Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm happy to introduce Adam Isaacson from the Center for International Policy.
Welcome to the show, Adam.
Hey, thank you for having me.
Oh, well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I was searching Joe Biden, Plan Colombia.
Wouldn't it be called the Colombia plan or something?
Why is it called Plan Colombia?
That's a Spanish translation thing?
It is.
I mean, the fiction that's always been maintained is that the United States, which has given six billion dollars in assistance to Colombia, most of it for the military since 2000, the fiction has been that this has been a plan devised by the Colombians to which the United States is merely contributing.
Of course, that plan was pretty much devised here with Colombian input, of course.
But the whole time it's been the United States has been by far the biggest single donor.
Almost no other country has given money to this mostly military plan in Colombia at times both to fight the drug trade and to help Colombia fight its 40 year old civil war.
That's funny, because usually we define tyranny as states using their military against their own people.
But that's what this whole thing is about.
Well, that's right.
I mean, it's a combination of things that you've got.
You do have two guerrilla groups in Colombia whose human rights record could hardly be worse.
I mean, they really are quite brutal and have seemed to have lost their way when it comes to defending the poorest and most defenseless in their country.
However, Colombia's military, you're just fighting fire with fire because their human rights record is also atrocious.
They are also involved in innumerable human rights violations.
At least 350 civilians killed last year, and it almost never gets investigated or punished.
And that's the side, of course, whom the United States is funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Right.
That's the actual government forces, or that's what they call the paramilitary, so-called independent militia, right wing death squad type?
That's right.
In addition to that, I'm just talking about the Colombian military itself.
In addition, there is a whole smorgasbord of what they call self-defense groups, which are militias that have been armed usually by wealthy people or drug lords in Colombia.
And they actually kill even more people every year, and the military most of the time looks the other way.
Now, is this whole conflict with the FARC and all that, is this just the caricature kind of right wing dictatorship versus leftist guerrilla insurgent type thing that we've seen in South America so many times?
Well, I guess it's more postmodern than that, clearly.
I mean, the quote-unquote dictatorship is a government that was elected, and elections generally judged to be free and fair, whether they did so by exploiting the media and people's perceptions is a whole other question.
But yeah, it's a very conservative government.
It's one of the only governments in Latin America that is so pro-Bush administration that it even supported the war in Iraq, so one of the only sort of toeholds or friends the United States has right now in the region.
And they're fighting an insurgency that, at least in its rhetoric, comes from the left and certainly has origins from the left, and at least claims to be fighting in the name of the poor majority of the country.
Again, I used a lot of qualifies there because I'm not convinced about their commitment to the revolutionary cause anymore.
But still, I mean, we are propping them up at a time when you've got governments throughout Latin America, throughout South America, that are being elected because people are being frustrated with poverty, with the lack of change in their economic situation, and they're electing governments that often are quite critical of the United States.
And Colombia's one of the only sort of marbles left to fall.
Well, let me ask you, you don't believe anymore, or you don't think they believe anymore?
I don't think they believe.
Well, even though, no, clearly, I mean, the FARC have leaders who date back to the 60s.
But I have talked in my many years, 10 years now working in Colombia, I've just talked to too many dozens of community organizations, peasant groups, displaced organizations, Afro-Colombian indigenous organizations, who are just as afraid of the FARC as they are of the right wing, who have suffered, you know, relatives killed, leaders killed, mass displacements at the hands of the FARC just as well.
And what happened to the FARC in particular, which is by far the larger of Colombia's two guerrilla groups, they, in the 1990s, managed to quadruple in size.
Because they sort of made their peace with the drug trade, they decided that rather than fight it as an example of, you know, poor US policy and decadent capitalism, they would use it as a way to buy weapons.
And it really did change the way they operated.
And getting in between the FARC and a key drug trafficking route, or between the FARC and one of the ways of, you know, one of the other ways that they would be making money for it, is just a dangerous place to be, whether you're a class ally of the FARC or not.
Well, you know, that was one thing I was going to ask you about.
As little as I know about this, I thought that was one thing that I remembered, that the FARC used to not be involved in the drug trade.
And at some point in the not too distant past, they had made a strategic change there.
And then, of course, just provided their enemies with the ultimate excuse to continue to fight them.
That's right.
I mean, at a time in the late 1990s, when, you know, the Clinton administration had really no appetite to reopen what the Reagan administration did in Central America in the 80s, a big counterinsurgency campaign, the drug war sort of opened a back door for them to make it palatable.
We'll be fighting guerrillas, but only because they're narco-traffickers, and we'll only be fighting their drug trafficking operations.
