CHAPTER 10

Colombia, a Model for Good Enough Governance

OF ALL OF THE STATE-BUILDING EFFORTS THAT THE UNITED States has undertaken following the very successful projects in Japan and Germany, many observers have regarded Colombia as the most positive. An op-ed published in the New York Times in 2015 by the then vice-president of the United States, Joe Biden, is worth quoting at some length.

In 1999, we initiated Plan Colombia to combat drug trafficking, grinding poverty and institutional corruption—combined with a vicious insurgency—that threatened to turn Colombia into a failed state. Fifteen years later, Colombia is a nation transformed. As one of the architects of Plan Colombia in the United States Senate, I saw that the key ingredient was political will on the ground. Colombia benefited from leaders who had the courage to make significant changes regarding security, governance and human rights. Elites agreed to pay higher taxes. The Colombian government cleaned up its courts, vetted its police force and reformed its rules of commerce to open up its economy. The United States invested $9 billion over the course of Plan Colombia, with $700 million the first year. But our figures show that Colombia outspent us four to one.¹

Biden was not alone in his praise; it came from sources inside and outside of the government. “A 2007 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), titled Colombia: Back from the Brink, credits Plan Colombia with many accomplishments, including expanding state authority, reducing violence, improving human rights, advancing the peace process, enhancing governance, expanding the economy, and providing social services. . . . ‘This critical ally of America has done all of the right things to try to bring stability, democracy, and prosperity to its own citizens,’ then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a 2008 statement supporting further US assistance for Colombia.”² Winifred Tate, an NGO activist and academic, has written that during her field research in January 2010 at the United States Southern Command, located in Florida, high-level American officers told her that “Colombia has been very good to all of us.”³

Plan Colombia

Plan Colombia was initially developed under the administrations of Bill Clinton in the United States and Andrés Pastrana in Colombia. Ernesto Samper, who preceded Pastrana and held office from 1994 to 1998, was discredited when it was revealed that his campaign had taken money from drug kingpins.⁴ As president, Andrés Pastrana held talks with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and agreed to give them authority over a large swath of territory, the size of Switzerland. The FARC hid thousands of fighters and weapons in this zone, which the FARC completely controlled. The talks collapsed in 2002. Pastrana’s popularity plummeted. His approval rating fell to 22 percent.⁵ A previous effort at negotiating with the FARC in the 1980s and creating a left-wing political party had also failed; many members of the party created by the FARC were assassinated. Efforts to reach a negotiated settlement with other left-wing militant movements in the 1980s and the 1990s were successful, but the FARC remained a formidable force. General Barry McCaffrey, who was in charge of the American war on drugs in the late 1990s, described Colombia as “out of control, a flipping nightmare.”⁶

Pastrana was interested in social investments. The United States, before 9/11, was focused on counternarcotics activities. The Plan, as it initially emerged from the US Congress, was essentially designed to support counternarcotics programs in Colombia. This was the only rationale that would generate congressional support in the 1990s.⁷ The goals of American and Colombian elites were far from perfectly aligned.

Pastrana’s failed negotiating strategy helped Álvaro Uribe to win the presidency on a platform that took a hard line against the FARC. Plan Colombia morphed into a broader project, one with ambitions beyond narcotics, under President Uribe. Uribe understood the American political environment and recognized that the surest way to get continued support from the United States was to link Plan Colombia with counterterrorism. Uribe took advantage of the fact that leftist groups had become heavily involved with drug trafficking in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. He closely aligned himself with President Bush, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. From an American perspective in the post-9/11 era, describing the war against the FARC and narco-trafficking as part of the war against terrorism allowed the Bush administration to cast its policies in nonreligious terms. There could be terrorists that were not Muslims. The United States was not, as President Bush frequently said, engaged in a war against Islam but rather a war against terror, and making Plan Colombia part of the American effort was evidence that the United States was concerned with terror and not with Islam.⁸ Uribe obfuscated distinctions among drugs, violence, and terrorism because this allowed him to more effectively appeal to the United States.⁹

During his successful electoral campaign Uribe committed himself to not negotiating with armed groups. Uribe linked Plan Colombia to what he termed his “Democratic Security and Defense Policy.” This policy listed five threats and five strategic objectives for Colombia. The threats were terrorism, illegal drugs, criminal finance, trafficking in arms and explosives, and killings. As strategic objectives, the Uribe plan listed effective state control over all of Colombia’s territory, providing security to the civilian population, maintaining the effectiveness of the security forces, ending the drug trade, and achieving higher levels of efficiency and transparency in public finances. These were all good-governance objectives, ones that would appeal to the American administration, which saw good governance and democracy as the most effective ways to address the root causes of terrorism.¹⁰

Uribe’s security policy was successful; murder and kidnapping rates plummeted. His popularity increased. He won a second term in 2006.

