February 22th, 2016
More than 15 years of financial injections from the government of the United States into the Colombian state radically changed the landscape of our country, defined the course of the war and ensured the continuity of an authoritarianism which today ensures the interests of large transnational corporations and the US.
More than USD 9 billion were injected into the national government and the security forces between 1999 and 2015, according to the annual military budget approved by the US Congress. Along with these resources, whose public records are kept in Washington, indeterminate amounts of money, weapons, men, contracts, intelligence information and actions in the field of American operatives were moved under the table for more than a decade and a half of the most important international cooperation initiative of the US in this hemisphere.
Thus, Colombia became the laboratory of a policy with which the United States modernized the so-called ‘low intensity war’, a strategy created as a result of its defeat in Vietnam to not intervene only indirectly in internal conflicts of countries that could escape its sphere of influence. Thanks to this, today it exports similar initiatives to countries like Afghanistan and Mexico, with consequences known to all.
Before Colombia, the US had tested this policy in Guatemala and Peru –Plan Montesinos–, leaving a long trail of deaths, torture, sexual violence, imprisonments, displacement, forced disappearances and destruction of the social fabric, including an extensive genocide against indigenous peoples, as a product of a strategy that combines the modernization of the armed forces, police and intelligence agencies; a bold initiative paramilitary –in Guatemala with the Civil Self-Defence Patrols (PAC) and Peru with the Colina Group and the Peasantry Patrols– the control of the media and an aggressive government propaganda. This includes welfare policies that increase the dependence of the population on the state and undermine social discontent or the claims of victims.
All this also applied in Colombia, but with the accumulated experience of two of the bloodiest civil wars in recent history on our continent: many of the diplomats, military trainers and US mercenaries who passed through Guatemala and Peru were coming to our country at different times, from 1995 to date, especially in the period of greatest upsurge in the Colombian war and the greatest human rights violations.
In the years of the Colombia Plan (1999-2015), according to the Register of Victims, 6,729,714 Colombians suffered 15,105,698 violations of human rights or were the subjects of war crimes or crimes against humanity in the context of armed conflict. This, in other words, represents 85.6% of the 7,860,385 victims that the state has registered between 1985 and today. Among the types of victimization of highest incidence are forced displacement, homicide, threats and forced disappearances, and thanks to the report “Enough!” (“¡Basta ya!”) of the National Center for Historical Memory, we know today that the responsibility for these crimes fall mainly on the macabre combination of state actors and paramilitary groups, an issue that was central to the undeclared strategy of Plan Colombia, as it was in Guatemala and Peru.
However, the three presidents that Colombia has had since the beginning of the initiative, Pastrana, Uribe and Santos, shamelessly reaped, each in his own way, the fruits of the huge investment of money from the United States in Colombia’s war and the tilting of the balance of the war in favor of the State that it promoted, from a strategic balance in its confrontation with guerrillas that, according to the US State Department, had options to take power by armed force of a favorable position in order to defeat them militarily and have most of those guerillas, the FARC-EP, currently at the negotiating table and to prepare a similar negotiation with the ELN.
Meanwhile, the anti-drug strategy that justified the Colombia Plan until 2003, when the US Congress authorized the use of its resources for its true objective of combating the armed insurgency and the social and political opposition, it was a complete failure: not only did it not significantly reduce the expanse of coca cultivation but it also increased the amount of hydrochloride cocaine exported from Colombia to the first world and the domestic consumption of the cocaine based paste made from processing excesses –known popularly as bazuco– as well as various synthetic drugs that catapulted to unexpected points, while big capital of drug trafficking was linked in different ways to the legal economy and to the networks of traditional politics, especially during the rule of the so-called ‘democratic security’ and ‘para-politics’.
This, due to the fact that Plan Colombia favored a counterinsurgency alliance formed by the state, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) –and the new paramilitary groups that emerged with the dissolution of those forces– regional politicians and the economic power that did nothing but persecute and imprison or eliminate all forms of social dissent and all those who obstructed the path of big business. Without the Plan Colombia it would not have been possible to dispossess millions of hectares of peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, nor the systematization of crime in poor neighborhoods of major cities such as the ones that caused hundreds of young people today to find their deathbeds in common graves of the “Escombrera” (“The Dump”) in Medellin, a product of the Orion operation.
Additionally, the Plan Colombia gave astronomical profits to companies like Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters; Monsanto, maker of the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) that has been spread over large areas of the Colombian terrain since 1990; and DynCorp, the controversial mercenary company that provides various services to the Police and the Army, among others. Regarding the presence of these ‘advisors’, the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE) has underlined that “in 2007 there were at least 2,000 contractors operating in Colombia, through some 20 companies.”
On the subject of the Institution, these years of Plan Colombia radically changed the state, leaving issues such as the balance of power in the nostalgia of the public discourse and with re-election as a permanent policy of rulers who not only come concentrating power like never before, but exercise it to leave their mark on society for decades. Meanwhile, the high command of security forces with about half a million men –one of the largest on the continent, the most controversial for the systematic violations of human rights and a potential threat to the region– especially the Army and Police, managed to secure a place among the decision-makers of the direction of the country, largely due to the considerable resources that these armed forces receive and the obvious corruption at its center, as well as forging their way as an undeclared public authority to which the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches should hold them accountable before any action, as was evident in the peace talks or the formulation of the national budget.
On their behalf, the citizens have borne the brunt of the effects of Plan Colombia. In addition to the large number of victims produced in recent years, the initiative leaves the Colombians with significant limitations to their freedoms due to the reform of the judicial system and the penal code, and with the proclamation of the intelligence and public security laws which violate basic rights such as privacy, the right to association and protest. While spying on large segments of popullation, imposing express processes and hardening penalties for those who attempt to claim what is theirs in the middle of a country in which the ruling classes imposed on the population, with blood and fire, a model based on mining, oil, hydroelectric power plants, agribusiness, the destruction of our ecosystems and the over exploitation of the work of laborers for the benefit of large local and transnational capital.
There is nothing to celebrate! A phrase well put by several human rights defense organizations. On the contrary, there is much to question concerning the cheers that the mainstream media and the governments of the United States and Colombia are exclaiming on the anniversary that closes this period of Plan Colombia and that surrounds the new project “Colombia Peace” that the government of Juan Manuel Santos has brought to Obama to fund what he calls the ‘post-conflict’. With that, decades of continuity of an interventionist policy can undoubtedly be expected from the US in Colombia that has only increased the violence and made huge profits for the wealthy, at the cost of the poor providing the corpses and putting up with increasingly poor living conditions.
However, the road is long and will depend on the social struggle in the coming years, the capacity of Colombians to join and organize their rage, the initiative of grassroots organizations to provide concrete proposals to the current situation of most of the population, and the persistence and maturity that the social movement managed to gain concerning the direction that Colombia will take and the possibilities that the country could build a road to sovereignty and a better future for all.
Even the almost absolute power of the United States can be made to totter when it is met with a a people who are able to risk everything for their dreams and the examples of those who fill history shows that not even 15 –in reality 17– years of Plan Colombia are enough to wipe out the hope that our nation enjoy peace, justice and dignity.
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* Translated by: Liesl Drew.
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