working, that there's too narrow an approach. For Colombia, the drug issue comes back to the strength of the state--economically, militarily, and politically." Colombia's government may have a lot of force at its disposal, but so do its opponents. More important, the state doesn't have the social authority to win its war on drugs.

The Colombia Plan was supposed to address those issues, by strengthening the judicial system and combating corruption. But Shifter questions whether new funds would produce the desired effects, since the plan itself is flawed. "It's too heavily concentrated on narcotics and too geared to the U.S. Congress," he says. "You have to ask, does it reflect Colombia's own priorities? What's important for them? This is what seems to be missing."

In a strange disappearing act, the country's aid request was never seriously included in President Clinton's 1999 budget, despite months of talks in Washington and Bogota and great expectations in the Colombian press. Clinton sent a last-minute note to Pastrana promising that 2000 would be different, and in the first weeks of the new year, he made good on his word, announcing a revised multi-year aid package of $1.3 billion. Secretary of State Albright spent a day in Colombia explaining the plan, which includes $600 million to train and equip two anti-drug battalions and at least 60 choppers. Another $436 million would go to drug interdiction and eradication (including spraying). About 10 percent would be spent trying to give peasants alternatives to growing coca and poppies. The aid pitch now goes to Congress, where Clinton and Pastrana hope emergency approval comes by spring.

Amid all the violence and intrigue, everyday life--if you can call it that--continues in Colombia, no matter how many kilos are found strapped to the bottoms of ships in the harbor of Cartagena, how many CEOs are kidnapped in Cali, how many traffickers are extradited to America, how many casualties pile up in the countryside. Colombians seem able to put up with higher levels of violence and chaos--and for longer periods--than just about anybody. Somehow, they maintain the hope that things will get better.

It's not as though the country lacks hardworking, creative people capable of pushing their way through a crisis. This is the nation of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the world's most widely translated authors; of artist Fernando Botero, perhaps the only living sculptor to have his work displayed in the Champs-Elysees, on Park Avenue, and in the Piazza della Signoria; of malaria researcher Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, inventor of the synthetic vaccine (as opposed to vaccines made with the viruses). And--speaking of scientists--of Alvaro Dueñas. The hapless doctor is a pioneer of cell-culturing techniques patented in the United States, an accomplishment all the more impressive because he had next to no research budget. "The Communists scared away the Rockefeller, Kellogg, and other foundations in the late '70s," he explains.

Unfortunately, the war has forced many of the most persistent and valuable Colombians, including all those just mentioned, to spend much of their working lives outside the country. And while one can only admire their capacity for hope, the people of this country could use a lot more than that, starting with a serious re-examination of the war on drugs. The drug war has distorted America's foreign policy, and it has done even more damage to life inside Colombia--corrupting officials, fueling violence, and ripping the country apart. That basic fact must be confronted if we are to avoid more needless deaths and more wasted dollars, and if millions of Colombians' hopes for peace are ever to come true.