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September 4, 2006
Love those Semana columnists
In yesterday's edition of the Colombian newsmagazine Semana, Daniel Coronell notes that the coca crop has been largely unaffected by fumigation in areas under paramilitary control. He refers to a map that appeared in last month's New York Times article documenting Plan Colombia's failure to reduced drugs.
The map, based on the U.S. government's satellite measures, indicates three types of zones. The first are the areas in which illicit cultivations have been abandoned. The second are the places where coca-planting has stayed stable, and the third are the regions where existing crops have increased and new cultivations have appeared.
When one compares this map with the map of FARC, ELN and AUC zones of action, one immediately notices that coca has stayed stable or incerased in regions controlled by paramilitary groups. ...
According to the Department of State and the [White House] Office for National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), southern Colombia [where guerrillas predominate] is now not the largest zone of illicit crops. Today, the largest coca-growing area extends across the [paramilitary-heavy] departments of Bolívar, Sucre, Córdoba, and northern Antioquia. ...
The map seems to contradict those who believe that the fumigations haven't done anything. The areas of Putumayo and Caquetá, which have been under FARC control, show the largest amount of abandoned cultivations. Eradication has also been successful in Norte de Santander, where the ELN has had influence.
Meanwhile, Antonio Caballero, whom El Tiempo called "an icon of criticizing power" upon his recent return from 20 years in exile, minces no words in a column about the longstanding but unacknowledged relationship between Colombia's elite and the paramilitaries.
If today the narcoparamilitaries are not being punished for their crimes - political or economic - or for their massacres or for their illicit businesses, this is not just for the obvious reason that they have not been defeated by the State. But because they are, and continue to be as they have been from the start, allies of the state security forces (military and police), and friends of the State's masters. ... The Colombian political and economic establishment has never had disgust for the paras, to the contrary. Not for their armed actions, whose spirit and goals it has always supported, though at times it may have been disgusted by the excessive roughness of their actions - those chainsaws. Nor for their legal or illegal businesses, in many of which the establishment has participated or wanted to participate, from cattle-ranching to narcotrafficking and including numbers rackets and siphoning off public funds.
Posted by isacson at September 4, 2006 8:45 AM
Comments
Coronell's pieces are often enlightening, as far as pointing specific things out goes, but his conclusion that "Plan Colombia could have worked" is a disingenuous one in this case.
It's been a constant observation that fumigations will continue to move drug crops in and out throughout the country, as growers and traffickers will not be discouraged by mere eradication alone, so it's logical that new areas come into play, whether they are guerrilla or paramilitary influenced.
What's more, the picture is complicated further because of the fact that there are paramilitaries even in guerrilla-influenced regions and, vice versa, guerrillas in paramilitary-influenced regions.
The map says little about who is really in control of specific coca plantations on the ground in each department. One can't just say that "southern plantations are for the guerrillas, northerns ones are for the paramilitaries", even if that statement *sounds* initially correct and may have some degree of truth to it.
In the end, fumigating everything equally would end up being more expensive (and ecologically wasteful), but it couldn't have worked either, because the business would simply continue to adapt and, at most, experience tactical fragmentation in order to survive.
As for Caballero, all of his weekly columns showcase him as "an icon of criticizing power", indeed, but a rather predictable one at that. You read one Caballero column or two and you've pretty much read them all.
He sometimes makes a good point or two too, but his methods of communicating it aren't particularly impressive, and at other times he eventually descends into "anti-everything" rambling. Coronell is, IMHO, a better columnist.
That said...the paragraph quoted up here is a relatively reasonable one though, as are a couple of unquoted ones that, FYI, actually recognize that there has been some progress (insufficient, true, but progress nevertheless) at uncovering both old and current cases of abuse and related scandals.
Posted by: jcg ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 4, 2006 12:23 PM
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