Rethinking Plan Colombia: some ways to fix it

"The White House insists it is winning the war against drugs. Those boasts fly in the face of the facts, but the White House would rather stick to a flawed plan than to admit that their approach isn't working and to fix it," says committee member Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont. "Congressional oversight ... has been sorely lacking," he says. "It is past time for an honest reassessment of Plan Colombia."

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Reevaluating Plan Colombia, say critics, requires a look at the priorities set by Washington that shape the way the war against drugs is waged. When experts and politicians are asked what changes might yield better results, the responses often divide into two different approaches.

The first is the school of alternative development. Sandro Calvani, director of the UN's office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia (UNODC) argues that Plan Colombia's heavy focus on aerial spraying needs to be supplemented with increased efforts to deal with the social and economic roots of Colombia's coca industry. Specifically, he wants the US and others in the international community to offer strategies – and funds – for rural development that would ensure alternative livelihoods for poor farmers who face destruction of their chief cash crop.

"Why do Colombians go back to replanting coca? Because it's easy, and no one talks to them about doing something else," says Mr. Calvani. The alternative development programs that have been attempted, he says, show clear, impressive results. A UNODC survey released in June shows that 70 percent of the fields eradicated through Plan Colombia are replanted. But if farmers receive alternative development assistance, states Calvani, the percentage of coca fields replanted dives to 3 percent. They're replaced with coffee, hearts of palm, and red beans. "Once coca peasants live on licit crops for one year, they never go back to the illicit economy," he says.

Pablo Casas, a security expert at the Bogotá-based Security and Democracy foundation, says aerial spraying also comes at the expense of combating the criminal structure higher up. "Eradication targets the smallest cogs in the machine," he says, "We need to focus on the money laundering businesses, on attacking the imports of cocaine precursors into Colombia, on intercepting the final product, and on weeding out corruption." Targeting the farmers and failing to provide them with alternatives is not only an opportunity cost, he argues, it is counterproductive, causing greater poverty and displacement.

Some $1.2 billion has been spent directly on eradication between 2000 and 2005, but alternative development projects have garnered $213 million in the same period. "When it comes to fighting drugs, there is no real division of the pie," says Calvani. "Practically the entire pie is used for interdiction ... and anything else gets thrown a cookie."

White House drug czar John Walters replies that security must be established in an area first. "Alternative development is most effective when conditioned on a police presence," he says.

At a Congressional hearing in Washington last week, House Republicans noted the rising cocaine use in Europe, and called for European governments to engage more in Colombia's drug fight. Rep. Dan Burton (R) of Indiana said Europe needs to fulfill its pledges of "soft-side assistance."

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