This Week in Europe, 1 September 2000
Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
On August 30 in Cartagena, Colombia, Bill Clinton, the US President, announced a US$1.3billion package of measures aimed at wiping out over five years the narcotics producers and the groups of guerrillas who have plunged that nation into a catastrophic war. In doing so he was responding to the concerns of Colombian leaders who argue that without such help their democracy and economy would collapse.
The internal situation in Colombia is chaotic. There, guerrillas and the drugs cartels act together, the one providing protection in return for funding from the other. In response the Colombian military have been fighting a vicious and unconventional war against both parties and in which no side observes any rules. As a result, within Colombia’s borders vast swathes of the country have ceased to be under government control. More than one and half million people are displaced. Violence and death are commonplace and crime is endemic.
The US and Colombian decision to escalate dramatically an unconventional war into one using conventional and other means is a gamble. It offers no great certainty as to its outcome. There is no exit strategy.
The prospect is that the war will escalate and the astonishing levels of expenditure just announced will have to be followed by yet more money. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is for the guerrillas and the narcotics producers and traffickers to be displaced to regional neighbours with unpredictable consequences. Plan Colombia, its critics suggest, will lead to greater human rights abuses and criminality and at worst to another Vietnam, this time destabilising not some distant part of the world but many of the United States southern neighbours.
The conversion of the US Congress and administration to supporting a programme with unpredictable consequences is a part of a pattern now well known to the Caribbean. What began in this case as a campaign by the Colombian Government and its friends in the US Congress and administration was soon joined by others. Defence contractors, US companies with security forces for hire, the US oil industry and others powerful commercial interests all became part of the lobby that convinced US legislators and doubters in the US administration that a massive military led response was the answer to Colombia’s problems.
The decision effectively bypasses any chance for Latin and Caribbean neighbours to try to broker a peace deal in Colombia. It places action ahead of trying to first exhaust all possibilities for regional co-ordination. Worse, there is also a real danger that the type of military excesses normally seen in such campaigns will divide Latin America and the Caribbean from the US. Already, concerns have been raised about human rights, sovereignty and the dangers of environmental degradation resulting from solutions that will involve defoliation of coca plantations. If the war drags on political parties throughout the Americas may come to see electoral advantage in encouraging further an already strong anti US sentiment.
The US decision to escalate the war against drugs in Colombia presents a number of paradoxes for the Caribbean and Europe.
While the US spends US$1.3 billion on trying to end narcotics production in Central America, trade policies continue to weaken economies in the Caribbean making them susceptible to narcotics led destabilisation. US trade policy on bananas, OECD attempts to dismantle the region’s legitimate offshore financial industry and the potential for new threats to tourism and sugar create instability, making regional economies more attractive to the narcotics industry.
If and it is a big if, the US action in Central America succeeds, displacement will occur. The drugs traffickers and guerrillas will migrate across Colombia’s borders. While production may well move further south there is then the likelihood that certain larger nations in the Caribbean will become indispensable for transhipment to markets in Europe and the US. Moreover, if Colombia becomes a battleground the growing trend to arms for drugs deals being brokered in the region will most probably escalate, as will payments in hard drugs and weapons to those who facilitate such deals. Whatever happens, the vast riches the narcotics traffickers accumulate will continue to be laundered through banks, dubious investments in hotels, the construction of apartments and other projects in the Caribbean region.
Destroying cocaine production in Colombia may also have the paradoxical short-term effect of increasing crime in Europe, North America and the region as a whole. It may also result in the rise of violence as groups in certain parts of South America and the Caribbean begin a war to control everything from production to new supply routes.
The decision to attack drug production at source suggests that the US and by extension Europe has run out of interest in curbing demand. Seemingly the trend in the case of the US is to cede responsibility in the case of the US to draconian laws and a network of privately owned jails. A further paradox may be that any severe restriction in supply will be to push up the price of hard drugs and increase levels of crime and violence amongst a narcotics dependent urban underclass in Europe and North America.
This is not to suggest in any way that the evil and corrupting trade in narcotics should be tolerated. But to argue that the latest actions are the beginning of a slippery slope of displacement and the institutionalising of a vast international industrial complex in whose interests it will be for narcotics trafficking to continue. It is also to express deep concern that Colombia’s most vulnerable neighbour nations, namely those in the Caribbean, will suffer whether US policy succeeds or fails.
The Caribbean desperately needs to increase the velocity of its development in a manner that brings benefit to many. Construction booms in economies where fiscal deficits are high very frequently tell a story of corruption. The real danger of events in Colombia and the absence of any holistic approach by the US and Europe to drugs and trade policy issues is that those in the Caribbean engaged in honest business may soon find themselves swimming in an ever-widening sea of corruption and criminality.