FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RADIO ENDEAVOUR 

FIRE

NOVEMBER 2007

PLAN COLOMBIA: A BRIEF OVERVIEW AND CRITIQUE

By Margaret Thompson

Plan Colombia was expanded in 2001 with $676 million allocated for the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, of which $380 million went to Colombia, and in 2004 Congress appropriated a total of $727 for this same program, with $463 million sent to Colombia.  The number of military advisors from the US that operate in Colombia has increased from 400 to 800, and private contractors from 400 to 600.  The latter are now allowed to carry military weapons to protect mostly transnational corporate personnel including fumigation operations and oil exploitation in Colombia. 
 

Critics of Plan Colombia including Amnesty International argue that the overall drug-centered approach ignores underlying causes of the conflict and human rights abuses.  They urge that more funding go to development projects to help provide viable alternatives for landless and other peasants who have few other economic opportunities than to cultivate coca, and are often caught in the middle of conflicts between the military, paramilitaries and guerrillas.  Eradication of coca in one area often results in shifts of cultivation and distribution to other areas.  Likewise, little money has gone to curb the demand for cocaine in the United States, which is the major destination for much of the coca cultivated in Colombia.
 

Another issue raised by critics of Plan Colombia is the charge that more Colombian School of the Americas graduates have been implicated in human rights graduates, than graduates from any other country.  US-trained officers have been implicated in several massacres.  Likewise, Colombian paramilitaries are using counterinsurgency methods including targeting of civilian supporters that US military schools and manuals have been teaching in Colombia and the region since the 1960s