Whiteout

Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia, by Russell Crandall. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2002). 193 pp. $19.95.

That Colombia's woes garner more recognition than its strengths should not be surprising. Sniffing carnations yields an exponentially less damaging reaction than sniffing cocaine. What is shocking, however, is how the United States' absolute focus on the country's woes has served to wholeheartedly "narcotize" the relationship. Government—guerrilla peace talks, human rights, long-standing commercial ties and other bilateral issues are "largely nonexistent by comparison." ¹ This is unfortunate, and as Russell Crandall, a Latin Americanist at Davidson College, highlights in his freshman effort Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia, the resulting U.S. policy has been inconsistent, feckless, and perhaps detrimental to both Colombian and American interests.

In large part, this was not a predetermined evolution. The 1970s rise of Colombia as the "primary producer and exporter of marijuana to the U.S. market" (with some 10,000 metric tons of marijuana being produced annually by up to 50,000 small farmers) happened to coincide with the demise of an international communist threat. In the resulting void other issues rose to prominence and a 1988 CBS News-New York Times poll showed that "48 percent of the U.S. public considered drugs to be the principal foreign policy challenge facing the United States." ² If U.S. leaders once feared being viewed as "soft" on communism, that specter extended now to the realm of drugs. ³ Counternarcotics efforts began in Bolivia and by 1989 the focus of an increasingly militarized Andean drug policy—the literal "war on drugs"—had extended to Peru and Colombia.

If U.S. policy toward Colombia was driven by the rise of drugs, Colombia's history has been driven by violence. The country's two dominant political parties, the Social Conservative Party (PSC) and the Liberal Party (PL), waged armed conflict through the 1950s in an epic period known as La Violencia and eventually spawned third-party guerrilla factions. Much less involved in the production and trafficking of cocaine and heroine, these guerrilla groups were not seen by Washington as an enemy in the drug war. ⁴ Accordingly, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), founded in 1964, now controls a 16,000 square mile "liberated zone"—an area the size of Switzerland. The National Liberation Army (ELN) targeted crude oil pipelines that resulted in an average loss of U.S.$3 million per day and a drop in total annual production from 2.2 to 1.9 million barrels. And the 19^th of April Movement (M-19), the most flamboyant of the groups, stole Simón Bolívar's sword in 1974 and later seized the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, which led to the deaths of eleven (out of twenty-four) supreme court justices. ⁵ By the 1990s, the guerrillas together earned almost U.S.$500 million per year through taxing landowners, kidnapping, and other illicit activities.

Meanwhile, the cartel kingpins became the "world's most successful businessmen," collectively reaping higher annual profits than Boeing or Pepsi-Cola. ⁶ Subsequently having purchased land with their profits, these "narco-landowners" began to openly combat the guerilla threat. Approximately 11,000 paramilitary commandos were operating in-country by mid-1989. No longer directly related to the cartels and exercising influence in roughly 40 percent of the nation, today's paramilitaries consist of "quasi-autonomous, drug revenue-supported groups committed to clearing the Colombian countryside of guerrilla influence." ⁷ An already fragile civil society has been further weakened by the continued state of violence; most visibly, close to one million Colombians have been displaced internally. ⁸ This, then, is the tragic dichotomy in which Crandall sets his work. As the conflict between guerrillas and commandos demonstrates, U.S. counternarcotics efforts often remained discordant with the interests of the Colombian government, which sought to reduce strife through negotiations with the cartels.

Crandall centers his work on the story of two recent presidencies, both...