Explicit Narcotization: US Policy Toward Colombia During the Presidential Administration of Ernesto Samper ( )

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1 Explicit Narcotization: US Policy Toward Colombia During the Presidential Administration of Ernesto Samper ( ) Dr. Russell Crandall, Department of Political Science, Davidson College Davidson, North Carolina Phone (704) ; Document prepared for the Latin American Studies Association Conference, Washington DC, September Introduction In the summer of 2000 the United States government approved a US$1.3 billion supplemental assistance package for Colombia, consisting mainly of counternarcoticsrelated aid. 1 This sum was actually greater than what the Clinton administration had originally requested, as at the last minute Congress tacked on some additional counternarcotics funding. The size of this package reveals the fact that the Clinton White House considered current Colombian president Andrés Pastrana to be a strong regional ally, above all in the fight against drugs. Even more importantly, the consensus in Congress and the Executive Branch surrounding the assistance package strongly suggests that narcotics-related issues will continue to dominate US policy toward Colombia for the foreseeable future. This willingness on the part of the United States to invest such a large sum of money in order to bolster the battered Pastrana administration s efforts to deal with Colombia s myriad problems drug cultivation and trafficking in particular--is a far cry from the acerbic and strained nature of the relationship between Washington and Bogota during the tenure of Pastrana s predecessor, Ernesto Samper. In fact, during the years 1994 to

2 1998 when Ernesto Samper was president of Colombia, the US-Colombian bilateral relationship was deeply strained, and in many respects a normal relationship barely existed. This era in the bilateral relationship provides critical lessons for the current state of US policy toward Colombia one that has now become a key foreign policy issue for the United States. The story of US-Colombian relations during the Samper years reveals a highly interventionist style of foreign policy on part of the United States, driven overwhelmingly by the United States unyielding focus on the war on drugs. Ultimately, while it was initially successful in achieving many of its drug-related goals, this policy of isolating Ernesto Samper served to weaken the Colombian state at a crucial time when both leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries were vastly increasing their activity throughout the Colombian countryside. It was only at the end of the Samper s term of office did the US government to realize the counterproductive nature of its policy. Since that time the Clinton Administration reversed its policy of isolation and has replaced it with aggressive support for Andrés Pastrana s government, best revealed by the unprecedented move to drastically increase assistance for the war-torn country. However, as we shall see, the Clinton Administration's new Colombia policy is in many ways more business as usual: The US' obsession with fighting drugs by definition places other issues on the back burner. At first glance the notion that the United States adopted such a vitriolic stance toward Colombia between 1994 and 1998 might seem strange, as throughout the twentieth

3 century Colombia had maintained unusually close ties with the United States. Yet, most of these warm ties were enjoyed before the advent of the United States war on drugs in the 1980s that targeted the Andean region-- and above all Colombia-- as the place where the US would draw the line against the scourge of illicit drugs entering its shores. Once this point is understood, along with the fact that the war on drugs is considered to be a vital national interest, it makes more sense why the United States was willing to go to such lengths to win this war, even if it meant infringing upon the sovereignty and crippling relations with one of its most trusted regional allies. This situation exacerbated an already delicate bilateral relationship as, for the first time since the war on drugs began in earnest in the mid 1980s, the United States shifted its counternarcotics strategies from focusing on arresting drug kingpins and interdicting drug trafficking, to aggressively--and publicly-- attempting to bring down the scandalridden but democratically elected president of Colombia. This conflict made the relationship between the United States and the Samper administration one of the most abrasive episodes in US-Latin American relations since the end of the Cold War. This fact is probably best exemplified when the US revoked Samper s visa in July 1996, making him only the second head of state to receive this dubious honor. 2 Although US-Colombian relations were virtually frozen during this period, this did not mean that the United States was unable to execute its policies. Rather, we have the interesting paradox whereby US-Colombian relations during the Samper administration were at their lowest point in history, but the ability of the United States to carry out its Colombia policy--which at this time had become almost indistinguishable from US drug policy toward Colombia-- was relatively unhindered. The solution to this puzzle is

4 that, since he lacked credibility on the drug issue due to the suspected links to the Cali cartel, Ernesto Samper had little choice but to cooperate with the United States counternarcotics efforts, no matter how much he might have personally detested them. Over the course of these four years, the United States continuously placed Samper on the defensive by forcing him to prove that he was clean on the drug issue. This strategy allowed the US to exploit Samper s drug links which at that point consisted mainly of the accusation that Samper s campaign received US$6 million from the Cali drug cartel -- by forcing him to do even more in the anti-drug arena than he normally would have done had he never been suspected of receiving payments from the drug cartels. This is ironic because Ernesto Samper carried out Washington s wishes on the anti-drug front with more vigor and success than any of his predecessors, including President César Gaviria ( ) who was seen by many in Washington to be the archetype of a reliable anti-drug ally. Furthermore, since the bilateral relationship became so polarized during Samper s tenure, the United States was often able to circumvent Samper and work directly with what it believed were trusted counternarcotics allies in the Colombian Armed Forces, specifically the National Police. Consequently, the United States was free to pursue its foreign policy goals both within and outside the Samper administration. While the US government was truly uncomfortable working with the corrupt Samper administration, there was much more behind the fall-off in US-Colombian relations than just a moral stand by the United States. Rather, the US stance toward the Samper administration had almost as much to do with US counternarcotics policy as it did with

