Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia

Latin American Politics and Society, Fall 2003 by Springer, Alexander P

Crandall, Russell. Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002. Photographs, map, tables, figure, notes, bibliography, index. 207 pp.; hardcover $49.95, paperback $19.95.

Daily news reports of atrocities, bombings, and assassinations show the continuing escalation of armed conflict in Colombia. To help combat the simultaneous "assault on democracy, prosperity and security" (as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman put it in a 2002 congressional hearing), the United States has dramatically increased its foreign assistance to make the Andean nation the third most important recipient of U.S. aid, after Israel and Egypt. Driven by Drugs tries to analyze the recent evolution of bilateral relations between Colombia and the United States by focusing on the issue of illegal narcotics. Following a brief introduction, the book is divided into four chapters dealing with the evolution of U.S. policy toward Colombia since independence, the roots of Colombia's violent conflict, and U.S. policy during the presidencies of Ernesto Samper (1994-98) and Andres Pastrana (1998-2002).

The book's main thesis is that Washington's perception of Colombia is overwhelmingly shaped by its "war on drugs" and that "cooperation" in that war-as defined by the United States-is the single overriding yardstick by which successive governments in Bogota are measured. Crandall is mildly critical of U.S. policy during the Samper years, arguing that the confrontational stance of the Clinton administration personified in "drug hawks" like Ambassador Myles Frechette and Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gelbard ultimately did more harm than good to U.S. interests. The U.S. policy of those years is characterized as "overt narcotization" (p. 132), as drugs came to dominate the bilateral agenda completely and relegated all other issues to the background. As a consequence, Washington initially paid scant attention to Colombia's myriad other problems, starting with a major economic downturn, the escalation of guerrilla and paramilitary violence, and the gradual implosion of state institutions. Two successive decertification decisions (1996, 1997) and Samper's diplomatic isolation further weakened an already embattled president, thereby making the government less able to deal with the increasingly violent situation.

According to Crandall, the U.S. government came to realize that its unrelenting pressure on Samper on the drug issue had been a mistake and shifted its policy to one of "implicit narcotization" (p. 146) during the subsequent presidency of Andres Pastrana Arango. Although Washington continued to demand unwavering allegiance to U.S. counternarcotics strategies, other aspects of the relationship could develop in a more positive direction.

Driven by Drugs covers familiar ground for the specialist but gives a good, although sometimes too brief, overview of the tormented most recent decade of relations between Washington and Bogota. The book makes some interesting observations, which unfortunately it does not develop further in the subsequent analysis. One is the hypothesis that with regard to the war on drugs, U.S. policy might be driven by what the author calls a "military industrial narcotics complex": "The budgets of U.S. government agencies involved in the drug war and the billions of dollars in military hardware that the United States sends to the Andes have become almost self-perpetuating" (p. 7). It would have been interesting to see the topic of U.S. strategic and economic interests explored in more detail, as it has found little attention up until now, apart from some journalistic accounts (Castro Caycedo 2001). This reviewer would also have been interested to see some analysis of the role in the "drug war" played by U.S. special forces, the aerial reconnaissance missions conducted by U.S. spy planes, and State Department "subcontractors" like DynCorp.

Crandall also briefly asserts that in spite of apparent sharp disagreements, Washington policymakers generally agreed on the main lines of Colombia policy. "While some U.S. policymakers expressed concern over the human rights implications and lack of an exit strategy, the main disagreements arose, for example, not over whether to send helicopters to the Colombian National Police, but how many" (p. 8, emphasis in the original). While this is an interesting hypothesis, it would need to be explored much more thoroughly, especially in light of recent very detailed research on the debate about Plan Colombia in the United States, which presents a much more differentiated picture (IEPRI 2001).

The volume suffers from several other weaknesses. First, it fails to put U.S.-Colombian relations into a more general context. It does not discuss the effects on Colombia of the current neoliberal world economy, which is in no small part the result of U.S. policies. Globalization not only creates conditions that facilitate the growth of transnational criminal organizations, such as drug mafias; it also generates a paradox for a country with precarious government institutions and a fragmented society: the state is asked to withdraw from the social and economic sphere but simultaneously forced to combat the growing violence more effectively. Tokatlian (2000) has therefore aptly called Colombia a case of "defective globalization."