Plan Colombia and Beyond

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August 01, 2005

Putumayo, 5 years into Plan Colombia

When Plan Colombia began five years ago, it got underway in the department of Putumayo in Colombia’s far south. At the time, Putumayo had about half of Colombia’s coca, and was a guerrilla stronghold with a rapidly growing paramilitary presence. A big portion of the 2000 package of U.S. aid for Plan Colombia went to something the Clinton administration called “the push into southern Colombia”: the creation of new military units, construction on military bases and expansion of fumigation in and around Putumayo. By 2001, as a report we published that spring affirmed, Putumayo was “Plan Colombia’s Ground Zero.”

In April 2004, when I last visited Putumayo, things were calmer than they had been in years. The amount of coca being grown had decreased. The governor and the mayors of several towns, who had been elected at the end of the previous year, came from a progressive, social-movement background. Thanks to an increased military and police presence in towns and along main roads, you didn’t see uniformed paramilitaries in the town centers (though I saw some on the outskirts) and the guerrillas had been pushed back into the rural hinterland. You could even drive at night, which had been unthinkable.

Things were far from perfect, or even good. The paramilitaries still had a tight grip on most town centers, and the guerrillas still operated freely in the countryside, making travel between the two very risky. Everyone I spoke to insisted that there was more coca than official estimates indicated. Many speculated that the guerrillas’ relative inactivity was their own choice, a “tactical retreat,” not the result of Plan Colombia or President Uribe’s “Democratic Security” policy.

On July 13, 2000, President Clinton signed into law the U.S. aid package for Plan Colombia. As if to commemorate the fifth anniversary, the FARC have launched a large-scale offensive in Putumayo that vividly shows, to everyone’s dismay and alarm, how little Plan Colombia has really achieved.

Here is what has happened so far (I am currently writing without Internet access, so this information is 2 days out of date). On July 20, the guerrillas bombed electrical pylons, shutting off power to Mocoa, the capital; Puerto Asís, the largest city; and several other major towns in what had been Putumayo’s coca heartland and population center. On July 23, they destroyed the Villalobos bridge, on the only road that connects Putumayo with the rest of the country to the north.

The FARC then declared an armed stoppage (paro armado), prohibiting Putumayo’s 300,000 residents from traveling by road and burning the vehicles of those who attempt to do so. The Colombian military has so far been unable to break the stoppage, and transportation is at a total standstill.

Much fighting is taking place around Puerto Asís, the department’s largest city and commercial center (the town center’s population is about 40,000 or more). Puerto Asís is not a rural hamlet with one main street and a general store, it is a big town: many buildings are 3-4 stories tall, it hosts hotels, clothing boutiques, discos and supermarkets. But the town is currently cut off from the rest of the country, without electricity or fuel. Residents are hearing bombs and gunfire.

Meanwhile, the guerrillas have stepped up bombings of infrastructure: bridges, electrical towers, and especially the oil pipeline that runs through the zone. Combat is occurring between guerrillas and the security forces in several sites, with rural residents caught in the crossfire or unable to leave their homes. Others have managed to flee, with 500 displaced people arriving in the town center of Orito, 200 in Mocoa, and a large flow believed to be crossing the border into Ecuador. The colonel in charge of the Colombian Army’s 27^th Brigade has asked to be relieved of his command.

The FARC carried out a similar armed stoppage between September and December of 2000, when Plan Colombia was just getting started. At that time, the Colombian military airlifted food and other supplies into the Puerto Asís airport. The airlifts have begun again, this time on a larger scale.

Though the FARC offensive roughly coincides with the fifth anniversary of U.S. aid to Plan Colombia, that is probably just a coincidence. The attacks are more likely the FARC’s response to Plan Patriota, the year-and-a-half-old, U.S.-supported military offensive taking place in a vast zone, about 150 miles to the north and east of Puerto Asís, that was undisputed FARC territory for decades.

Unable to operate unhindered in that zone (parts of the departments of Caquetá, Guaviare, Meta, and Vaupés), the FARC is believed to be beefing up its presence to the south and west, in Putumayo and neighboring departments of Nariño and Cauca. These three departments make up Colombia’s southwest corner; by dominating them, the guerrillas can control routes to the Pacific and into Ecuador and Peru. The frequency, scale and brutality of guerrilla attacks in these departments have increased sharply since February. Examples include the February bombing of a barracks in Iscuandé, Nariño; the repeated FARC attacks on Cauca indigenous communities like Toribío, Jambaló, and Tacueyó since April; and attacks on military targets in Santa Ana, La Tagua, and Teteyé, Putumayo. The Colombian military, occupied with Plan Patriota to the north, has been unable to respond to the increased guerrilla activity in and around Putumayo.

It is outrageous that so much investment in Plan Colombia has failed to improve security even in the very department where Plan Colombia began. Associated Press reporter Andrew Selsky, who has traveled to Putumayo periodically since 2000, put it well in a story dated July 29: “U.S. officials who began aerial fumigation of cocaine-producing crops in this isolated state almost five years ago believed then that the ‘outlawed groups’ that control cocaine production – leftist rebels and their right-wing paramilitary foes – would be long gone by now. The theory was that with the coca fields killed by herbicide, the gunmen would leave.”

That did not happen. There may be less coca, but there is not less poverty, and there is not less violence.

The immediate priority in Putumayo is to weaken the armed stoppage, get aid to isolated towns, and help civilians to escape the fighting. After that, though, the U.S. and Colombian governments must take a good look at the strategy that has failed so miserably in Putumayo.

The July armed stoppage shows that Plan Colombia – especially its “push into southern Colombia” – was unable to affect the FARC’s military capacity in Putumayo. Plan Patriota – the large offensive just to the north – has not stopped the FARC from increasing its attacks elsewhere in the country. What do the two offensives have in common? Both have taken place in zones that the Colombian government has abandoned, leaving citizens to fend for themselves. Both are little more than temporary – if sizable – increases in the presence of one part of the Colombian government: the military and the police. Eventually, the soldiers move on to somewhere else; when they do, they leave little behind.

The lesson of Putumayo should be that temporary surges in military activity, however ambitious, will not bring meaningful results on their own. If the Colombian government is serious about governing zones like Putumayo, the military action is only a small part of what is needed. Protected by the security forces, government representatives – from teachers to cops to agricultural extensionists – must be present in places like rural Putumayo, in regular contact with the locals and providing badly needed services. If the civilian part of the government is there and has the trust of the population, “armed stoppages” and other guerrilla actions will not take the government by surprise. In fact, they will be unlikely to prosper.

This seems rather obvious. But it hasn’t been tried in Colombia. Instead, the same mistake keeps getting repeated. The U.S. contribution is a shining example. Eighty percent of U.S. aid to Colombia since 2000 has gone just to the military and police. And this may change little, if at all, in 2006. This is very bad news for the residents of places like Putumayo.

Posted by isacson at August 1, 2005 08:44 AM

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