Following the Bay of Pigs disaster, President John F. Kennedy was racked with anxiety. Caught between the realities of the Cold War and an aggressive anti-communist State Department hellbent on suppressing the so-called “Red Menace” growing in Latin America, Kennedy felt compelled to act.
So his administration pivoted: Rather than preparing U.S.-friendly regimes throughout the Western Hemisphere to repel a (non-existent) Soviet invasion, Kennedy’s administration would assist its allies in keeping in check a much closer foe—the burgeoning leftwing movements that were then cropping up across Latin America.
In 1962, General William Yarborough, who had skillfully commanded airborne troops in Tunisia, Algeria, and Sicily during the Second World War, was sent to Colombia to assist in combating the nascent Marxist guerilla groups that were “causing trouble” in the countryside.
The United States was more than happy to aid its longtime anti-communist allies. Colombia, after all, had been the only Latin American country to send troops to the Korean peninsula during the first proxy conflict of the Cold War in the early-1950s.
Meanwhile, the insurgent guerillas, made up mostly of peasants and impoverished workers, aimed to prevent their small, but strategically important territory from being reintegrated into the Colombian state. And their irregular form of warfare—honed in the rugged Andean landscape that they controlled just south of Bogotá—made it difficult to parse out who, exactly, was or was not a rebel.
Yarborough, a granddaddy of the contemporary American Special Forces, was frank in his prescription: Colombia’s military and police, he advised, would have to fight dirty by engaging in “paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents,” activities which would be “backed by the United States.”
Colombia’s military assembled death squads to cleanse the Marquetalia Republic, as it was called, of Marxist partisans and anyone who sympathized with them. According to Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa, Colombia’s former minister of foreign affairs, this tactic meant the newly equipped and U.S.-advised brigades could “exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists.”
If there were ever a country that understood the term “Forever War,” it’s the Republic of Colombia.
Yarborough’s strategy, dubbed Plan Lazo, appeared to work. The Marquetalia Republic was brought to heel when a massive Colombian force besieged its remote villages, in which only a small portion of the residents were involved with the guerillas.
And so, a new Cold War tactic was born; it would soon echo not only across the mountains of Colombia but into countless theaters throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in which U.S. foreign policy goals overrode human rights and international law.
If there were ever a country that understood the term “Forever War,” it’s the Republic of Colombia.
This past spring, Colombia erupted into a massive protest and a general strike in response to a tax increase on all monthly incomes, initiated to offset the dramatic 6.8 percent GDP loss that the global pandemic has wrought. The increase was proposed by President Iván Duque Márquez, former president and national strongman Álvaro Uribe’s hand-picked candidate during Colombia’s 2018 election.
Protesters were met by an all-out assault from Duque’s regime. An elite law-enforcement unit, the Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squadron, was deployed to quell dissent. As a part of the U.S.-sponsored Plan Colombia, these forces had been outfitted with U.S.-made weapons and crowd-control devices such as tear gas, which were used liberally against the organized outburst.
The end result was a bloody, months-long affair that resulted in thousands of injuries, numerous cases of sexual violence by police against those arrested, and as many as seventy-five people killed.
Despite the carnage, the mass movement proved effective; both the tax increase and recent health care “reforms” were rescinded, and many members of Duque’s economic brain-trust were forced to resign.
The protests—and Duque’s authoritarian response—echo an earlier period in Colombia’s history, when the country was on the verge of being declared a failed state. After decades of brutal insurrectionary struggle, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the principal Marxist guerilla group within the country, had by the mid-1990s gained control over substantial parts of the countryside and several urban enclaves.
It was the leadership of the Marquetalia Republic—a guerilla-controlled enclave in rural Colombia, and the birthplace of FARC, that was supposedly overwhelmed by the Colombian security forces and their U.S. allies—which had transformed the seemingly scattered peasant rebellion into a dedicated insurgency.
The rise of the infamous narco cartels and their cocaine-based empires in the mid-1970s-early-2000s only added fuel to fire, spurring countless turf wars, uprooting the agrarian sector of the economy, and bleeding into every aspect of Colombian society.