Under Plan Colombia the United States provided not only financial and material resources, although not nearly as much as Colombia itself, but also logistical and intelligence support that was important, if not critical, for the success of Colombian forces. The United States gave Colombia about two hundred helicopters, allowing mobility in difficult and mountainous terrain that had previously been inaccessible to the Colombian military. American intelligence and surveillance allowed the Colombian government to locate and kill a number of FARC leaders. With American technology, heavily vegetated areas no longer provided a safe haven for guerrillas.

Plan Colombia Outcome

Security in Colombia dramatically improved after 2002. In Bogotá, the nation’s capital, housing prices increased at 10 percent a year from 2011 to 2015, tourism boomed, and international chains like Marriott and Four Seasons built new hotels. In 2014 the New York Times published a travel story in its 36 Hours travel series about Cartagena, the main Colombian city on the Caribbean Sea. Other areas covered in the series in 2014 included Burgundy in France, Cambridge in Massachusetts, Edinburgh in Scotland, and Richmond in Virginia—hardly war zones. There was no mention of security issues in the story, which focused on must-see tourist attractions. This was not a story that could have been written a decade and a half earlier.¹¹

From 2002 to 2008, homicides in Colombia dropped 45 percent. A UN study reported that the murder rate in Bogotá per 100,000 dropped from 24 in 2005 to 16.5 in 2012.¹² Kidnapping dropped 90 percent from 2002 to 2012. The number of kidnappings for ransom, which had been in the thousands, fell to around two hundred.¹³ Colombia improved its scores on a number of governance measures, including control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness, and government accountability.¹⁴

The improved security situation in the country reflected a dramatic increase in the capacity of Colombian security forces. Under Uribe, the security budget increased substantially. The size of the Colombian military grew by 45 percent from 2000 to 2007, when it reached four hundred thousand soldiers. Training and equipping efforts by the United States, especially the provision of helicopters, increased the intelligence and mobility of the security forces. The military budget increased from 3.4 to 5.7 percent of GDP. The capacity of the military was enhanced by a number of special units, including mobile brigades, special forces, and high-mountain battalions. Uribe moved to have a police presence throughout the country.¹⁵

The implementation of these reforms did have a dramatic impact on rebel groups. The FARC was able to operate only with small units, usually of under ten, during Uribe’s presidency; in the 1990s they had been able to field as many as one thousand individuals.¹⁶

The Colombian military was assisted by right-wing paramilitary units that were organized outside of the state’s direct control, at least before 2006. Official and nonofficial forces coordinated their activities.¹⁷ The paramilitaries were not constrained in the same way as official forces by human rights norms and other international standards that at least some American politicians would be attentive to.

In the middle of Uribe’s term in office, thousands of paramilitaries were demobilized. The government reached an agreement with the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the largest paramilitary organization. Some members of the AUC were given reduced sentences, which could still reach up to eight years, provided that they confessed to their crimes, agreed to eschew illegal activity in the future, and turned over their assets to provide compensation for their victims.¹⁸ Some AUC members were extradited to the United States, where they stood trial in federal courts and where their trial transcripts were sealed (possibly because they were cooperating with US drug investigators). Many members of the paramilitaries, however, later joined criminal gangs, or bandas criminales (BACRIM), that were engaged in drug trafficking.¹⁹

The official security forces, not just the paramilitaries, were plagued by human rights violations. The most dramatic was the false positives scandal. During Plan Colombia the military sometimes captured and killed young civilians and then placed weapons on their bodies, claiming that they were guerrillas that had been defeated. Security forces were rewarded for higher body counts. When this practice was discovered near the end of Uribe’s presidency, it led to the resignation of a number of high-ranking officers. The military also engaged in phone tapping and other activities that were illegal under Colombian law.²⁰

The reduction in violence, even if some of it was achieved by methods that were inconsistent with global standards, was accompanied by economic growth. Between 2002 and 2008, average annual economic growth was 4.9 percent for Colombia. This was three times higher than in the previous seven years.²¹ In terms of both the reduction in violence and the increase in economic activities, Colombians, at least a significant number of Colombians, were better off near the end of Uribe’s term as president than they had been near the beginning. Plan Colombia had contributed to these positive outcomes.

