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Overview
In 2000, the U.S. passed a major aid package that was going to help Colombia do it all: cut drug trafficking, defeat leftist guerrillas, support peace, and build democracy. More than 80% of the assistance, however, was military aid, at a time when the Colombian security forces were linked to abusive, drug-trafficking paramilitary forces. Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats examines the U.S. policymaking process in the design, implementation, and consequences of Plan Colombia, as the aid package came to be known.
Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804795678 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2015 |
| Series: | Anthropology of Policy |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats
U.S. Policymaking in Colombia
By Winifred Tate
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9567-8
CHAPTER 1
Domestic Drug Policy Goes to War
IN THE 1990S, the war on drugs in the United States went from being a metaphor to a real war involving combat helicopters, military advisors, and dedicated army battalions. The zero tolerance paradigm that the United States embraced domestically in the 1980s provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. Although rooted in the long history of the regulation of drug consumption that has targeted particular marginal populations, zero tolerance emerged as a dominant policy apparatus during the Reagan administration. This paradigm viewed all illegal drugs as irreparably damaging to white middle-class youth. The overwhelming force of the military was required to prevent these commodities from passing through U.S. borders or to ensure their physical destruction during production and transit. Militarization and zero tolerance of drug use emerged from and employed the same set of cultural logics based on a totalizing ideal of overwhelming force and control. Both relied on conjuring dystopian futures through imagined threats. Both created new social relationships based on exclusionary visions that draw boundaries around enemies and allies, demand allegiance, and signal traitorous betrayal at any sign of opposition.
Dwight Eisenhower warned of the growing "military-industrial complex" in a 1961 speech at the close of his presidency. "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government," he told the nation. In the past three decades, a small but growing anthropological literature has focused on the evolving institutions, social practices, and cultural values facilitating the increasing domination of military institutions, technologies, and logics in multiple spheres of social life. As the pioneering scholar of militarization Cynthia Enloe reminds us, this process is not inevitable, nor is it transparent. A gun may be militarized or not, as may a toy or can of soup. Scholars have focused their inquiry around specific geographies, such as Catherine Lutz's study of Fayetteville, North Carolina; masculinities, in the case of Aaron Belkin's study of the entwined histories of U.S. gender ideologies and imperial projects; or the production of subjectivities as violence workers, as in Ken MacLeish's analysis of soldiers' communities in Fort Hood. Here I focus on the militarization of a policy. I am interested in the way in which an issue — defined as "drug policy" — comes to be dominated by military institutional practices, logics, and expertise.
This history is part of a larger genealogy of contemporary national security threats. To study such a genealogy involves tracing how threats and fear are produced and circulate, the role they play as structures of feeling within U.S. policymaking, and their state effects. Joseph Masco argues that the imaginaries of fear are central to the securitization of contemporary political life and the militarization of national security threats in the case of nuclear war and the so-called war on terror, tracing their deployment in discourses, technologies, and infrastructures. As Jutta Weldes reminds us in her masterful analysis of the events that became known as the Cuban missile crisis, threats do not simply arise, but are produced in relation to particular state identities and assumptions about national roles and character, and within distinct time scales. These threats are deployed to produce particular affective dispositions, political subjectivities, and scientific practices, as anthropologists have argued in the case of possible nuclear annihilation, biological hazards, and geological disasters. In this complex political terrain, the threat posed by the consumption of illegal drugs has come to encompass not only social values and the bodily integrity of particular youth populations but also national security. This threat now emanates from distant producers and traffickers. Fighting these new enemies requires the United States to secure new allies, in this case, the Colombian military forces.
Militarization of the drug war is only one small piece of the broader militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Spending on civilian diplomatic missions has decreased while that on the military has grown. This shift is reflected in the distribution of financial resource within state agencies. The State Department's operating bud get was cut 20 percent during the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in 22 percent fewer Foreign Service personnel and smaller embassy staffs around the world; more than thirty embassies and consulates shuttered their offices by the late 2000s. The difference in size between the civilian and military bureaucracies is enormous; compare the institutional weight of 6,000 Foreign Service officers and 2,000 USAID staff versus 1.68 million active-duty military personnel. The number of musicians employed in military bands is larger than the total staff of the State Department.
