Plan Colombia was in effect to Global South pacification what the 1994 crime bill had been to domestic policing, and what the 1996 immigration laws were to border security and the persecution of migrant families: a consolidated, bipartisan framework for permanent escalation. Spanning successive administrations in both countries, it would go on to receive around $10 billion in U.S. assistance through 2015—and untold more in covert, “black-budget” involvement. Analysts emphasize its disproportionate militarism, compared to developmental spending. But what matters isn’t the price tag or relative budget breakdown. Plan Colombia functioned like an ideological laboratory for forever war in the twenty-first century, with Cold War counterinsurgency giving way to counternarcotics giving way to counterterror, waged against an ostensibly “narco-terrorist” Marxist insurgency that rendered such distinctions irrelevant. And while many Democrats have since distanced themselves from mass incarceration and deportation, Plan Colombia’s success only seemed to accrue over time. Indeed, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq spiraled, it came to be the only success Democrats could reasonably invoke as justification for further escalation in Mexico, Central America, and beyond. “Rightly or wrongly,” as Joe Biden had said in 2000, Plan Colombia would be judged not by its actual outcomes but “how much political consensus is sustained.”
“I’m the guy who put together Plan Colombia,” Biden told the Des Moines Register last year, with the idea that it represented, as he had noted previously, a unique “opportunity to strike at all aspects of the drug trade at the source.” Colombia grows more coca, and produces more cocaine, today than it did twenty years ago. But the human rights concerns included toward the bottom of Biden’s 2000 report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations have proved prescient. Plan Colombia would undermine the 1998-2002 peace process, inciting the worst period of violence in a half-century of armed conflict. The Colombian government would not demonstrate a commitment to the internally displaced—of which the country has more than any on earth—but instead to the agroindustrial, mining, speculatory, and narcotrafficking interests that profited from the theft of some seven million hectares of indigenous and peasant land. Colombian military units that received U.S. training are more likely to boost their kill counts through “false positive” murders of unarmed civilians.
These are unintended consequences to hear Biden and others tell it. As Michael Bloomberg has defended stop-and-frisk in New York, Plan Colombia’s boosters excuse the occasional war crime by pointing to positive macroeconomic and public safety indicators. But violence was the necessary precondition of Colombia’s vaunted progress. Direct foreign investment flowed to extractive and megadevelopment projects that were only made possible by paramilitary land grabs and protected by specially designated military outfits. With popular movements subject to constant state and extrajudicial persecution, Colombia loosened its labor code, privatized health and education services, and loaded the national budget with International Monetary Fund and World Bank debt. For every assassinated land defender in the lawless periphery, a stretch of interior highway became safe to drive on at night. Eighty thousand forced disappearances were simply the price of admission into the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Plan Colombia buttressed the Washington Consensus—free trade, financialization, deregulation, structural adjustment, etc.—when the Pink Tide of leftist governance swept South America, providing the architecture for U.S. statecraft under neoliberalism. Just as the Colombian military outsourced its dirty work to drug-funded, right-wing death squads, the United States has underwritten Colombia’s emergence as a “security exporter” entrusted with training Brazil, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala and dozens of U.S. allies around the world to manage the shocks and crises of globalization. Colombia’s current right-wing administration has called repeatedly for the downfall of the Venezuelan “narco-state.” Its armed forces have worked with their repressive counterparts in post-coup Honduras, where President Juan Orlando Hernández continues to govern as a walking U.S. federal drug indictment.