War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

by Ronan Farrow

  ON OCTOBER 28, 1998, Colombia’s new president, Andres Pastrana Arango, stood in the Rose Garden next to President Clinton and became a participant in one of the strangest political press conferences on record. The goal was to discuss the deepening ties between the two nations that would eventually take the form of a watershed new assistance package. “This was the first stage of Plan Colombia,” Pastrana told me. “The first time we really, really talked about Colombia,” at such a high level.

  The reporters in attendance had other topics in mind. “The first question in the press conference,” Pastrana recalled, “was ‘How are you going to explain to Chelsea the scandal?!’ ” In fact, the question was several deep into the conference, but his recollection was, otherwise, correct. The transcript of the press conference reads like a layer cake—Clinton valiantly attempting to redirect toward foreign policy, the press corps hammering him about the sex scandal involving a White House intern and engulfing his presidency.

  Clinton, Pastrana recalled, was stressed. “He offered me a Diet Coke. You could tell he was a human being, for the first time you saw the human side.” The surreal juxtaposition continued. Around the margins of the press conference, Pastrana asked for ten minutes with Clinton, in the Oval Office. As Pastrana recalled, Clinton went to his desk and pulled out a map of Colombia, and the two men looked at areas that Pastrana intended to demilitarize. Then, Pastrana said, “He asked me what I thought of his answer to the first question,” referring to Monica Lewinsky. Pastrana told Clinton he’d done all right. He chuckled at the memory. “It was strange,” he said. The two men got along. “It was good chemistry.” The conversations continued and, over the following year, evolved into the plan that would define Clinton’s legacy in Latin America. “I proposed what I called a Marshall Plan for Colombia,” Pastrana said. The result was a ten-billion dollar aid, development, and military assistance infusion.

  In selling the expensive plan, Clinton appealed to an American public obsessed with drugs. Gallup polls from 2001 show that overwhelming majorities of US citizens expressed a “great deal” of concern about drug use. Since 90 percent of America’s cocaine was coming from Colombia at that point, it made sense that much attention was directed at the Latin American nation. Clinton had an easy sell: “Colombia’s drug traffickers directly threaten America’s security,” he told the public. Plan Colombia “would enable Colombia’s counter-drug program to inflict serious damage on the rapidly expanding drug production activity in areas now dominated by guerrillas or paramilitary groups.” Anne Patterson, who had been US ambassador to Pakistan during Holbrooke’s stint in the region and in Egypt after, was also the ambassador to Colombia for the first three years of the new assistance plan. “The strategy is to give the Colombian government the tools to combat terrorism and narco-trafficking, two struggles that have become one,” she told me. “To fight against narco-trafficking and terrorism, it is necessary to attack all links of the chain simultaneously.”

  President Clinton decided to waive human rights provisions in the funding legislation, arguing that security came first. In justifying the waiver, the president explained that “our assistance package is crucial to maintaining our counterdrug efforts and helping the Colombian government and people to preserve Colombia’s democracy.”

  Initially, Colombia wanted a 70–30 social-military split; the United States wanted the reverse. The final plan was written in large part by a Colombian—by Jaime Ruiz, one of Pastrana’s closest aides, in Pastrana’s and Ruiz’s telling—but it bore the obvious marks of those American priorities. It set aside $1.3 billion a year for a decade to combat “narco-terrorism.” The first year, more than 70 percent of the funds went to military and police assistance—including everything from Black Hawks to communications equipment to trainers to chemical warfare technology. As the former US ambassador Robert White put it: “[Colombia] comes and asks for bread and you give them stones.” But the remainder of the American money went to economic development, judicial reforms, and aid for displaced people. And the greatest successes of the deal came only as the balance of military and civilian assistance evened, and US and Colombian officials began to recognize the value of rebuilding the country’s long-suffering institutions.

  THE UNITED STATES’ ENTANGLEMENT in Colombia was shaped by the same anti-communist zeal that propelled American involvement from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Concerns over drugs would come later. Seeds of the trends that would explode under President Trump—the devaluing and de-prioritization of diplomacy, the rise of generals in policymaking—were planted in this earlier period, amid the military adventures of the Cold War. Hundreds of thousands of innocents would become casualties of those interventions.

  The Colombian intervention began with a Special Warfare trip to Bogota in 1962, headed by Lieutenant General William Yarborough, commander of the US Army Special Warfare Center, who proposed one of the era’s classic proxy wars, using locals “to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.”

  Based on his findings, the US helped the Colombian government formulate Plan Lazo, a counterinsurgency strategy modeled on the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Formally adopted by the Colombian military on July 1, 1962, Plan Lazo was sold to the Colombians as a “hearts and mind” strategy. In fact, it was an American plot to wipe out communists, aided by civilian informants. Plan Lazo was reinforced by a Colombian presidential order called Decree 3398 that stated, “all Colombians, men and women . . . will be used by the government in activities and work that contribute to the reestablishment of order”—in effect allowing Colombian authorities to organize ordinary citizens into militia groups. Together with the US-backed Plan Lazo, Decree 3398 created civilian “self-defense units” and “hunter-killer teams” instructed and authorized to kill armed or unarmed peasants.

