“Nation building” is what it’s all about, argues Max Manwaring, a professor of military strategy at the U.S. Army War College. “Nobody wants to use it because that term is verboten,” he told the New York Times a few months ago, but it is the driving force behind the growing U.S. role in Colombia’s civil conflict.[1]
That the perilous Colombian situation and the U.S. response to it should bring to mind the practice of “nation building” of the late 1950s and early 1960s occasions no surprise. Nation building, an integrated effort to strengthen civil society, promote liberal democracy, and enhance government accountability, has always been about more than economic growth and social development. Economic assistance has gone hand in hand with efforts to improve the “security environment” in which it would be disbursed. Nation building is both a foreign aid and a military assistance program; however imbalanced, the two aspects of nation building have always been inextricably linked. It is no surprise that the process would interest a professor of military strategy. Preparation for what is euphemistically termed “low intensity conflict” necessarily accompanies development assistance in countries like Colombia where there is extensive civil unrest.
Crucial for the success of nation building in Colombia are U.S.-supported efforts to open citizen access to a fair judicial system, to bring consistency to law enforcement practices, to promote respect for human rights, and to attack corruption in government. Unobjectionable on their face, these general goals conceal the pervasiveness of the actual and projected U.S. presence in the country. What the details reveal might be termed “nation building in one country.” It is not an exaggeration to contend that the United States is engaged in an effort literally to reconstruct the country of Colombia.
To what extent will nation building and the interventionist ethos to which it gives life prove to be salutary for Colombia and Colombians in the new century? That remains to be seen, of course, although drug control—the means chosen to stimulate the process of remaking Colombia—has never served larger U.S. foreign policy goals very well.
The Department of State, the Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Defense (DoD), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the agencies most involved in U.S. relations with Colombia, have been working with the White House since 1999 to stem the country’s spiraling social unrest and political disintegration. Their apparent goals are to bring stability and order to Colombia without either tying the United States too closely to the activities of Colombian security forces or deepening the extent of U.S. responsibility for Colombia’s fate. Plan Colombia, the latest in a series of U.S. efforts to stem the flow of drugs such as cocaine and heroin from the Andes to North America, is the means for achieving these—perhaps—incompatible objectives.
Plan Colombia’s primary emphasis is on drug control at the source: first, through eradication and fumigation and, second, through interdiction. Both crop destruction and interdiction have long been mainstays of U.S. drug control policy. Washington indicated its support for Colombia’s president Andrés Pastrana by increasing antidrug assistance for fiscal years 2000, 2001 from $330 million to about $1.2 billion. The total U.S. commitment for the duration of Plan Colombia is currently projected to be about $1.6 billion or more, to be disbursed mostly to Colombia with some $75 million to be spent in neighboring countries such as Peru and Ecuador.
As the logical culmination of more than a decade of U.S. efforts to set policy priorities in the Andes, Plan Colombia elevates drug control to a status of vital importance in Colombian politics and diplomacy. In addition to its overly optimistic assessment of the prospects for coca and opium eradication, it also seems to carry promises of progress in Colombia’s civil conflict as well.
Plan Colombia signified to some of its drafters that a struggle for the Americas was taking place, much like had occurred with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in the 1980s. As before, nation building appeared to offer a desirable array of responses to a security threat, even if there did not exist a singular, identifiable adversary. If Colombia was actually on the verge of disintegration at the outset of the new millennium, then Plan Colombia presented the United States with a welcome opportunity to re-assert its primacy in hemispheric affairs where regional security and internal order virtually became as one. Just as the United States had endeavored a century earlier to bolster its hegemony through an activist foreign policy in the circum-Caribbean, so, too, in the years 1999–2001 Washington was seeking to re-establish its primacy of place by defining the hemispheric security agenda as a struggle against the corrosive influences of drug production, trafficking, and, to a lesser extent, consumption. As George W. Bush was settling into office, Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), chair of the Committee on Government Reform, spoke vividly of the battle in terms he thought would be well understood by his constituents: “Everyone realizes that the whole region is in crisis. But the best way to avoid [another] Vietnam is to deal with it early.”[2] Nation building would hold the key to success.
Colombia, the Andes, the circum-Caribbean, America’s “backyard” as another Vietnam: Had Che Guevara’s wish from the early 1960s that the United States would face many “Vietnams” finally come to pass? Some of the similarities were striking, at least in Colombia and its environs. Rebel forces were entrenched in much of the countryside; state security forces frequently operated without concern for human rights; U.S. Special Forces advisers, representative of a number of security and intelligence interests, and civilian-contract personnel found it more and more difficult to avoid hostile fire or even death as their numerical and operational presence increased in Colombia. To counter the threats to Colombian security, the United States endeavored to bring the region into play in a number of ways, including drug surveillance flights over Peru, the construction of new military facilities in Ecuador—which were welcome by some Ecuadorians and a matter of concern to others—and closer cooperation with Brazil. The Bush Administration also sought to placate Venezuela’s fiercely independent president Hugo Chávez by sending George W.’s father—the former president—to meet with him as an emissary of North American economic interests, most notably the petroleum industry.