5 Samper s ethics. Bolstering this view is that many of the most damaging revelations related to Samper s trustworthiness came well after the United States had already decertified Colombia for not doing enough on the drug front. This leads one to believe that, if Samper had better satisfied the US counternarcotics demands, the United States would have been more willing to overlook Samper s links to the drug cartels. Also, confronted with a drug war that had failed to curb the flow of narcotics into the United States, the State Department used the drug-tainted Samper administration as a convenient scapegoat to mollify a Republican-controlled US Congress that was demanding demonstrable success on the drug front. Nature and Theoretical Importance of Study Most scholars of US-Latin American relations agree that the United States policies toward Latin America during the Cold War were above primarily concerned with the threat of communist infiltration and expansion. Even if it meant allying itself with authoritarian regimes or helping to overthrow democratically elected governments, the United States went to great extremes to maintain its regional security objectives, above all preventing communism from gaining a foothold in the hemisphere. 3 Now that the Soviet Union ceases to exist and Marxist-Leninist ideology has been largely discredited across the globe, the United States can no longer use this framework to formulate policy in the region. Indeed, there must be a new model for understanding the United States foreign and security policies in the hemisphere.

6 Yet, in the decade since the end of the Cold War, it has proved difficult to create convincing new explanatory paradigms (Desch, 1999; Fishlow, 1999). This article argues that the United States overriding priorities in Latin America since the end of the Cold War are increasingly linked to intermestic issues (combining international and domestic concerns), such as immigration and the drug war. 4 Specifically, in intermestic-driven cases such as Colombia, US policy tends to be characterized by competition among the involved US agencies, personalized diplomacy, and greater intervention in the domestic political situation of the subordinate state. And it is true that US policy in Colombia during the 1990s was often characterized by heated differences of opinion among the various involved US organizations, with a good share of the in-fighting taking place between the Republican dominated Congress and the State Department. The debate surrounding US policy toward Colombia was not as acerbic or polemical as was the case with, for example, US policy toward Central America in the 1980s. But if one glances at the dozens of congressional hearings that dealt with Colombia during these years, one might conclude that there were sharp disagreements over the nature of US policies, especially between Congress and the State Department. Yet, with a closer look it becomes clear that these seemingly acerbic political disputes were actually episodes in which both sides generally agreed with each other. Disagreements came, for example, not over whether to send helicopters to the Colombian National Police, but how many should the United States send. Indeed, there was a surprising degree of agreement on the various polices that the United States should take toward the Colombian government. That this level of

7 agreement over US policy toward Colombia almost invariably revolved around counternarcotics issues is yet another indication that drugs had so overtaken other bilateral issues (e.g. government-guerrilla peace talks, human rights, commercial ties) as to almost make them largely non-existent by comparison. Thus, the answer to why the United States was willing to allow its bilateral relationship with Colombia to implode has its roots in the domestic-driven national interest concern that is the war on drugs. When taken in its aggregate, US policy toward Colombia produces the unusual result of being at once bureaucratic and realist: on one level it is characterized by intense bureaucratic competition, seemingly devoid of any type of overarching strategic policy; on another, US policy toward Colombia is marked by a consensus that crosses ideological boundaries, united in the belief that the war on drugs is both necessary and vital to US national interests. 5 As will be shown in this article, it is ultimately the national interest concern (i.e. war on drugs) that overrides the bureaucratic politics factors, thus making US policy surprisingly realist. The Samper years provide sober lessons for how the United States has conducted policy in such situations, something that will help us better predict how it might act in the future. These findings also hold important ramifications for how we understand current and future hemispheric-wide trends in US policy. 6 In short, Colombia represents the type of potential security crisis that the United States will be confronted with in the post-cold War era. While these types of crises will not be common, when they occur they will hold Washington s attention and the threat to regional stability and US security interests will be considerable. Moreover, the US response to these crises--while they will be erratic and highly influenced by domestic political concerns--will ultimately be

8 characterized as realist policies, reflecting the dominance of national interest over bureaucratic factors. Dominant-Subordinate State Relationship By assuming that individual states seek to maximize their power within the international arena, realism allows us to study the interaction between two states like the United States and Colombia. Yet, it is necessary to expand on this realist premise by placing the United States and Colombia in a dominant-subordinate context in order to see how - two countries standing toward each other drives their relations. In our case at hand we can assume that, due to its enormous economic and political power, the United States is the dominant power and, by definition, Colombia the subordinate power. David Abernathy provides us with a helpful definition of the dominant-subordinate model (Abernathy, 1986). The first fundamental tenet of the dominant-subordinate relationship is that the two involved states interact with each other on a wide range of military, diplomatic, economic and intermestic issues. 7 As Abernathy writes, this relationship has historical depth meaning that the two countries have experienced recurrent patterns of interaction over the period of at least a decade that enable us to generalize with a reasonable degree of confidence and that permit us to make projections and speculations about the future (Abernathy, 1986, 105). Normally it is the subordinate state that experiences the most serious and lasting consequences from the interaction. Applied to the case of the US-Colombian relationship, this is undeniably true as Colombia has clearly been the country that has been most affected by the nature of the bilateral relationship.

