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4 Under
the mask of the war on drugs By
Lars Schall
I mean, we have to ask the
question: how can such a drug trade flourish under
the very nose of the leading hegemonic power in
the Americas, if not the world, the United States?
You had the Chinese Revolution, you had even
authoritarian regimes, fascist regimes, that were
able to wipe out the drug trade. Why can't the
Western powers with all the resources that they
have put a dent on it?
But instead they
have actually exacerbated the problem. It's
getting worse, and the fact is there is never a
real end in sight, and they don't want to change
their policies, so someone is clearly benefiting
and suffering from this.
The logic, if we
can call it that, is the conclusion that it is
part of that paradox and part of their interest to
maintain this political
economy. We can look at
it from a different angle, if you like.
Look at oil, our dependence on
hydrocarbons. We know that is bad for our
environment, we know what scientists call "Peak
Oil", and we know we will have problems with that
form of energy system, but it continues. So is it
in their interest to stop this? No, it isn't. This
is what I see as the very fabric of capitalism and
imperialism, and that the logic becomes the
illogical and the conclusion becomes part of the
contradiction. That's why I don't see it as a
failure at all but very much in the interest,
stubbornly or not, of US imperialism to drag on
this war on drugs.
LS: Can
you tell us some of the reasons for the period in
Colombian history that is called "La Violencia"
and how it played a role ideologically in the Cold
War as it was fought in Colombia?
O.V. "La
Violencia" was a period in Colombian history and
probably the only time that the Colombian state
acknowledged that the country was in a war with
itself, a civil war, if you will. In 1948, there
was a popular liberal candidate named Jorge
Eliecer Gaitan, a populist leader, who was
promising land reform, and he promised at least to
the landless and the poorest in Colombia that
something would change in the country.
Since then, an ultra-conservative and
reactionary oligarchy has remained in power in
Colombia. What this candidate stood for was some
shake-up in the system. Gaitain was assassinated,
conservatives were blamed for the assassination,
and from there on we saw a civil war that dragged
on up until 1958, when you saw the nucleus of the
main body of armed resistance, which is now the
FARC, take shape.
Ideologically, the Cold
War was seen as a way to justify the state
repression which continued. Something like 300,000
people were killed in "La Violencia". But not much
changed afterward. After 1958, there was no end to
the class war. This was basically a war between
those with land and those without land, which is
important to understand in the political economy
of cocaine in Colombia: that's the land, the
problem of land. And this dragged on after 1958.
So rather than viewing it as a problem that's
historical involving land, they saw it as a
problem of communism, but of course, once the Cold
War ended there needed to be a justification to
drag on this repression.
Conveniently, we
increasingly heard terms like the "war on drugs",
"narco-terrorism" - and that provided ideological
ammunition for the United States and the Colombian
state and its ruling class to target the same
revolutionary and main forms of resistance in
Colombia. This included trade unions, student
associations, peasant organization, and the same
kind of what are considered subversive elements in
Colombia.
So the "war on terror" you could
say is a continuation of very much the same
rational that the state was using during "La
Violencia". It is a continuing problem, which
continues to be resolved by the state with force,
which means to treat the security problem through
military repression. So it's a serious problem in
the wake of this political economy because
violence becomes the means in which this political
economy can be maintained.
LS: When did the cocaine
business actually begin big time in Colombia?
According to the book Cocaine: Global
Histories, before cocaine was made illegal by
the single convention of the United Nations in
March 1961 it came primarily from Indonesia,
Malaysia and Thailand. [5] Why was the shift
taking place then from Asia to Colombia, Peru and
Bolivia?
OV: In the context
of the Cold War, it wasn't just simply an
ideological war, it was also very much a real war
in where there was resistance to capitalist and
financial arrangements that were implemented
throughout the world financial system at that
time.
In Asia we know, of course, there
was the Vietnam War; we also had the Chinese
Revolution beforehand, as I have mentioned before,
and we know that drugs became a way to finance
much of the counterinsurgency operations that were
going on. We know for example that Chiang
Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang who fought
Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war and the
Chinese Revolutionary process, was a drug
trafficker himself. Many of the contacts that the
CIA had in Vietnam, particular in South Vietnam,
were also deeply enmeshed in the drug trade.
What was known as the World Anti-Communist
League at that time drew much of these alliances
and organizations together in order to finance
much of their operations. But when the Vietnam war
eventually draw to a close, what did we see? We
began to see a shift, not only with
counter-insurgency operations against what was
seen as communist insurgencies, but also in drug
trafficking operations.