Is nation building as a strategy up to the task that has been set for it? In Colombia nation building is a multi-faceted program largely under the direction of USAID.[3] Since 1991, during the administration of César Gaviria, USAID has been involved in an effort to reform Colombia’s judicial sector, to foster a more democratic and inclusive political culture. Endemic corruption and lack of access to services, including lawyers, make judicial reform an uncertain outcome. Justice remains most available to those who can most afford it. Since 1991, USAID has also encouraged Colombian officials to address their nation’s human rights situation. Scarce resources and a lack of will within the armed forces, the police, and elements of the populace make it difficult to undertake the kind of institution building needed to improve conditions in which human rights might be taken seriously.
At the municipal and departmental levels, USAID is currently endeavoring to reconstitute a state presence through political and social reform programs drafted locally with advice and training supplied by the U.S. agency. In a country beset by civil unrest, if not quite civil war, such activity is a profound intrusion into the internal affairs of another people. Reconstitution of the state is also present in efforts to reduce the incidence of government corruption. Corruption at any level, but especially the federal, threatens to curtail the delicate process of modernization that provides the raison d’être for U.S. foreign assistance programs.
Nation building entails more than state reconstruction and the shoring up of civil society. USAID is intimately involved in the alternative development component of Plan Colombia, which inevitably places the agency in a controversial, highly politicized position. Areas primarily targeted for alternative development are those where coca leaf bushes and opium poppies grow in abundance. More than 17,000 acres are presently under poppy cultivation; in Putumayo Department alone more than 170,000 acres are given over to coca growing. Total coca cultivation in Colombia may exceed 300,000 acres. With USAID’s help, the government of Colombia has agreed to provide development assistance for those farmers who voluntarily destroy their crops. Aerial fumigation awaits the crops of those farmers who do not eradicate coca or opium within a specified period of time.
By the time Plan Colombia caught the public attention in the United States and Colombia in mid–2000, its existence was a fait accompli. It is uncertain whether it was drafted in Washington or Bogotá, and, except to the ardent nationalists on either side of the bilateral relationship, it does not matter. A pattern of coercive diplomacy on Washington’s part, sporadically begun in the 1970s, continued into the 1990s, had finally paid off in 1999 with the inception of Plan Colombia.[4]
Conceptually, Plan Colombia is the operational descendant of Operation Blast Furnace, Operation Snowcap, and the first Bush Administration’s Andean Drug Strategy. Blast Furnace began in Bolivia in July 1986 shortly after President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive No. 221 which identified drugs as a threat to the United States and, by implication, hemispheric security. Operation Snowcap in theory broadened the geographical parameters of Blast Furnace to include Colombia, Peru, and other Andean nations in an ad hoc, inadequately funded attempt to throw limited military resources at the cocaine trade originating in South America. The Andean Drug Strategy, adopted by the United States at the time of the February 1990 meeting at Cartagena, Colombia, among the heads of state of Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and the United States, received approximately $2.2 billion in funding. The strategy was intended to focus on the three key Andean countries involved in coca growing and the cocaine trade by enabling them to respond with greater flexibility to particular conditions within each nation. The first President Bush’s initiative resulted in the increased militarization of the struggle against drugs, turning it into a kind of low intensity conflict; it also resulted in deeper involvement by the United States in the domestic affairs of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.[5]
The entry of the once reluctant DoD into the drug war roughly coincided, it should be pointed out, with the end of the Cold War in Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union. How committed the DoD was to waging war on drugs at the end of the 1980s remains an open question. It was particularly the situation in Colombia, where the Medellín and Cali cartels, revolutionaries, and paramilitaries threatened state stability, that led the United States to wage war on drugs. In the process the Bush and Clinton administrations played an increasingly visible and controversial role in Colombian politics. U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of other countries would also deepen in Bolivia and Peru in the 1990s as a result of its antidrug strategy. Colombia, however, remained the center of attention.
The elder George Bush hurriedly sent outdated military equipment to Colombian President Virgilio Barco Vargas in the wake of the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán in August 1989. Although it is inaccurate to characterize the aid package as the fruit of systematic planning, in retrospect there does appear to have been something inevitable about Bush’s decision to provide assistance. Bogotá could not long ignore the widespread presence of drugs and the violence associated with production and trafficking as symptoms of paralyzing societal decay. As a result, officials in the Bush and, subsequently, the Clinton administrations were able to influence certain of their Colombian counterparts, particularly in the Colombian National Police and the armed forces, to act more forcefully against drugs, even as they sought to manage their nation’s civil conflict. The effort to spread the drug war into the far reaches of Colombia in the 1990s was carried on both through diplomatic pressure and in the court of Colombian public opinion.
