Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  Violence in Buenaventura exploded in 1999, when two blocs of the AUC entered the city supposedly to rid it of guerrillas; various massacres were carried out as the population was accused of collaborating with the guerrillas. Following the official demobilization of the AUC blocs in 2004 and 2005, the FARC re-entered the municipality, and a new wave of paramilitaries was not far behind. The violence returned with a vengeance. As government forces weakened the FARC’s ranks, other paramilitary groups entered the city, and today the government claims the ongoing violence is related to struggles between criminal bands trying maintain control over various areas in the city. The names of these groups change regularly: for example, in only two years, the Verdaderos Urabeños became the Campesinos del Pacifico, which became Los Gaitanistas, which became Los Chocoanos, which became La Empresa, leading to mass confusion in addition to terror. According to reports, paramilitary groups tend to be led by paisas (light-skinned Colombians from other regions, particularly from the state of Antioquia), while the foot soldiers are local Afro-Colombian youth. These groups have access to drug money, as the port facilitates an important outflow of cocaine (an estimated 250 tons per year).[69]

  Fumigations and other activities under Plan Colombia pushed cocaine production out of Caquetá and Putumayo beginning in 2002, transforming Buenaventura and the Pacific region into cocaine producers and increasingly important transshipment points.[70] The city is heavily militarized, though soldiers and police collaborate with criminal groups and generally aggravate the violence. “It’s as if we have a little Haiti within Colombia. It feels like another country,” police officer Lt. Nikolai Viviescas told the New York Times in 2007.[71] Movement between neighborhoods, controlled by different paramilitary groups, is tightly restricted, and for a civilian to step foot into enemy territory is to risk death. Reports of people being murdered in broad daylight, killed by chainsaws, picked to death by screwdrivers, cut into pieces and dumped in the sea, and other barbaric, terror-inducing techniques swirl below the surface in private conversation and unpublished reports, but in general people are afraid to speak about what is happening. A list of clandestine mass graves is in circulation, but authorities have made no effort to excavate them. Extortion is the norm, and levels of violence are so intense that some residents are unable to go to the market for food. In some parts of Buenaventura, leaving is the only chance of survival.

  The interests of the port, according to the Archdiocese of Cali, supersede the rights of the population. “The interests of the port dynamic and of transnational capital have gobbled up the Black and Indigenous Buenaventura, the majority of the residents are excluded, marginalized from the social, economic and political life of the port.”[72]

  In June 2013, Buenaventura was declared the capital of the Pacific Alliance, a US- and Canada-backed trade bloc made up of Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Chile. The link between the terror exacted against Afro-Colombians and the rising profile of Buenaventura as an expanding neoliberal port is undeniable. Local observers note that in areas where the new container port and airport are being constructed, where highway corridors are being built, where the convention center is under construction, and where other mega projects are planned, forced displacement, threats, expropriations, torture, and killing of residents have increased.

  Throughout the country, displacements have a disproportionate effect on Indigenous people and Afro-Colombians: nearly a quarter of the displaced population is Afro-Colombian, and an estimated 7 percent is Indigenous.[73] According to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), sixty-four of Colombia’s 102 Indigenous groups are at risk of extinction, and Indigenous peoples have been and continue to be disproportionately impacted by the armed conflict in Colombia.[74] The situation of Indigenous people has become so dire that human rights groups warn of genocide.

  Plan Colombia’s Measure of Successes

  For all of the damage wrought and the money spent in Colombia, Plan Colombia failed to meaningfully reduce the amount of cocaine flowing from South America to the United States, and homicide rates in the Andean nation remain among the highest in South America.[75] Colombian and US authorities continue to hail Plan Colombia as a successful initiative, despite the program’s goals not being met. Instead of forcing a change of strategy, Plan Colombia’s failure was minimized in favor of an emerging series of metrics linked to security and an improved business environment. In a response to the GAO report on the failure of Plan Colombia to meet drug reduction targets, the State Department argued that other impacts of the plan should be emphasized, including Colombia’s transition to a US-style justice system and the extension of Colombian police forces throughout the national territory. “In many ways, Colombian programs and US support have evolved from our original, more narrow focus into a comprehensive strategy that can now serve as a model to inform efforts in other challenged or failing states,” wrote Bradford Higgins, the assistant secretary for resource management and CFO of the US State Department.[76] Higgins’s assessment was echoed by another official review of the program.