9 Another characteristic of this framework is that the two states differ in their abilities to enforce compliance upon the other if the other prefers not to comply (Abernathy, 1986: 106). A pertinent example of this type of asymmetric relationship could be the ability of the United States to decertify Colombia on its counternarcotics efforts, but the inability of Colombia to decertify the United States. Additionally, the dominant state can and will use coercive power in order to gain this compliance. The result for the subordinate state is that its capacity for autonomous action is constrained by the actions of the dominant states; leaders in the subordinate state must incorporate the dominant state s domestic and foreign policies into their own policy process. Indeed, as will be shown, Ernesto Samper spent a great deal of his presidency calculating and responding to what he perceived to be Washington s concerns and predilections. The last major characteristic of the framework is that government officials and agencies from the dominant state play a direct and at times public role in the subordinate state s domestic political arena. In the case of Colombia, a handful of US officials played an extremely influential and public role in Colombian domestic affairs, perhaps best manifested when one senior Colombian official called ambassador Myles Frechette the new viceroy. Using this framework, the dominant state is thought to act in a rational manner in order to maximize its control and benefits from the subordinate state. But as will be shown later in this chapter, foreign policy decisions never solely reflect a completely rational decision made according to national interests. Rather, bureaucratic decision making and bureaucratic competition also influence policymaking. Accordingly, when we look at the case of US policy toward Colombia, we will see that realism alone does not

10 adequately describe or predict reality. That is, realism s assumption that the United States seeks to influence Colombia solely to maximize its national interest is both too vague and simplistic. To that end, the dominant-subordinate state model is most useful when incorporated into the broader conceptual framework, allowing for both realist and bureaucratic interpretations. US Policy Toward Colombia Leading up to the Samper Administration Back in the late 1980s public concern over America s drug problem reached unprecedented levels. The US media reported on an almost a daily basis how the scourge of crack cocaine was infecting America s cities and how thousands of crack babies were being born. Tellingly, a CBS News/New York Times poll published in March 1988 said that 48 percent of the US public considered drugs to be the principal challenge that the United States faced in foreign policy and 63 percent thought drugs should take precedence over the anti-communist struggle (Tokatlian, 1994:103). George Bush picked up on this perceived need to do something about the drug problem and made international drug interdiction and eradication efforts a fundamental component of his newly declared war on drugs. In a 1988 campaign speech Bush declared, The logic is simple. The cheapest way to eradicate narcotics is to destroy them at their source We need to wipe out crops wherever they are grown and take out labs wherever they exist. (Andreas et al. 1988; Perl, 1988) In short, the arrival of the Bush administration--and the concomitant end of the Cold War--underscored the fact that drugs had now replaced communism as the number one threat to the United States in Latin America. 8

11 At the same time that the United States was making drug interdiction a national security priority, events in Colombia quickly made the country a focus for the United States heightened drug interdiction efforts. Due to the partially successful peace negotiations during the presidential administration of Belisario Betancur ( ), many guerrillas laid down their arms and integrated themselves into the orthodox political system, with a good number of them forming a new political group Union Patriótica (UP). At the same time, however, the cocaine business in Colombia was beginning to explode and newly wealthy drug traffickers were declaring war on these ex-guerrillas, believing that their moves toward political integration were actually thinly veiled attempts to continue their revolutionary agenda through seemingly legitimate means. This explosive mix of drug traffickers and former guerrillas resulted in the assassination of several ex-guerrillas cum politicians. For example, on August 27, 1987 former UP presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal was killed by orders from drug traffickers; a few years later on March 22, 1990, UP presidential candidate Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa was assassinated; and a month later M-19 presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro Leongómez was also killed. All in all, over one thousand members of UP, as well as countless other ex-guerrillas, were killed during the 1980s and early 1990s, with the vast majority of the deaths coming at the hands of the drug trafficker-financed paramilitary groups. Regardless of how many ex-guerrillas were killed by drug-financed groups, it was the brutal assassination of Liberal Party presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán on August 18, 1989 that prompted the United States to get more involved in Colombia.

