Colombia (Lonely Planet, 5th Edition) - Jens Porup [14]
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As Álvaro Uribe was being sworn into office in 2002, guerrilla units camped at Bogotá’s outskirts sent rockets aimed at the Casa de Nariño. Instead the rockets landed in a working-class barrio, killing 19 people.
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URIBE & THE US
Fed up with violence, kidnappings and highways deemed too dangerous to use, the nation turned to right-wing hardliner Álvaro Uribe – a politician from Medellín who had studied at Oxford and Harvard, and whose father had been killed by FARC. Uribe ran on a full-on antiguerrilla ticket during the testy 2002 presidential election. While his predecessor Andrés Pastrana had tried negotiating with FARC and ELN, Uribe didn’t bother, quickly unleashing two simultaneous programs: a military push back of groups such as FARC, and a demobilization offer for both paramilitaries and guerrillas, who were promised lenient sentences in exchange for weapons and information. In the post-9/11 era, his branding of guerrillas as ‘terrorists’ helped garner even more US support, which runs between US$500 and US$600 million annually.
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Under Álvaro Uribe’s watch (amid the US-funded Plan Patriot program that bumped up the size of the Colombian security forces by 33%), the number of FARC troops fell from 17,000 in 2002 to 11,000 in 2008.
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A rare Latin American ally with the US, Uribe is wildly popular in his country – even his harshest critics acknowledge much overdue progress made under his watch. From 2002 to 2008, notably, murder rates fell 40% overall, highways cleared of FARC roadblocks became safe to use, and Uribe’s go-ahead for a successful Rambo-style rescue in 2008 of high-profile kidnap victims from FARC (including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt) did a lot to keep the president’s approval ratings regularly near the 80% mark.
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PLAN COLOMBIA
In 2000 the US entered the war against the drug cartels, with the controversial ‘Plan Colombia,’ concocted by the Clinton and Pastrana administrations to curb coca cultivation by 50% within five years. As the decade closed, and with US$5 billion spent, even the normally rah-rah US International Trade Commission called the program’s effectiveness ‘small and mostly direct.’ The worldwide street price for Colombian cocaine hadn’t changed – indicating no lack of supply – and, after a few years of dipping coca cultivation, by 2007, a UN report concluded that cocaine production rose by 27% in 2007 alone, rebounding to its 1998 level.
Originally the money was supposedly to be split half-and-half between efforts to equip/train the Colombian military, and developmental projects to offer campesinos (peasants) attractive alternatives to coca farming. It didn’t turn out that way. Nearly 80% of the money ended up with the military (as well as helicopter-drop devegetation chemicals that infamously killed food crops, along with elusive coca crops). In 2007 a Pentagon official told Rolling Stone that Plan Colombia ended up being less about ‘counternarcotics’ than ‘political stabilization,’ in particular the ongoing fight with FARC.
Emerging in the first decade of the century, new harder-to-track cartelitos (smaller sized mafia groups) replaced the extinguished mega cartels (capped with the 2008 extradition to the US of Medellín narco king Don Berna). The cartelitos run from dropped devegetation chemicals and relocate to harder-to-reach valleys (particularly near the Pacific coast). Many are linked to FARC, who tax coca farmers (earning FARC between US$200 to US$300 million annually, according to the New York Times). Other cartelitos, however, are linked with paramilitary groups, who sometimes benefit from government money.
As a result, Colombia still supplies about 90% of the USA’s cocaine – often getting there overland via Mexican cartels. With Barack Obama in office, it’s unclear how or if Plan Colombia will continue.
For more, see Plan Colombia (2003), an hour-long documentary by Gerard Ungerman that unveils how narcotraffickers are