  The US Army and the CIA began instructing Colombian troops in the same techniques being introduced in Vietnam. As part of a CIA program, USAID provided training to Colombian police at the agency’s “bomb school” in Los Fresnos, where the curriculum included courses like “Terrorist Devices,” “Incendiaries,” and “Assassination Weapons.”

  The United States wasn’t just teaching the Colombian army to fight the communists—it was underwriting that fight. Beginning in the 1960s, Colombian forces used US-supplied vehicles, communications equipment, and arms to destroy rebel communities across the country. The counterinsurgency campaign against communist campesinos—most were peasants—began in earnest on May 18, 1964, when the Colombian army sent one-third of its troops to destroy the left-leaning village of Marquetalia, defended by a few dozen fighters. The operation was undertaken at the request of the United States, with American assistance. US military advisers were there for the planning and the execution. After that first assault, the Colombian government began attacking other self-governing leftist rural communities.

  That the Colombian initiatives were corrupt and mismanaged—and that they encouraged more bloodshed—was no secret in Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson admitted to the moral contradiction, writing in cables that US funding was encouraging rural violence and economic dislocation. And the State Department would be hard-pressed to argue that the prolonged fighting between the leftists and the US-backed Colombian military did much to improve the lot of most Colombians: the underlying class struggle that sparked the conflict persisted, as the landless remained disenfranchised and the urban elite grew rich from the chaos. US investment and loans surged during this time, leading President Alberto Lleras Camargo to remark drily, “blood and capital accumulation went together.”

  THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMED FORCES of Colombia (FARC) rose up soon after, in direct response to the US-backed attacks on leftists in Colombia. After the obliteration of Marquetalia, the few remaining leftists from the area fled to the mountains, where they banded with other rebel groups, who together pled
ged to fight for better conditions for people in the countryside and to defend their followers from military abuses.

  Their organization swelled rapidly. FARC became not just a guerrilla force struggling for more land, but a political movement pushing socialist reorganization of the country. Rural peasants, indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, landless laborers, unionists, teachers, intellectuals—people “of the soil”—joined the fight. FARC began to organize schools, medical centers, and social projects, essentially running a parallel state.

  But the group was still, at its core, a fighting force. Soon after organizing, FARC leaders began training militias in rural areas to carry out attacks. FARC relied on a campaign of terrorism, not only bombing police stations and military bases, but also hospitals, churches, and schools. Kidnapping for ransom provided revenues—until the late 1970s, when the group began trafficking in cocaine.

  During Reagan’s first term, Colombia accounted for almost eighty percent of both cocaine and marijuana that reached the United States. FARC’s newfound drug fortune allowed it to attract support from Colombians who were unhappy with the staggering poverty facing much of the country. By 1980, FARC’s numbers had grown sixfold to some three thousand fighters spread across the country. Revenues soared, eventually topping billions. And the violence worsened. FARC’s reign of terror targeted priests, politicians, military officers, and even prominent right-wing civilians, often simply to incite fear.

  In turn, elite landowners hired right-wing fighting forces, many of which traced their roots to the US-backed groups under Plan Lazo. These groups aggressively targeted anyone hostile to their employers. The paramilitaries were everywhere: at their peak, they counted thirty thousand people in their ranks and operated in two-thirds of the country. Some were armed by the government and legally sanctioned. And they were brutal: one group, the AUC, killed more than nineteen thousand people in its first two years of operation.

  The paramilitary death squads over time gained the support of the government, military, traffickers—and even the United States. The White House refused to support any peace dialogue between the government and the leftists, which it decried as “narco-guerrillas.” In some cases, Reagan’s White House went as far as to directly support right-wing paramilitaries as informants or assassins.

  In the eighties, in one of the more ill-fated partnerships in America’s transnational war against drugs, the Colombian army and the twenty largest cocaine traffickers teamed up to establish a national counterterrorism training school, supported by US intelligence. The group was known as MAC, or Muerte a Secuestradores (“Death to Kidnappers”) and had, ostensibly, a simple mission: to thwart FARC’s tactic of abducting politicians and the wealthy. Traffickers were required to put down thirty-five thousand US dollars as an initial fee. Generals contracted Israeli and British mercenaries to do the training; CIA and US intelligence agents participated.

  The group was successful in the sense that it was deadly; eventually, it grew into another paramilitary, criminal extension of the army, doing the government’s dirty work in the war against FARC, with little, if any, focus on stopping kidnappers. MAC would go on to arrest the peace process led by President Bentancur in the 1980s by murdering over seven hundred FARC members who entered the political process as part of the Unión Patriótica, a leftist political party. In an ironic twist, many of these paramilitary organizations got into the drug business too, and US dollars sent to Colombia to combat the war against drugs found their way into traffickers’ pockets.