12 Washington viewed Galán as a reliable and modernizing politician who was committed to warm relations with the United States. His violent death horrified many US government officials, who now came to believe that much more needed to be done to support the Colombian government in its fight against the drug traffickers. The US quickly sent an additional US$65 million in counternarcotics aid (US$10 million was the original budgeted amount for 1989). Then on September 5, 1989 President Bush announced his five-year US$2.2 billion Andean Initiative whose goal was to put an end to drug cultivation and trafficking in the Andes. (USGAO, 1993). This initiative resulted in making the Andes, rather than Central America where by now most of the civil conflicts had been resolved peacefully, the leading recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere, another sign that the United States focus had switched from communism to drugs (Americas Watch, 1990). While the Andean Initiative strategy did vastly increase the US involvement in the drug war in Colombia, by the end of 1992 there was widespread agreement within the US government that the plan had failed miserably in its effort to reduce the amount of cocaine and heroine entering the United States. Indeed, after three years passed and US$2.2 billion were spent implementing the Andean Initiative, cocaine was as cheap and plentiful as ever on America s streets. According to Congressman Charles Schumer (D-NY), by every objective standard, the President s Andean strategy has failed. (Treaster, 1992) Compounding this inability to stem the flow of drugs was the fact that the US military s focus on the war on drugs had been diverted due to the Persian Gulf War, which it considered more important than anti-drug efforts in the Andes. (McGeal and Ross, 1991)

13 The Clinton Administration Confronts the Drug War in Colombia The subsequent election of Bill Clinton ensured that at least initially the United States anti-drug efforts in the Andes were not expanded but actually reduced. In early 1993, the Clinton Administration conducted an extensive classified review of drug eradication and interdiction programs in the Andes and concluded that efforts to date had been ineffective. The end result was that the planned fiscal year 1993 US$387 billion in antidrug aid for the Andean countries was slashed to US$174. (Notimex, 1993) The staff of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was reduced from 146 positions to 25. Yet, any possibility for significant long-term reduction in the United States couternarcotics efforts in the Andes was ended when the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress following the 1994 mid-term elections. While it is clear that Democrats can be as hawkish on the drug issue as their Republican counterparts, the Republican majority nonetheless turned up the heat on the war on drugs. This fact had grave consequences for the new scandal-ridden president of Colombia, Ernesto Samper, who happened to be taking office at around the same time as the Republicans convincing electoral victories. The end result of the Republican electoral victory is that the policy momentum shifted toward a US Congress that was much more hawkish on the drug issue than the Clinton White House. Thus, the move toward a scaled-down anti-drug program in the Andes during the first year of the Clinton Administration proved ephemeral, replaced by the Republican-led

14 belief that the US needed to continue to fight the war on drugs at its source down in Latin America. In other words, any move by Washington toward denarcotization was over, replaced by the revival of the war on drugs. That this shift was coupled with the election of a narco-president in Colombia held serious consequences for the bilateral relationship. It should also be pointed out, however, that by the year reflected in its US$1.3 billion heavily anti-drug weighted assistance package for Andrés Pastrana-- the Clinton Administration has in many ways now outflanked congressional Republicans on the drug issue. Although there were suspicions about President Samper s drug involvement during the early stages of his presidency, many of the sparks between the United States and Colombia were not necessarily related to the United States view of Samper. Rather, in the last year of his presidency César Gaviria s anti-drug credentials were becoming increasingly suspect in Washington, which in turn cooled the bilateral relationship. This was due mainly to the perception that, after successfully dismantling the Medellín cartel, Gaviria had subsequently gone soft on the Cali cartel (McClean, 1999). While these controversies rankled the Washington-Bogota relationship throughout the Gaviria years, they had never significantly changed Washington s confidence in César Gaviria himself. By the end of his administration, however, this changed markedly as Washington increasingly realized that Gaviria was not the docile ally that they had once believed he was. In many ways, while for the first few years of his administration he was considered by Washington to be a reliable, effective ally in the war on drugs, Gaviria s increasingly tough, independent stance toward Washington on the drug issue helps to explain why the US government was initially eager to work with Samper. Even

15 though for years US officials had believed that he had links to the drug cartels, Samper represented a welcome change. In short, when Samper was elected president in 1994 Washington basically thought that Samper was far from perfect, but could not be any worse than what Gaviria turned out to be. Yet, the post-gaviria honeymoon between the United States and Samper proved short-lived. Quickly, the relationship deteriorated into a seemingly counterproductive shouting match. And much of the reason for this deterioration lay in that, especially with the Republicans in control of Congress after 1994, Washington s litmus test for strong bilateral relations with Colombia had become much more stringent, a point not lost on the new president of Colombia. The Samper Presidency: Poor Relations from the Beginning The United States view of Ernesto Samper as a reliable ally in the war on drugs began to sour well before he took office in August of Beginning in 1982 when Samper was the campaign manager of Liberal Party presidential candidate Alfonso López Michelsen, the US government had suspected Samper of taking bribes from drug traffickers (Watson, 1999). 9 This suspicion was compounded on November 14, 1984, when Cali cartel kingpin Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela was arrested in Spain and officials found Samper s unlisted phone number in Rodríguez Orejuela s address book. (El Tiempo, 1995a) Compounding this problem was clearly the fact that, since Samper had advocated drug legalization in the late 1970s and early 1980s, US officials viewed him as potentially soft on the drug issue. Samper was known as Mr. Legalization by many in the US government. (McClean, 1999)