Although U.S. antidrug aid continued to flow into Colombia, amounting to $500 million between 1989 and 1993, it carried a heavy political price. By the time César Gaviria left office in August 1994, the White House had become extremely disenchanted with his minimizing the importance of the drug war. The Clinton Administration, which followed the lead of U.S. officials in Bogotá, including Ambassador Myles Frechette (who shared the perspective of his predecessors, Morris Busby and Thomas McNamara), was right in its critical assessment of the limited will in Bogotá to combat drugs. Neither Gaviria nor Barco before him had seriously considered drug control and the war on drugs a central function of either domestic politics or foreign policy. Both presidents attempted to mollify the United States with an attempt to balance modest responsiveness to U.S. concerns about drug trafficking with their desire to achieve some form of domestic order. This balancing act ultimately became impossible and stalled discussions between the government and leftist rebels.[6]
Bogotá’s emphasis on the restoration of state stability as a policy priority greatly increased under the presidency of Ernesto Samper through 1998, resulting in a serious diplomatic clash with the United States. Samper’s well-known receptivity during his presidential campaign to the monetary blandishments of the Cali Cartel might be viewed as a rational, if shortsighted, response to the hydra-headed threat to the state posed by narcos, rebels, revolutionaries, and paramilitary forces. Samper, without the resources to respond to each and every threat against the Colombian state, apparently felt he had little choice but to appease the narcos while entering into talks with leftist guerrillas, especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Recognizing the fragile state of civil society in Colombia, Samper constantly had to be mindful, too, of the chronically poor state of civil-military relations—as reflected in Colombia’s lengthy, dismal record on human rights. For its part, however, the Clinton Administration labored under no comparable liability and insisted upon greater vigilance against drugs by Bogotá. Samper’s bold, if ultimately unsuccessful response to domestic strife resulted both in the United States canceling his passport and in the decertification of Colombia in 1996 and 1997 for not cooperating fully with U.S. drug control policy. Thereafter, he only came to the United States when he was scheduled to address the United Nations.[7]
That U.S.-Colombian relations did not deteriorate more than they did owed much to the close relationship cultivated by U.S. congressmen and representatives in Colombia with Gen. José Rosso Serrano of the National Police, Colombia’s charismatic top drug-policy official. More than any other individual, Rosso was responsible for the continuation of U.S. antidrug aid to Colombia during the late 1990s. His concurrence with the United States over what the proper course of drug policy should be, namely, control at the source, kept the issue in the forefront of bilateral relations even as Colombia edged closer to complete disarray.
Plan Colombia cannot be understood, let alone implemented, in isolation from the totality of the situation in Colombia. In spring 2001, even before a significant infusion of Plan Colombia aid had begun, the country was facing an unemployment rate of approximately 20%; as much as 40% of the countryside was not fully in government hands. Lack of confidence in the ongoing peace process with the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) was evident throughout Colombia. The internal migration of perhaps two million people, better characterized as dislocation if not exile, was exceeded only in Sudan and Angola. Human flight of the privileged classes, with its attendant and burgeoning capital flight, to North America and Europe was continuing apace; and foreign investors were growing more reluctant by the day to continue business as usual.
If the welfare of Colombia is tied to Plan Colombia, then it is necessarily also directly linked to the success of nation building. While history does not precisely repeat itself, Colombia’s fate was associated with similar U.S. efforts 40 years ago. In the early years of the Alliance for Progress, the administration of John F. Kennedy designated Colombia as a model for how modernization might occur through nation building. The attempt failed to meet expectations. Officials in Bogotá’s National Front governments could not agree on the desirability of true democratization and social progress, even in the wake of the horrors of la violencia. Moreover, the United States found it could not force a program of nation building upon an ideologically divided host country. By mid-decade in the 1960s, the conflict that now threatens to tear Colombia apart had begun.[8] Further, the allure of nation building receded in Washington as the perceived threat from Castro’s Cuba subsided after the Cuban missile crisis.
In sum, there is no certainty that U.S.-style nation building with its democratic, liberal—and interventionist—principles will, or even can, meet the needs of the Colombian people. The long unacknowledged limits of nation building force its supporters to discuss its supposed virtues in what are essentially tautological terms. Nation building will perhaps serve the larger, regional hegemonic aspirations of the United States. In so doing, however, Plan Colombia and its adherents may long be associated with a tragic time in the history of Colombia and its environs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William O. Walker III is professor of history and international relations at Florida International University. He is the editor of Drugs in the Western Hemisphere: An Odyssey of Cultures in Conflict (Scholarly Resources, 1996).
NOTES
1. New York Times, February 25, 2001.
2. New York Times, February 25, 2001.
3. Much of the factual information in this discussion is taken from the USAID Website. See http://www.usaid.gov/country/lac/co and http://usembassy.state/gov/bogota/wwwhaidc.html and related links.
4. William O. Walker III, “The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: U.S. Drug Policy and Colombian State Stability, 1978-1997,” in H. Richard Friman and Peter Andreas, eds., The Illicit Global Economy and State Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 143-71.
5 . William O. Walker III, “The Bush Administration’s Andean Drug Strategy in Historical Perspective,” in Bruce M. Bagley and William O. Walker III, eds., Drug Trafficking in the Americas (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), pp. 1-19.
6. Juan Gabriel Tokatlián, Globalización, narcotráfico y violencia: Siete ensayos sobre Colombia (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2000), pp. 39-40, 217-225.
7. Juan Gabriel Tokatlián, Globalización, narcotráfico y violencia, pp. 226-30.
8. Stephen J, Randall, Colombia and the United States: Hegemony and Interdependence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 231-40.
