More Terrible Than Death: Drugs Violence and America’s War in Colombia by Robin Kirk, takes readers from La Violencia and the beginning of FARC through the rise of the paramilitaries, to Medellin cartel, with a focus on the role the United States has played in each of these catastrophes. Kirk does a good job of laying out the backstories of FARC and the AUC (a major paramilitary), the leading guerrilla and paramilitary groups, respectively. She also offers detailed biographies of their founders (Manuel Maurlanda, aka Pedro Marin, aka Tirofijo for FARC and Carlos Castano for AUC).
But the book’s stated purpose is to unpack America’s involvement in Colombia.
The book does not argue that the United States is responsible for all of Colombia’s ills; certainly, there is blame to generously share. Yet there is one conclusion I hope most readers will take away from these pages: American habits and ideas and actions on the ground give speed and bite to the wars now gripping Colombia. We share responsibility. But we have yet to acknowledge this, or to think deeply or truly about how to stop. To the contrary, we delve ever deeper into Colombia’s conflict.
I want to make note of three distinct chapters that emerge from her account.
The war on communism
Certainly, the Communists took advantage of what became known as the Bogotazo. A few agile comrades even managed to raise a Soviet banner over the town hall in faraway Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast. A single army officer pulled it down. In fact, the Communists were as shocked by the magnicidio as anyone. Looters even sacked their tiny office. City blocks smoldered after rioters torched the wood and straw buildings. Nevertheless, within hours, the Conservatives had blamed Communists for Gaitán’s murder and the riots that followed. Rioters, charged President Ospina, were inspired by “a spirit alien to us, a movement of communist inspiration and practices.”
Americans found Ospina’s words intoxicating. They seemed to confirm every suspicion circulating in Washington of the Soviet plan for domination in the hemisphere. On April 14, 1948, the New York Times reported on a statement by Secretary Marshall, which struck a new and ominous tone… U.S. election-year politics had a strong influence on Marshall’s view. At the time, the Republicans were calling President Harry S. Truman naive in the fight against communism. Campaigning for the Republican nomination, Governor Thomas E. Dewey said in a stump speech on April 12 that Truman’s mismanagement of American intelligence was to blame for the failure to detect what he called “Communist plans” for revolution in Colombia, “just two hours’ bombing time from the Panama Canal.”... Eleven days later, New York Herald Tribune columnist Walter Lippmann described Marshall’s assessment as well as the fears of an imminent Communist rebellion as based on faulty logic. The Americans were engaging in what he called “the very human propensity to insist on making the facts fit one’s stereotyped preconceptions–in this case to treat a South American revolution as a phase of the Russian Revolution, and then to suppose that all revolutionary conditions in the world begin and end in Moscow, but for Moscow there would be no revolutions.” But Lippmann’s voice of reason was lost…. In the American view, communism was afoot in Colombia and it had to be stopped. The Colombians were ill-equipped to face the Soviets. President Ospina hadn’t even been able to save his own capital, much of which lay in ruins. Only through more active intervention—meaning military support and picking leaders who firmly shared Washington’s views—could the menace be stopped…
Prior to World War II, the Colombian army had looked to Europe for military assistance. But as concern mounted about the Communist advance in Latin America, the United States courted the Colombians aggressively. At the time, influential advisers were telling President Dwight D. Eisenhower that the Soviets were winning the Cold War. In places like Colombia, they were doing it, the explanation went, by using unconventional techniques, among them peasant guerrillas like those holed up at El Davis. Colombia had signed its first military aid agreement with the United States in 1952….
In 1954, the first Colombian soldiers completed U.S. Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. One year later, graduates started the country’s own Ranger unit, named the Lanceros, the first counterguerrilla training center in Latin America. Among other things, Americans began to instruct Colombian pilots in how to handle and use napalm, to apply “discreetly,” in Ambassador Bonsal’s words, to Communist settlements in the central Andes…
In 1959, the United States sent the first of many military advisory teams (made up of Philippines and Korea veterans) to Colombia to assess the war and the methods used by its army. The three-volume U.S. report advocated an extensive network of advisers and direct U.S. involvement in counter-rebel actions there. By 1961, U.S. military hardware designed to vanquish the “independent republics” included helicopters, vehicles, communications equipment, and small arms. Within a year, the Colombians flew their first air assault on an “independent republic” using an American helicopter piloted by a Colombian with a U.S. air force instructor at his side.