During this period, Colombia’s second civil war—which began in 1964 as an armed struggle between the Colombian state and the guerillas—grew to include a fourth faction: ultraconservative paramilitary forces.
That’s when the United States, anxious about the potential implosion of its most trusted geopolitical ally, once again intervened in Colombia, just as it had in much of Central and South America throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
But this time around, as the possibility of the Colombian state’s disintegration loomed, the intervention was framed more euphamestically: as a war on drugs, as a way of cracking down on terrorism, and as a means of preventing a humanitarian crisis.
In 2000, this imprecise, vague premise is what inaugurated “Plan Colombia,” a military and economic aid package brokered between the Clinton and subsequent George W. Bush Administrations and Colombian President Andrés Pastrana. Since Plan Colombia’s inauguration, the United States has sent almost $8.5 billion in military assistance to one of the oldest democracies in South America.”
Championed by both the foreign policy blob and “rules-based” international order acolytes like then-Senator Joe Biden, the massive influx of arms, military training, and economic support brought Colombia from the brink of collapse.
The initial surge was praised as a shining example of the United States’ ability to execute an effective philanthropic intervention. And Colombia’s military, now flush with cash along with an international mandate, set about bringing “law and order” to the country.
The FARC was diminished to around 7,000 troops by 2016, less than half its original size. The cocaine mafias were, for a time, put on the ropes. Global commerce was able to safely go, relatively speaking, about its business within the borders of the country. And then-President Álvaro Uribe—who accelerated the war on the guerillas—was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush, despite his nationalistic and authoritarian tendencies.
Even then, the “triumph” of the contemporary Colombian state was a Pyrrhic victory; as the sixtieth anniversary of the conflict approaches, the body count—which is made up of mostly civilians—includes 260,000 people, and millions of others have been internally displaced.
After more than two decades and more than $10 billion dollars, the legacy of the Colombian-American experiment with modern statecraft is clear.
Additionally, between 80,000 to 120,000 people were disappeared, and some 25,000 bodies have yet to be identified; Colombia is now, in large part due to the legacy of counterinsurgency within the country, one of the most dangerous places on Earth to be a trade unionist or a human rights activist.
After more than two decades and more than $10 billion dollars, the legacy of the Colombian-American experiment with modern statecraft is clear. Rather than ushering in peace, it has bolstered the progenitors of the Western Hemisphere’s longest-standing armed struggle—the corrupt Colombian military, their far-right paramilitary allies, and the deep inequality that defines the country.
As the United States reckons with the fall of Afghanistan, it is more important than ever to examine other examples of Washington’s reckless use of military aid to solve the problems of its allies.
While some within the U.S. foreign policy establishment has finally been forced to concede that Afghanistan was a remarkable failure, the tactics used in Colombia are still seen as examples of how the United States can properly intervene in the affairs of other countries.
President Joe Biden has stressed a “human rights-based” foreign policy and proudly identifies himself as “the guy who put together Plan Colombia.” But in spite of his humanitarian rhetoric, there’s little sign that the money will stop flowing to a military and police force with open ties to some of Colombia’s most violent paramilitary outfits and a grim record of cracking down on civilians.
To be fair, the scandalous nature of Colombia’s “cocaine cowboys”—and their equally controversial antagonists in the FARC—made them ripe for the spotlight. The lawlessness and malevolence of these groups has been cited as the reason behind the internal strife within the country.
In 1999, when Plan Colombia was initially announced, the reactionary paramilitary groups—most notably the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)—were the most blatant culprits of extrajudicial killings and human rights violations. The largest portion of civilian casualties in the fifty-seven-year-long conflict have been caused by such groups.
The Colombian military and their U.S. backers seemed, at best, disinterested in disincentivizing the alliance between government forces and the paramilitaries. When the United States began heavily investing in Colombia’s military operations, “paramilitary forces committed the largest number of atrocities of any actor or any period of the war.”
