Rethinking Plan Colombia: some ways to fix it

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.

War on drugs A three-part series Part 1 - 09/27/06 Ambushed in Jamundí Part 2 - 09/28/06 Plan Columbia: Big gains, but cocaine still flows Part 3 - 09/29/06 How to fix Plan Colombia

"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."

Europe says it opposes aerial eradication on environmental grounds and extols the alternative development option. "The US does not have enough faith in alternative development, and the Europeans have faith, but do very little," says Calvani.

Increasingly, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe himself has also voiced criticism of the eradication focus and begun calling for a more "multidimensional approach."

"We cannot disconnect alternative development from this war," he said last week, speaking to the Colombian American Association in New York. "It is necessary to eliminate crops, yes. But we need to combine this with options, and with better access to markets," he said.

Mr. Uribe's administration is lobbying for Colombia to be reclassified as a US "strategic partner" in the war on drugs - a move that would give Bogotá greater control of where money was spent.

If awarded this freedom, he would, for example, suggest expanding the Forest Warden Families program that pays farmers monthly stipends in return for keeping their land free of illicit crops. "We have 43,000 families looking after 1.7 million hectares. In that area, coca production has fallen 80 percent and we have recovered 236,000 hectares of forest where coca was being grown," said Uribe last week. "The results are spectacular."

The continued US focus on aerial spraying, despite questionable results, has to do in part with who's in charge of the drug fight, admits one State Department official. Development and social experts have, historically, been far less involved and listened to, she claims, speaking off the record because she is not authorized to discuss the subject. The defense and security voices - with their more combat-oriented approach - have the upper hand, she notes.

The post-Sept. 11 discourse used by President Bush and adopted by Uribe (including rechristening narcotraffickers and guerrillas as narcoterrorists) has made it even harder to replace "hard" measures with softer ones. The US political cycle also plays a part in drug-fighting methods, adds Bruce Bagley, an expert on drug trafficking at the University of Miami. "No one in the US wants to look 'soft' on drugs, and nothing looks tougher than spraying hundreds of thousands of hectares of coca fields," he says. "Talking about [alternative] development won't get you re-elected."

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