Even the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has admitted that Plan Colombia was a resounding failure from a counter-narcotics perspective (albeit not from a “counter-insurgency” one).
This is a development we have been tracking since June 2022, when the then-President of Ecuador Guillermo Lasso spoke of the possibility of entering into a “Plan Colombia”-style initiative with the US, with the ostensible aim of combating the country’s increasingly powerful drug cartels. Since then, Lasso has departed the scene, brought down by a string of scandals, including, ironically, one revolving around his and his brother-in-law’s alleged ties to an Albanian drug cartel. But his successor, Daniel Noboa, is keen to follow through with the plan Lasso set in motion.
What’s more, Ecuador’s government is not alone in seeking to set up such an arrangement with Washington. The foreign minister of neighbouring Peru, Javier González-Olaechea, announced on Sunday (Dec 10) that he has asked the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to help draw up a “Plan Peru” to help combat drug trafficking in the country.
“We are concerned about the production and exportation of cocaine and its derivatives, which is why I raised (with Blinken) the possibility of having a Plan Colombia tailored to our national reality,” the chancellor said in an interview with the Peruvian newspaper Comercio.
Asked whether Plan Peru would include the entry of US troops onto Peruvian soil, González-Olaechea said the issue had not yet been discussed, which is hard to believe. As we reported a few months ago, one of Lasso’s last acts in office was to sign an agreement with the US allowing for the deployment of US naval forces along Ecuador’s coastline and, if requested, the disembarking of US land forces on Ecuador’ soil.
Peru’s Dina Boluarte government and Congress already allowed the temporary entry of over a thousand US troops in the summer. This was just months after the government had unleashed a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests leading to the deaths of an estimated 62 demonstrators and 1,200 injuries. Boluarte herself has been accused, among other things, of “crimes against international law” by Amnesty International and homicide by Peru’s Attorney General Patricia Benavides. Now the government she heads wants to further strengthen its military and security ties with the US.
A History of Failure
The dictum that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” may be falsely attributed to Albert Einstein, but it’s still a good dictum. And there are few better examples of it in operation than this.
The Peruvian government’s “Plan Peru,” said González-Olaechea, would be closely modelled on Plan Colombia, the disastrous US-designed and -delivered drug-eradication program, signed in 1998, that burnt through $10 billion of US and other overseas funds during more than two decades, worsened the violence in Colombia, bathed more than a million hectares of farmland in a rich brew of toxic chemicals, including Monsanto’s “probably” carcinogenic weedkiller glyphosate, exacerbated illegal mining and organised crime while overseeing a significant upsurge in coca production.
Of course, eradicating Colombian cocaine and combating Colombian drug-trafficking cartels were not the only, or even primary, motives behind Plan Colombia or the broader US war on drugs. The primary goal was — and still is — to achieve or preserve geo-strategic dominance in key, normally resource-rich regions of Latin America, as the Colombian journalist Eduardo Giordano noted in a 2020 article.
In Plan Colombia, this took the form of a concerted security campaign to wipe out the guerrilla forces and extinguish their social base among the peasantry, says Giordano. At the beginning of this century, the “war against drug trafficking” came to replace the outdated ideology of the “cold war” in Latin America. Yet Plan Colombia also strengthened the presence of drug trafficking mafias linked to paramilitary groups, which would ultimately cause more deaths than the actual guerrillas, according to Colombia’s Truth Commission.
This is not to say that drug trafficking and other forms of organised crime are not a major problem in Ecuador and Peru. The homicide rate in Ecuador, traditionally one of the safest countries in South America, has soared by almost 500% since 2016, to an estimated 22 murders per 100,000 people in 2022, according to global risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft — largely due to an explosion in drug trafficking and organised crime. In August, four Colombian hit men assassinated presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in broad daylight. For its part, Peru is the world’s second largest exporter of cocaine and its derivatives.
Yet dusting off a plan that has already proven to be both a resounding and hugely costly failure is unlikely to be the solution to any of these problems. Yet that is precisely what both governments are proposing…
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Nick Corbishley 