Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats

U.S. Policymaking in Colombia

Winifred Tate

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804795678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

In 2000, the U.S. passed a major aid package that was going to help Colombia do it all: cut drug trafficking, defeat leftist guerrillas, support peace, and build democracy. More than 80% of the assistance, however, was military aid, at a time when the Colombian security forces were linked to abusive, drug-trafficking paramilitary forces. Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats examines the U.S. policymaking process in the design, implementation, and consequences of Plan Colombia, as the aid package came to be known.

Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.

Part I

Militarization, Human Rights, and the U.S. War on Drugs

Figure 2 Coca paste in Putumayo manufactured by a peasant farmer, 1999.

Photograph by Winifred Tate.

Chapter 1

Domestic Drug Policy Goes to War

IN THE 1990S, the war on drugs in the United States went from being a metaphor to a real war involving combat helicopters, military advisors, and dedicated army battalions. The zero tolerance paradigm that the United States embraced domestically in the 1980s provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. Although rooted in the long history of the regulation of drug consumption that has targeted particular marginal populations, zero tolerance emerged as a dominant policy apparatus during the Reagan administration. This paradigm viewed all illegal drugs as irreparably damaging to white middle-class youth. The overwhelming force of the military was required to prevent these commodities from passing through U.S. borders or to ensure their physical destruction during production and transit. Militarization and zero tolerance of drug use emerged from and employed the same set of cultural logics based on a totalizing ideal of overwhelming force and control. Both relied on conjuring dystopian futures through imagined threats. Both created new social relationships based on exclusionary visions that draw boundaries around enemies and allies, demand allegiance, and signal traitorous betrayal at any sign of opposition.

Dwight Eisenhower warned of the growing “military-industrial complex” in a 1961 speech at the close of his presidency. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government,” he told the nation.¹ In the past three decades, a small but growing anthropological literature has focused on the evolving institutions, social practices, and cultural values facilitating the increasing domination of military institutions, technologies, and logics in multiple spheres of social life.² As the pioneering scholar of militarization Cynthia Enloe reminds us, this process is not inevitable, nor is it transparent. A gun may be militarized or not, as may a toy or can of soup.³ Scholars have focused their inquiry around specific geographies, such as Catherine Lutz’s study of Fayetteville, North Carolina; masculinities, in the case of Aaron Belkin’s study of the entwined histories of U.S. gender ideologies and imperial projects; or the production of subjectivities as violence workers, as in Ken MacLeish’s analysis of soldiers’ communities in Fort Hood.⁴ Here I focus on the militarization of a policy. I am interested in the way in which an issue—defined as “drug policy”—comes to be dominated by military institutional practices, logics, and expertise.

This history is part of a larger genealogy of contemporary national security threats.⁵ To study such a genealogy involves tracing how threats and fear are produced and circulate, the role they play as structures of feeling within U.S. policymaking, and their state effects. Joseph Masco argues that the imaginaries of fear are central to the securitization of contemporary political life and the militarization of national security threats in the case of nuclear war and the so-called war on terror, tracing their deployment in discourses, technologies, and infrastructures.⁶ As Jutta Weldes reminds us in her masterful analysis of the events that became known as the Cuban missile crisis, threats do not simply arise, but are produced in relation to particular state identities and assumptions about national roles and character, and within distinct time scales. These threats are deployed to produce particular affective dispositions, political subjectivities, and scientific practices, as anthropologists have argued in the case of possible nuclear annihilation, biological hazards, and geological disasters.⁷ In this complex political terrain, the threat posed by the consumption of illegal drugs has come to encompass not only social values and the bodily integrity of particular youth populations but also national security. This threat now emanates from distant producers and traffickers. Fighting these new enemies requires the United States to secure new allies, in this case, the Colombian military forces.

Militarization of the drug war is only one small piece of the broader militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Spending on civilian diplomatic missions has decreased while that on the military has grown. This shift is reflected in the distribution of financial resource within state agencies. The State Department’s operating bud get was cut 20 percent during the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in 22 percent fewer Foreign Service personnel and smaller embassy staffs around the world; more than thirty embassies and consulates shuttered their offices by the late 2000s. The difference in size between the civilian and military bureaucracies is enormous; compare the institutional weight of 6,000 Foreign Service officers and 2,000 USAID staff versus 1.68 million active-duty military personnel. The number of musicians employed in military bands is larger than the total staff of the State Department.⁸