In February 1962, the U.S. army sent another team to Colombia, this time headed by Brigadier General William P. Yarborough… [a cold war expert whose assessment of Colombian military capability was grim] He stressed the central role of “civic actions,” some carried out with food donated by the Americans (including for the soldiers themselves, whom Yarborough described as poorly fed and poorly paid). But [he also believed that] Colombia’s only hope lay with the direct intervention of the United States. Only if Americans took what he called “positive measures” could the Communist threat be eliminated. “Even complete implementation of the recommendations made in the basic report will not bring decisive or lasting results,” he wrote in a secret supplement. The Americans needed to create what he described as a “clandestine” force able to perform “counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.” This combined civilian and military force should respond to U.S. command, not Colombian, he noted. “This would permit passing to the offensive in all fields of endeavor rather than depending on the Colombians to find their own solution.”
He wanted this force to take independent action and hit rebels where and when they least expected it: not in battle, but at rest, through their neighbors, their habits, and their stomachs. Yarborough also recommended that within this clandestine force, the Americans create “hunter-killer” units to collect intelligence and execute suspected rebels or their supporters. In Vietnam, the hunter-killer units were part of the CIA’s Phoenix Program, launched in 1967. Vietnamese operatives were supposed to target civilian members of the National Liberation Front, thus hampering its ability to fight. In its first four years, Phoenix Program operatives killed over 20,000 people, many of whom, its critics claimed, were civilians wrongly accused of rebel activity. activity. In Colombia, these units faced a similar issue. How were they to identify the enemy?
In the end, [that question] went unanswered. Imperceptibly to some and all too gruesomely to others, La Violencia transformed from a clash between political parties to a campaign against subversives and their suspected supporters within the society at large. Instead of being guilty because they were Liberal or Conservative, people became guilty because they lived in or near an “independent republic” or had thoughts that could be said to be influenced by the Communists. [As the book explains, there weren’t actually that many communists in Colombia at all. The Colombian leaders framed it that way to secure US investment, and the US accepted that framing because it suited them.]
The war on drugs
If I had more time I’d grant this one a whole separate post because there’s tons of great details and illustration of how the paramilitaries and Colombian military - and by extension the Colombian government — are awash in drug money, and how the FARC went from taxing narco-trafficking in their territory to becoming major traffickers themselves. And how the U.S. contributed to so much of that first with our irrepressible demand for product, then through our atrocious foreign policies and dim politicking.
In 1972, Richard Nixon was the first president to use the phrase “war on drugs.” A decade later, Ambassador Louis Tambs went a step further when he coined the word “narco-guerrilla” to refer to the FARC, since the group levied taxes on cocaine. There was both manipulation and truth to the description. When Tambs used it, the relationship between the FARC and drug trafficking existed, but it was no more pronounced than the FARC’s relationship with any other business. He could have called them “cattle-guerrillas” or “oil-guerrillas.” Guerrillas “taxed” coca and charged fees but did not themselves make or sell cocaine. Nevertheless, the choice of term served a political purpose. It worked as a hinge to connect what had been a war on communism to a new campaign, waged with the same tools and against similar targets.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed Directive No. 221, which declared drugs a national security threat. Funding for the treatment of drug addicts in the United States began the decline that continues to this day. Instead, what began to be called “the war on drugs” was focused on the source countries, among them Peru (where the coca was grown) and Colombia…
Drug-war scholar Peter Reuter once described U.S. drug policy as “frozen in place” since the mid-1980s. Instead, American presidents engaged in small changes, tweaks, shifts in language that go virtually unnoticed in the United States but have huge impact in places like Colombia.