16 Whatever evidence the United States government had of Ernesto Samper s links to the Cali cartel was corroborated on June 16, 1994 when Conservative Party presidential candidate Andrés Pastrana s campaign manager, Luis Alberto Moreno, walked into the US embassy in Bogota and delivered to Ambassador Morris Busby tapes of police intercepts that he had received on June On one of the tapes Cali drug leader Miguel Rodríguez apparently tells journalist Alberto Loco Girardo that he has made arrangements to move US$3.5 million into Samper s campaign (Cañon, 1998:2-56). Moreno, knowing that if the Conservatives released the tapes it would look like a ploy to steal the election, hoped that the US embassy would make the tapes public. Officials in the US State Department, however, thought the issue too delicate and instead directed Busby not to leak the tapes to the press. A few days later on June 19, Samper narrowly defeated Pastrana, with many observers believing in hindsight that the badly needed funds that the Samper campaign received from the Cali cartel probably made the difference between victory and defeat. Fed up with what he believed was a whitewash of a candidate who was in the pocket of drug traffickers, Bogota-based United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Joe Toft leaked the narco-cassettes to the press. Even though Toft resigned from the DEA only six weeks later, the firestorm that he created by leaking the tapes has left an indelible legacy on the Colombian political system. The narco-cassettes ignited a farreaching investigation of those Colombian government officials believed to have ties to drug traffickers (El Tiempo, 1994). The investigation came to be called the Proceso 8000 case, and before it was over, Samper s attorney general, defense minister, and

17 campaign treasurer, along with several other legislators, were convicted of drug money related crimes. When soon after the election president-elect Samper met with US officials, they made it clear to him that he would have to cooperate on the drug issue if his administration was going to have a normal relationship with the United States. (Skol, 1999) While indignant, Samper agreed to most of the US demands, which included that he replace National Police Commander General Octavio Vargas Silva, whose name was also mentioned on the narco-cassettes, with General Rosso José Serrano. Interestingly, while they may have not been fully aware at that time of its eventual impact, the successful US effort to bring in General Serrano to head the National Police would turn out to be a key move--and victory from the US perspective-- in that it allowed the United States to continue its counternarcotics efforts, even while it increasingly isolated the Samper administration. In other words, while General Serrano was still technically under the command of Samper, US policy gradually adopted a bifurcated nature whereby it supported and cooperated with its good guys such as General Serrano and Chief Prosecutor Alfonso Valdivieso, while attacking the bad guys (i.e. those suspected of drug links) such as Samper and his Interior Minister Horacio Serpa. It surprised few, therefore, when relatively low-level Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit led the United States delegation to Samper s inauguration, while the presidents of eight Latin American countries were present (Buckman, 1994).

18 While Ernesto Samper was eventually pressured to do more on the drug war issue than any of his predecessors in order for him to have the semblance of good relations with the United States, for the rest of 1994 US-Colombian relations were actually quite cordial. The United States government-- especially US Ambassador in Colombia Myles Frechette and Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Robert Gelbard--remained deeply suspicious of Samper, but Washington was generally pleased with the new administration, mostly because it seemed that Ernesto Samper was going to be tougher on drugs than César Gaviria. For example, in December 1994 Samper launched Operation Splendor, an operation that consisted primarily of illicit crop fumigations in the southern departments of Guaviare and Putumayo. The fumigation efforts clearly pleased Washington, but infuriated the campesinos in these areas who made their livelihood from growing illicit crops. Soon after the operation started, thousands of campesinos marched demanding an end to the spraying, occupied seven oil-pumping stations, and blew up 40,000 barrels of oil coming from Ecuador. Samper ordered the military to forcibly remove the protesters and also set up a US$150 million fund for crop substitution. (The Economist, 1995) These types of sporadic yet unprecedented counter-narcotics actions came to characterize Ernesto Samper s presidency, and often took place right before or after key US decisions on Colombia such as drug certification or the revocation of his visa, suggesting that US arm-twisting on the drug issue was having the desired effect-- at least for the United States. Knowing that critics both in Colombia and Washington were highly dubious about Samper s willingness to fight the war on drugs, Samper was forced to go even further in this area than he or the United States ever imagined.