  The result was an Escheresque tesselation of faction and violence. In 1999, Columbia experienced thousands of acts of terror and kidnappings. The homicide rate was a staggering sixty per one hundred thousand. Nearly twenty-thousand FARC fighters were holed up around the country, netting millions from kidnappings. A full half of Colombia’s territory lacked a security presence; FARC essentially governed the entire south, where the government did not dare enter. More than 700,000 Colombians left the country from 1995 to 2000. The violence had grown more grisly, too: the AUC massacred civilians by the dozen, making a name for itself with macabre tactics like playing soccer with severed heads and cutting their victims apart with chain saws.

  Clinton’s drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, remembered the violence vividly. “You couldn’t drive anywhere in country without risking being kidnapped. It was sort of like dialing for dollars: The FARC checkpoint would search your name, get your worth, and you’d end up either kidnapped or dead in the jungle.” It was a “vile situation.”

  By the end of the century, Colombians had decided it was time for a permanent peace. Thirteen million people showed up at the “No mas” nationwide protest of the war in October 1999, in a country of forty million. Later that month, ten million voted for peace in a symbolic referendum that served as a wake-up call for Colombian politicians. No official political election had ever seen such a high turnout.

  Andres Pastrana, who was president at the time and had himself once been kidnapped by the Medellín Cartel, said he immediately understood the ramifications of that vote. “No presidential candidate has ever received that many votes,” he said. So, after he was elected president, he “decided the first thing I should do was try and achieve peace.” Pastrana attempted tactics never seen before. He met with top FARC leaders, even going as far as travelling into the mountains to personally speak with the rebel commanders. He granted FARC a demilitarized zone as a show of goodwill. He began official peace talks in his first six months on the job. And, of course, he and Clinton, after that strange encounter in the Rose Garden, brokered Plan Colombia.

  NEARLY TWO DECADES LATER, that Plan Colombia was considered a success story spoke to just how grim the situation had been before. The costs of the deal were astronomical in both financial and human terms. The United States had spent $10 billion propping up Colombia’s security forces, economy, and political institutions. Only Israel and Egypt received more aid. From 2005 to 2014, more than one hundred and seventy thousand political assassinations targeting leftists had reportedly been carried out. The false positives scandal claimed the lives of thousands. Human rights abuses, some of them enmeshed in American assistance, were frequent: US-made smart bombs were used in the mid-2000s to wipe out FARC leaders outside of Colombia’s borders, which often led to the deaths of civilians.

  Incidents of “secret state terror” were common. Most famous was the destruction of the town of San Vicente del Caguán in February 2002—an attack that echoed the joint US-Colombian attack on Marquetalia forty years earlier. Government forces, under US pressure, invaded San Vicente, in the prosperous, largely self-governing southern territory colloquially referred to as “Farclandia.” San Vicente was a successful community, with its own police force, new highways and bridges, widespread electricity, quality schools and a health care system. But after a round of peace talks abruptly broke off, Pastrana ordered the military to invade. US-supplied A-37s and A-47s dropped bombs. Thirteen thousand US-trained troops circled the village. The government declared victory, telling the media they had wiped out the supposed FARC camps in the area. And they had—along with a number of civilians, including children and the elderly.

  Victims of the war seldom saw justice. Militants were “incarcerated” on farms and in villas, after which they could emerge with their wealth and networks intact, immune from further prosecution or extradition. US-extradited paramilitary leaders tended to receive light sentences—just seven years, a little more than half what street-level dealers arrested for selling less than an ounce of cocaine would serve.

  Nearly two decades after Plan Colombia was launched—and nearly seventy years after US intervention in Colombia began—the question remained: Did Washington’s insistence on achieving its military and security aims come at too high a human cost? And could stronger civilian influences at the decision-making table have prevented deaths like Elvir’s? When I asked General McCaffrey, the Clinton administration drug czar, whether the United States bore any responsib
ility for the civilian deaths throughout the civil war, he was fiercely dismissive. The idea of US complicity was “complete illogical poppycock of the worst sort. Just utter nonsense.”

  “Why would that be the case?” he asked, referring to the data suggesting a correlation between US support and Colombian units committing abuses. “Why would oversight by US Foreign Service officers and military officers . . . increase EJK and mayhem? It’s just complete nonsense. More likely those units were just more involved in counterinsurgency . . . some may well have been involved in more action which may have included human rights violations. But [blaming the US] is such poppycock it’s beyond belief.”

  “It was a bloody war, there were some bloody things that happened,” he conceded. “But basically [the Colombian Army] was the most trusted institution in Colombian society.” And indeed, the militaries were often the most trusted institutions in countries marked by these American proxy wars. The uncomfortable question US officials seldom confronted was the extent to which American support elevated those militaries to their status as the only lasting structures in their lands.

  WHATEVER ITS COSTS, Plan Colombia—unlike later efforts in, for instance, Pakistan—eventually rebalanced toward civilian assistance, and laid the foundations for peace. In the plan’s first decade, the national police expanded into all of the country’s municipalities, helping knock kidnappings down from three thousand a year to just over two hundred. Killings were cut nearly in half, as was the size of FARC’s forces. By 2006, Colombia had achieved the voluntary demobilization of more than thirty thousand combatants, put an end to much of the paramilitary violence, and launched peace talks with AUC commanders, many of whom agreed to prosecution in exchange for lighter prison sentences.