Hostage Nation (8 page)

By 1960, after continuing to come up empty for more than a decade in its pursuit of the Red threat, the U.S. government believed it had found proof of a real Communist rebellion in Colombia—a ragged group of fighters in the central Colombian mountains, led by peasant revolutionary Pedro Marín. To help Colombia fight the rebels (whose ideology at the time was more nationalist and anticapitalist than Communist), President Alberto Lleras signed a military-aid agreement with the United States. The Colombian military received twenty-five fighter
jets and sixteen light bombers and lessons from U.S. pilots in how to napalm insurgent settlements. In 1964, the Colombian army, trained and funded by the United States, went to wipe out Marín and his cohorts with a bombing raid on their camp. When troops arrived on the ground, the rebels were nowhere to be found. The raid had forced Marín and forty of his men to become mobile guerrilla warriors, disappearing into the impenetrable Colombian countryside. It was the beginning of a new kind of war, one that the Colombian government—for more than four decades—would be powerless to end.

The United States remained dedicated to helping keep communism in check, and in 1962, the government developed a counterinsurgency program called Plan Lazo. The policy included a dramatic increase in aid and the training of Colombian soldiers and citizens “to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions, and as necessary, execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.” The relationship between the two countries morphed in the late 1970s when the sale and use of illicit marijuana and cocaine trafficked through Colombia became a social crisis and a fiscal drain in the United States.

In the early 1980s, the white powder that had once been a white-collar drug exploded into American inner cities in the form of crack cocaine. By 1985, use of cocaine among young adults reached an all-time high with over 8 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and 6 percent of those between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four admitting to using the drug. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan called drug abuse “a repudiation of everything America is” and implored Americans to join a “national crusade against drugs.” With the increasing fervor over this issue, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (378–16) in favor of a $1.7 billion Omnibus Drug Bill. While the money and military aid allocated in the bill seemed extreme to some, the political climate in the United States gave lawmakers little option. “This is such an emotional issue—I mean, we're at war here—that voting no would be too difficult to explain,” said Arizona senator John McCain. “By voting against it, you'd be voting against the war on drugs. Nobody wants to do that.” Ninety-seven million dollars was allocated to build prisons, $200 million for drug
education, and $241 million for treatment. The bill was accompanied by an aggressive campaign to attack the drug business at its source.

Peru and Bolivia were the initial targets of the $200 million U.S. effort to find a supply-side fix to the problem. At the time, both Andean countries were the main growers of coca and producers of cocaine. The drug trade then traveled to Colombia, where smugglers took advantage of the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the narrow land bridge through Panama to ship the illegal export through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, or El Salvador, then from Guatemala to Mexico. A second passage ran northeast to Florida, directly or via Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or the Lesser Antilles. Planes, boats, and trucks carried the powder north, with transport accomplished easily and mostly with impunity. Eradication efforts began at the ground level, with local contract workers or government troops spraying herbicides or cutting down the coca plants. To help the thousands of coca farmers who were put out of work by the eradication programs, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) earmarked $131 million between 1987 and 1998 for crop substitution and alternative development for Bolivia and Peru. In both countries, the programs failed miserably, with the total area of coca cultivation decreasing by less than 5 percent. In another ill-fated attempt to stop cultivation, Bolivian growers were paid two thousand dollars per year by the U.S. Embassy's Narcotics Affairs Section not to grow coca. According to a 2002 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, the $100 million program to pay farmers was rife with corruption, as many ineligible beneficiaries collected payoffs, and farmers who collected funds just moved to other areas and continued to grow coca. Even in those early years, the idea of trying to wipe out cocaine by eradicating coca plants seemed pointless to many critics. Paul Boeker, president of the Institute of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego, told
The New York Times
in 1991 that the land in the Andes suitable to growing coca was virtually unlimited. “Nibbling around the edges of the leaf market,” he said, “is terribly inefficient.” Traffickers in Colombia soon realized the same thing: coca could just as easily be grown and processed in Colombia as in Peru and Bolivia. And toward the late
1980s, the bulk of the cultivation business was firmly planted in Colombian soil.