This was
essentially the time where I noticed, and this was
of vital importance for the book, that the same
kind of arrangements were emerging in Latin
America. The regional section of World
Anti-Communist League was the Confederation in
Latin America, which was then headed by Argentina,
particularly the military junta of 1976, and they
saw by learning from lessons in Asia that by
allying themselves and by managing drug operations
themselves, and so forth, and by using the same
elements to finance these operations against the
communists, they could do the same.
From
there we saw some very important unfolding of
history, which was the great concentration of
operations within the drug trade, in Bolivia in
particular with the Cocaine Coup of 1980, where
you even had former Nazis who were employed and
used with their experience to undergo these
operations. [6] The Colombians, long before they
became the main cocaine production center, saw
this as an opportunity to get involved and take
advantage of the situation. From there we saw the
beginnings of the modern cocaine trade in Latin
America which is now global, and has reached a
global scale.
LS: What
function had in their time famous drug lords like
Pablo Escobar? What was the secret of his success
in particular?
OV: As an
entrepreneur he did see the events, particularly
in Bolivia, I think, as an opportunity. Before
then it was marijuana, not cocaine, that was the
main drug at that time in the late 1970's. He saw
a great opportunity to actually invest. He was the
first to really begin to use small planes to
traffic and smuggle cocaine into the United
States. He became famous and a pioneer because he
saw the opportunities at least from a capitalist
perspective - what this would bring for what would
became the Medellin Cartel.
He became
after the Bolivian chapter the clear cocaine
monopolist from the 1980s and so on. I think it
had to do with his experience in the marijuana
trade which allowed it to happen. He also made
contacts with the very Bolivians who were
providing him with the supply of coca. It was his
far-sightedness to take full advantage of the
situation.
LS: Despite the
US claims that it is engaged in a war against
drugs in Colombia, it is in fact engaged in an
anti-insurgency war against the left-wing FARC
guerillas, is this correct?
OV: This is correct. What is
known as "Plan Colombia" was a program first
devised by president Bill Clinton, and, as I
explained, from the Cold War onwards we had that
growing drug problem in Colombia. What Clinton saw
as the solution to deal with the insurgency was to
say: Let's give it a drug package. What "Plan
Colombia" did though was under the mask of the war
on drugs it actually made it into a military
package itself. Most of the money had military
operations and training in focus. So what this did
since the late 1990s is in fact make it a war
against the FARC guerrillas.
You have to
take into account that the FARC have been there
long before the cocaine trade appeared in the
1980s or the cocaine decade when it became big
time. And so by focusing on the FARC, they can
also be blamed for the drug trade. The New York
Times is good at that, they see them seen as
narco-terrorists. So the Colombian state can say:
Well, we are fighting a war on drugs and terror,
and the United States can also say: Well, they are
our key partners in the Western hemisphere in this
war. And they can also gear themselves to deal
with the broader politics in the region, to deal
with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and other nations
which are fast becoming much more independent and
left-leaning.
So it brings in a whole lot
of other politics into question, but by fighting
the FARC as the main threat to the Colombian state
it deals with it in a very military way. They are
a threat indeed, because they are not simply as
they are called narco-terrorists, they are a group
that has been indigenous to the history of
Colombia, which past presidencies have actually
acknowledged. But since September 11, 2001, there
has been this increasing radicalization by the
ruling class in Colombia to see no other
alternative but finally to destroy the FARC once
and for all.
LS: Which has
come, sadly enough, as a high price to the
Colombian population in general.
OV: Yes, we are looking at
horrific statistics that go way beyond the state
crimes of the 20th century in Latin America. Up
until now it was Central America, Guatemala who
held the record of victims from state-terror -
200,000. Second came Argentina with 30,000.
Colombia has experienced 250,000 victims of
state-terrorism in the past two presidencies
alone, so since 2002 onwards. So this is quite
horrific. Also the effects on trade unions are
quite horrific. More trade unionists are killed in
Colombia than in the whole world combined. It has
the lowest rate of unionization in the whole
continent. It has actually come to the point where
there are not many more unionists to murder.
Yet, this is not an issue, this is not a
problem, and much of the world does not know much
about this. It is quite ironic if we look at the
war on terror in the Middle East, where we are
hearing a lot of news about the Assad regime in
Syria, the "rebels" there, and Muammar Gaddafi in
Libya was also terrible so we had to go in there
and support the "rebels" - yet, we got the world's
oldest rebel organization, more than
half-a-century old, which has popular support
among the poorest in Colombian society, and that
is why they are able to continue the fight, and
it's not drugs or terrorism, no.
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