Just prior to signing Plan Colombia, three out of every four political killings in the country were a product of paramilitary violence. “Military aid in Colombia’s war . . . coincides with the highest spike of human rights violations, including human rights violations by military and police forces,” Pablo Abitbol, a political economy and history professor at the Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, tells The Progressive.
The U.S. State Department was well aware of this. The former ambassador to Colombia, Curtis Kamman, stated in a cable to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that the “systematic arming and equipping of aggressive regional paramilitaries” proved to be a “pivotal” strategy for the Colombian military.
So the United States went ahead with its plan to provide high-tech weaponry and top-tier intelligence to an institution rife with ties to vigilante death squads. And for a time, leadership from both countries was able to ignore these horrendous transgressions when their strategy brought about a brief period of peace.
While the guerillas eventually chose to lay down their arms, the official peace accord failed to pass after a national referendum narrowly declined the terms of the agreement—in part because former President Uribe had rallied behind the “No” vote, claiming it was too lenient to the FARC.
Still, the architects of Plan Colombia maintain that it was their technocratic policy that initiated the end of the conflict. Never mind that hardly any aspects of the treaty have been implemented.
“The narrative is that Plan Colombia led to the peace, which is the most ridiculous thing. The failure of Plan Colombia is what led to the peace,” says Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, the Andean director at the Washington Office of Latin America.
Much like the counter-narcotics programs in Afghanistan, the efforts of the U.S.-Colombia coalition to snuff out the coca fields have hardly made a dent in the illicit trade that powers the country’s underground economy. While there was an initial decline in the coca trade during the late 2000s, production and profits have spiked over the past half-decade.
Both of the countries in question have reported that poor farmers engage in narco-agriculture because they cannot afford “food, medical expenses, and debt repayment,” and that the distribution of these informal economies without a “viable alternative” leaves rural communities in dire straits.
“In the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, people still didn’t have their basic economic, political, and social needs met,” said Chelsey Dyer, a cultural anthropologist at North Carolina State University. And since the peace accords, Dyer adds, “New guerrilla groups and paramilitaries try to reclaim previous FARC territory, but a lot of it has also been gone to these international business interests.”
Pedro Arenas, the former mayor of the San José del Guaviare, a small town near the edge of the Amazon, says that the Colombian government is more interested in the land where coca is cultivated, and less with the actual impact of the trade.
“Counter-narcotics strategy is not really against drugs, it’s not about the elimination of cocaine or international trafficking,” Arenas says. “It’s for territorial control, for the control of Indigenous, campesino, and Black communities.”
Indeed, more than 50 percent of the nation’s land is owned by the top 1 percent of the population. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations—as is the case for almost all of the Americas—are overwhelmingly impacted by this distribution: Poverty, unemployment, and lack of access to basic resources fall disproportionately on these communities.
Both Plan Colombia and the peace accords were supposed to address these disparities, but so far little land redistribution has occurred. These dire circumstances are what continue to divide the country.
And the anti-narcotics efforts, alongside the supposed demobilization of the FARC, has cemented a state-apparatus that is efficient in violence, repression, and little else.
The crackdown on demonstrators during the recent protests in Colombia was so shocking that more than fifty members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding a moratorium on arms sales to the country.
But these elected officials could consider going much, much further with their demands. Leahy’s Law, named after Vermont’s senior senator, is supposed to inhibit U.S. monetary funding from being allocated to groups with histories of human rights abuses.
“What does it really take for either decision-makers or the population in the United States to stop atrocity behavior by forces either indirectly supported by the United States or by U.S. forces themselves? I mean, how many civilians have died in Afghanistan and Iraq and in many other countries as a result of U.S. bombings, where the United States is directly responsible?” John Lindsay-Poland, the author of Plan Colombia: U.S. Ally Atrocities and Community Activism, tells The Progressive.
As the United States revaluates the horrendous legacy of the War on Terror, this legislation should be invoked by all elected officials who—cynically or not—are demanding a scale-back of the U.S. empire. It’s time to promptly interrogate how our “guns (and sometimes butter)” approach to international conflict has stifled the rights and livelihood of innocent people caught up in the maws of U.S.-backed security forces.