In a secondary method designed to dampen the flow of illegal imports, the United States put pressure on the Colombian government to extradite captured drug dealers. A bilateral extradition treaty between Colombia and the United States had come into effect in 1979 under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Julio César Turbay. The treaty—along with $26 million in U.S. aid—launched what Washington thought would be a model antinarcotics program. A snag was hit when President Belisario Betancur, elected in 1982, refused to extradite Colombian nationals as a matter of principle. But two years later, following the murder of the Colombian minister of justice by Pablo Escobar's men, Betancur relented and began approving the extradition requests. From November 1984 to June 1987, Colombia extradited thirteen accused narco-traffickers, including Carlos Lehder, who was believed to have amassed a net worth of $2.5 billion. The thirty-eight-year-old Lehder was sentenced in the United States to life without parole, plus an additional 135 years. But in a major setback for Washington's antidrug effort, in June 1987, the Colombian Supreme Court declared the extradition treaty unconstitutional. More than seventy extradition requests were shelved, including one for Medellín cartel CEO Pablo Escobar—arguably one of the most successful drug bosses who ever lived.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the reign of the big cartel bosses continued to fuel ever-increasing violence. Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín were repeatedly racked by bomb attacks, kidnappings, and shootings intended to intimidate government officials into changing laws to favor the drug traffickers. Brutal conflicts also erupted among the big cartels and reached a pinnacle in 1993, when a war broke out between Pablo Escobar and a rival vigilante group, Los Pepes. Although the cartels were a scourge for the Colombian government, some in the general population, reaping the benefits of a drug economy and of generous cartel bosses who sought to improve their communities, had a more favorable feeling toward the cartels. Soccer stadiums, churches, schools, and low-income housing were built compliments of drug
money. All the while, the Colombian government and justice system became increasingly impotent and permeated with rampant corruption.

The FARC and other armed groups were also capitalizing on the new profits. At the time, guerrillas controlled many of the coca-growing regions in central and southern Colombia, while the cartels managed much of the cocaine production and trafficking. The guerrillas operated by taxing the cartels and drug producers for protection and services. According to a Rand Corporation report, fees (which fluctuated depending on market value) were approximately $15 per kilogram for production of coca paste and $10.50 per kilogram for cocaine shipments. The FARC demanded $5,200 for international drug flights and $2,600 for domestic drug flights. They also charged “protection” fees for each laboratory, landing strip, and acre of coca and poppy fields. This economic alliance began to collapse when the leaders of the cartels in Medellín and Cali began investing their newfound wealth in property, primarily large cattle ranches, which placed them firmly in the ranks of the guerrillas' traditional enemy—the landowning elite. Beginning in the early 1980s, family-based drug empires invested millions of dollars to buy more than 2.5 million acres—more than one-twelfth of Colombia's productive farmland. In turn, the guerrillas began a policy of kidnapping and extortion of the cartel members. For protection and retaliation, the drug lords organized and financed their own paramilitary armies. Politicians, ranchers, and peasants tired of guerrilla attacks helped form the “self-defense” groups. Most notorious were two organizations using the same name: Muerte a Secuestradores, or MAS (Death to Kidnappers). One group was formed as a death squad for the Medellín cartel; the other was formed by army officers and ranchers.

At the time, the units were actually sanctioned by the government and military leaders, who had called for peasant self-defense groups to rise up against the guerrillas. The policy initiated Colombia's “Dirty War” as paramilitary groups linked to drug cartels worked closely with the Colombian military to brutally torture and murder suspected guerrillas, guerrilla sympathizers, and peasant union leaders. At the same time, the self-defense units attacked police and authorities investigating
drug trafficking and paramilitary activity. Throughout the 1980s, paramilitary groups were implicated in the assassinations of hundreds of police officers, judges, and political leaders, including Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in 1984.

