Secretary Powell in Colombia: Some Tough Questions

By Adam Isacson
Senior Associate, Center for International Policy

Secretary of State Colin Powell is visiting Colombia, a South American neighbor where a four-way, drug-fueled conflict will kill nearly 4,000 people this year, three-quarters of them non-combatants. This rate of violence is twice that of only three years ago.[1]

Into this mess the United States is sending about $1.5 billion from 2000 to 2002, three-quarters of it helicopters, guns, combat training, intelligence, and aerial herbicide fumigation.[2]

During his two days in Bogotá, Secretary Powell owes it to us to ask some tough questions about where America is headed. Why, he should ask, have we chosen this strategy? While few doubt we should be helping a friend and neighbor in trouble, is our mostly military approach the best way?

The Secretary should make clear whether we are in Colombia to fight drugs or to beat back Colombia’s well-armed Marxist guerrillas. Bush administration officials tell us that they are currently debating that very question. Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman said in August that a review process is making “agonizing decisions” about whether our interest is “just narcotics, or is there some wider stake we may have in the survival of a friendly democratic government.”[3]

If the U.S. mission is “just narcotics,” are we going about it the right way, placing nearly all of our eggs in the basket of aerial herbicide fumigation? We’ve sprayed glyphosate on at least 75,000 acres of Colombian soil every year since 1995; since then, the amount planted with coca has grown by 268 percent.[4] Instead of reducing coca-growing, fumigation has only proven able to move the plants around geographically. Spray in one place, and coca appears elsewhere. This sort of cat-and-mouse game can go on indefinitely: all coca planted in South America in 2000 could fit in a land area two-thirds the size of Rhode Island.[5] Colombia’s Amazon-basin jungles and plains alone are the size of California.

Worse, the focus on coca-growers will never affect the price of cocaine on U.S. streets. A peasant normally sells a kilo of unrefined coca paste to a middleman for $1,000; this kilo is then turned into cocaine sold on U.S. streets for up to $150,000.[6] The profit margin for criminals higher up the narco chain is $149,000. A hugely successful fumigation campaign might increase the price of coca-growers’ primary product to $5,000 – cutting the narcos’ margin to $145,000, hardly a dent.

If not a good drug strategy, then, is the aid designed to weaken Colombia’s guerrillas, who many in Washington see as a threat to regional stability? If in fact it fails to do more than inconvenience the FARC and ELN, how far do we continue down this path? In El Salvador, it took a decade-long military buildup to bring guerrillas to a hurting stalemate, and only after 70,000 people lost their lives. Can we avoid stumbling into an open-ended commitment to help pacify a country fifty-three times the size of El Salvador, with eight times as many people?

Our policymakers insist that they won’t let mission creep happen. Once his troops finish creating and equipping three new Colombian army battalions, “that is the end of my military mission, sir,” the Southern Command’s Gen. Peter Pace assured a House committee member in April.[7] But according to several recent reports, officials are now considering the creation of new Colombian battalions, to operate in new parts of the country.[8] Does the military mission indeed have an end?

Secretary Powell should also demand candid answers about the persistent links between Colombian military officials and paramilitary groups. The paramilitaries, responsible for more than three-quarters of killings and forced disappearances, are growing at an astounding rate, doubling in size in the last two years.[9] Colombian President Andrés Pastrana noted recently that the “paras” could soon be a greater threat than the guerrillas.[10] Why, then, are charges of military aiding and abetting of the death squads so commonplace?

Let’s hope Secretary Powell solicits Colombians’ ideas about alternatives to Washington’s current direction. Even Colombia’s most brutalized, impoverished zones have an abundance of local elected leaders and citizens’ groups with their own proposals for ridding their homes of drugs and violence. They must participate in the solution to their problems, instead of having plans handed down to them from offices in Washington and Bogotá.

A new effort to support such alternatives would make Secretary Powell’s visit a true turning point not only for Colombia, but for the United States’ relationship with Latin America. Let’s hope he asks the right questions.