The military presence abroad has expanded through a growing network of U.S. bases and participation in advising missions and training operations. Many tasks that had been assigned to civilian agencies have been transferred to the military so that U.S. regional military commanders play a growing role in establishing mission mandates and developing in-country relationships. These shifts have had profound political consequences, as military leaders use "military-to-military relations to seduce countries into the U.S. sphere of ideas and geopolitical interests." Although overwhelmingly endorsed by U.S. civilian politicians, such arrangements also generate conflict between civilian leadership and military programs in the countries where they are carried out and in the case of U.S. civilian critics of these efforts.
In this chapter, I trace the emergence of the zero tolerance framework and how the U.S. Military Southern Command (SouthCom) successfully lobbied for an expanded military role in counternarcotics operations in the post–Cold War period. For much of the 1990s the Colombian National Police were the major U.S. partner in counternarcotics operations. Despite critiques of the military as an abusive, inefficient, and corrupt garrison force, in the late 1990s, the Colombian military was poised to replace the Colombian police as the primary recipients of U.S. assistance. Military aid became a solution to the Clinton administration's political vulnerability generated by Republican concern about domestic drug consumption and the ongoing culture wars. Increasing assistance to the Colombian military rather than the police allowed the Democratic administration to differentiate itself from the Republicans who were championing the Colombian National Police.
The expansion of militarized counternarcotics programs to primarily support the Colombian army required ideological and institutional work including the creation of new enemies justifying a military response. Yet these new enemies were not entirely new: U.S. policymakers merged the lingering Cold War fears of communism with the escalating concern of hyperviolent traffickers. To these policymakers the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) embodied both of these historical enemies. The narcoguerrilla label, used by U.S. Foreign Service officials to categorize insurgents throughout the continent during the Cold War, signaled the convergence of the FARC and the drug trade. The designation proved to be very sticky and was frequently recirculated by pundits and media outlets. This chapter also traces the erroneous assumptions at the heart of this policy narrative. The narcoguerrilla moniker falsely implied that the guerrillas were the drug traffickers at the center of the drug trade, in the process erasing the larger presence of paramilitary traffickers allied with the Colombian military.
Officials' fear of bureaucratic vulnerability played a central role in the mobilization of institutional support for these projects. Focused on the possible loss of political power, prestige, and control, this sense of vulnerability orients officials toward viewing themselves as charged with protecting their own vulnerable and besieged institutions. Efforts to promote the militarization of international drug programs were fundamentally bureaucratic processes, focused on gaining resources for the ongoing support and expansion of existing institutional programs. "Bureaucracy has been studied as a rationalizing apparatus, instigating discipline and organizing audit procedures, with no room for affect," Yael Navaro-Yashin writes. Yet as her research with the Turkish-Cypriot civil service reveals, bureaucracy "produces and incites specific modes of affectivity in its own right." As an "emotive domain," these institutional practices involve desire, reverence, resentment, irony, restraint, apathy and dissatisfaction. Fear, which is central to the affective experience of bureaucratic vulnerability, favors particular policy options — in this case, militarization. The U.S. military feared funding declines in the post–Cold War era; SouthCom wanted leverage for its expanded presence in Latin America and to bolster its role relative to other military divisions. The Clinton administration worried that attacks from Republican congressional leadership would further delegitimize the administration.
As an ethnographer the meetings that were the foundational practice of these bureaucratic efforts were off-limits to me; in some cases they were held in classified spaces (defined as secret allegedly to safeguard national security), and in every case they were subject to the institutional policing of attendance, the literal concern over who had a seat at the table. Those who did agree to speak with me insisted on anonymity — that they were speaking "on background" or could be identified only by general position or military rank. Much of this fieldwork was conducted over the phone or in meetings in chain restaurants and cafes. The tone and style of this chapter reproduce this disembodied institutional logic as recounted by participating officials.