19 Ironically then, the supposedly narco-compromised presidency of Ernesto Samper ended up-- whether he liked it or not--being a reliable and predictable ally with Washington vis-à-vis the war on drugs. The credibility gap that Ernesto Samper had incurred stemming from his earlier promotion of drug legalization, and compounded by the narco-cassette revelations, forced him to govern Colombia with one eye focused on Washington. From the US government s perspective, this concern with US opinion served its interests: they knew that Samper had to prove himself, so they constantly put pressure on him to escalate his anti-drug policies. Yet, while Samper did indeed take a stronger stance on the drug issue--definitely stronger than that of Gaviria-- it was still not enough to appease the United States government, especially some influential US Congressmen. This dissatisfaction arose despite the fact that the Colombian government went to great lengths in Washington to convince the US government that Colombia was cooperating on the drug front (El Tiempo, 1995b). In February 1995, for example, Samper sent a letter over the next few years he would send several--to the US Congress that listed the Colombian government s counternarcotics achievements. Relations between the Samper government and Washington took a turn for the worse during a May 27, 1995 meeting in Colombia between Robert Gelbard and Foreign Minister Rodrigo Pardo. The meeting was apparently going well until the issue of DEA agents operating in Colombia came up. A few weeks earlier on May 15, Pardo had sent Myles Frechette a letter that listed nine new conditions limiting DEA agents conduct in Colombia, including one that DEA agents must inform Colombian officials of their activities. The reaction from the US government was predictably negative to these new

20 conditions. So when this issue surfaced in the meeting between Gelbard and Pardo, it sparked a heated exchange in which Gelbard stated that Pardo, could not talk to the United States that way. Pardo replied that, in Colombia we can. (El Tiempo, 1995c) The Crackdown on the Cali Cartel The combination of pressure from both the State Department and Congress no doubt had an influence on Samper s subsequent decision to crack down on the Cali cartel. Not long after Colombia received the stern warning in the form of a national interest waiver during the annual drug certification process in March 1995, Samper announced that he was deploying 6,000 elite troops to Cali to search for drug leaders and that he would press to make money-laundering a crime for the first time (El Tiempo, 1995c). Yet, these actions did not prevent Colombia from being decertified the following year, further suggesting that, beginning the latter part of 1995 and following through 1997, the US government had become increasingly obsessed with Ernesto Samper himself. When General Serrano returned from his post in Washington to take over as head of the Colombian National Police, even his most loyal supporters could not have imagined how effective he would be in bringing down the Cali cartel. Upon assuming office, Serrano quickly fired scores of whom he believed were corrupt officers, including three colonels, thirteen lieutenant colonels, 25 majors, and 26 other mid-level officers. He also fired several thousand rank and file police officers (Menzel, 1997: ). Equipped with up-to-the-minute intelligence information from the CIA and DEA, the Colombian security forces then set sight on the Cali cartel, most notably in early 1995 when they formed an elite Cali-based police squad modeled after the famous squad

21 Bloque de Búsqueda that had worked effectively in tracking down and killing Medellín cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar a few years earlier. The squad consisted of 6,000 special forces and conducted over 200 raids against the Cali cartel and related criminal organizations. Six months later this elite squad--by this time it had moved its base to Bogota and instead flew into Cali unannounced so as to reduce the chances that corrupt officials in Cali would compromise its operations--began raiding businesses and homes of the Cali drug leaders. They seized files, computer disks, and other evidence and used them to implicate the kingpins, as well as uncover connections between the traffickers and politicians or other government officials. General Serrano s results were unprecedented in the Colombian government s decades-long fight against drug traffickers. Serrano s unit arrested the very kingpins that the United States had demanded at the time of the issuance of the national security waiver earlier this same year. While there is little doubt that much of the credit for the crackdown does in fact need to go to the efforts of General Serrano and his men, some Colombian officials who worked with Samper believe that he truly was committed to doing something about the drug issue in order to demonstrate to the Colombian populace that he was serious about the drug issue. As Samper s second High Commissioner for Peace, Daniel García-Peña was one of several high-level Colombian officials who shared this view. According to García-Peña, Samper was tough on the drug issue because he wanted to prove his enemies wrong (García-Peña, April, 1999). Not surprisingly, the view from the US government was much different. One US Embassy official remarked in an interview,

22 He (Samper) took the credit for everything, but he had no input. It was Serrano backed up by us that did the trick with Cali (US Embassy, May 1999). 11 These competing conceptions of Samper s integrity on the drug war reveal how both sides saw the issue so differently: Washington viewed Samper as an obstacle--although an increasingly convenient one--to its counternarcotics efforts; the Samper administration saw itself as the champion of these strengthened anti-drug operations. The remark from the US embassy official also exposes how personalized US policy toward Colombia had become. Led by Robert Gelbard, and to a lesser extent Myles Frechette, US policy was disproportionately focused on Ernesto Samper himself. Indeed, US policy with one of its traditionally most reliable allies in Latin America had by now reduced itself to a base, personal brand, driven by upper-middle level US government officials. Seeing as at this point unlike by the time that Andrés Pastrana took office-- Colombia was still not considered a crisis case by the US government, inattention by high-level officials such as Secretary of State Warren Christopher created a vacuum that allowed upper-middle level officials such as Gelbard and Frechette to basically control Colombia policy. This continued for much of the remainder of Samper s presidency (Watson, 1999). By the middle of 1995 a quick glance would have suggested that the United States was getting what it wanted in Colombia, exemplified by the rapid dismantling of the Cali cartel. Moreover, that the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were actively assisting in the apprehension of the cartel