Well, and that must be the argument of Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Am I right?
It certainly was in 2000.
Biden started out as a huge, enthusiastic backer of the Clinton administration's large proposed aid package in 2000, which was sort of the first down payment on what would be the $6 billion Plan Colombia.
Wow.
Six billion dollars.
So what that means, I'm sorry, I have a very visual imagination, and I just imagined a bunch of Cobra and Apache attack helicopters and cool stuff like that.
A lot of Blackhawks.
We never got as far as Cobras and Apaches, which are even another degree of high-tech, but a lot of Blackhawks, 15 million a shot, a major campaign of aerial herbicide fumigation over the coca fields that sprayed about 2 million acres, but has not reduced the amount of coca grown in Colombia at all.
Helping the Colombian military set up new mobile units all over the country, intelligence capabilities.
We've trained about 60,000 Colombian military and police agents in that time.
60,000.
And have had a constant presence of hundreds of special forces on the ground in Colombia all the time.
Well, I guess it just shows a typical Democrat like Biden's understanding of economics.
Even if the coca spraying actually did eradicate some percentage of the supply, it'd only drive up the price, encourage more people to go into the business at the same time.
As long as there's a demand for cocaine in America and other countries, somebody's going to keep growing it and selling it.
Yeah, Joe Biden, I mean, Joe Biden has always maintained a really strong interest in the drug war.
He even bills himself as the original author of the legislation in the 80s that created the Office of the Drug Czar.
And he backplanned Colombia.
He thought that expanding the spraying there was really going to reduce coca growing.
And you're right.
It was a clear misreading of economics.
It was also just a clear misreading of, well, it was also a clear misreading just of the effect of poverty in these vast neglected areas of a place like Colombia, where people have no economic choice.
They're growing five acres.
It gets sprayed.
What are they going to do?
Start growing beans?
No, they just cut down more trees and plant coca somewhere else.
And that's what's happened over and over.
And Biden, I think I'm going to defend him now, because I think that since 2000, he is one of a small number of senators who've learned from the experience.
When it was passed in 2000, he was very enthusiastic about it, but he was laying down markers.
He was saying, look, I mean, we better see as a condition of this an increase in human decrease in human rights violations.
We better see as a result of this a decrease in coca and cocaine production.
And by 2005, 2006, certainly now, he was starting to write some quite angry letters and make some occasional statements indicating that he was not happy about how this was going and that it was time to change course.
He wrote some very pointed letters to Colombia's right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe, about his attacks on human rights groups.
He's written, he's made some statements clearly saying he doesn't think the Uribe government has done anywhere near enough on paramilitaries, and he's even more recently said it's time to cut the military aid and make the package look more economic.
He's also, I haven't heard him say anything about the proposed free trade agreement with Colombia, but he opposed the free trade agreement with Peru last year.
So I mean, he's certainly been on a journey of his own from his initial enthusiasm about playing Colombia.
He's, we almost, we pretty much consider that office to be an ally now.
Well, if he, if he's talking about, well, for example, cutting the military aid and leaving just the economic, what kind of difference is that in terms of billions of American taxpayer dollars?
Well, yeah, our position and that of most of the groups that have worked on Colombia over the years is that, you know, as long as we don't clean our house, as long as we haven't treated our drug addicts and reduced the population, or even pursued other ways of entirely of approaching problems like cocaine, as long as we've still got this huge demand that's pumping money into Colombia's conflict, we have a responsibility to help them help that country.
Now, we don't think that an 80% military package was the way to do that, but, you know, helping, giving more humanitarian assistance to the world's second largest population of internal refugees, absolutely.
Helping...
The world's second largest population of internal refugees is in Colombia?
Also known as displaced people, right after Sudan.
Worse than Somalia, even?
Worse than Iraq, yeah, absolutely.
We're talking about, in the last 15 years, we're talking about nearly 4 million people.
We're talking about 100,000 displaced just in the first three months of this year.
It's a conflict where, and the FARC are right up there, they're responsible for at least a third, maybe as much as half of the displacement, which is why we keep them at arm's length.
It's a humanitarian crisis of great proportions, and we could easily be giving a lot more resources to helping these people who are streaming into the cities and living in the slums.
Yeah, and by the way, let me just stop you there, because, understandably, you keep having to make this disclaimer, because this is the way people think, and you're trying to sort of preempt it and explain, but to oppose American intervention on behalf of one warring faction does not equal objective support for the other side.
It's simply saying, we need to stop doing this.