The military presence abroad has expanded through a growing network of U.S. bases and participation in advising missions and training operations.⁹ Many tasks that had been assigned to civilian agencies have been transferred to the military so that U.S. regional military commanders play a growing role in establishing mission mandates and developing in-country relationships. These shifts have had profound political consequences, as military leaders use “military-to-military relations to seduce countries into the U.S. sphere of ideas and geopolitical interests.”¹⁰ Although overwhelmingly endorsed by U.S. civilian politicians, such arrangements also generate conflict between civilian leadership and military programs in the countries where they are carried out and in the case of U.S. civilian critics of these efforts.¹¹

In this chapter, I trace the emergence of the zero tolerance framework and how the U.S. Military Southern Command (SouthCom) successfully lobbied for an expanded military role in counternarcotics operations in the post–Cold War period. For much of the 1990s the Colombian National Police were the major U.S. partner in counternarcotics operations. Despite critiques of the military as an abusive, inefficient, and corrupt garrison force, in the late 1990s, the Colombian military was poised to replace the Colombian police as the primary recipients of U.S. assistance. 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. Increasing assistance to the Colombian military rather than the police allowed the Democratic administration to differentiate itself from the Republicans who were championing the Colombian National Police.

The expansion of militarized counternarcotics programs to primarily support the Colombian army required ideological and institutional work including the creation of new enemies justifying a military response. Yet these new enemies were not entirely new: U.S. policymakers merged the lingering Cold War fears of communism with the escalating concern of hyperviolent traffickers. To these policymakers the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) embodied both of these historical enemies. The narcoguerrilla label, used by U.S. Foreign Service officials to categorize insurgents throughout the continent during the Cold War, signaled the convergence of the FARC and the drug trade. The designation proved to be very sticky and was frequently recirculated by pundits and media outlets.¹² This chapter also traces the erroneous assumptions at the heart of this policy narrative. The narcoguerrilla moniker falsely implied that the guerrillas were the drug traffickers at the center of the drug trade, in the process erasing the larger presence of paramilitary traffickers allied with the Colombian military.

Officials’ fear of bureaucratic vulnerability played a central role in the mobilization of institutional support for these projects. Focused on the possible loss of political power, prestige, and control, this sense of vulnerability orients officials toward viewing themselves as charged with protecting their own vulnerable and besieged institutions. Efforts to promote the militarization of international drug programs were fundamentally bureaucratic processes, focused on gaining resources for the ongoing support and expansion of existing institutional programs. “Bureaucracy has been studied as a rationalizing apparatus, instigating discipline and organizing audit procedures, with no room for affect,” Yael Navaro-Yashin writes. Yet as her research with the Turkish-Cypriot civil service reveals, bureaucracy “produces and incites specific modes of affectivity in its own right.” As an “emotive domain,” these institutional practices involve desire, reverence, resentment, irony, restraint, apathy and dissatisfaction.¹³ Fear, which is central to the affective experience of bureaucratic vulnerability, favors particular policy options—in this case, militarization. The U.S. military feared funding declines in the post–Cold War era; SouthCom wanted leverage for its expanded presence in Latin America and to bolster its role relative to other military divisions. The Clinton administration worried that attacks from Republican congressional leadership would further delegitimize the administration.

As an ethnographer the meetings that were the foundational practice of these bureaucratic efforts were off-limits to me; in some cases they were held in classified spaces (defined as secret allegedly to safeguard national security), and in every case they were subject to the institutional policing of attendance, the literal concern over who had a seat at the table. Those who did agree to speak with me insisted on anonymity—that they were speaking “on background” or could be identified only by general position or military rank. Much of this fieldwork was conducted over the phone or in meetings in chain restaurants and cafes. The tone and style of this chapter reproduce this disembodied institutional logic as recounted by participating officials.

