Losing The War On Drugs: Colombia's Descent Into Chaos, Part 2

HOW 'VICTORY' IN THE DRUG WAR HAS LEFT COLOMBIA IN RUINS

The U.S. boasted that defeating Colombia's cartels would end the illegal
drug trade. Instead, things got worse.

BOGOTA, Colombia - They are only dark memories now, but in the 1980s and
early 1990s, Colombia's drug lords loomed large in North American
nightmares. Pablo Escobar, the ruthless chief of the Medellin cartel, was
the most infamous of all, the personification of the cocaine plague.

In 1989, pressed hard by Colombian authorities, Escobar declared "total and
absolute war." A horrified world watched as the drug lord launched an
unprecedented campaign of terror. The Colombian government responded with
its own brutal force. For the first time, the "War on Drugs" became a
literal war.

Ultimately, with much bloodshed and sacrifice, Colombia won the battle with
Escobar. Then the other great Colombian trafficking ring, the Cali cartel,
was taken down. These were the greatest victories the War on Drugs has
ever known.

Yet today, just a few years after these triumphs, Colombia is suffering
political turmoil, economic free-fall, epidemic violence and massive
corruption -- all while producing and shipping more drugs than Pablo
Escobar could have imagined in his greediest dreams. Victory over the
cartels did not stop the illegal trafficking of drugs. Nor did it stop the
corruption and violence drug trafficking breeds. It only made these plagues
worse.

For Colombians, this recent, bitter history foreshadows the future. With
the backing of the United States -- President Bill Clinton travelled to
Colombia last week to formally deliver a massive aid package -- Colombia is
preparing a new anti-drug assault. The details have changed but not the
essential approach: Once again, the illegal drug trade will be fought with
police, soldiers and helicopters. Once again, the War on Drugs will become
a literal war.

Monica de Greiff shakes her head with disgust when she talks of this
looming war. Her memories of the last one are vivid.

In 1989, Ms. de Greiff was vice-minister of justice. Pablo Escobar had
ordered the murder of a leading presidential candidate, prompting
Colombia's president, Virgilio Barco, to announce a crackdown on
traffickers and the extradition of the worst of them to the U.S. The drug
lords were enraged.

President Barco made Ms. de Greiff his minister of justice. The next day,
Escobar launched his terror campaign to stop the extraditions. Life for Ms.
de Greiff became "like hell," she says.

Now a lawyer in private practice in Bogota, Ms. de Greiff is an elegant
woman graced with the bright blue eyes of her Swedish ancestors who settled
in Colombia in the early 19th century. She would fit in easily among her
colleagues on Bay Street, though her experience as Colombia's chief law
officer is a nightmare beyond the imagination of any Canadian.

The drug lords feared extradition, and Monica de Greiff's signature was
needed to send them to trial in the U.S. The death threats started
immediately. There were blunt phone calls and notes. Funeral arrangements
arrived expressing condolences for her passing. A headless doll was
delivered to her inside a tiny coffin, inscribed with the name of her
three-year-old son.

Meanwhile, Escobar launched a wave of maniacal assaults throughout the country:

- - A bus packed with 500 kilograms of dynamite exploded in front of the
headquarters of the Colombian federal police, killing 80 people and
injuring 700;

- - The editor of a muckraking newspaper was murdered; a truck bomb later
destroyed the newspaper's offices;

- - Judges and police officers, with rich bounties on their heads, were
murdered by the score;

- - Car bombs maimed shoppers and street merchants;

- - A bomb aboard a commercial airliner knocked the plane from the sky,
killing 107 people.

For Ms. de Greiff, life was a state of siege. Soldiers blocked off the
street in front of her house. Her little boy went to school surrounded by
guards and machine-guns. She travelled in a bombproof car, though with
Escobar's well-known desire to kill her, it was rarely possible to go
anywhere. "People were so scared, that if I went shopping or to a
restaurant, they would get up and leave."