That's right, and yet we find ourselves having to defend ourselves on that all the time, especially in the post-9-11 environment.
You hear that all the time.
Yes, right, you're objectively pro-all of our enemies if you don't agree with the stupid policy for how to deal with them.
That's right, and remember, a lot of the people, especially in this administration, who make Latin America policy, they cut their teeth on the Central America years 20 years ago, when you had insurgencies in Salvador and Guatemala, and of course the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, whose human rights records weren't perfect, but were an entirely dimension different than what the FARC is.
So these people, drawing on their past experience, think that us opponents are still performing the same guerrilla solidarity work that we did 25 years ago, and that's just not the case.
Yeah, it's always nice to have Elliott Abrams and the guys running the National Security Council, isn't it?
We try not to think about it.
Well now, you also mentioned that Colombia, at least not the FARC-controlled territory, which my understanding is it's about the size of Switzerland, but the rest of it, controlled at least nominally by this Uribe government, isn't he a drug trafficker too?
Uribe, we don't know that.
We can't say it and be able to footnote it.
There are any number of conspiracy theories, it is of course the mere fact that he was mayor of Medellin in 1983, when Pablo Escobar was the head of his power, certainly makes you scratch your head.
Or that he was the head of Colombia's version of the FAA, at a time when the Medellin cartel was building airstrips all over the place, to send drugs northward does make you scratch your head.
Is he in league with narco-traffickers now or in the recent past?
Probably not.
I can't imagine he'd be that stupid or corrupt, but there's a lot of cloudy things in his past that many investigative reporters and investigators in Colombia and even in the United States have looked into, but have never found the smoking gun, but have often been viciously attacked by the president for even asking questions.
Also the pushing of the rest of Latin America to the left, this is something that I actually celebrate even though I'm a libertarian and I'm for private property rights and capitalism and opposed to all kinds of socialism, however, what, by three years ago they were supposed to have signed and implemented the free trade area of the Americas, which was going to be the American takeover of South America and Latin America, and they've failed miserably and through their heavy-handedness, perhaps support for the Uribe government in Colombia as part of this, they've really helped push the people of Latin America further and further away from the idea that they would ever have any sort of permanent economic or especially military alliance with the U.S.
What we did in Latin America throughout the 90s was push this free market model, which is fine, you know, lazy affair model, I mean, it does create economic growth and there was economic growth, but who benefited from it was, really, this is the least equal region in the world economically, we've got a tiny group that really controls most of the economy, they made off with all the benefits, they're the ones who got even richer as a result of these privatizations and reforms and economic growth, and with a huge dose of corruption mixed in.
We paid no attention to inequality, we paid no attention to corruption, and we also paid no attention as we pushed these policies through the IMF and through our own government, we paid no attention to just what we were leaving behind in terms of a government, and we ended up having, you know, these governments so strapped trying to meet their debt needs and trying to privatize everything and trying to reduce the bloated state that they weren't even providing schools and roads were falling apart, and with growing populations who were unable to meet even basic needs.
So what happened with the poor majority, they got angry, who, and there were many leaders in Latin America, and there continue to be many leaders who effortlessly have been able to tap into that anger and get elected, and one thing that has happened in Latin America since the 80s is that you've had military governments give way, you've had dictatorships give way with elections, and it took a little while, people, you know, the first people elected were from the right, and they were these privatizing, you know, pro-U.S. guys, but as people got more confident in that their vote would count, they have started to vote for more people claiming to represent the interests of the poorest, and many of them, because of the experience of the United States, included a real dose of anti-Americanism or at least anti-U.S. government policy in their platforms, and those guys are, in South America, the only countries now that don't have a leader from the left are Peru and Colombia, and in Colombia it's only because of the FARC.
I mean, I think if there was no insurgency claiming to be the left that was one of the biggest factors in killing civilians in the country, the leftist, the peaceful left in Colombia would have been much more successful than it is now with only about 20% of the vote.
Well, I think it's really important that you talk about the so-called free market model where really what happens is you have all these publicly owned, government-owned resources, the waterworks, the things that, well, you know, I think everything ought to be privatized 100%, but...
Yeah, but not in a crony model.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's the whole thing is that, you know, I'm also not the dictator of anybody else's country either, and what they did was they used the IMF and the World Bank to say, look, you're going to turn over all your public resources to our friends or else, and that ain't free trade at all, that's simply stealing, and of course as they call it, laissez-faire, as they, you know, hold guns to the head of people of South America and take all their resources and run off with them, in a lot of cases just liquidating the assets and running away and just leaving dry husks of industries and things behind, as they call that laissez-faire, people say, well, if that's capitalism, leave me out of it.
