SURVEY: COLOMBIA

Drugs, war and democracy

Apr 19th 2001
From The Economist print edition

The world’s demand for drugs has given new fuel to old conflicts in Colombia. Establishing democratic order will take time, and outside help, writes Michael Reid

APCan President Pastrana make peace?

IT IS a country with many qualities. Though only the fifth-largest in Latin America by area, Colombia is the third-largest by population (with 41m people), and the second (after Brazil) in biodiversity. More of its women work outside the home than elsewhere in Latin America. It is the world’s second-biggest supplier of coffee and of cut flowers. For much of the past century, Colombia was a rare model of Latin American economic stability and success. Between 1945 and 1995, its economy grew at an annual average rate of almost 5%. It was one of the few countries in the region to enjoy an investment-grade credit rating. Among foreign businessmen, it came to be known as Latin America’s best-kept secret.

Colombia also claims to be the region’s oldest democracy (though that requires some qualification), and it takes its culture seriously. Not only does it have a living Nobel-prize-winning novelist in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but its cities are teeming with bookshops, and its exports of books exceed those of any other Latin American country. Colombian-born Fernando Botero is perhaps Latin America’s greatest living visual artist.

But nowadays Colombia has become associated with less attractive features: the prevalence of illegal drugs, and the violent disorder of its guerrillas and paramilitary bands. For the past two decades, Colombia has been the world’s main supplier of cocaine. Its role in this industry was originally that of an entrepôt. It would import the coca (whose leaves provide the raw material for the drug) in semi-processed form from Peru and Bolivia, where most of it was grown, and re-export it as refined cocaine to the United States and Europe. But in the 1990s, coca growing became concentrated in Colombia.

The country’s central role in the illegal-drug business has fuelled a wider breakdown in public order. Violence in Colombia is not new, but it has taken on new forms. The drug gangs have turned a generation of unemployed urban youths into sicarios, or hired killers. At the same time, the drug business has supplied finance, and given new military strength, to three irregular armies: on the left, the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN); and on the right, bands of paramilitary vigilantes, most of whom are organised in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).

Conflict between the guerrillas and the security forces, which enjoy the unofficial (and increasingly unwelcome) support of the paramilitaries, began four decades ago, but it has recently become more intense. The number of civilian casualties is rising. The government’s writ now runs over only about half of this vast country—though that half includes the cities, where most Colombians live.

The statistics of violent death in Colombia are shrouded in confusion, some of it deliberate. The murder rate climbed steadily in the 1980s; it then remained broadly constant during the 1990s. In proportion to the population, it is the world’s highest (see charts 1 and 2).

According to the Defence Ministry, there were 1,777 deaths in combat last year. But the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), a human-rights group, says that in all, 6,067 people were killed as a result of “socio-political violence” in the 12 months to September 2000—an increase of almost 50% compared with the previous 12 months. The security forces’ traditionally poor human-rights record has improved. But the CCJ identifies the paramilitaries as the authors of 49% of the non-combat killings, with the guerrillas responsible for 11%.

All the armed groups target civilians who are held to be “collaborators” with rivals. The paramilitaries do this with particular savagery: their massacres of civilians are aimed at “cleansing” territory. Over the past five years, some 1m Colombians are thought to have fled to the cities to escape rural violence. Last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross gave emergency aid to 130,000 such “displaced people”.

The paramilitaries’ raison d’être, they say, is the state’s failure to provide security against kidnapping and extortion by the guerrillas. In kidnaps, too, Colombia is the world leader. Last year the police recorded 3,707 kidnaps, or roughly ten every day, well over treble the number in 1996. The guerrillas were responsible for about 60% of these, according to the defence ministry. Some kidnap victims are rich, but many are merely not poor. Some are seized at impromptu roadblocks; some are children.

To make matters worse, the economy no longer seems immune to the insecurity of everyday life. In 1999 Colombia suffered a steep recession: GDP shrank by 4.5%. A tentative recovery is now under way, but unemployment stands at 20%. Until security improves, investment may be held back.