The government answered Escobar, attack for attack. There were massive
seizures of drug cartel property. In sweeping investigations, as many as
10,000 people were detained for questioning. State security forces took
emergency legislation as a licence for ferocity, committing summary
executions of suspects and murders wholly unrelated to the war with
Escobar. In 1989, 5,700 people died in politically related murders, 70 per
cent of these committed by the army or police.

Amid this chaos, Monica de Greiff lasted nine months. One day, a caller
described to her precisely where her son went to school, how he got there,
what time he arrived and when he left. She resigned and fled to Miami with
her family.

Escobar and his henchmen never were extradited. But over the next several
years, the Colombian government dismantled the Medellin cartel, player by
player. In 1993, Pablo Escobar, hunted and alone, was shot dead.

One of the key men responsible for taking down Pablo Escobar was Monica de
Greiff's father, Gustavo. As Colombia's prosecutor general, he was a
frontline commander in the War on Drugs. And thanks to his role in the
sensational manhunt, he was also a hero in the U.S.

While Escobar was still on the run, American television journalist Sam
Donaldson interviewed Gustavo de Greiff in Colombia. If Escobar is
imprisoned or killed, asked Mr. Donaldson, what effect will it have on the
drug trade in Colombia? Mr. de Greiff startled the American with his
answer. "Mr. Donaldson, nothing will happen. There is so much appetite in
your country for drugs, the killing of Escobar will not be a solution."

Gustavo de Greiff was beginning to doubt that the illegal drug trade could
be crippled by going after drug lords. As long as the demand existed, there
would be huge profits to be had, and people prepared to risk prison or even
death to get those profits. The carnage and destruction in Colombia, he
suspected, was pointless.

As it turned out, Mr. de Greiff was not quite right in saying that nothing
would happen to the drug trade. Illegal drug exports did change after the
death of Pablo Escobar: They rose.

Escobar's rivals, the Cali cartel, had been instrumental in the destruction
of the Medellin cartel, supplying the government with intelligence and
taking out Medellin gunmen with their own assassins. Once the competition
was in jail or dead, the Cali drug lords cashed in. Cocaine shipments to
the United States outpaced demand -- the price of cocaine in the U.S.
actually fell in the years after Escobar's death. The Cali cartel became
flush with money and power.

Colombia's first victory in the War on Drugs had produced only more drugs,
more corruption, and more power for organized crime.

Just how bad things had become was confirmed in the 1994 presidential
election when evidence surfaced that the campaign of the winner, Ernesto
Samper, had been financed in part by the Cali cartel. Where Pablo Escobar
had tried to destroy the state, the Cali cartel threatened to buy it.

The U.S. responded by "decertifying" the Samper government -- issuing a
formal reprimand for not doing enough to fight drug trafficking. Economic
sanctions and an end to American financial aid were threatened.

Colombia's economy had only just been opened to international trade and
investment, and with 40 per cent of the country's exports going to the
U.S., economic sanctions would have been devastating. The Samper
government, desperate to improve relations with the U.S., attacked the Cali
cartel with a vengeance. By 1996, all of the Cali drug lords were either in
prison or dead. Still the Clinton administration refused to give its
blessing to the Colombian government and Ernesto Samper left office under a
cloud of corruption allegations.

With the destruction of the Cali cartel, the War on Drugs had won its
second triumph. But the cost was terrible. In the decade between 1985 and
1995, 3,400 Colombians died and another 5,000 were wounded in the fight
with the drug lords, including helpless civilians caught in the crossfire.
The impoverished nation -- with total government revenues in 1996 of only
$26 billion U.S. -- was spending as much as $1.3 billion U.S. each year in
counter-narcotics measures.

Yet Colombia had scored two smashing victories. At the time, American and
Colombian officials directing the fight against drug trafficking were
elated. Ted Carpenter, a foreign policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a
free-market think-tank in Washington, D.C., recalls that "when Escobar was
killed and the Medellin and Cali cartels were broken, drug warriors in this
country and in Colombia loudly proclaimed victory. They said, 'The back of
the drug trade has been broken.'

"But these statements always disappear down the Orwellian memory hole."

