Plan Colombia and Beyond

I made the argument (often expressed in this weblog) that Colombia will not resolve the twin challenges of insurgency and illicit crops until it is able to govern – to enforce laws and provide services – in the remote, neglected areas where both thrive. Ruiz disagreed strongly, using an argument that I’ve heard before and have found difficult to dispute.

While I’m paraphrasing, the argument runs along the lines of “Colombia is far too vast to expect the government to be present in every last corner of the country where a few people decide to live. Many of these ungoverned spaces are dense jungles that were only settled because of the coca economy. The soils are terrible, and markets are very far away. People should not be living in these areas to begin with.”

Never mind that there are many places with near-zero government presence where people have been living for generations (think afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast, or the paramilitary-dominated towns across northern Colombia). For many areas, Ruiz’s argument applies, and the population’s isolation is a big challenge.

But these people are there now. As much as 3-4 percent of Colombia’s population are newcomers to areas that were largely empty before the 1960s or 1970s. Many participate in the coca economy, and many form the “social base” of armed groups active in these regions. What should the Colombian government be doing for these forgotten citizens?

The United States, which also has huge expanses of nearly empty territory, offers an interesting counterexample. According to the House of Representatives’ Committee on Resources, 29.6 percent of U.S. national territory is owned by the federal government. (This includes 91.9 percent of Nevada, over 66 percent of Alaska, Utah and Idaho, and half of Wyoming and Arizona.) A smaller but significant number is in the hands of state, county and municipal governments.

On this land, you can’t just settle in and plant crops (legal or illegal) and try to make a living. (Though as we’ve noted before, that doesn’t stop everyone from trying to grow marijuana in national parks and reserves.) You can’t build a vacation home either (though some permits for doing that in national forests were issued until the 1960s). And even if you have a clear claim to private land, there’s always the possibility – however remote – that the government, citing the “greater good” and the need to bring you out of isolation and into modernity, could leave you in the same situation as the former inhabitants of Shenandoah National Park.

In Colombia’s ungoverned zones, of course, land tenure is more ambiguous. The Colombian government is generally unable (and at times unwilling) to evict colonos (“colonizers”) from national parks, indigenous reservations and public lands, much less empty wilderness zones.

And it’s not clear whether it should be doing so. To begin evicting people and relocating them closer to the country’s core would be a huge, costly and complicated effort. It would face legal and human rights challenges. It would have to grant concessions to indigenous groups – including nomadic, barely contacted tribes – who were in these areas first. For Colombia to approach the U.S. model of government dominion over unused land would be a long and painful process.

What to do, then? The 1999 “Plan Colombia” document, written largely by Jaime Ruiz, offers the outlines of a solution.

It is estimated that as much as 60 percent of the coca-producing areas are far from potential markets and in areas that are poorly suited to any sort of sustained agricultural production. To offer legal income opportunities to small farmers and laborers in such areas, the Colombian Government envisions three possible responses: First, farmers and others with an agricultural vocation will be offered the opportunity to move from the coca-producing areas and resettled on land that has been seized from narcotics traffickers or provided by the land reform institute, INCORA; second, economic opportunities in small- and micro-enterprise will be offered in the urban areas of origin for migrant coca farmers, to remove the economic incentive for that migration; third, the Colombian Government will work with indigenous groups and local governments to launch economically feasible environmental protection activities that conserve the forested areas in an effort to slow the advance of the agricultural frontier into inappropriate areas.

Very little of this has happened, needless to say. There have been some efforts along these lines: USAID has supported the second idea with productive projects to generate employment in some small cities near coca-growing zones, while the third idea is reflected in the Uribe government’s “forest-guard families” program, which pays about 30,000 families in several dozen municipalities to keep forests from being felled.

If you’re not one of the lucky few rural Colombians to benefit from these small programs, however, the U.S. and Colombian governments have probably already made it clear to you that they don’t want you to be living where you’re living. You may have been fumigated, perhaps several times. Military offensives and other combat may take place nearby, though these efforts to push out guerrillas have not included any attempt to win your support by providing you with basic services.

Fumigation and military pushes into these zones usually cause de-population as residents are displaced. U.S. and Colombian officials consider this de-population to be a sign of progress toward their goals. The Colombian government estimated that Putumayo’s population declined from about 320,000 in 2000 to about 270,000 by the end of 2002. It’s considered good news that Plan Patriota has turned several coca boomtowns in southern Colombia – Peñas Coloradas, Caquetá, Miraflores, Guaviare – into near-ghost towns.

Where did these tens of thousands of people go? Did they give up the coca economy, or have they re-planted the crop elsewhere? (Statistics show that re-planting has been very robust.) Have they made common cause with an armed group? How are they and their children feeding themselves? Can they really be considered citizens of Colombia?

It is entirely unacceptable that the U.S. and Colombian governments can only answer these questions with a big “I don’t know.”

Even a mass relocation – loading people and their belongings on trucks and giving them land titles in more-governed areas – would be more humane than the current policy. Even the Shenandoah solution would be an improvement. Not only is the current strategy inhumane, it’s ineffective if the goal is truly to reduce coca-growing and strengthen the Colombian state.