This monograph inquires into the genesis of Plan Colombia, the foreign aid programme that transferred US$1.3 billion to Colombia during FY2000/01 alone. It reveals that President Andrés Pastrana invited US intervention into many aspects of Colombia’s internal affairs, from peace talks with guerrilla insurgents to the restoration of state control over Bogotá’s ‘internal periphery’. A complex, three-way negotiation between two core Executives and the US Congress ensued, which yielded a more limited intervention than the Colombians had wished. Notwithstanding the vast power asymmetry between the two countries, it was the small state that took the initiative and managed to influence the great power. These findings conclusively refute the paradigmatic assumption that Plan Colombia was a hegemonic imposition. To the contrary, there was a protracted negotiation of terms which showed the ‘hegemon’ decidedly reluctant to intervene deeply in its putative victim’s internal affairs. Plan Colombia follows a classic and previously noted pattern in US foreign relations, a unique brand of ‘imperialism’ whereby ‘subject states’ actually invite intervention and in some cases even occupation.1
Unlike the a priori method that predominates in IR, the inference to such surprising conclusions was essentially inductive. The author interviewed the gamut of elite participants in the making of Plan Colombia, from Pastrana himself to Thomas Pickering, third-ranking officer in the US State Department. Letting the facts from all sources speak for themselves yielded findings and conclusions that bid fair to interest both theorists and practitioners of international relations.
The argument
This monograph provides a foreign policy analysis of the origins of Plan Colombia, the United States (US) foreign aid programme for the eponymous South American nation that has been compared to the Marshall Plan in its scale relative to the beneficiary’s size. Plan Colombia was actually implemented between 2000 and 2005, but the scope of analysis is confined to the period between 1998 and 2000, when the Plan was conceived and brought into being.2 Substantial evidence is conclusive that Plan Colombia was a comprehensive development plan which the Colombians originated and proposed, and whose entrepreneurial initiative engaged the US to participate.
For many decades the US has led an intense anti-drug strategy in the Andean region.3 However, US intervention via Plan Colombia did not emerge from this matrix at all, but from an invitation bespoken by the Colombians, to which the US reacted and responded. The theoretical point is that whatever weak states ‘lack in structural clout they can make up through creative agency’.4 Agency in this context is understood as a person’s capacity to express identity and assert self-interest in action, successfully or not.5 Agency in foreign policy is a goal-setting or -seeking decision by a sovereign state expressed in action in the international system. Agency amongst Latin American nations is aimed to achieve national goals.6
This finding enhances understanding of the international system and the not insignificant role that weak states can and do play in it. This is a challenge to the received verities of the literature of dependency and world systems theories,7 negating the conventional wisdom and the implicit ideology and political activism that sees nothing of significance but hegemony in all it surveys.8
The contribution of the author is to sublate (without pretending to subvert) the kernel of truth undoubtedly contained in the prevalent theories, but within a wider horizon. Hegemony might be conceived as an explanatory first approximation that ‘covers the ground’ of IR like concrete covers an urban landscape. To illustrate its crudity, to a first approximation all animals on earth are insects,9 and mankind does not exist. Exceptions to systemic rules flourish, possibly in great profusion, like plants springing up in between cracks in the urban concrete. The aspiration for more general explanatory power and applicability, the outlines of which may be just beginning to come into focus, still awaits the definitive formulation that this monograph cannot attempt.
It is not denied, in the case under study, that a centre–periphery relationship subsisted between the US, centre of the world system, and the very marginal state of Colombia; or that structural violence was in play in the war on drugs, the US grand strategy that coerced Latin American countries to take extreme measures of supply interdiction whilst doing little about US domestic consumer demand. It is only denied that the Colombians let structural disadvantages preclude their own agency and initiative, the key factor in Plan Colombia’s success.
US intervention through Plan Colombia is a far more complex phenomenon than meets the eye. The Colombian political elite’s positive invitation was a démarche that falls squarely within an historical pattern of external dependency (on the US in particular), caused both by the ‘tragic flaw’ of Colombia’s domestic system, the chronic alienation of the periphery from its centre, and by its paradoxical strength, the elite’s seamless transnational integration into the West. The monograph will address the former cause; though noted, the full ramifications of the latter lie beyond its scope.
The genesis of Plan Colombia
This monograph traces the process by which one of the few successful foreign aid packages ever assembled was negotiated.10 When the enabling act passed the US Congress in June 2000, Colombia had reached one of its lowest ebbs in 200 years. The ramifications of ever-expanding production of coca for sale abroad had seemingly irreversibly undermined the state’s authority. Loss of effective control over huge swaths of its own territory had precipitated capital flight. The ensuing recession resulted in a cratering of desperately needed tax revenue.11 Except the thriving illegal drug trade, hope of recovery faltered. Plan Colombia halted this spiralling dégringolade in its tracks. The uncommonly large sums transferred by the US to the Colombian fisc decisively turned its situation around to full recovery of the economy and of state authority.
Colombian Agency – intervention by invitation
The title Colombian agency and the Making of US Foreign Policy signifies the peculiar way the Colombian government used creative agency in the international system. The US government intervened in Colombia’s internal affairs on a much grander scale than ever previously contemplated, because the Colombians prevailed on the US to accept their invitation on (some of) their own terms. The formal idea of inviting US intervention originated this time with President Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) and his inner counsel. This was thinkable because they believed the US could be trusted to intervene ‘softly’, i.e. with enough respect for their sovereignty to suit the Colombian public. In fact, they invited more intervention than the US was prepared to deliver, precipitating a three-way negotiation between two core Executives plus the US Congress ending up in a tightly limited acceptance. But for the small state moving first, the hegemon’s intervention would have been improbable given the trends of the day. This complicated process revealed the US drawn into the internal affairs of its ‘client’ reluctantly; the agency of both sides interacted densely and dynamically to produce the final outcome.
This interpretation is summed up in the following thesis and corollary. It is hoped that the exposition and proof of this thesis will shed light on the making of foreign policy that systemic theory has consigned to the black box of ‘unit-actors’.
Both thesis and corollary were put to the empirical test of evidence gathered in the field; the reader should bear in mind, however, that testing alone cannot be the end-all. To do fieldwork is to expose oneself to the ardent flux of reality. Everything that was discovered over and above the thesis in its original form and was relevant to the intuition underlying it was rightly incorporated into this monograph and its reasoning and conclusions. The study of Plan Colo...
