War on Peace

And indeed, the militaries were often the most trusted institutions in countries marked by these American proxy wars. The uncomfortable question US officials seldom confronted was the extent to which American support elevated those militaries to their status as the only lasting structures in their lands.

Nearly two decades after Plan Colombia was launched—and nearly seventy years after US intervention in Colombia began—the question remained: Did Washington’s insistence on achieving its military and security aims come at too high a human cost?

By the end of the century, Colombians had decided it was time for a permanent peace. Thirteen million people showed up at the “No mas” nationwide protest of the war in October 1999, in a country of forty million.

The result was an Escheresque tesselation of faction and violence.

In an ironic twist, many of these paramilitary organizations got into the drug business too, and US dollars sent to Colombia to combat the war against drugs found their way into traffickers’ pockets.

In the eighties, in one of the more ill-fated partnerships in America’s transnational war against drugs, the Colombian army and the twenty largest cocaine traffickers teamed up to establish a national counterterrorism training school, supported by US intelligence. The group was known as MAC, or Muerte a Secuestradores (“Death to Kidnappers”) and had, ostensibly, a simple mission: to thwart FARC’s tactic of abducting politicians and the wealthy. Traffickers were required to put down thirty-five thousand US dollars as an initial fee. Generals contracted Israeli and British mercenaries to do the training; CIA and US intelligence agents participated.

US investment and loans surged during this time, leading President Alberto Lleras Camargo to remark drily, “blood and capital accumulation went together.”

Secretary of State Dean Rusk and UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson admitted to the moral contradiction, writing in cables that US funding was encouraging rural violence and economic dislocation.

Plan Lazo was reinforced by a Colombian presidential order called Decree 3398 that stated, “all Colombians, men and women . . . will be used by the government in activities and work that contribute to the reestablishment of order”—in effect allowing Colombian authorities to organize ordinary citizens into militia groups. Together with the US-backed Plan Lazo, Decree 3398 created civilian “self-defense units” and “hunter-killer teams” instructed and authorized to kill armed or unarmed peasants.

In Washington’s race to support its Colombian partners in their mission to secure the country from so-called terrorists, US military officials and other policymakers often failed to take a close look at the fighters they were preparing for battle.