Drugs: weapons of mass destruction for Colombia.

• Author: Dahl, Patricia
• Position: Thinking Politically

Seek and ye shall find? Not when operations seek weapons of mass destruction and the locale of those operations is Iraq. Curtail drug production within a drug's source country? Not when the drug is cocaine and the source country is Bolivia, Peru, or Colombia.

Unlike the formal US incursion and occupation in Iraq, which is accompanied by unprecedented cross-border outcry, the US presence in Colombia has launched the titular "Dirty War"--a war designed largely during the Kennedy years to be low-intensity and covert. From a journalistic black hole, rare and vague mention of Colombia's "civil war" is relegated to the hinterland of certain dailies. Yet in the aftermath of lobbying by Occidental, BP Amoco, Enron, private military contractors and others, Colombia's "civil war" costs US taxpayers more money in aid than any operation in the western hemisphere, and costs the Colombian people so much bloodletting of innocent life that the "civil war" is now decried as genocide.

While the US role in this "civil war" merely expanded under Kennedy, its origins date back to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and to this promulgation by early 20th century president William Howard Taft: "The day is not far distant ... when the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact, as by virtue of the superiority of our race, it already is ours morally."

The Congressional Record of 1960 indexed the purpose of earlier US incursions as "protecting American interests," or more to the point, US-conceived interests, and for the more revealing purpose of "restoring order."

Just as nation-building contracts in Iraq have fallen into the laps of US corporations like Bechtel and Cheney's Halliburton, few people are aware that CIA historian Gerald Haines wrote that in 1945 this providence was presaged in South America, when the US acted to supercede British, French, and Canadian rivals "in order to secure the area for surplus industrial production and private investment, and for exploiting the vast reserves of raw material." Fewer still know that after being sent on a tour of Latin America in 1969, Nelson Rockefeller reported to Nixon that, "Rising frustrations throughout the Western Hemisphere over poverty and political instability have led increasing numbers of people to pick the United States as a scapegoat and to seek out Marxist solutions to their socioeconomic problems." A Castro on the mainland, Rockefeller warned, would "pose an extremely difficult problem for the United States."

The resulting foreign policy engineered to "stabilize" the area plays out like a Coney Island ride of the mind. The scourge was first identified as Communism, but then the Soviet Union collapsed. It was then described as drug trafficking. In the early 1980s the perpetrator was embellished as a "narcoguerilla" by Reagan ambassador to Colombia Louis Tambs, and in 1986 as a "narco-terrorist" by a prophetic Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliot Abrams.

After September 11, 2002, the US sought to connect dots in Latin America and dots in the Middle East with cohesive interventionist urgency. The "narco" prefix was jettisoned, leaving a generic, jack-of-all-trade terrorist. The dots, however, would not connect. A lacuna was created between the low-intensity War on Drugs and the high-intensity War on Terror of the present day. Recalling the Reaganera term "narco-terrorist," and utilizing its holistic confluence to weld the two wars seemed to make good policy sense.

After costly US military-controlled fumigation efforts in Latin America, drugs and their covert profits did not diminish. Instead, they flourished within the borders of the United States. Allegations regarding gross human-rights violations committed during those military-controlled efforts began to leak from a variety of sources, making a mockery of the Leahy Amendment, which prohibits anti-drug aid, such as the Clinton administration's $1.3 billion Plan Colombia package, to foreign security forces that have been implicated in such violations.

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Despite these leaks and the public's increasing cognizance of them, aid continued to flow to Colombia and bordering countries. As the wording to signify the nature of our "problem with" Colombia adjusted over time, so did the wording to signify the nature of our "solution for." By August 2000, the H.R. 4775 emergency budget outlay for counterterrorism passed in Congress. For the first time in a public record, Washington was shown a green light to lift aid restrictions from fighting narcotics to fighting "Marxist" guerillas.

But for policy insiders, the wording in H.R. 4775 was nothing new. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act clearly show that as early as the first Bush administration, the US "Andean Strategy" provided southern governments with counter-drug aid that could also be used against our mutual adversary, the insurgent guerilla. Human Rights Watch obtained a Colombian Army document articulating the reorganization of an intelligence system drawn up with assistance from CIA and the DoD officials. This document made no mention whatsoever of drugs, and instead focused only on "armed subversion."

As recently as July 2003, three years after H.R. 4775 gave...