Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: US Policymaking in Colombia by Winifred Tate (review)

Working on human rights in Colombia in the 1990s was an exercise in dread and frustration. The dread anticipated each morning’s headlines. There seemed to be no “floor” to the violence, as fighters on all sides seemed committed to finding ever more clever ways to mutilate the human body and devastate the human spirit. The main paramilitary leader, Carlos Castaño, led a private army known as the “Moche Cabezas,” or Head Splitters. Often, they’d dismember bodies or leave them posed in macabre dioramas on the side of the road.

The guerrillas weren’t any better. As a Human Rights Watch researcher, I remember quite clearly the day the news arrived about a tiny village called Machuca, in the same department (state) as Colombia’s second largest city, Medellín. At 2 a.m. on October 18, 1998, members of the National Liberation Army ([Ejército Nacional de Liberación] ELN) dynamited one of Colombia’s oil pipelines. An enormous, viscous glob of aerosolized oil spilled out, slid down a hill, jumped the narrow Pocuné River, and landed on the town, bursting into flame with the spark of the lanterns poor people use throughout this rural region. In an instant, 84 people burned to death.

Meanwhile, Colombia’s military routinely helped the paramilitaries conduct a “cleansing” campaign that cost thousands their lives and tens of thousands their homes and livelihoods, forcing them to flee to the country’s major cities. A common military tactic was to kill civilians, then dress them in old guerrilla uniforms already marked with bullet holes, assuming that investigators would fail to match the wound to the tear. High body counts meant faster promotions and more praise.

For their part, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ([Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia] FARC) launched their own massacre campaign against banana workers who refused to support them and coca farmers who resisted their takeover of the cocaine business in the country’s vast, southern lowlands. As Winifred Tate, a fellow human rights researcher and now anthropologist, describes in her fascinating new book, Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: US Policymaking in Colombia, this was a

frantic world of daily emergencies. Paramilitary gunmen occupied villages for days, killing and dismembering their victims. Activists were pulled off buses and shot by the side of the road. Families fled their homes in the cover of darkness with only what they could carry.

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Next comes the frustration element, largely supplied by Washington, where in the 1980s, Congress and the White House took a new interest in Colombia due to the country’s role in supplying US consumers with cocaine (and, while the opium-hating Taliban briefly ruled, heroin). Tate’s introductory summary of the shift in US thinking is crisp and detailed, showing how a focus on drugs as a national health issue during the Nixon administration morphed under President George H. W. Bush and then President William Clinton into a high-tech military campaign meant to eradicate coca plants and send soldiers after traffickers and so-called “narco-guerrillas”—in other words, directly into the heart of Colombia’s decades-long internal conflict. The fact that traffickers were often also the paramilitaries who were massacring and “disappearing” innocents was the kind of pesky fact I was paid to shout into what was usually a void.

As Tate notes, “Military aid became a solution to the Clinton Administration’s political vulnerability generated by Republican concern about domestic drug consumption and the ongoing culture wars” (31). In this calculus, Colombia’s military was championed by hawkish Democrats while the Colombian police, newly fitted with body armor, helicopters, and US dollars, were Republican darlings, their long-time chief lauded by Republican Dan Burton (R-IN) as the “world’s best cop.”

In her introduction, Tate describes how she first became involved as part of the policy-making machine, as an analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights NGO founded during the political battles over...