Those office spaces I was able to access for interviews reflected both the imperial and bellicose aspirations of these institutions and their bureaucratic banality. Entering the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá requires traveling to a large compound, passing the outside perimeter wall and then through bronze doors two stories high, which open to a gray granite lobby with a four-story atrium and Marine guards behind bulletproof glass. But once inside, I discussed the history of counternarcotics operations and military training in beige cubicles, personalized only by coffee mugs. Approaching the neatly mowed campus of the Joint Interagency Task Force South, which coordinates counterdrug missions off the Florida Keys, I encountered a homemade submarine sitting in a circle of crushed gravel lined with white stones. I was instructed that no picture taking was allowed (national security again?), but was proudly told the story of the capture of this vessel, its lone sailor, and hundreds of pounds of cocaine. Inside, the walls of the offices where I received my briefings were featureless particleboard decorated with smudgy white boards. A few days earlier I had spent the day at the Miami headquarters of SouthCom, an anonymous glass and concrete office building along a highway surrounded by parking lots. In my fieldnotes, I reflected at the end of that visit on "the shabby similarity of all the Army offices I have been in," with the same generic institutional accouterments, while "[all the people I see while waiting] are dressed the same, in desert camouflage uniforms with boots — although clearly office style, with the Major's uniform including two pens in pen holders sewn into the forearms." However, the offices of higher ranked officers and civilian advisors did feature accessories that signaled a connection to Latin America: an oversized coffee-table book of photographs of Colombia, handmade artisanía clocks, or baseball caps emblazoned with logos in Spanish of military units. Because of my limited access to these spaces and the daily practices of the officials who worked within them, I do not focus on these realms in this book, but rather trace the institutional narratives and histories that made possible the militarization of drug policy and made it legible as a rational public project.
Emergence of the Zero Tolerance Paradigm
President Richard Nixon (1969–74) declared the first U.S. "war on drugs" in 1971. His administration focused on the rising rates of heroin addiction among veterans of the wars in Southeast Asia. In contrast to drug consumers who were associated with crime and social deviance, as soldiers these addicts were viewed as worthy subjects for rehabilitation. For the first and only time in American history, treatment on demand was made available, and medical professionals drove drug policy. However, Nixon's antidrug rhetoric still linked drug consumption and crime as part of his larger law-and-order agenda, defining drug treatment as an anticrime program and exacerbating social fears of criminal drug users. At the same time, Nixon and other conservatives were increasingly critical of the escalating recreational drug use among youth during the 1960s that was linked to political opposition and social unrest. Richard Nixon told an anxious public, "To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war on drugs."
Concern about white middle-class drug use came to a head in the 1980s with the creation of what became the "most powerful lobbying group in the country." In the late 1970s, a small group of concerned parents had organized Families in Action, which expanded to become the National Federation of Parents for Drug Free Youth and was soon a major player in drug policy debates. After the election of Ronald Reagan, these lobbyists worked with the First Lady to redefine drug policy around the adage "just say no." Reacting to the widely perceived decline in parental authority and so-called traditional values, this first wave of what became the culture wars of the 1980s was not concerned with teenage drinking or cigarette smoking, but rather saw white middle-class youth as profoundly vulnerable to illegal drug use. "We had a sense of something invading our families, of being taken over by a culture that was very dangerous, very menacing," said Marsha "Keith" Schuchard, who became a founder of the parent's movement because of her outrage against marijuana use. Describing "serious behavioral changes" in their children and decrying the "deterioration of values," this group produced a widely circulated booklet, Parents, Peers, and Pot, which contained a scalding critique of "youth culture" and its tendency to undermine "the traditional authorities who could nurture a young person's ability to reject drug use."
