I observed the first Peace Corps volunteers as they trained at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I accompanied them to Bogotá for a three-month course with the promotores, after which they went out two-by-two to the countryside.
From Coffee to Cocaine: U.S. Pours Gasoline on Colombia's Flames
By Gary Maceoin, AlterNet. Posted September 12, 2001.
[Excerpt]
We didn't stop there. We grabbed the Alliance for Progress, and Colombia became its showcase. We recruited young men in Colombia to work with the Peace Corps volunteers. We called them promotores. They would develop grassroots initiatives in the villages in which they would work with their U.S. counterparts.
I observed the first Peace Corps volunteers as they trained at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I accompanied them to Bogotá for a three-month course with the promotores, after which they went out two-by-two to the countryside. The promotor would assemble the villagers to discuss the perceived needs of the community: a water well, a school, a bridge, whatever. No problem, said the Peace Corps guy. He could get the materials. The people would volunteer the labor.
"Not so fast," said the villagers. They knew the protocol. "We must first discuss this with Don Jaime." Don Jaime was the local patrón, probably the local representative of the Coffee Federation. Don Jaime listened. "But why hadn't you told me about this? If I had known, I'd have taken care of it long ago. Don't worry. Leave it to me." And Don Jaime paid for the well or the school. The traditional patrón relationship had been reaffirmed.
By the next decade, nothing had changed. During the 1960s and into the 1970s, the violence became institutionalized as never before. Warlords set themselves up in autonomous regions, of which the best known was the self-styled Republic of Marquetalia. Kidnappings became a common method of raising funds. The countryside was no longer safe for the Peace Corps volunteers, and they were moved to desk jobs in government offices.
I spoke several times to Orlando Fals Borda, then dean of the faculty of sociology at the National University of Colombia. His analysis of the Alliance was devastating. "What we actually did was mortgage the country in order to save a ruling class that was headed for disaster. It was already tottering when this stimulation came along to enable it to gasp out a few more breaths, the same kind of artificial breathing as that of a dying man who is fed oxygen, and equally expensive. The sad part is that this ruling class will not have to pay the mortgage it incurred. It will be paid, perhaps with the blood, certainly with the sweat of our children and the working classes, the innocent people who always in the last analysis pay for the broken plates."
The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee had looked at the first five years of the Alliance and its conclusion was the same as that of Fals Borda: It had fallen far short of the economic and social goals it had set for itself. Nevertheless, the Committee insisted that the Alliance had justified itself. It had purportedly achieved its objectives, which were to ensure "political stability and maintenance of Colombia's democratic institutions." Thirty years later, as I look at Colombia's "political stability" and "democratic institutions," I shudder at such naiveté. Is that the level of political judgment of the most powerful country in the world? Can we be trusted with nuclear weapons?
The politicians ignored Fals Borda and continued on their traditional path. For my part, I tearlessly said goodbye to the Coffee Federation. Things have changed since then, but only for the worse. There were 19 kidnappings in 1982; now they number thousands each year. In 1999 alone, there were more than 500 massacres. (If Colombia had the same population as the United States, the annual number of violent deaths there would be a quarter of a million.) The war against the guerrillas is responsible for too many of them, but only 15 percent of the total.
According to Human Rights Watch, the paramilitaries, "working with the tacit acquiescence or open support of the Colombian military," carried out most of the four hundred massacres in 1999.
So far, I have not once mentioned drugs or drug lords. The reason is that, while they constitute a new aggravating factor, they did not create the tragedy of Colombia. Get rid of drugs, and the essential issues remain unsolved. Drugs came to Colombia because the insatiable demand in the United States since the Vietnam War forced the production of drugs to expand traditional suppliers in Asia to South America. Peru, traditional home of coca, was the logical place to start; when U.S.-sponsored eradication operations raised the cost of production there, economics forced a shift to other markets.
Colombia was ready and willing. Social chaos provided the climate. It was a perfect match. Wars require money, and drug profits enable all three parties in the Colombian war to buy ever more sophisticated weapons and maintain bigger armies.
Will today's U.S. escalation of the war achieve its objective of destroying the coca crops in Colombia? It is most unlikely. At best, it will take years. And even if it does, production will merely move across the borders into the Amazonian forests of Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, Cayenne, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador. Already drug-processing plants are springing up on the Ecuadorean side of the border with Colombia.
Envision what Colombia will be like if all this comes to pass. What little industrial infrastructure now remains will have been reduced to rubble. The vast areas today under coca production and the additional acres that will be planted as the war goes on will have been sprayed with glyphosate and will lie infertile for generations. The U.S. government says glyphosate is "safe as salt," but that's what we were told about Agent Orange. And what about the land mines and depleted uranium shells?
Will a U.S. Senate Commission decide once again, as happened in its 1969 evaluation of Vietnam, that our decisive role in achieving this outcome has been justified, that we have brought political stability and democratic institutions to Colombia?
