Plan Colombia

Pastrana had first proposed the idea of a possible "Marshall Plan for Colombia" during a speech at Bogotá's Tequendama Hotel on June 8, 1998, nearly a week after the first round of that year's presidential elections.

[9] For President Pastrana, it became necessary to create an official document that specifically "served to convene important U.S. aid, as well as that of other countries and international organizations" by adequately addressing US concerns.

According to Pastrana, Under Secretary of State Thomas R. Pickering eventually suggested that, initially, the U.S. could be able to commit to providing aid over a three-year period, as opposed to continuing with separate yearly packages.

[16][17] Most of this funding was earmarked for training and equipping new Colombian army counternarcotics battalions, providing them with helicopters, transport and intelligence assistance, and supplies for coca eradication.

In 2000, the Clinton administration in the United States supported the initiative by committing $1.3 billion in foreign aid and up to five hundred military personnel to train local forces.

[22] A third more security oriented countermeasure—to provide enhanced intelligence, training and supplies to Colombian armed forces against the FARC—took greater importance post 9/11 under the Andean Regional Initiative, as the threat of global terrorism received increased attention.

The 2001 initiative reduced the limitations on the numbers and the activities of civilian contractors, allowing them to carry and use military weapons which, according to the U.S. government, would be necessary to ensure the safety of personnel and equipment during spray missions.

In October 2004, the compromise version of two U.S. House–Senate bills was approved, increasing the number of U.S. military advisors that operate in the country as part of Plan Colombia to 800 (from 400) and that of private contractors to 600 (from 400).

[24] Taken together then, the three countermeasures represent what President George W. Bush referred to as his “three-legged stool” strategy of “waging a global war on terror, supporting democracy and reducing the flow of illicit drugs into the United States.”[25] Although Plan Colombia includes components which address social aid and institutional reform, the initiative has come to be regarded by its critics as fundamentally a program of counternarcotics and military aid for the Colombian government.

[27] Plan Colombia itself didn't exist at the time of the second RAND study, but the U.S. aid package has been criticized as a manifestation of the predominant law enforcement approach to the drug trade as a whole.

Critics of Plan Colombia, such as authors Doug Stokes and Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, argue that the main intent of the program is not drug eradication but to fight leftist guerrillas.

[28][29] As of 2004, Colombia is the fifteenth largest supplier of oil to the United States[30] and could potentially rise in that ranking if petroleum extraction could be conducted in a more secure environment.

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman argue that the distinction between guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug dealers may have increasingly become irrelevant, seeing as they could be considered as part of the same productive chain.

[41] The Pastrana administration replied to critics by stating that it had publicly denounced military-paramilitary links, as well as increased efforts against paramilitaries and acted against questionable military personnel.

According to author Grace Livingstone and other critics, the problem is there have been very few military units free of members that have not been implicated in any kind of human rights abuses at all, so they consider that the policy has been usually ignored, downplayed or occasionally implemented in a patchy way.

United States policymakers advocated for the extensive use of the herbicide Roundup Ultra created by Monsanto for large-scale aerial spraying of illicit crops in Colombia.

[51] The practice of forced eradication of illicit crops through aerial spraying has been criticized for its effectiveness in reducing the drug supply as well as having negative social and environmental impacts.

"[52] According to Joshua Davis of Wired.com, the area has seen the emergence of a Roundup resistant variety of the coca plant known as "Boliviana Negra" that is not talked about because it might "put an end to American aid money", depicting the ecological adaptation resulting from this operation.

[53] The aerial eradication strategy in Colombia has been a highly controversial approach in the nation's efforts to combat coca cultivation and the subsequent illicit drug trade.

The strategies implementation of herbicides, specifically glyphosate, through aerial aircraft spraying was targeted towards coca crops, the raw material for cocaine production.

Despite this perspective, statistics show that sharp reductions in growing caused by fumigation in 2002–2003 did not reduce cultivation levels back to their numbers in 1998, and on top of that, Colombia still remains the largest coca-growing country in the world.

The officials had argued that illnesses arise as a result of the herbicides used by local farmers for individual crop control and cultivation rather than the aerial spraying operations.

[citation needed] In 1999, the U.S. Congress added a provision to its Plan Colombia aid package that called for the employment of mycoherbicides against coca and opium crops.

Military aid packages that were both part of, and separate from, Plan Colombia have successfully driven the FARC out of most of their former territory and targeted the leaders of the insurgency, killing over two dozen of them.

With the deaths in 2008 of main leader Manuel Marulanda and second-in-command Raúl Reyes, followed by the killing of top tacticians Mono Jojoy and Alfonso Cano in 2010 and 2011, the group became increasingly disjointed.

[61] In terms of land, the FARC once controlled a DMZ the size of Switzerland in 1999 and had encircled the capital of Bogota, yet they were subsequently pushed back to the southern highlands of the country and into the surrounding borders of Ecuador and Bolivia.

from U.S. government pdf file On April 14, 2006, the U.S. Drug Czar's office announced that its Colombian coca cultivation estimate for 2005 was significantly greater than that of any year since 2002.

"[67] On June 20, 2006, the United Nations (UN) Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) presented its own survey on Andean coca cultivation, reporting a smaller increase of about 8% and confirming a rising trend shown by the earlier U.S.

U.S. Drug Czar John Walters stated that "the reason for [reductions in supply not immediately driving prices up] is that you are not seizing and consuming coca leaves that were grown in 2004 in 2004.

"[73] Other observers say this points to the ultimate ineffectiveness of the Plan in stopping the flow of drugs and addressing more important or underlying issues like providing a viable alternative for landless and other peasants, who turn to coca cultivation due to a lack of other economic possibilities, in addition to having to deal with the tumultuous civil conflict between the state, guerrillas and paramilitaries.