Those office spaces I was able to access for interviews reflected both the imperial and bellicose aspirations of these institutions and their bureaucratic banality. Entering the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá requires traveling to a large compound, passing the outside perimeter wall and then through bronze doors two stories high, which open to a gray granite lobby with a four-story atrium and Marine guards behind bulletproof glass. But once inside, I discussed the history of counternarcotics operations and military training in beige cubicles, personalized only by coffee mugs. Approaching the neatly mowed campus of the Joint Interagency Task Force South, which coordinates counterdrug missions off the Florida Keys, I encountered a homemade submarine sitting in a circle of crushed gravel lined with white stones. I was instructed that no picture taking was allowed (national security again?), but was proudly told the story of the capture of this vessel, its lone sailor, and hundreds of pounds of cocaine. Inside, the walls of the offices where I received my briefings were featureless particleboard decorated with smudgy white boards. A few days earlier I had spent the day at the Miami headquarters of SouthCom, an anonymous glass and concrete office building along a highway surrounded by parking lots. In my fieldnotes, I reflected at the end of that visit on “the shabby similarity of all the Army offices I have been in,” with the same generic institutional accouterments, while “[all the people I see while waiting] are dressed the same, in desert camouflage uniforms with boots—although clearly office style, with the Major’s uniform including two pens in pen holders sewn into the forearms.” However, the offices of higher ranked officers and civilian advisors did feature accessories that signaled a connection to Latin America: an oversized coffee-table book of photographs of Colombia, handmade artisanía clocks, or baseball caps emblazoned with logos in Spanish of military units. Because of my limited access to these spaces and the daily practices of the officials who worked within them, I do not focus on these realms in this book, but rather trace the institutional narratives and histories that made possible the militarization of drug policy and made it legible as a rational public project.

Emergence of the Zero Tolerance Paradigm

President Richard Nixon (1969–74) declared the first U.S. “war on drugs” in 1971. His administration focused on the rising rates of heroin addiction among veterans of the wars in Southeast Asia. In contrast to drug consumers who were associated with crime and social deviance, as soldiers these addicts were viewed as worthy subjects for rehabilitation. For the first and only time in American history, treatment on demand was made available, and medical professionals drove drug policy.¹⁴ However, Nixon’s antidrug rhetoric still linked drug consumption and crime as part of his larger law-and-order agenda, defining drug treatment as an anticrime program and exacerbating social fears of criminal drug users. At the same time, Nixon and other conservatives were increasingly critical of the escalating recreational drug use among youth during the 1960s that was linked to political opposition and social unrest. Richard Nixon told an anxious public, “To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war on drugs.”¹⁵

Concern about white middle-class drug use came to a head in the 1980s with the creation of what became the “most powerful lobbying group in the country.”¹⁶ In the late 1970s, a small group of concerned parents had organized Families in Action, which expanded to become the National Federation of Parents for Drug Free Youth and was soon a major player in drug policy debates. After the election of Ronald Reagan, these lobbyists worked with the First Lady to redefine drug policy around the adage “just say no.” Reacting to the widely perceived decline in parental authority and so-called traditional values, this first wave of what became the culture wars of the 1980s was not concerned with teenage drinking or cigarette smoking, but rather saw white middle-class youth as profoundly vulnerable to illegal drug use. “We had a sense of something invading our families, of being taken over by a culture that was very dangerous, very menacing,” said Marsha “Keith” Schuchard, who became a founder of the parent’s movement because of her outrage against marijuana use.¹⁷ Describing “serious behavioral changes” in their children and decrying the “deterioration of values,” this group produced a widely circulated booklet, Parents, Peers, and Pot, which contained a scalding critique of “youth culture” and its tendency to undermine “the traditional authorities who could nurture a young person’s ability to reject drug use.”¹⁸

In the view of these parent groups, any exposure to drugs inevitably led to extreme addiction. Their publications wildly exaggerated the negative health effects of marijuana and its dangers. By rejecting the scientific consensus that marijuana use was relatively benign (the view held at the time by several senior drug policy officials in the Carter administration, who supported the decriminalization of marijuana consumption), these parent groups proclaimed themselves “the real counterculture.” “The parents’ movement turned [the previous] policy upside down. Their concern was not with inner-city addicts, but with suburban teenagers, not with heroin but with pot, and not with treatment but with ‘zero tolerance.’”¹⁹ According to Michael Massing’s account of the evolution of U.S. drug policy, these parents and policymakers felt that “the notion of recovery meant that addicts could get well—a message that, they felt, undermined their warning to young people not to use drugs.” This view was echoed by prominent drug policy officials, including the first “drug czar” appointed by the first President Bush, literature professor William Bennett. According to his aides, the Office of National Drug Control policy “was not directed at hard-core addicts. They consumed the vast bulk of the drugs, and contributed a significant part of the crime, but they weren’t the main threat to your kids becoming drug users.”²⁰ The white parents’ movement and Reagan-appointed policymakers rejected science-based studies of addiction in their focus on preventing white middle-class children from gaining access to drugs, attempting to terrorize them into rejecting consumption.

Cocaine addiction and the crack economy did have real and devastating effects on many communities during this period, particularly among inner city African Americans. However, press coverage and public narratives of drug use during this period relied on ...