23 leaders made many in Washington believe that the United States could work with the new Colombian administration. Even if most of the credit for this progress was going to General Serrano and not Ernesto Samper, it seemed as though any initial aversion that the US government had to working with Samper was abating. But this incipient thaw in the US government s position toward Samper was put on hold when in late 1995 more revelations emerged about his involvement with the Cali cartel during his campaign for the presidency. Furthermore, the euphoria and optimism generated by the crackdown on the Cali cartel was more than offset by the smaller, seemingly tangential issues such as the aforementioned controversy over the role of DEA agents working in Colombia. This frustration continued into the 1996 certification process in which, given the Colombian government s virtual dismantling of the Cali cartel, full certification should have been assured. Yet, rather than being rewarded for its efforts, Colombia was instead decertified. This suggests that, unlike the Gaviria years when Bogota could disagree with Washington on counternarcotics issues and still enjoy warm relations and receive certification, now Ernesto Samper had to provide full and unconditional cooperation with the United States on the counternarcotics issue. In other words, with a tainted president like Samper in office, dismantling the Cali cartel would not be enough. Even though it had accomplished what it wanted regarding the Cali cartel, the United States was now willing to let the bilateral relationship deteriorate because there were issues at times quite minor ones-- in which Colombia was less than fully cooperative. As the theoretical literature on dominant-subordinate relationships helps make clear, the US could afford to not tolerate such affronts from a

24 corrupt president mainly because there were few consequences for treating Colombia with such contempt. The US Congress, for one, was looking for enemies in its revved up war on drugs and Ernesto Samper was an easy target; Robert Gelbard and Myles Frechette were also eager to look tough on the drug front and they too were not hesitant to attack Samper publicly. And, unfortunately for the Colombian government, the remainder of 1995 saw a variety of new revelations that caused the US government to sour on the Samper administration, no matter how successful it was in tearing down the Cali cartel. With Gelbard and Frechette seemingly in control, US policy seemed to reflect bureaucratic factors at this point; yet, as was stated earlier, we will see that US policy ended up being much more realist than was readily apparent at this time. The 1996 Decertification Decision If the 1996 drug certification decision toward Colombia had been evaluated on the criteria laid out by the US government during the 1995 process when Colombia was issued a national interest waiver (i.e. gains against the Cali cartel), then there is little doubt that from an objective standard Colombia should have received full certification. Yet, there was little that was objective in the United States 1996 decertification of Colombia (USGAO, 1998). The criteria had shifted from an emphasis on the Cali cartel to the personal conduct of Ernesto Samper. 12 Robert Gelbard s testimony, in which he justified the State Department's decision on March 1, 1996 to decertify Colombia, clearly shows that the US policy had shifted its focus toward the Samper administration: The decision to deny Colombia certification was not made lightly. We work with some extremely dedicated Colombian officials who, in spite

25 of tremendous odds, have continued to attack the drug syndicates During mid-1995, the situation appeared to be improving: the Colombian National Police arrested a number of the leading Cali kingpins and the country s top prosecutor launched a sweeping corruption investigation that left no branch of the government untouched these efforts have been undercut at every turn, however, by a government and a legislature not only plagued by corruption, but which are fostering corruption in order to protect themselves. The Cali traffickers have been running their operations from prison, and the Prosecutor General has been the target of a public campaign to undermine and discredit his efforts. (Gelbard, 1996) At this point Gelbard s position had come to be virtually indistinguishable to those of vocal Congressional drug war advocates like Senator Jesse Helms (R, NC) or Representative Benjamin Gilman (R, NY). In this respect, by the time of the 1996 certification process, US policy toward Colombia was increasingly characterized by a sense of agreement between Congress and the Executive Branch that the United States should take a tough stance against the Samper administration, with the exception of the good guys such as Serrano and Valdivieso. A letter that Jesse Helms Foreign Relations Committee staff wrote to Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (R, KA) is a telling summary of this growing consensus regarding Colombia, Based on the clear evidence presented by President Samper s closest personal confidants and collaborators, and the first hand information obtained in this report, I recommend that the United States decertify Colombia this year with no national interest waiver No government can be completely committed to obliterating the drug cartels, drug corruption, and drug related violence, nor effective in the achievement of these goals, if its senior officials owe fealty to drug kingpins. The Colombian government will never be dedicated to fighting drugs or drug corruption as long as Ernesto Samper is its leader, and its politicians, police, and judiciary are all guided by the money of drug kingpins. (Senate Committee, 1996) An additional factor that sealed the decision to decertify Colombia was that Robert Gelbard had in effect decided to out-radicalize the drug hawks in Congress. Up until this point, Congress had normally used the certification process as a sort of saber-