Far from breaking the back of the illegal drug trade, the triumphs over the
Medellin and Cali cartels set in motion changes which have made Colombia
today at least as desperate as it was at the height of Pablo Escobar's
campaign of terror.

First, the defeat of the drug lords did not sever the link between South
American cocaine and North American noses. Instead, it helped create a
whole new swarm of trafficking groups. Where there had been two main
cartels, there are now hundreds of trafficking alliances, each much smaller
and much less centrally organized than the old cartels. No longer can
police focus on a few major targets. Infiltration, too, can be more
difficult because the groups are so small. Worse, in this fluid
environment, traffickers who are taken down by police are quickly and
seamlessly replaced by competitors.

Mr. Carpenter notes that this aspect of what happened in Colombia fits a
pattern. "What seems to happen when the big, better-organized cartels are
shattered is that you get more of the small operators, the freelancers, the
next generation of traffickers who, if anything, tend to be even more
ruthless and more unpredictable." And successful: Despite the collapse of
the Colombian cartels, so much cocaine flooded into the U.S. between 1991
and 1998 that the wholesale price dropped by one-third -- from $68.08 U.S.
to $44.51 U.S. per pure gram.

Meanwhile, an even more fundamental change was occurring, helped along by
the fight with the old cartels. Until the 1990s, Colombia grew very little
coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived. Instead, Colombian cartels
got coca "base" -- unrefined cocaine -- from Peru and Bolivia. They then
processed it into cocaine and shipped to the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Beginning in 1992, the plant-ing of coca expanded rapidly in Colombia. In
1995, it took off. Over the next five years, the amount of coca grown in
Colombia doubled. The U.S. government estimates that coca now covers some
123,000 hectares of the country, making Colombia the single largest source
of coca in the world. Combined with the coca brought into the country to be
processed, Colombia now exports three-quarters of the world's cocaine.

Even more dramatic was the shift to opium poppy, the plant from which
heroin is derived. Before the 1990s, opium poppy was little-known in
Colombia. Now it covers 7,500 hectares. That's enough to supply two-thirds
of the American heroin market.

Why did drug production suddenly soar in Colombia? In large part, coca
shifted over the border when government crackdowns in Peru and Bolivia
(helped by a fungus that attacked Peruvian coca) pushed production down in
those countries. Opium poppy arrived after Colombian traffickers cut deals
with southeast Asian gangs, who traditionally dominated heroin production
and smuggling, in order to get involved in the American heroin market.

More crucial, though, was the chaos in the Colombian countryside. Leftist
guerrillas who held effective control over huge swaths of Colombia,
especially in the south, encouraged the traffickers to develop coca and
opium poppy on their lands. In exchange for protection from the government,
the rebels "taxed" the drug producers. The traffickers got a steady supply
of drugs, and the rebels got a lucrative new source of financing for their war.

The current civil war in Colombia has been going on for 35 years, at
varying levels of intensity. Why had this shift not occurred before?
Because the guerrillas had never before been so strong. Many experts feel
they owed their new strength to the American government's decision to
isolate president Ernesto Samper.

Ethan Nadelmann, a former Princeton professor, is now head of the
Lindesmith Centre, a drug policy reform group in New York City, and a
leading critic of the War on Drugs. In Colombia, he says, the U.S. "did the
stupidest thing we could have imagined. We had a guy there, President
Samper, who was taking money from some traffickers, but this was the same
guy who had done more to take out traffickers than any other president had."

"We were so hung up on the corruption end of it that we went after him with
all we had and punished the country to get rid of him. In two or three
years of punishing Samper, we weakened the central state, we weakened the
civilian government."

With Colombia's government isolated and forced to focus its meagre
resources on the fight against the drug cartels, the rebels rapidly
expanded their territorial control. Drug producers were invited into
rebel-controlled lands, creating a bonanza for the guerrillas which
financed new weapons purchases. The main rebel faction, known by its
Spanish acronym, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), is now the
best-financed insurgent group in the world. Estimates vary, but the FARC
probably makes between $200 million and $500 million U.S. a year "taxing"
coca and opium poppy, making it powerful out of all proportion to its
numbers. The FARC's 17,000 fighters are far better equipped than their
adversaries in the Colombian army. They are even better paid.