In the view of these parent groups, any exposure to drugs inevitably led to extreme addiction. Their publications wildly exaggerated the negative health effects of marijuana and its dangers. By rejecting the scientific consensus that marijuana use was relatively benign (the view held at the time by several senior drug policy officials in the Carter administration, who supported the decriminalization of marijuana consumption), these parent groups proclaimed themselves "the real counterculture." "The parents' movement turned [the previous] policy upside down. Their concern was not with inner-city addicts, but with suburban teenagers, not with heroin but with pot, and not with treatment but with 'zero tolerance.'" According to Michael Massing's account of the evolution of U.S. drug policy, these parents and policymakers felt that "the notion of recovery meant that addicts could get well — a message that, they felt, undermined their warning to young people not to use drugs." This view was echoed by prominent drug policy officials, including the first "drug czar" appointed by the first President Bush, literature professor William Bennett. According to his aides, the Office of National Drug Control policy "was not directed at hard-core addicts. They consumed the vast bulk of the drugs, and contributed a significant part of the crime, but they weren't the main threat to your kids becoming drug users." The white parents' movement and Reagan-appointed policymakers rejected science-based studies of addiction in their focus on preventing white middle-class children from gaining access to drugs, attempting to terrorize them into rejecting consumption.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats by Winifred Tate. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe introduction focuses on defining the central terms and agenda of an anthropology of policy. The chapter argues that policy narratives play a central role in making politics legible, that is, coherent and comprehensible, rather then setting out a concrete plan for future action. This chapter analyzes the process of policy problematization, through which particular social relationships, identities and practices are defined as requiring institutional intervention from the state, and how policy production generates alliances and support among competing bureaucracies through strategic ambiguity providing an appearance of institutional coherence and consensus among disparate programs. Such ambiguity also limits dissent and opposition. This chapter analyzes the challenges of ethnographic research on policy, developing the concept of "embedded ethnography," in which ethnographiers have taken on positions within organizations not as researchers, but in institutional roles gain valuable insight that enrich their later anthropological analysis.
1Domestic Drug Policy Goes to War chapter abstractThis chapter argues that the zero tolerance paradigm that the U.S. embraced domestically in the 1980s provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. It begins with the history of the contemporary US war on drugs beginning with the Nixon Administration and traces how illegal narcotics emerged as a national security threat, requiring the war-fighting machinery of the U.S. to be applied in concert with foreign militaries throughout the Western Hemisphere and the reorientation of the military industrial bureaucracy. Increased military roles bolstered a range of institutional interests, including the U.S. Southern Command's efforts to increase their mission profile and Democratic concerns about the culture wars. The labeling of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as a narcoguerrilla meta-threat merged lingering Cold War fears of Communism with the escalating concern of hyper-violent traffickers.
2Human Rights Policymaking and Military Aid chapter abstractChapter 2 tells the story of how an increasingly professionalized human rights lobby attempted to transform their documentation of abuses into specific policy reforms. Many of these activist practices originated with the Central America peace movement of the 1980s. One of the most important examples of human rights legislation was the Leahy Law, which prohibited US military counternarcotics assistance to foreign military units facing credible allegations of abuses, and its unintended consequences. First passed in 1997, the law emerged from strategic alliances between elite NGO advocates, grassroots activists and critically located Congressional aides. This chapter explores the resulting transformation of aid delivery: rather than suspend aid when no "clean" units could be found, US officials convinced their Colombian allies to create new units consisting of vetted soldiers. Implementation of the law reveals the knowledge practices inherent in policy implementation, the social production of credibility, and erased some forms of violence.
3Paramilitary Proxies chapter abstractChapter 3 examines evolving forms of counterinsurgency violence, arguing that the paramilitaries emerged as state proxies in part because of the human rights legislation that demanded accountability from official actors.