  “U.S. support for Plan Colombia has significantly strengthened Colombia’s security environment, which may eventually make counter drug programs, such as alternative agricultural development, more effective,” said Jess T. Ford, director of international affairs and trade, as part of her testimony before the Subcommittee on Domestic Policy, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.[77] “Support for legal institutions, such as courts, attorneys general, and law enforcement organizations, in drug source and transit countries is not only an important part of the U.S. counter narcotic strategy but also advance State’s strategic objectives relating to democracy and governance,”she said. [78]

  Changes to the legal system implemented between 2005 and 2007 took away defense attorneys’ right to access state assistance for investigations and to access the information garnered by prosecutors in advance of their appearance before the courts. “The accusatory criminal system was a cheap copy of the gringo system,” said Gloria Silva, a lawyer with the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners, an NGO founded in 1973. While her bodyguard looked on, Silva told me the reforms resulted in a regression in terms of access to justice, amounting to a privatization: the defense is now required to pay for its own investigations and legal assistance, where it wasn’t previously. Like the reforms introduced in Mexico, there are no juries in Colombia’s new legal system, meaning power is concentrated with judges. “The victims of state crimes in this country are poor people who don’t have the chance to access independent experts who can represent them, and who could permit them to demonstrate a situation different from that presented by state prosecutors,” she said. Alongside US-sponsored legal reforms, prison sentences have become increasingly harsh in Colombia.

  In addition to the reforms of the justice system, the 2005 passage of two laws, 962 and 963, was crucial to ensuring investor security in Colombia. Law 962 simplified the investment process in Colombia, and Law 963 allows investors to sign “legal stability contracts” with the Colombian government, which ensure that “the laws applicable to the investment at the time the investment is entered into will remain in effect for a period between three and twenty years, depending on the type and amount of the investment.”[79]

  Foreign direct investment (FDI), the measure by which spending by transnational corporations in host countries is measured, has increased steadily since the early years of Plan Colombia. “Colombia’s economic takeoff after 2003 did not happen by chance,” boasted USAID in 2008. During Plan Colombia, fifty-two areas of Colombia’s economic system were targeted for reform, and “USAID provided technical assistance to the [government of Colombia] to help it design and implement policies ranging from fiscal reform to financial sector strengthening to improving the environment for small businesses, and many others.”[80] At the outset of Plan Colombia, total FDI was calculated at $2.4 billion.[81] By 2011, Colombia’s FDI stood at $14.4 billion, the fastest growth in FDI in Latin America.
[82] This has not only been a boom for US and transnational companies, but there is also a growing Colombian elite whose fortunes are pegged to the new legal and financial regime there. “The total number of Colombian millionaires is forecast to grow by 36%, to reach over 48,600 in 2017 … WealthInsight expects there will be strong growth in wealth held by Colombian multimillionaires; their wealth is projected to increase 28% to reach US$89 billion by 2017 … The number of multimillionaires, however, will grow faster.”[83]