The government did not just rely on economic growth to secure support from the society. Military units protected major roads and the government sponsored private convoys of vehicles, which allowed Colombians to travel between major cities for the first time in years. The number of vehicles that passed through toll stations increased by two and a half times between 2003 and 2009.²² Plan Colombia did bring greater security and better governance to Colombia.

The narcotics trade, however, continued to thrive. The destruction of the major cartels in Medellín and Cali in the 1990s fragmented illegal drug activities. Drug production and trafficking from Colombia continued. According to US government figures, coca production peaked at 167,000 hectares in 2007, fell to 78,000 hectares in 2012, but then rose to 159,000 in 2015. The increase in production could be the result of the fact that the government of Colombia reduced spraying in certain areas, such as along the border, because of objections from Ecuador, and in other areas because of opposition from peasant groups.²³

Plan Colombia was not a panacea for Colombia. In many parts of the country the central government’s authority remained weak. The port city of Buenaventura, for instance, continued to have poor government services. Sewage was untreated and ran directly into the bay. Gang violence in the city remained high.²⁴

With the assistance of the United States, however, the Colombian government was able to reduce violence in many parts of the country, but many other fundamental characteristics of the Colombian polity did not change. In 2014 the Gini index (a measure of income inequality) for Colombia was 53.5, the highest among those countries in Latin America (where Gini indexes are high compared with other parts of the world) for which the World Bank presented data. Although the level of income inequality in Colombia dropped slightly during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Gini index in 2014 was slightly higher than it had been in 1989, although lower than it had been in 2000. The justice system did not keep pace with improved policing; a culture of impunity remained in Colombia. Throughout the entire period of the Pastrana, Uribe, and Santos presidencies, from 1998 to 2018, the Freedom House score assigned to Colombia hardly changed.²⁵ During this entire period Colombia remained an electoral rather than a liberal democracy. Elections had been routinely held since the mid-1960s, although in many cases, especially during earlier periods, outcomes were negotiated among competing elites.²⁶

Plan Colombia, by degrading the military capacity of the FARC, contributed to a set of agreements between the government and rebel factions during the Santos presidency, which began in 2010. Plan Colombia brought stability and greater security but did not transform the nature of the polity. As a state-building project, Plan Colombia did bring good enough governance, at least some aspects of good enough governance. It did not, however, set Colombia on the path to consolidated democracy.

Accepting Plan Colombia

The Colombian political elite accepted extensive assistance from the United States, including thousands of Americans in the country working on Plan Colombia, not because it was committed to an open access democracy but because the country was threatened with potential collapse and the members of the political elite could not insulate themselves from violence.

In the mid-1990s Colombia was decertified by the United States for not cooperating on counternarcotics measures. This decertification limited American foreign assistance. This was a clear negative signal for the Colombian elite, which had traditionally been pro-American. The Colombian elite feared not only internal enemies but also external abandonment.

In the early 1990s the Medellín and Cali drug cartels were able to field thousands of fighters. The cartels intimidated and sometimes killed public officials to make sure that narco-traffickers were not extradited to the United States.²⁷ Medellín was the most dangerous city in the world in the early 1990s, with a murder rate of 381 per 100,000. In the late 1990s the FARC took over a military base in Putumayo; attacked a naval base in Antioquia; and took over Mitú, the capital city in the department of Vaupés, killing thirty-seven people and kidnapping sixty-one members of the armed forces. In 2002 there were attacks in 209 municipalities.

Thirty-nine percent of Colombia’s municipalities experienced violent events between 1964 and 1984. About a quarter of these events were associated with the FARC. More than eight thousand people died, and 388 towns were captured. Areas that had experienced rebel violence from the 1960s to the 1980s were more likely than other areas to experience rebel violence in the subsequent decades, because such areas had legacies that made it easier to organize violence.²⁸ The leaders of drug cartels attacked and threatened government officials. Hundreds of judges and police investigators were killed. Three presidential candidates were assassinated.²⁹