In response to the rising power of the guerrillas, and the weakness of the
central government, rich landowners and major drug traffickers -- who are
often one and the same -- formed their own paramilitary groups. The
paramilitaries commonly massacre and terrorize innocent peasants, usually
to frighten the population away from supporting the rebels. But sometimes
it's also done to force farmers to turn over their property to the
paramilitaries' financial backers.

During the same period of government weakness that fostered the growth of
the rebels, the paramilitaries rose to become political powers unto
themselves, with independent financing and strong control in many
regions. Again, the illegal trade in drugs was their springboard. Not only
have the paramilitaries profited by offering protection to traffickers,
they are heavily involved in refining and smuggling drugs themselves. A top
paramilitary leader admitted on Colombian television that "drug trafficking
and drug traffickers probably finance 70 per cent" of the paramilitaries'
operations.

These paramilitaries have long been known to have close ties to Colombia's
official military. Army units have frequently allowed paramilitary
operations to occur in regions they control and, in some cases, have
actively facilitated massacres. The Colombian government has tried for
years to break the link between the army and the paramilitaries, but, in
its weakened condition, it has failed.

The economy, meanwhile, has crumbled. After decades of economic expansion,
Colombia is now in its worst economic recession since the 1930s, leaving
one in five Colombians without work. Here, too, the fingerprints of the
illegal drug trade can be found. Corruption, the standard tool of illegal
drug trafficking, erodes the quality of governance, which in turn hampers
development efforts, as a recent United Nations report noted. And the huge
profits of narco-trafficking create serious structural distortions to the
economy over time.

Not the least of these is money laundering. Drug traffickers, who need to
hide the origins of their profits, are willing to take a percentage loss on
each dollar in the process of laundering it. So, for example, they will set
up legitimate businesses that operate below cost to encourage a high cash
flow-through. The money that comes out afterward is "laundered." But these
businesses undercut their honest competitors, driving them out.

All this leaves Colombia as it is today, seven years after Pablo Escobar
was shot dead. The murder rate is 10 times that in the U.S. -- on average,
one person is killed every 20 minutes. The kidnapping rate is the highest
in the world -- an average of seven people are seized every day. Powerful
guerrilla factions dominate much of the countryside. Civil war has forced
1.5 million people from their farms and villages into lives of misery and
desperation. And more drugs are being produced and shipped than ever before.

The sense that Colombia stands at the edge of chaos is everywhere. Days
before I arrived in Bogota, the capital's power stations were knocked out
by rebel attacks. A planned interview with the national police chief was
cancelled when two massacres and a major guerrilla attack occurred within
the span of five days. In the choked streets of Bogota, refugees from the
carnage in the countryside stood at traffic intersections, babies in arm,
begging for spare coins.

Kidnapping has become an industry in its own right, making even the main
streets of major cities dangerous. Early one afternoon, on a busy street,
my Canadian photographer, Liam Scott, was approached by an English-speaking
man in a suit who claimed to be a police officer. He said tourists must
register with the police and he pointed Mr. Scott toward an unmarked
building. Having been warned that this approach is used by robbers and
kidnappers, Mr. Scott bolted in the other direction.

If the cities are dangerous, the countryside is a minefield. Guerrillas
often erect roadblocks and search vehicles to see if they've netted
landowners, businessmen, foreigners or anyone else who may be worth a
ransom. They call it "miraculous fishing."

Monica de Greiff has a summer home two hours' drive from Bogota that she
hasn't seen in years. She can't take the short drive there because, she
says, even with armed bodyguards, "I'm scared."