  In 2002, over 40 percent of Colombia’s budget was going to paying foreign debt, and a third was being spent on state security forces like the police and army. “Even then, the IMF and the World Bank were pressing for further reductions in state spending on health and education.”[84] Halfway through Plan Colombia, in January of 2003, the International Monetary Fund approved a $2.1 billion loan to Colombia, and a wave of austerity measures were applied, including the restructuring of the pension program, cuts to the public sector workforce, and the privatization of a major bank (BANCAFE).[85] According to the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, “Although not directly related to Plan Colombia, the IMF’s Colombia loan fits in to Plan Colombia as part of the larger strategy to revive the Colombian economy.”[86] In 2002, 300 state companies were privatized or shut down, impacting over 150,000 workers.[87] In the final year of Plan Colombia, the government privatized 30 percent of the electrical grid and sold off the national gas company and part of Ecopetrol, the state oil company. “The most important Uribe energy reform was the creation of the Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos (ANH, the National Hydrocarbons Agency) and the introduction of new ways to attract private and foreign investors to explore and exploit the country’s underground energy resources.”[88] At this time the government introduced new mechanisms to allow for coordination between the army and extractive industries companies. Though not initially made explicit, it was eventually revealed that Plan Colombia was considered a precursor to the signing of a free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States. According to a report prepared by the Colombian government, “promoting conditions for employment generation and social stability” and expanding “tariff preferences in compensation for the negative effects of the drug trade and to favor a free trade agreement that will broaden employment opportunities” were among the objectives of Plan Colombia.[89] The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement was brought into force in 2011, followed by the US-Colombia agreement in 2012.

  Oil & Gas in Colombia

  Oil and gas make up an increasingly important portion of Colombia’s inward FDI, up from around one-tenth in the mid-90s to almost one-third by 2010, when it reached $4.3 billion.[90] Colombia’s oil has long been in the sights of the US government, as “the current U.S. Interest in Colombia began one year after Occidental Oil discovered the billion-barrel Caño Limon oilfield in 1983. It led to the national security decision directives of 1986 and 1989 that authorized a U.S. military presence.”[91] Ecopetrol, short for Empresa Colombiana de Petróleos, was formed in 1951 when a concession belonging to Ohio’s Standard Oil expired and wasn’t renewed. Ecopetrol took over the concession, though foreign companies like Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron were still allowed to operate in the country.[92] In 2010, Ecopetrol was the largest corporation in Colombia, controlling 100 percent of Colombian refining, 55 percent of oil production, 60 percent of gas production, and 79 percent of existing pipelines (equivalent to 8,815 kilometers of pipeline).

  The steps toward the company’s partial privatization are familiar to anyone who has studied the oil industry. First, there were cuts, which rendered the company unable to perform properly. “On 29 November 2002 Ecopetrol, Colombia’s state oil company, announced that it wanted to cut benefits for the roughly 50 percent of its workers who belonged to a trade union.… Already the company had started court action to alter the working conditions agreed with the union—to hive off oil-well maintenance, to cut pension benefits for new workers, to cut health care costs and to be able to sack union members more easily.”[93] Five years later, in 2007, Ecopetrol was partially privatized, and is now a mixed corporation, 89.9 percent of which is owned by the Colombian state, and 10.1 percent owned by shareholders (Ecopetrol is listed on the Colombia Stock Exchange [BVC] and the New York Stock Exchange). In 2010, Ecopetrol promised to invest $60 billion in exploration, infrastructure, transportation, refining, production, marketing, and acquisitions over the following five years. That same year, construction work began on a new, $3.5 billion pipeline from Ariguaney in the department of Meta to the port of Coveñas in Sucre.[94] These developments transformed Colombia into “one of the world’s fastest growing and most important energy development stories,” according to Luke Burgess, an energy sector commentator, who in 2010 dubbed Colombia “The World’s Hottest Oil Frontier.” He went on to note that the billions of dollars that Ecopetrol and the state plan to invest in oil and gas infrastructure and exploration means investors have “huge opportunities for easy profits.”[95]

  Not only did oil companies in Colombia get a boost from paramilitary groups and the opening up of Colombia’s oil sector, the US government also threw down to ensure their assets were protected: “Violent attacks on Colombian energy installations, prior to and within the context of the post–11 September global anti-terrorism campaigns, have provided US lawmakers and members of the executive branch with legitimating arguments for increasing military aid to Colombia and expanding significantly and without precedent, the US mission there beyond counter-narcotics to include counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.”[96]