In search of safety and better economic prospects, record numbers of Colombians are leaving their country for the United States, Venezuela, Ecuador and Central America. According to ANIF, an economic think-tank in Bogota, 1m Colombians have moved abroad since 1996.

To add to the gloom, Colombians are disillusioned with their political leaders. The guerrillas have little public support; the paramilitaries have only slightly more, though approval of them is growing. But democratic politics has become tarnished not just by the apparent helplessness of government in the face of the country’s problems, but also by rising corruption in public life.

In 1998, Colombians elected as their president Andres Pastrana, a Conservative former television news anchorman from a prominent political family. Faced with a dispiriting panorama, Mr Pastrana took two big steps. The first was to begin peace talks with the FARC. The second was to start repairing Colombia’s relations with the United States, which had suffered under his predecessor, Ernesto Samper.

The peace talks have moved slowly, but Mr Pastrana’s second initiative has been more successful. In Washington, drug fighters were fretting over the surge in coca cultivation. Policy buffs were alarmed that Colombia—strategically located between the Panama Canal and Venezuela’s oilfields—was deteriorating into a “failed state”, which in turn could endanger the weak democracies of its Andean neighbours.

Uncle Sam steps in

Their answer was Plan Colombia, drawn up jointly by Colombian and American officials and launched by Mr Pastrana in September 1999. It is officially designated as “a plan for peace, prosperity and the strengthening of the state”. It is meant to involve an investment of $7.5 billion over three years, including $4 billion from Colombia itself.

But Plan Colombia has a hard core. Last year the United States granted Colombia $1.3 billion in emergency aid, to be spent over two years. Most of this is military aid, but it includes $81m for schemes to wean farmers off coca, as well as $122m for human rights and for the judiciary. It was approved with strong bipartisan support in America’s Congress, and comes on top of an annual aid programme of some $330m, most of it for fighting drugs. This makes Colombia the biggest recipient of American aid anywhere outside the Middle East.

The Clinton administration insisted that the military aid was to fight drugs, not guerrillas—but that by cutting the flow of drug money to the insurgents, it would force them to take the peace talks seriously. That is a distinction the Bush administration may blur.

Plan Colombia has been controversial from the start. Polls show that most Colombians welcome American aid, though they may disagree on the details. But neighbours, especially Ecuador, are nervous, fearing overspill from an intensified war. The presence of American military advisers in a foreign jungle conjures up memories of Vietnam. Human-rights groups note the history of brutality in Colombia’s armed forces, as well as links between some military officers and the paramilitaries.

Some critics ascribe Colombia’s difficulties mainly to what they consider to be the failings of its democracy, and see the guerrillas as the product of political exclusion and socio-economic injustice. Others, especially in Europe, claim to favour more “social investment” rather than military aid—but the European Union has so far offered only a modest $100m in aid to Colombia, though Spain has also offered a similar sum.

According to a second set of critics, Plan Colombia’s military aid is too narrowly focused on the United States’ war against illegal drugs rather than on Colombia’s own problems. Two decades of repression of the drug industry in the Andean countries have failed to make a dent in its overall output. These critics fear that Plan Colombia may simply move coca cultivation to other parts of Colombia, or to neighbouring countries. They think that foreign aid should instead be concentrated on strengthening Colombia’s democratic state across the board. A recent joint report by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Inter-American Dialogue, two American foreign-policy think-tanks, concluded that: “The core problem has to do with state authority, the inability of the government to protect its citizens. In seeking to strengthen the capacity of Colombia’s security forces, more emphasis should be placed on professionalisation and training than on supplying equipment to fight drugs.”

It is true that Colombia’s problems have been hugely aggravated by drugs, which in turn have flourished in the country’s atmosphere of general lawlessness. Since the rich countries that are the world’s main consumers of cocaine show no sign of depriving the drug gangs of their vast profits by legalising the stuff, they have a responsibility to help the country that has suffered most from their habit.

But mending Colombia goes beyond trying to tackle the drug trade. It means dealing with three other problems: public insecurity, lack of economic confidence and political cynicism. That requires an understanding of how Colombia got into its current mess—not least because Colombians’ perception of the present is shaped by myths about their past.

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