26 rattling exercise through which they appeared concerned about the war on drugs. Full decertification decisions were almost always reserved for rogue states like Afghanistan and Nigeria and not for more upstanding countries like Mexico or Colombia. But now Gelbard, in what increasingly appeared as a self-appointed role as America s number one drug cop, was actually pushing even harder than Congress on the certification issue (Watson, 1999). This stance was compounded by the fact that Washington was going to certify drugriddled Mexico, which put pressure on the State Department to decertify at least major drug producing country in order to soothe the drug hawks in Congress. With Ernesto Samper in office, the easy choice was Colombia. This is not even to mention the fact that, because of its relative lack of economic and political power, Colombia is much more subordinate to the United States than Mexico; thus, decertification of Colombia held fewer consequences that a decertification of Mexico. The Colombian President Loses His Visa Following the March, 1996 decision to decertify Colombia, few observers could have imagined that US-Colombian relations could have gotten any worse. They did. On June 12 th, 1996 the Liberal Party-dominated lower chamber of congress voted to not pursue the criminal charges against the Colombian president in a vote of 111 to The vote meant that the president could not be tried by the Senate, or be investigated by the Supreme Court. (The Economist, 1996b)

27 The reaction from Washington following the vote was swift and severe. On July 11, 1996 the United States stripped Colombia s democratically elected president of his visa to enter the United States. While the US intended this move to further isolate Samper and hopefully bring him down, it actually had the effect of galvanizing public support in favor of him, as he was now seen and able to portray himself as a victim of US bullying. There is no question that the decision to revoke the visa was provoked by the congressional vote absolving Samper of any illegal activities. With the strength of the evidence implicating Samper, the US government believed only a corrupt congress could have possibly exonerated him. Since US officials could not get the Colombian congress to implicate Samper, they would do the next best thing and that was to revoke his visa. Samper responded to the diplomatic insult by escalating the Colombian government s counternarcotics efforts, including more vigorous illicit crop fumigation efforts. This included the implementation of Operation Condor, which utilized 38 helicopters and 21 aircraft. During the operation the Colombian government also experimented with the controversial herbicide Imazapyr (U.S. House, 1997a). 14 As was the case the year before with Operation Splendor, the government s anti-narcotics efforts sparked violent protests from those campesinos who were being affected by the aerial fumigation. In August, 30,000 farmers began protesting in the southern department of Putumayo in order to stop the planned fumigation of the area. The situation eventually calmed down after the government agreed to let the farmers destroy their own coca crops and handed out payments so that they could cultivate rubber, yuca, and other cash crops (The Economist, 1996c). 15

28 While it continued to be the major issue of contention between the two governments for a good part of 1996, the controversy surrounding the revocation of Samper s visa was not the only type of pressure that the US government exerted on the Samper administration during this year. Instead, the issue of extradition--and its retroactive application-- came to dominate the bilateral relationship from the end of 1996 and through most of Extradition On June 26, shortly before the United States revoked president Samper s visa, and eleven days after Samper was absolved of wrongdoing by the Colombian congress, US Attorney General Janet Reno formally demanded the extradition of four principal Cali cartel leaders, asserting that the 1979 US-Colombian extradition treaty still held (El Tiempo, 1996). Reno also hinted that the United States would consider applying sanctions against Colombia if the Samper administration rejected the petition. The Colombian government responded by asserting that the 1991 Constitution negated the 1979 treaty and thus extradition was illegal under Colombian law. 16 Nevertheless, Samper took the lead on this issue and began to actively push for an amendment to the 1991 Constitution that would allow for extradition. He also presented before Congress a law that would increase sentences against drug traffickers. Once again, the timing of Samper s tough anti-drug stances suggested that the US influence did play an important part in his decisions (Tokatlian, 1996).

29 First and foremost in the United States push to clear the way for extradition of drug kingpins to the United States was the issue of its retroactive application. Since many of the Cali cartel leaders were arrested in 1995, any new extradition law that did not allow for retroactivity would not apply to them. Some have suggested that one central reason that the US wanted retroactivity was so that, when the Cali leaders were extradited and subsequently placed on trial in the United States, they would divulge their dealings with Samper. In October, a Colombian Senate committee voted to initiate the process of looking into the issue of amending the Constitution (El Tiempo, 1997a). The Constitution was eventually amended in December 1997 to allow for non-retroactive extradition In many ways extradition was the new litmus test for the Samper administration. Weakened by the ongoing accusations of narco-related corruption, Samper knew that he had to look strong on the drug front. The United States also knew this and, given Washington s realization that Samper was not easily going away, sought to exploit Samper s credibility problem in order to exact as many concessions on the counternarcotics fronts as possible. As one US Embassy official stated, The good thing about Samper was that we could do whatever we wanted on the drug front. The extradition issue was another instance when we moved the goal posts back in order to see how far we could push Samper on the drug stuff (US Embassy, 1999).

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