Two per cent of Colombia's population of 39 million has left the country
since 1996 and every young, educated person I met in Bogota is desperately
looking for a way to join them. Aside from government officials, everyone I
spoke with -- whether refugee, student, activist, or cab driver -- believes
this nation of bounteous natural riches and beauty will suffer even worse
torments in the future.

l

The common strand interwoven through Colombia's woes is drug prohibition.
Jaime Ruiz, senior adviser to the current president, Andres Pastrana, says,
"as long as there are drugs, the other problems become bigger. It is
fuelling the rest of the problems." The illegal drug trade is not the
source of all of Colombia's problems; violence, civil strife, and
corruption have plagued the country since independence. But illegal drugs
are like gasoline poured on smouldering fires. As Mr. Ruiz wrote in a key
government statement, illegal drug trafficking in Colombia is fostering
violence, corruption and instability "on a scale comparable only to the era
of Prohibition in the United States."

Mr. Ruiz's comparison of Colombia's plight with that of the U.S. during
alcohol prohibition is provocative yet insightful. The mayhem of the
Prohibition era was fuelled not by alcohol itself, but by illegal alcohol.
By banning alcohol, the U.S. took the trade in that profitable drug away
from law-abiding companies, leaving it to organized crime. Violence and
corruption exploded.

In the same way, many are now saying, Colombia's woes are fuelled not by
drugs but by illegal drugs. There was a major, worldwide, legal cocaine
trade long before the drug was banned in the early 20th century. Farmers in
South America and elsewhere grew coca peacefully, as they would any other
crop. Producers of cocaine included good corporate citizens such as Merck
in Germany and Parke, Davis in the U.S. Cocaine retailers included
neighbourhood pharmacies and, famously, Coca Cola. Much the same was true
of opium and heroin. Neither drug was associated with violence, corruption,
rebels, paramilitaries or "drug lords." Only when cocaine, opium and heroin
were banned did the trade in these drugs become the domain of organized
crime. And only then did these drugs become intimately linked to murder,
bribery, civil unrest and enrichment of gangsters like Pablo Escobar.

When the U.S. legalized alcohol in 1933, the trade was effectively taken
out of the hands of gangsters like Al Capone and returned to law-abiding
companies like Seagram and Budweiser. The mayhem associated with alcohol
all but vanished.

So Mr. Ruiz's comparison of Colombia's situation with that of the U.S.
during Prohibition invites a question: If the solution to the violence and
corruption of the American Prohibition era was to legalize alcohol, would
the violence and corruption in Colombia be eased by legalizing cocaine and
heroin?

Mr. Ruiz, who says he has "read a lot about the Prohibition era," answers
the question bluntly. "From the Colombian point of view, (legalization) is
the easy solution. I mean, just legalize it and we won't have any more
problems. Probably in five years we wouldn't even have guerrillas. No
problems. We (would) have a great country with no problems."

The profits of the drug trade would no longer buy guns for rebels,
paramilitaries and drug lords. They would no longer corrupt officials and
institutions or undermine the legitimate economy. Instead, drug trade
profits would go to law-abiding companies who could even be taxed on their
profits.

However, Mr. Ruiz quickly adds, legalization might cause drug consumption
in other countries to go up, so he's not ready to support it. But he wishes
there were more open discussions at the international level of
alternatives, including legalization. "I, myself, am not sure what the
solution is."

Mr. Ruiz's candour is rare in official circles. The American government
disapproves of discussing alternatives to current policies, and Colombia,
the third-largest recipient of American foreign aid in the world, cannot
buck the U.S.

Not surprisingly, then, the Colombian government intends to deal with drugs
by once again attacking illegal producers and traffickers. As President
Pastrana recently told the Los Angeles Times in words that echoed his
predecessors, "our goal is to break the spine of the cartels." Drug fields,
he wrote in the Citizen, "have spread like an oil stain through our Amazon
territory."

As a key part of what it calls "Plan Colombia," his government is creating
army units that will, with the backing of attack helicopters, drive into
rebel-dominated territories in the south and destroy these coca and opium
poppy fields. The U.S. will finance the operation with a $1.3-billion U.S.
aid package. President Clinton made that official with a visit to the
Colombian city of Cartagena last week.

Once again, the War on Drugs will become a literal war.

Ms. de Greiff, who is affiliated with the opposition party in Colombia,
says of the Plan Colombia, "It's a plan for Colombia for the United States,
but it's not a 'Plan Colombia' for Colombia." A newspaper columnist in
Bogota put it succinctly in a headline: "El Plan Washington."