The FARC, the largest but not the only left-wing group in the country, was estimated to have seventeen thousand to twenty thousand members in 2000. At the turn of the century the FARC controlled large areas of the country, imposed taxes on coca growers, and threatened large landowners. By the end of the 1990s the FARC might have been securing nearly a billion dollars in revenue, a substantial part of that, but not all, from the drug trade. In 1999 a FARC commander, probably operating on his own, killed three American indigenous rights activists.³⁰ Each was blindfolded and shot multiple times; their bodies were discovered just across the border in Venezuela. Even though the FARC might have eroded some of its support from the population in the 1990s, by becoming the principal in drug operations rather than protecting the population from drug traffickers, the FARC was able to generate enough funds from drug trafficking to recruit new members, strengthen its arsenal, and act more like a state within a state. The ELN, another leftist group, was extorting money from foreign corporations.³¹

This violence, extralegal activity, kidnapping, and mayhem did not affect just the poor. One observer has written that “by far the most important indicator of the crisis for many middle and upper-class Colombians, however, was the fear of escalating attacks by the guerrillas.”³² Kidnappings increased. The elite, including their children, were often targets. For the elite the war had come home.

One Colombian who had worked in the Foreign Service during this period compared the country to Afghanistan. “The FARC was going to take over the country,” while the callous elite fled to Miami. . . . As I heard from other elite Colombians, as well as from US officials in Bogotá, FARC strength was symbolized by its presence in La Calera, a small town about a fifteen-minute drive from the Bogotá city limits over the eastern mountain range, where many wealthy residents had country homes or spent the weekend horse back riding and enjoying leisurely barbeques. “The FARC took over La Calera. La Calera! That is Bogotá!” he exclaimed, concluding, “The state was unraveling. A FARC takeover was likely.”³³

Ernesto Londoño, a writer for the New York Times who grew up in Colombia, reports that for a long time the elites were able to keep violence at bay. His wealthy classmates in a private American school in Bogotá arrived, he wrote, in bulletproof cars with bodyguards. When Londoño was nine, a group of armed robbers broke into his house, threatened to kidnap his two-year-old sister, and made off with the family’s valuables. The parents of a close high school friend of Londoño’s were kidnapped thirty miles from Bogotá, the stepfather held for five months and the mother for an additional six when the FARC reneged on the original ransom deal.³⁴

The threat of violence was so palpable that the richest Colombians agreed to a special tax, which was supported by the Uribe administration. The wealth tax, which was imposed on the wealthiest individuals in the country, was earmarked for the security services. In 1999 nearly one million people demonstrated against the FARC. Many people in the middle class left the country in the late 1990s.³⁵

By the time that Uribe assumed the presidency in 2002, Plan Colombia, including substantial assistance from the United States, looked like the only good option. Among many in Colombia there was a recognition that the country was near collapse. Pastrana’s efforts to negotiate with the FARC had only strengthened the organization. Despite its Marxist roots it had continued to thrive after the Soviet Union collapsed. Violence, bombings, and kidnappings were taking place in the capital city itself.

Latin American elites have always been nervous about the power and intrusiveness of the United States. The United States has frequently shown that it was willing to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries. If anything, the environment after 9/11, in which the United States experienced the first major attack against its home territory since 1941, could only make Latin American elites more nervous. But the leaders of Colombia did not believe that they had any good alternatives to extensive American assistance. The Colombian elite accepted intrusive American assistance not because of a commitment to making the country a consolidated democracy but because the country was near collapse. Without American assistance the elite would not have been able to maintain its position.

Peace Agreement 2016

Even with substantial increases in expenditures, American assistance, and sometimes brutal military tactics, not to speak of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declining attractiveness of Marxist ideology, the Colombian government was not able to definitively defeat the FARC. Government control over peripheral areas, especially in the South, remained tenuous. President Santos began negotiations for a peace agreement with the FARC in 2012. Santos lost in the first round of elections in 2014 but his opponent did not win the required majority. In the second round of elections Santos prevailed, securing 50.95 percent of the votes.³⁶ The negotiations were then continued in Havana. Cuba had the only explicitly Marxist regime in the Western Hemisphere, and the Cuban government was sympathetic to the FARC. In March of 2015 Santos stopped bombing FARC encampments and praised the FARC for holding to a partial cease-fire.³⁷

An agreement was reached in 2016. Santos, however, had committed to submitting the agreement to a popular plebiscite, and on October 4, 2016, it was defeated by less than 1 percent of the votes cast. The turnout, at 40 percent, was low, perhaps because Colombians expected the agreement to be endorsed, which is what polls had indicated, and perhaps because treacherous weather discouraged voters in some areas. The agreement, which guaranteed to members of the FARC a small number of seats in the legislature and which limited jail time for FARC members who confessed to their crimes, was opposed by former president Uribe, whose father had been killed by the FARC.