4Living Under Many Laws chapter abstractChapter 4 describes the strategies employed by Putumayans to shape their political future while living in a region contested by multiple actors claiming the right to govern during the coca boom of the 1990s. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, the FARC were the dominant power in the region, regulating local conflicts, organizing collective work, and imposing their rules. The Catholic Church played a critical role in developing a vision of peasant autonomy and political participation. Despite repeated protests and ongoing lobbying efforts, local farmers were unable to shift the counternarcotics program imposed by the US: aerial spraying of chemical herbicides. Beginning in the late 1990s, United Self Defense Forces paramilitary forces working with military commanders terrorized the region in order to consolidate their social and territorial control. Despite their criminalization and repression, peasant farmers in Putumayo used a range of tactics to encourage state presence in the region.
5Origin Stories chapter abstractChapter 5 employs origin stories produced through oral history interviews with policymakers to reveal agency and institutional action frequently hidden in public policy debates. The officials describe Plan Colombia as emerging from a range of policy priorities: a domestic counternarcotics policy intended to address the Clinton's administration moral crisis, a peace plan to bolster Colombian President Andres Pastrana's negotiations with the FARC, or a counterinsurgency program to defeat the Colombian guerrillas. This strategic ambiguity enabled the range of institutional alliances to coalesce in support of military aid. This chapter explores the functioning of the Plan Colombia Interagency Task Force, charged with creating Plan Colombia. The Colombian diplomatic corps also played an active role in shaping the aid package to fit their political agenda. Yet some lower ranking officials disputed the description of Plan Colombia as a consensus plan; they were the losers in the bureaucratic battles dominated by militarization.
6Competing Solidarities chapter abstractThis chapter explores how solidarity emerges from the resonance of a particular issue or population has with a set of could-be advocates and materially made through institutional and organizational channels. Supporters and critics imagined themselves as acting in solidarity with distinct categories of Colombians, from counternarcotics soldiers to human rights activists. For critics of Plan Colombia, this process reactivated activist identities and commitments, legacies of the Central American peace movement. The focus of this chapter is travel as a technique of emotional management, producing new forms of political subjectivities accompanied by expectations of political action. Travel played a central role in the construction of distinct sensory, affective and moral geographies. Congressional delegations focused on militarized technology, weaponry and enacted scenarios of counternarcotics operations. These excursions were channeled into larger political field valorizing militarized expertise delineating the boundaries of appropriate policy debates.
7Putumayan Policymaking chapter abstractChapter 7 explores how elected officials and local residents resisted criminalization and exclusion, attempted to engage distant powers and mobilized to shape the policies impacting their region, presenting policy alternatives through scientific efforts to document the harms of fumigation, depoliticized development proposals, and testimony. Although these efforts were invisible or discounted in official Washington policymaking arenas, the policy imaginaries and practices of the targets of intervention are a critical site for apprehending the full process of policymaking. Putumayan activists participated in proxy citizenship, the mechanism through which certain rights of citizenship—the ability to make claims for redress to a state—are conferred on activists through relationships with NGOs. This process generated political opportunities, created new citizenship subjectivities but also involved political costs, as activists were forced to transform their claims and their profound critiques of US policy were remade into support for US programs.
Conclusion: Plan Colombia in the US Policymaking Imagination chapter abstractU.S. intervention in Colombia has been widely praised as a success to be replicated in other sites. The conclusion analyze these claims to success and what constitutes "the Colombian miracle," as the title of a 2010 National Standard article put it. The life stories of three residents of Putumayo challenge this triumphal narrative, offering in their place sober assessments of damage in the region, including the failures and catastrophic results of counternarcotics programs, the economic and political legacies of paramilitarism, and the complexities of community security. This chapter argues that an anthropological approach necessarily includes the appraisals of policymakers and analysts and the targets of policy, their efforts to shape these programs and their reflections on the process. Examining democracy promotion and nation-building efforts reveal that such projects are less involved with encouraging widespread involvement in governance than facilitating specific policy outcomes.