In 1990, top Colombian officers came to Washington and told Congress quite pointedly that they intended to use any U.S. aid to fight the FARC. The announcement caused little comment, a sign of how neatly the war on subversion had already melded into the “war on drugs.” “The arms are given to the government in order that it may use them in the anti-narcotics struggle,” commented former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Thomas MacNamara, a Bush administration supporter. “But this is not a requirement.” That same year, the United States sent yet another team of military advisers to Colombia, this time to once again revamp the Colombian military’s intelligence system. It had been two decades since General Yarborough delivered his scathing report, but little had changed. According to the U.S. Defense Department, the goal was to make the Colombian system more “efficient and effective” in the fight against drugs. Those in the Colombian military accepted the advice, as always. Then they directed the system not against traffickers but against people they suspected of “subversion.” For human rights, the consequences were disastrous.
Colombia’s military brass had resisted the conflation of the drug war and counterinsurgency. They wanted no part of chasing down traffickers or busting labs, a dirty job better suited to the police. In 1992, the Colombian military had flatly rejected a U.S. offer of $2.8 million to set up army counter drug units. Of course, anyone who followed Colombia also knew that the traffickers themselves had been important army allies through MAS and Castaño’s Head Splitters. The generals also wanted nothing to do with human rights talk, which inevitably accompanied American dollars. But by the mid-1990s, things had changed. Even with Castaño’s help, the generals continued to lose the war. Regularly, Marín’s forces outmatched soldiers... Meanwhile, millions in U.S. aid—money, equipment, helicopters, and training—was bolstering the army’s bitterest rivals, the Colombian police.
[Also in 1992] The Republicans were accusing President Bill Clinton of being soft on drugs and even “sabotaging” the drug war by failing to fight it hard enough in Colombia. Clinton’s campaign trail admission that he had tried marijuana but hadn’t inhaled enticed some Republicans to portray him as a drug-addled dilettante. It was a cynical, shallow tactic. In fact, little distinguished Clinton’s record from that of his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, or for that matter Ronald Reagan. All favored an emphasis on supply-side eradication and interdiction, even as funding for treatment in the United States—considered the most effective way to reduce demand and therefore the amount of cocaine sent into the country—dwindled.
In 1994, President Clinton presented his first budget for the drug war. It differed little from the Bush administration’s plan. Of the $13 billion requested, President Clinton asked for a 1-percent increase in spending on demand reduction. But he succeeded in getting something that had eluded President Bush: an agreement by Colombia to drop its opposition to the use of herbicides… Since 1995, when the United States began spraying coca bushes with herbicide, thousands of acres have been destroyed. Police and customs agents have seized millions of pounds of pure cocaine in ships, airplanes, submarines, and trucks. Every day, passengers enter the United States, their intestines holding condoms or balloons filled with cocaine; they either shit it out or die trying. Yet in 2002, the CIA reported that there was more land planted in coca than ever before in Colombia’s history.
Coca was spewing out of the Andes, 550,000 metric tons of raw leaf in 1996 alone. The actual size of coca fields shown on the embassy’s oversized maps seemed manageable, even tiny. In terms of acreage, it was equivalent to the land devoted only to malt barley in south-central Idaho. But the profits were astronomical–$53 billion annually, calculated on the basis of the average U.S. street price of $175 per gram of cocaine. That was five times the amount of foreign aid spent on the entire African continent. At best, even the most committed drug warriors could only say that American efforts had “slowed the rate of increase”—in other words, shaved some seconds off the run of an accelerating train fueled by their fellow Americans.
It was 1997 and the U.S. Congress was beginning to debate new military aid for [Colombian] troops. Suddenly, the word “narco-guerrilla” was everywhere, the magic spell that would ease millions out of the American treasury… In U.S. government reports and the congressional testimony of administration officials, Colombia’s military was described as little changed from the disorganized and largely passive force that General Yarborough had assessed in 1962. Washington [was] now convinced that the only way to wage war on drug trafficking was by increasing the firepower available to Colombia’s soldiers. Strengthening the army was necessary, American drug warriors argued, because the FARC units that controlled the coca fields were themselves heavily armed.
[Also] In 1997, U.S. law for the first time required embassies to screen security force units receiving security assistance anywhere in the world for credible evidence of human rights violations; such evidence would disqualify them from receiving aid. Drafted by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the measure, called the Leahy Amendment, won congressional support in large part out of concern over the relationship with Colombia’s tainted army.
