It is regarded as axiomatic in certain circles that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to bolster the interests of U.S. business. If so, then the purpose of “Plan Colombia” should be to safeguard existing U.S. investments, to encourage the opening of new investment opportunities, to promote free markets, and to see to it that they continually expand.
Yet Plan Colombia will not strengthen free markets. On the contrary, it will wind up weakening them. Capitalism requires not just certain economic conditions to take root and expand, but certain political conditions as well: stability, private property protections, the rule of law, and so on. Businessmen need not just an adequate rate of return if they are to continue investing. They also need assurances that some local warlord will not seize their property on a whim and that a dispute with a customer or a supplier will be settled by lawyers and judges, not Uzi-toting gunmen. Plan Colombia undermines such confidence in at least two ways. First, by funneling arms to the military, it provides indirect support for a growing right-wing paramilitary movement with which the military is closely allied. Second, by doing nothing to reduce drug demand in the United States, it ensures that the Colombian drug sector will continue to thrive and that the armed groups that raise revenue by taxing participants in the underground economy will thrive along with it.
Rather than winding down the conflict, Plan Colombia thus pumps it up by effectively subsidizing both sides of the battlefield, the guerrillas no less than the military. Not only does it amount to “suitcases of dollars” so that Colombians can “continue killing each other indefinitely,” as one guerrilla leader put it, but it undermines the political and legal conditions on which capital growth depends.[1] Yet even though it was the Clinton Administration that developed Plan Colombia, the Bush Administration, the most pro-business since Calvin Coolidge, has embraced it and is carrying it forward.[2]
There are those who argue, of course, that while Plan Colombia runs counter to some U.S. business interests, it does not run counter to all of them. The arms sector, for example, sees U.S. intervention as a major growth opportunity, as witness the catfight that broke out between United Technologies and Bell Helicopter Textron in March 2000 over whose helicopter, the Sikorsky UH-60L Blackhawk or the Huey II, would be deployed in the Colombian countryside. Considering the hard times that have fallen on arms makers since the end of the Cold War, military contracts like these are manna from heaven. Could it be that Washington does not care what happens to some U.S. business interests in Colombia because it knows that the business of intensified combat will more than make up for the loss? The answer is no. Despite the impression one sometimes gets from the press, the post-Cold War arms sector is actually quite small. In terms of annual sales, it is less than half the size of the auto sector, less than a third the size of construction, and less than 2% of U.S. manufacturing overall.[3]
Moreover, since the war against coca began heating up in 1996, the United States has seen its official balance of trade with Colombia go from a $436 million surplus to a $3.3 billion deficit, a deficit more than two-and-a-half times the size of Plan Colombia.[4] A few helicopter contracts, consequently, will not begin to close the gap. As the anti-drug effort further destabilizes the region, the red ink will undoubtedly spread and business opportunities will shrink. Given how bad the drug war has been for U.S. business as a whole, the puzzle remains: Why does the United States insist on ratcheting it up to ever-higher levels?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Lazare is a freelance writer who has written widely about drug issues, urban affairs and the U.S. Constitution. His latest book is America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It (Harcourt, 2001).
NOTES
1. Simon Jenkins, “Clinton’s billions keep a drugs war alive,” The London Times, September 1, 2000, features section.
2. Although the Bush Administration says it wants to supplement Plan Colombia with other programs designed to strengthen government institutions throughout the Andean and Amazonian region, the original core program will remain intact. See Christopher Marquis, “New Drug Plan Shifts Focus in Latin America,” The New York Times, May 17, 2001, p. A12.
3. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Industrial Reports, Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories, and Orders: 1987-1997, Series M3-1(97).
4. U.S. Census Bureau, “U.S. Trade with Colombia in the 2000,” available at http://www.ita.doc.gov/TSFrameset.html.
