Introduction
Illegal drug use kills nearly 50,000 persons annually in the United States and the costs related to drugs, including health care, accidents, policing, and lost productivity, reached 160 billion dollars in 2000. Because of that, during past years, almost 50% of US foreign assistance has gone to fighting this war.
For the same reason, as well as because Colombia provides 90% of the cocaine entering the US, this South American country received for the last three years 1 billion dollars from the White House. So, if the United States has been engaged for four decades in its “War on Drugs”, Colombia has certainly been its battlefield since the 1980s.
As a major issue in this “War on Drugs”, there is the internal political—and armed—struggle in Colombia. There, three groups have been competing for the political authority and for the monopoly of force—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC), the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN), and, more recently, the Colombian Self Defense Forces (Fuerzas de Autodefensa de Colombia, AUC)—, as well as hundreds of international drug cartels.
The FARC and the ELN appeared in the 1960s based on Marxist’s teachings and revolutionaries ideals. They resorted to kidnapping, extortion and “revolutionary taxes” to fund its insurgents. To challenge them, supported sometimes by the state, or by farmers or even by drug cartels, the paramilitary groups were created. The most important is the AUC, established in the 1980s.
In recent years, the reality is that those groups became deeply involved with trafficking of drugs, which makes really hard to distinguish any revolutionary ideal or self-defence effort from the cocaine business.
Due to those groups, in the early 2000s, the Colombian state did not exercise control over an estimated 40% of the national territory and the violence rates in Colombia were between the highest in the whole world.
On my next text, I will explain the US Foreign Policy toward Colombia and its ineffective results so far.