I don't want a part of that, that's right, that's right.
To think that there could be consequences from government intervention, it's just incredible sometimes.
That's right.
All right, now, oh, I wanted to share this with you.
This is an article by Jim Lowe, Bush rallies behind Colombian president despite drug allegations, this is at antiwar.com, and he's referring here to a Defense Intelligence Agency document about narco-terrorists in South America, and it says here that...
1991, yeah.
Yeah, Uribe is listed as number 82, just after Pablo Escobar, maximum chief of the Medellín cartel.
I think I found your footnote.
Right, well, this is a DIA document that was produced in 1991, and it was declassified a few years, I think it's around 2003, and it lists then-Senator Alvaro Uribe on a list of the largest narco-traffickers in the country.
Now, the DIA has completely disavowed the document, said, we didn't vet the intelligence, this was just a draft, we didn't know what we were doing, and yeah, in their defense, and I'm not the only thing I'll say in their defense, another one of those hundred people is Carlos Avivas, who at the time was a soap opera star in Colombia, and is now one of the country's biggest recording artists, and it doesn't make any sense that he would be there.
So, you know, it is messy, but, you know, he was a senator from Medellín whose political career thrived in Medellín during the 1980s, at the height of the Medellín cartel.
The key members of the opposition in Colombia have brought out documents that have not yet been refuted, indicating that Uribe and his brother may even have been organizing death squads in the late 1980s.
These documents do point to something smelly that, of course, the Uribe people deny like crazy but still haven't completely responded to.
Something was going on in that period.
Something may even have been going on in Uribe's relations with sort of the narco and paramilitary underworld as late as the mid to late 1990s when he was governor of the Department of Antioquia, the province where Medellín is the capital, which he was governor at a time when the paramilitary presence in that department exploded with daily massacres and he did nothing about it.
So, you know, there's a lot that smells, most of it now is not very recent, but the man's background certainly has provided fodder for a lot of investigators who still, as I said, haven't found the undeniable smoking gun, but certainly have had a lot of things to poke around in.
I once, on our blog, which is CIPCOL.org, I think it was last fall in one of our posts, I made a list of 14 of the most common allegations and I think we've named some of them.
Last year, for instance, Pablo Escobar's former girlfriend wrote a book that was a bestseller in Colombia in which she talks about how Escobar introduced her to Uribe, his buddy who was helping him with the airstrips and things like that.
Uribe always, you know, his head explodes and he gets very angry and has a tantrum and denies everything and sometimes even threatens people and says that they're enemies, but it's never, you know, he never actually responds on the content of the allegations.
So that's why those things are still out there floating around.
Well, this guy isn't a graduate of the School of the Americas, is he?
Alvaro Uribe never spent a day in the military, so no.
Oh, that's good.
Well, there's one more thing that I thought of, which was a statement that Ron Paul made one time where he brought up Plan Colombia and just said, you know, when it comes time to vote on this thing, it's all the helicopter lobbyists walking around trying to sell helicopters.
They're the ones pushing this policy.
Yeah, Ron Paul's one of maybe 15 Republicans who ever votes with us on this stuff.
And yeah, he has a point that the two, I mean, certainly in 2000, when the big helicopter money was part of the package, you had the delegation from Connecticut where Sikorsky Helicopter, who makes the Blackhawk, is really fighting it out tooth and nail with the delegation from Texas, where Bell Textron is, and who makes the Huey and the Huey upgrade kits.
And our helicopter has a better carrying capacity, but our helicopter is less expensive.
And you had even some of the most liberal members of Congress in both delegations fighting for a piece of this pie.
And you had the unions from those corporations, this is pre-911, this is a time when the Defense Department's not taking a lot of orders for its own helicopters, fighting to keep their production lines open, and they're fighting for Plan Colombia, the unions themselves.
So it was quite a display, and Ron Paul is exactly right.
Yeah, it was sort of like the drug war was just kind of the stand-in until they could get the war on terrorism going at full speed.
I am not the person, I don't even remember who it was, but somebody coined the term drug war industrial complex a long time ago.
Oh yeah, there you go, I should have thought of that myself, I'm sorry that I didn't, y'all.
Alright, well hey listen, I really appreciate you making time for us on the show today.
No, my pleasure, thank you for inviting me.
Everybody, that's Adam Isaacson, he's from the Center for International Policy, the website is cipcol.org.
Thanks very much.
Hey, my pleasure, have a good rest of your day.