Robert White, a former American ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador, and
former No. 2 man with the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, is president of the
Centre for International Policy in Washington D.C. He, too, is critical of
the planned military offensive. "If you read the original Plan Colombia,
not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia,
there's no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels. Quite the
contrary. (President Pastrana) says the FARC is part of the history of
Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as
Colombians." But, Mr. White claims, when the Colombian government came to
Washington looking for aid for its peace and development plan, the
Americans wanted the anti-drug military drive. "They come and ask for
bread," Mr. White says disgustedly, "and you give them stones."

Many critics of the military attack plan, both inside and outside Colombia,
think this coming war is even less likely to produce lasting good than the
war against the cartels. Robert White points to the superior equipment,
motivation, and experience of the guerrillas. These factors, plus a terrain
dominated by mountains and jungle, mean "there's no way that this thing can
work and we're going to find that out."

Human-rights workers worry that the drive will intensify murder and terror
directed at civilian farmers, a standard tactic used by all sides. The
anti-drug attack may mean more atrocities and more refugees begging on the
streets of Bogota.

The futility of these drug-war plans is something Mr. White feels
personally. At the American Embassy in Bogota, "I was in charge of
co-ordinating the counter-narcotics program," he says. "I nearly got four
very fine young DEA (drug enforcement agency) agents killed by authorizing
an operation. And then three months later the chief of the DEA (in Bogota)
was killed. And all of this sacrifice and hard work and resources was all
for nothing because it turned out that the chief of the national police and
the chief of the special narcotics unit were in the pay of the drug
traffickers."

Monica de Greiff, too, despairs. She feels Colombia today is even worse off
than it was when Pablo Escobar and the drug lords terrorized the nation.

These should be happy days for Ms. de Greiff. Earlier this year, she
finally gave up her last bodyguard. "I can walk in the streets alone, I can
go and shop alone." But the dark mood in the streets and shops is draining.
At her law office, Ms. de Greiff gets "three or four calls a day from
people trying to go to live in the States. Really, you don't see the future
here in Colombia."

That's a bitter reality to accept, she says, after so many "good people,
police officers, military officers, and judges have died." This wasn't how
it was supposed to be after fighting and winning the greatest victories the
War on Drugs has ever known.

Dan Gardner is a Citizen editorial writer

Losing the War on Drugs

Is the war on drugs causing more harm than drug abuse itself? The Citizen's
Dan Gardner spent five months researching this question, travelling to
Colombia, Mexico and the United States, where efforts to end the
international trade in illicit drugs have led to unexpected, often
unwelcome, consequences.

Series Schedule

Yesterday: Uncle Sam's War

TODAY: Colombia's descent into chaos

Tomorrow: An inevitable harvest

Friday: Mexico's peril

Saturday: Border wars

Sunday: The drug interdiction debate

Next Monday: The drug war's health crisis

Tuesday: The war on civil liberties

Wednesday: Rewarding organized crime

Thursday: Drugs and the police

Friday and Saturday: Other ways of thinking

Colombia at a Glance

History: Gained independence from Spain in 1819, established early
tradition of civilian democratic government. In recent years,
assassinations, widespread guerrilla violence and drug trafficking have
severely disrupted normal activity.

Population: 39.3 million.

Infant mortality rate: 24.3 deaths/1,000 live births

Religion: Roman Catholic, 95 per cent.

Language: Spanish

Government: Republic-style, executive branch dominates government structure

Capital: Bogota

Rebel groups: Two largest insurgent groups are: Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC); National Liberation Army (ELN).

Economy: Ended 1998 in recession, with 0.2 per cent GDP growth due to low
world oil prices, reduced export demand, violence and diminished investment.

Drugs: Illicit producer of coca, opium poppies and cannabis. Cultivation of
coca in 1997 was 79,500 hectares, an 18-per-cent increase over
1996. World's largest processor of coca derivatives into cocaine. Active
eradication program seeks to eliminate coca and opium crops.

Source: CIA World FactBook