By 1993, with strongly antidrug president César Gaviria in office, the cartel bosses began to fall. Escobar was murdered in December 1993 by Colombian Special Forces, with the help of U.S. intelligence agents, who firmly believed that they had put a nail in the coffin of not just a wanted drug boss but the war on drugs. There were fifteen more top cartel leaders left. “We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go,” John Carnevale, director of planning and budget at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), told
Rolling Stone
in 2007. “There was this feeling that if we got all 16, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs.” Shortly after Escobar was taken out of the business, the remaining fifteen cartel bosses were either killed or safely out of circulation in U.S. prisons. There were copious pats on the back and champagne toasts from Bogotá to Washington.

It soon became apparent that the celebration had been premature. By the mid-1990s, a multitude of factions—guerrillas, paramilitaries, local peasants, city drug dealers, and street gangs—entered the business to fill the power vacuum. The proliferation of new drug regimes made the trafficking business more robust than ever. Manuel Marulanda's guerrilla army, with an estimated eighteen thousand soldiers controlling more than 50 percent of rural Colombia, was well positioned to take a large percentage of the new market strategy. Although the FARC was only one of several larger shareholders in a much bigger export operation, the regime change from cartels to insurgent armies was not lost on U.S. president Bill Clinton, who repeatedly linked the FARC to drug trafficking by referring to them as “narco-guerrillas.” Manuel Marulanda, who did not appreciate the “narco” label, would continually downplay his organization's role in the drug trade and claim he could eradicate coca production in three to five years with crop-substitution programs if supplied with economic aid from the government and international organizations. All the while, his army was
making a fortune and steadily increasing its military armament strength and troop levels, and launching successful offensives and attacks throughout the country.

When it was apparent both that the drug flow was actually increasing and that Colombia—the United States' strongest ally in South America—was losing its fight against the guerrillas, the United States stepped up its funding to the tune of $309 million in 1999, followed by $765 million in 2000. The behemoth offshoot of the war on drugs was a six-year program dubbed “Plan Colombia” by the Clinton administration, which argued that wiping out the guerrillas was crucial to ending the flow of drug imports. To prop up the Colombian military, the State Department—which is responsible for antidrug operations abroad—turned to U.S. defense contractors to supply the Colombian military with weapons, military training, and equipment to fight the guerrillas. As Colombia continued to enjoy its status as the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid, the military components of Plan Colombia were substantially downplayed publicly, while the coca eradication and fumigation program became its touted centerpiece. (USAID began a $52.5 million alternative development program in 2000 to coincide with the military and eradication components of Plan Colombia. The funds were to be administered through the Colombian government. But because nearly all of the coca-growing regions were completely under the control of insurgents, the programs had little success.)

As with other military contracts, the outsourcing of the war on drugs in Colombia was designed to protect the U.S. government from liability should anything go awry. And to complicate an already-confusing picture, larger corporations would frequently subcontract to smaller companies in order to distance themselves from accountability. The military's SOUTHCOM Reconnaissance System (SRS) program that employed Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell, and Marc Gonsalves in 2003 was no different. Lockheed Martin was selected by the DOD as the prime contractor, which then subcontracted to Northrop Grumman, which then subcontracted to California Microwave Systems. The practice created an absence of oversight or protocols for the CMS employees. A 2003 U.S. Navy investigation found that there had been no written set of standard operating procedures at CMS. Pilots
and systems operators had to learn procedures largely by word of mouth. DynCorp (which ran the fumigation missions) was the biggest U.S. contractor in Colombia and had the largest budget, the most planes, and a fleet of SAR helicopters. However, the positions at CMS were coveted because they paid nearly 25 percent more than what the DynCorp pilots were making for similar work. (According to former CMS pilot Doug Cockes, pilots were paid $160,000 per year and systems analyst, slightly more.)