In November of 2016 the Santos government took a new agreement to the Colombian legislature, bypassing a popular vote. This new agreement was approved. Santos’s party held a majority of seats in both houses of the legislature. The new agreement stipulated that there would be a special tribunal to try FARC members, but those who confessed were still guaranteed limited time in jail. Members of the FARC were guaranteed seats in the Congress but they could not run from districts in former conflict zones. Uribe and other opposition leaders walked out of the Congress and refused to support the new agreement.³⁸

In sum, Plan Colombia was successful in bringing Colombia back from the brink. Political authority did not completely disappear, something that had seemed possible in 2000. Levels of violence declined. Parts of the country, most of the major cities, were no longer afflicted with pervasive violence. American assistance had been consequential.

But Colombia was not transformed. External assistance and increased Colombian government commitments returned the country to a degree of stability, but Colombia has not made any jump that would put it securely on the path to an open access or inclusive order. The country is still dominated by a narrow elite. Elections have mattered in Colombia, but power has been swapped among members of the elite. President Uribe, who was the principal architect of the Democratic Security Program, which was linked with Plan Colombia, is a large cattle rancher. Uribe became a senator in Colombia after he left the presidency. President Santos is the son and grandson of former presidents.

Plan Colombia should be understood as helping to provide good enough governance for Colombia. Above all, it did bring greater security to the country. For the Colombian elite the alternative to Plan Colombia could have been the complete disintegration of state authority and the end of any semblance of order and security, even in Bogotá.

Violence in Colombia

That good enough governance, not a path to Denmark, has been the outcome in Colombia is not surprising, given the conditions in the country. Colombia has been a limited access order with a weak central state since it became independent. Since its creation Colombia has been torn by violence. There were eight civil wars in the nineteenth century.³⁹ Non-state armed groups have been a constant presence. During the period between 1946 and 1964, which Colombians labeled La Violencia, power fragmented dramatically.

Violence in Colombia did not end in 1964. After La Violencia a number of leftist armed groups emerged in Colombia of which the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) became the most important. Right-wing paramilitaries began to form in the early 1980s, at least in part to fight against left-wing guerrillas.⁴⁰

Historically, elections were often contested with weapons.⁴¹ There have never been substantial state-building projects in Colombia. Along with Ecuador and Bolivia, Colombia is a mosaic of regions. Among ten South American countries, excluding Brazil, only two others have less urban concentration than Colombia.⁴²

The central government has never been able to effectively assert its authority in all parts of the country. Areas of limited statehood have been the norm. There is not even a system of uniform railway gauges throughout the country. Political elites opposed projects designed to build stronger state institutions. During the nineteenth century the national army never numbered more than six thousand troops.⁴³

Drug violence in Colombia was part of a longer history. Colombia has been very violent.⁴⁴ Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín cartel who was killed in 1993, was elected as an alternative deputy in the Colombian Chamber of Deputies in 1982. Escobar was responsible for the assassination of at least one presidential candidate in the late 1980s and for many other murders.

In sum, the explosion of violence that occurred in the period when Plan Colombia was formulated and accepted did not emerge from a vacuum. Violence has almost always been present in Colombia. What was different was the inability of the political and economic elites, even those living in Bogotá and its environs, to protect themselves at the turn of the twenty-first century.

PLAN COLOMBIA HAS been considered a model for American state-building efforts, the most notable success since Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War. By providing financial aid, training, military technology (especially helicopters), and intelligence, the United States did contribute to restoring security to large parts of Colombia. The country’s political elite, especially President Uribe, was fully on board with this project. Plan Colombia does not, however, vindicate the utopian vision of some American leaders.

Colombia should be understood as an example of how an external actor might contribute to good enough governance, but not good governance. The country was much more peaceful by the end of Uribe’s presidency than it had been at the beginning. Colombia did improve its scores on a number of World Bank governance indicators, including control of corruption and government effectiveness, after 2000. Colombia, however, never scored higher than a partial democracy in the Freedom House listing.

With a willing elite, good enough governance can work, but consolidated democracy is much less likely. Despite very substantial US assistance, the basic structure of Colombia’s society did not change. The Gini index has not budged. The country is still dominated by a small wealthy elite, but that elite was willing to accept some reforms and intrusive assistance from the United States to avoid personal violence and the possibility of state collapse.