  At some junctures, the connection between Plan Colombia and the protection of the oil industry was particularly evident. Part of Plan Colombia was dedicated to carrying out counterinsurgency in order to protect from bombing the Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline, which was operated at that time by Ecopetrol (Colombia), Oxy (US), and Repsol (Spain). By 2005, US Special Forces had “provided training and equipment to about 1,600 Colombian Army soldiers” tasked with guarding the pipeline.[97] The US Narcotics Affairs Sections of the US Embassy in Bogotá administered the aviation component of the US-led militarization of the pipeline.[98]

  The economic incentives for investing in the extractive industries in Colombia come with an added bonus: in 2010, the government of Colombia promised that the military would train a battalion of soldiers to assist companies in obtaining and transporting seismic testing results in parts of the country where there may be operational risks.[99] This marked the first time that the Colombian army provided troops for companies in the exploration phase, as previously the army’s role was restricted to protecting oil and gas production and transportation in the exploitation phase. The Colombian government announced that by 2015, it would install a military radar base in Meta (an oil-producing region) and build domestic drones for the surveillance of oil pipelines and other military interests.[100]

  The unfolding of Plan Colombia in Putumayo, a vast region encompassing Colombia’s southern jungles, which shares a border with Ecuador, shows concretely how anti-drugs initiatives have impacted the economic and social landscape since the plan launched in 2000. “In December 2000, U.S.-trained counter narcotics battalions, U.S.-supplied Blackhawk helicopters and U.S.-piloted spray planes descended on Putumayo department to conduct Plan Colombia’s initial aerial fumigation campaign,” wrote journalist Gary Leech in 2004.[101] “But while Plan Colombia has failed to affect the price, purity and availability of cocaine in U.S. cities, its militarization of Putumayo has contributed significantly to increased oil exploration by multinational companies in this resource-rich region.” In 2006, there were 4,500 soldiers guarding oil facilities in Putumayo, as well as two extra brigades and one special brigade, trained by the US Army.

  One of the key points about the conflict in Colombia is that civilians are not murdered and displaced as a consequence of the war, nor are they “collateral damage”—instead, the displacement of civilians, the threats to activists and community organizers, the force
d disappearances, and the terror are integral to the conflict.[102] “Forced displacement in Colombia is not a casual by-product of the internal conflict. Armed groups attack the civil population to strengthen territorial strongholds, expand territorial control, weaken the support of the opponent, and accumulate valuable assets (e.g., land or extraction of natural resources). Forcing out population as a war strategy aims at impeding collective action, damaging social networks, and intimidating and controlling the civilian population.”[103] By moving people off the lands, new territories are opened up for these so-called frontier investments. When people are forced off their land and are living in camps and slums, it becomes much more difficult for them to effectively organize to control their territories.

  Part of the oil drilling in Putumayo is taking place on the land of the Cofán people, some of whom have been displaced as part of a concerted strategy to make their lands available for mega projects. According to the Colombian government’s Sistema de Información Indígena de Colombia (Indigenous Information System of Colombia, SIIC), “The fumigation of their territory as part of a military plan to weaken the stability of the guerrillas and battles between the FARC and paramilitaries caused a migration of the Cofán to Ecuador.”[104] However, there have been challenges to the government’s assertion that the displacement of the Cofán from their oil-rich lands was a result of military battles. “This displacement is not only the result of armed actions by the various factions fighting in the area; it must also be seen as the outcome of a strategy for expropriating lands that are part of the Cofán’s ancestral territory.”[105]

  Among the prime beneficiaries of the conflict in Putumayo are Canadian oil companies: Grand Tierra Energy Incorporated, a Calgary-based firm, produces approximately 14,000 net barrels per day in Putumayo, and controls over 750,000 net acres of territory there. Calgary’s Petrobank has fourteen exploration blocks, covering a total of 1.6 million acres. Calgary’s Parex Resources Incorporated, formerly Petro Andina, is also active in Putumayo and in the plains region. But the most important oil company in Colombia today is Toronto-based Pacific Rubiales.[106]