Part Two of Four
Starting in the mid-70s, cocaine became a drug of choice for some consumers in the U.S. That was identified by politicians and others to be a palpable threat to social stability. As everyone involved in the anti-prohibition movement knows, fear is an indispensable political tool and the hysteria about drugs in general – and cocaine in particular – was nurtured by successive administrations. The truth is that, in the 2005 annual survey of drug use, conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, 2.34 million Americans identified themselves as regular (monthly) cocaine users, approximately 1% of the population aged 12 or older. The same survey recorded 680,000 crack users, about 0.3% of the adult population.
But supply - from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia - inexorably met whatever demand there was. Colombia wasn’t the major player (Peru was) but its two cartels, around Cali and Medellin, were the biggest in the area and formed their own paramilitary forces, sometimes in cooperation with the landed gentry, sometimes not.
So, from the late eighties well into the nineties, there developed this smorgasbord of armed groups all over the country, mainly funded by cocaine money intent on protecting their interests and using selective assassination, mass killing and constant intimidation of both the peasantry and the politicians. The paras were notoriously brutal. To send their message, for example, they often executed villagers by dismemberment while others were forced to watch. FARC slowly fell into similar practices, feeling they had to out-intimidate their rivals. As it has developed, it’s now often impossible to tell who is responsible for what atrocity. Each faction has been known to adopt the uniform and to mimic the modus operandi of others.
An example is a mass killing in a church in Puerto Asis, the main town of Putamayo, the day before we left the area. Seven people, including 3 children and a teenager, were shot to death and carved up. No one would say who did it. The local police chief, a brave man, finally announced that the confusing evidence led him to the conclusion that a new, smaller paramilitary group, made up of soldiers demobilized from the larger armies (more on that in a minute), was vying for control with the resident para group.
Meanwhile, on the drug front, in cooperation with the Colombian government, the U.S. went after the two major cartels and succeeded in dismantling them during the 90s. That only changed the demographics. The market devolved into about 100 smaller groups, all-powerful in their own fiefdoms, and cocaine became more available than ever. At about the same time, the U.S. government targeted its own domestic market, devising progressively more draconian sentencing schemes that resulted in millions of users – and occasionally sellers - being jailed for longer and longer terms. That approach had always failed utterly to prevent the growth of drug use, let alone eradicate it, and it was no more successful this time around. They then increased efforts at interdiction at the U.S. border or en route and did even worse. It was notably not cost-effective and cocaine use actually rose. Finally in 2000, the Clinton administration decided to try eradication at source – a tactic that had already (1998) been identified by the Rand Corporation, in one of the best-researched papers on the economics of illicit drug use, as the least cost-effective to deal with the (non-) problem. Thus began Plan Colombia.
To be continued…
