February 20, 2004

It's almost impossible to turn on the news these days without hearing about the dire state of the federal budget. Faced with the largest deficit in history, the United States is foundering under the outlays of a multi-front war on terror, the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, and domestic security needs. 

Last month, President Bush released his request for the 2005 budget, which projects a whopping 10 percent increase in Pentagon spending but leaves many domestic social programs and foreign assistance programs stagnant or in decline. Among the more egregious cuts is a 10-12 percent reduction in child survival and development assistance to Latin America. 

In Latin America, U.S. military spending is at record highs. Since the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia package passed Congress in 2000, Colombia has received the lion's share of U.S. security assistance to the region. First justified in the name of the war on drugs, U.S. aid to Colombia has expanded since 2002, and Colombia is now awarded more than half a billion dollars a year for what the Bush Administration calls "a unified campaign against narcotics trafficking, terrorist activities, and other threats to its national security." Colombia is slated to receive over $500 million—again, the majority of it military and police assistance for anti-drug and anti-terrorism efforts—for fiscal year 2004 (1/1/03-9/30/004). 

U.S. aid to Colombia's military is complicated by continued evidence of ties between some sectors of the armed forces and right-wing paramilitary groups, who routinely threaten and attack innocent Colombian civilians. Ironically, the paramilitaries were added to the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations just a few months before President Bush proposed allowing U.S. aid to Colombia to be used to fight terrorism. Some paramilitary units—including several whose leaders are wanted in the United States on serious drug trafficking charges—are now engaged in a peace process with the Colombian government. The government-paramilitary negotiations have been criticized because of government promises of amnesty, which could include leaders who have orchestrated massacres and reaped the profits of the drug trade. 

When the United States added terrorism to its list of policy targets in Colombia, congressional attention was diverted from the drug war aspects of U.S. involvement. U.S. anti-drug efforts, however, are anything but stalled. Chemical fumigation of land in southern Colombia—the cornerstone of U.S. counternarcotics efforts since 2000—continues, and fumigation will spread to other areas of the country this year, including Colombia's national parks. As the United States begins a fourth year of large-scale fumigation off the radar screen of most members of Congress, it is important to examine whether this aspect of U.S. policy is worth the cost. 

The architects of Plan Colombia sold fumigation as a tool to stop Colombia's rural communities from growing coca, the base material for cocaine. After their cash crop was destroyed by herbicides, coca-growing communities were supposed to be offered development assistance to keep them from returning to drug cultivation. However, under-funding of the development program guaranteed that the "carrot" part of the package could never keep pace with the stick. Between December 2000 and December 2002, fumigation hit 629,096 acres of land in Colombia. In the first seven months of 2003, another 100,000 acres of land were fumigated. Since the beginning of 2001, the United States has offered alternative development aid to farmers on only 30,000 acres of land. The Colombian government's Human Rights Ombudsman—an official mediator between the government and the people on human rights issues—has documented a number of cases in which U.S. spray planes actually fumigated alternative development projects by accident. According to witnesses on the ground, food crops, water sources, livestock, and homes have all been hit by the herbicides. 

Colombian peasant farmer organizations, human rights groups, indigenous communities, government officials, and members of the international community have all strongly denounced the fumigation program on humanitarian and environmental grounds. Many have noted that this blunt instrument was never used in Bolivia or Peru, two areas lauded by the United States as drug eradication successes. Colombia's Comptroller General wrote in August 2002 that "forced eradication has not only yielded few results, it has been carried out in such a way that the negative externalities exceed the benefits." Both he and the Human Rights Ombudsman have called for a suspension of the fumigation program. Their request has not been heeded. 

In the summers of 2001 and 2002, governors from Colombia's southern region met with Washington lawmakers and proposed a more humane approach to coca eradication. The governors brought with them detailed proposals, drafted in consultation with peasant farmers' organizations and other local groups, to manually eradicate coca in exchange for targeted development aid. They outlined for State Department officials the humanitarian impact of the spray program; they warned that the policy was quickly eroding the fragile trust that had been built between poor farming communities and the local government; and they called for a policy that addressed the economic conditions that drove farmers to grow coca in the first place. The governors asked State Department officials to suspend fumigation for nine weeks, the time during which they believed they could put the manual eradication plan into effect. State Department officials roundly rejected their request, arguing that the suspension of fumigation would undermine U.S. commitment to fighting drugs. 

White House and State Department public relations campaigns laud fumigation as an effective tool for curbing drug production, but the numbers tell a different story. Historically, short-term decreases in one area have been balanced by increases elsewhere as the market stabilizes. Bolivian cultivation continued to grow during 2003 while Colombian cultivation declined. Within Colombia, coca production has moved back into the province of Guaviare, an area that was the laboratory for U.S. anti-drug efforts in the late 1990s. State Department findings show that since 1988, net coca production in the Andean region has stubbornly hovered at around 200,000 hectares. 

Perhaps more important to Congress is another statistic: State Department and White House reports indicate that thus far, the fumigation program has had virtually no impact on the availability, price or purity of cocaine in domestic markets. It is an ineffective policy with significant human and financial costs. 

Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) have taken the first step in challenging this policy. Despite a general disinterest in the fumigation program in the Senate, Leahy and Feingold have managed to add fumigation conditions to the foreign aid bill each year since 2002. The conditions require the State Department to certify that fumigation is not adversely affecting human health or the environment, and that alternative development programs are in place in the fumigated areas. The conditions are difficult to enforce, and are by no means the final solution to the problem of fumigation, but they have provided a vehicle for debate on U.S. drug war tactics, and have put the State Department in the difficult position of having to justify, year after year, its continued use of a stunningly inhumane policy. 

Some members of Congress respond to criticism of fumigation or military aid by arguing that a change in policy is tantamount to "abandoning Colombia." The proposals of the southern governors and calls for support by Colombian human rights and peasant farm groups tell a different story: the United States and its citizens have an important role to play in supporting Colombia, but not through the punitive policy of fumigation. In an election year, when many members of Congress are hesitant to take a lead on controversial issues, constituent pressure can help bring attention to a policy that targets poor farmers and call for a new, more humane policy that prioritizes alternative development and assistance for Colombia's important human rights, justice and peace programs. 

Elanor Starmer is Associate for Colombia at the Latin America Working Group in Washington, DC.