Even the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has admitted that Plan Colombia was a resounding failure from a counter-narcotics perspective while providing short-term benefits from a counter-insurgency perspective.
As regular readers are by now well aware, the Commander of US Southern Command (SouthCom), General Laura Richardson, has a rare talent for saying the quiet parts out loud. She also has a penchant for dividing the world into a Manichean struggle between good guys — essentially countries and governments in the US’ neighbourhood that are aligned with “Team USA” and “Team Democracy” — and bad guys — primarily China, Russia and Iran, and their allies on the American continent, which has helped her to win hearts and minds on Capitol Hill and among the Neocon think tanks that help to shape foreign policy in Washington.
These two talents were on full display in a recent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center, titled “Preserving and Strengthening Democracy in Latin America”. In one exchange with the moderator she laid out in disarmingly candid, unabashedly neo-colonial terms how SouthCom — the command unit of the US Department of Defense she heads up, which is responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation for Central and South America, and the Caribbean — views the role of Latin America and the Caribbean in the US’s great power rivalry with China and Russia:
I look at the defence of our homeland as a number one priority. And so I go back to being a good neighbour and what that means. You want to have good neighbours around in your community and where you live. That’s what you want, right? And to be a good neighbour and want to have good neighbours, you’ve got to be a good neighbour yourself.
Good Neighbourliness
It’s almost painfully ironic to hear a US military commander talking about the need for good neighbourliness in Latin America, a region that the US has spent the best part of the past 200 years invading, occupying, pillaging and, when necessary, regime-changing. Washington still to this day regularly meddles in the affairs of other American countries, including its direct neighbour to the south, Mexico. Back to the speech:
So, as we look at the Caribbean, Central America and South America, … a lot of reference is given to… the first and second island chain (in the Indo-Pacific region). Well, I would say we have the first and second island chain to our homeland with the Caribbean and Central America and South America. And really so if you replicate that and you look at all the investment in critical (dual purpose) infrastructure by the People’s Republic of China [through its Belt and Road Initiative]…, I’m a little suspicious that it’s maybe for extraction as opposed to investment.
In other words, the whole land mass of the American continent south of Guatemala and east of Florida is supposed to serve as a buffer zone for the US against its main strategic rival, China. At another moment in the interview, Richardson reiterated one of the main reasons why the US is showing a renewed interest in Latin America: the region’s abundant natural resources, including all heavy crude and light sweet crude oil, the Amazon (“31% of the world’s fresh water”),”60% of the world’s lithium, gold, copper,… over 50% of the world’s soybean, over 30% of the sugar and corn.”
Needless to say, the US government and military, and the corporations whose interests they serve, have their eyes on all of these resources. In an interview last year with the Atlantic Council, another Neocon think tank (which we covered here), Richardson explained that one of the main missions of USSOUTHCOM is to find ways of preventing the US’ biggest adversaries, China and Russia, from being able to purchase strategic resources in Latin America and the Caribbean. That is already in the process of happening in Argentina.
As I noted in that piece, this represents a rejigged form of the Monroe Doctrine, a 200-year old US foreign policy position that opposed European colonialism on the American continent. It held that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers was a potentially hostile act against the United States. Now, it is applying that doctrine to China and Russia.
Later in this interview, in the Q&A section, she said that Plan Colombia, the US-designed drug-eradication program, had been a roaring success — indeed so successful that it has become an example for the entire region, beginning in Ecuador. This, to put it mildly, is a deeply controversial and worrying statement given the amount of damage Plan Colombia inflicted on Colombia’s communities, economy and environment:
Repeating an Unmitigated Disaster
If there’s one thing most historians can agree upon, it is that “Plan Colombia”, the US government’s anti-narcotics drug-eradication program, was an unmitigated disaster — at least from an anti-narcotics perspective. Signed in 1998 by President Bill Clinton and his Colombian counterpart, Andrés Pastrana, it burnt through $10 billion of US and other overseas funds over 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 and exacerbated organised crime — all while overseeing a significant upsurge in coca production.
Global cocaine production reached the highest level ever reported in 2016, with most of the production coming from Colombia, according to the United Nations’ World Drugs Report 2018.
One of the main architects of Plan Colombia was then-US Senator Joe Biden. In 2022, former Colombian President Ivan Duque personally thanked Biden for helping to draw up the plan, which, he said, allowed the Colombian government to “confront and defeat many challenges we had.” But two years earlier, the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee admitted that Plan Colombia had been a resounding failure from a counter-narcotics perspective…
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Nick Corbishley 