A month before my arrival, the Americans had begun a new spray campaign in the Putumayo, the “push into southern Colombia” that had motivated an emergency $1.3-billion aid request for the Andes to the U.S. Congress in 1999. Most was meant for Colombia’s military and was packaged by proponents as “Plan Colombia.”
On September 10, 2001, while Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Peru, the State Department announced that it had placed Castaño’s AUC on the list of foreign terrorist groups.
In 2002, the Bush administration finally acknowledged a fact that was clear to anyone traveling Colombia: The two wars were inextricable, the trunk of a tree and its rotten fruit. The White House asked the U.S. Congress to lift the requirement that all military aid be spent only on counterdrug operations. The request was granted with little opposition. opposition. Although the decision simply acknowledged what anyone with eyes could see, it also marked yet another entanglement in a war that would not have such a lethal punch without American consumers.
Colombia’s use of U.S. funds and advice—and the human rights abuses that resulted—caused little outrage in Washington. To the contrary, officials rejected proposals to place human rights conditions on aid, claiming that they would be counterproductive. Reform, they argued, would come by a kind of osmosis, as Colombian officers saw that good behavior translated into more goodies from the Americans. Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson articulated the U.S. position before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Denying aid or imposing conditions impossible to meet defeats the goals of improving human rights. In the real world, the perfect is the enemy of the good.” A different message was understood by Colombia’s generals. The gringos would turn a blind eye to abuses as long as the military paid lip service to the drug war. For the politicians, cutting aid on human rights grounds risked making them appear soft on drugs. Especially in an election year, this was unthinkable.
The war on terror
In Washington, Colombia is now the Latin front of the global war on terror and America’s most enthusiastic ally in the region. In his speeches, President Uribe has explicitly linked Colombian violence to events in the Middle East, thus making the case for the continued funding that he believes is necessary to win against guerrillas. As the United States prepared the invasion that would topple Saddam Hussein, Colombia volunteered for the “coalition of the willing,” becoming the only South American nation to do so… In the short term… President Uribe’s political calculation has paid off. At a time of shrinking resources in the United States, Colombia remains the top recipient of U.S. aid in the hemisphere. In 2002, the White House asked the U.S. Congress for and received permission to use military assistance in Colombia to directly engage groups identified by the U.S. State Department as terrorists. Previously, this aid could only be used in counter-drug operations. In 2005, Colombia will likely receive another half-billion dollars in mostly military and counterterrorism aid from the United States. But here is some useful history that needs to be shouted from the rooftops: there are no global terrorists in Colombia. Neither Osama bin Laden nor his backers creep through the gullies of the Colombian backland. That is as hallucinatory–and false–a specter as the Communist basilisco was in the 1950s. It doesn’t, and didn’t, threaten Colombia. As I explain in these pages, during the Cold War, Americans saw in Colombia the reflection of our most pressing fear, not reality. For its own reasons, Colombia played along, sealing the alliance by joining the coalition of the willing of the day, for the Korean War. Then–president Laureano Gómez reaped the diplomatic and military benefits, using U.S. support to mount an entirely unrelated extermination campaign against his political rivals, the very un-Communist Liberals. The ramifications of that hideous chapter in history, still so mysterious to most Colombians, remain palpable today…
Americans continue to fight, in someone else’s country and at someone else’s cost, our demon of craving and addiction. Too often, that cost is measured in human lives. Certainly, there are weapons that cause massive destruction in Colombia. They are called guns, and they are made in America and Israel and Belgium and Brazil. Certainly, there is terror. No other word fits what it feels like to be in a town when guerrillas launch their gas cylinder bombs or when paramilitaries start going, lists of names in hand, door to door. Americans should help Colombians who want democracy and peace. Some of that help must be military aid; as a human rights activist, I am too familiar with the brutal ways of both guerrillas and paramilitaries not to acknowledge that many will fail to be convinced by argument alone. But help must, in greater measure, also come as schools and medicine and roofs. Americans must recognize our role in this disaster, through our craving for the drugs we classify as illegal. The solution lies in our communities and in Washington, not in Colombia. All the bullets in the world will not cure Colombia; only hope and ensuring Colombians power over their own future has that kind of magic.