Plan Colombia
Plan Colombia is an ambitious initiative aimed at resolving the ongoing, thirty-year civil war in Colombia.The Plan was conceived in 1999 by the administration of President Andrés Pastrana Arango with the stated goals of:
- social and economic revitalization
- overcoming the armed conflict
- an anti-narcotic strategy
Colombia planned to finance $4 billion of the estimated $7.5 billion overall cost, most of which would go towards the social portion of the project, but was ultimately unable to do so in part due to the state's 1997-1998 economic crisis.
The final U.S.-approved $1.3 billion assistance package is mostly of a military and counternarcotics nature but also includes a small amount of social development aid.
Though the Colombian Government had seeked additional support from the European Union and other countries, with the intention of financing the mostly social component of the original plan, it eventually met with little cooperation as the would-be donors considered that the U.S. approved aid represented an undue military slant, and additionally lacked the will to spend such amounts of money for what they considered an uncertain initiative. Some countries did end up donating several hundred million dollars to Colombia but preferred to avoid falling under the Plan Colombia moniker, and in any case did fall short of the amounts that the original Plan called for.
Although the Plan Colombia program that has been finally implemented includes components which address social aid and institutional reform, the Plan Colombia label has become associated with being fundamentally a program of counternarcotics and military aid for the Colombian government.
Officially, especially in the US, it is justified as part of the "war on drugs", but many suspect the true targets of the Plan would be the guerrilla forces, which have exerted influence over vast swaths of territory in the rural interior of the country. Some of the more critical observers argue that the peasantry and indigenous people might be considered as a target of the Plan, as they would be calling for social reform and the protection and eventual legalization of drug crops as their source of income or cultural expression, thereby potentially interfering with alledged international plans to exploit Colombia's valuable resources, including but not limited to its oil (Colombia has been considered as the 7th or 8th oil supplier to the USA, though recent studies point to a coming reduction in the country's currently known oil reserves).
Prominent in the aid package approved by Clinton is the so-called "Push into Southern Colombia", an area that for decades has been a stronghold of Colombia's largest guerrilla organisation FARC; it also a major coca producing region.
This funding would train and equip new Colombian army counternarcotics battalions, providing them with helicopters, transport and intelligence assistance, and supplies for coca eradication. While the assistance is defined as counternarcotics assistance, many believe it will be used primarily against the FARC. Supporters of the Plan argue that such an action would make sense as the distinction between guerrillas and drug dealers may have increasingly become irrelevant, seing as they could be considered as part of the same productive chain.
In June 2000, Amnesty International issued a press release in which it criticized the implemented Plan Colombia initiative:
Plan Colombia is based on a drug-focussed analysis of the roots of the conflict and the human rights crisis which completely ignores the Colombian state's own historical and current responsibility. It also ignores deep-rooted causes of the conflict and the human rights crisis. The Plan proposes a principally military strategy (in the US component of Plan Colombia) to tackle illicit drug cultivation and trafficking through substantial military assistance to the Colombian armed forces and police. Social development and humanitarian assistance programs included in the Plan cannot disguise its essentially military character. Furthermore, it is apparent that Plan Colombia is not the result of a genuine process of consultation either with the national and international non-governmental organizations which are expected to implement the projects nor with the beneficiaries of the humanitarian, human rights or social development projects. As a consequence, the human rights component of Plan Colombia is seriously flawed. [1]
During the late 1990s, Colombia was the leading recipient of US military aid in the Western Hemisphere, and due to its continuing internal conflict has also compiled the worst human rights record, with the majority of atrocities attributed (from most directly responsible to least directly responsible) to paramilitary forces, insurgent guerrilla groups and elements with the police and armed forces.
A United Nations study reported that elements within the Colombian security forces, which have been strengthened as a whole due to Plan Colombia and other initiatives, at times and in certain regions do continue to maintain intimate relationships with right-wing death-squads, help organize paramilitary forces, and either participate in abuses and massacres directly or, as it is usually argued to be more often the case, deliberately fail to take action to prevent them. Critics of the Plan and of other initiatives to aid Colombian armed forces point to these continuing accusations of serious abuse, while supporters of the Plan consider that the number and scale of abuses directly attributable to the government's forces have been slowly but increasingly reduced.
All these considerations contribute to making the Plan Colombia initiative a source of much controversy both inside and outside Colombia.