*Estefanía Ciro
Original en Español en La Jornada de México (2024, octubre, 31). https://www.jornada.com.mx/2024/10/31/opinion/018a1pol
Four moments play in the history of Colombia a sort of laboratory to explain how a country is dispossessed in the context of the fight against drugs. An example so that solidarities in all corners of Latin America can know and prepare themselves for what we face in this multipolar transit, which in our region acquires its own nuances and demands action.
In the 1980s in Colombia, the great story of the cartel or Pablo Escobar emerged. As it was being built, the DEA was expanding its influence in the offices of the Colombian government, mainly the police and the Attorney General’s Office. The myth also hides the fact that the first anti-drug operation in the country, the Guajira Campaign, took place when victimizations increased between 1979 and 1981 in the region. This great narrative paraphernalia hides the counterinsurgency operation of the Security Statute, the configuration of the MAS as a paramilitary group guilty of the genocide of the Patriotic Union. As a legal underpinning, the National Narcotics Statute, Law 30 of 1986, was drafted.
In the 1990s a stage of the anti-narcotics narrative emerged, the “narco Farc”, or narco-guerrillas, a key underpinning woven into the training of commanders at the School of the Americas, as they showed in their accounts to the Truth Commission. Thus, we move from the military doctrine of the war against the communist to the war against the drug trafficker. As this story spreads, the government of César Gaviria makes one of the most harmful economic structural reforms for the countryside, industry and workers in the country and the paramilitary groups expand, emboldened after having supported with the U.S. and the Colombian government the persecution of Pablo Escobar. The contradiction is growing and the cocalero peasant mobilization is opening a massive way against the repression and the spraying with glyphosate.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. military apparatus and the training of the Colombian armed forces are materialized in Plan Colombia and the multiple plans (Patriot, Sword of Honor) that will be deployed throughout the national territory. The narrative hides a counterinsurgency exercise, against the people and the territories, and the victims left by democratic security demonstrate a humanitarian tragedy without precedent in the history of Latin America. They deny that there is an armed conflict and what Álvaro Uribe Vélez says is that there is a war between gangs. The dispossession is atrocious, in 2005, there is a record of profits in the banks and a record of human rights violations. The dispossession is supported by the legal change in the mining code -which facilitates the appropriation of large corporations and persecutes artisanal mining, inaugurating the stage of illegal mining-, they sign the zones of interest for rural and economic development (ZIDRES) to monopolize land in key regions of the country, and Juan Manuel Santos gives free rein to – as they call- the “mining-energy locomotive”.
The fourth period is the current one, the post-peace agreement (2016). Several narratives are constructed, from the fight against drugs to the fight against deforestation, the Amazon as the place of crime, the policy of environmental crimes is installed and the dark contracts of carbon credits are expanded throughout the jungle. Faced with the reincorporation of the FARC-EP into civilian life, and the actions of dissident groups, the fracturing of the social movement, we are living through moments of chaos, very much in tune with the latent interests of intervention in the Amazon by the great powers. The seizure of drugs is sold as a new and efficient policy by a leftist government, which also follows the same recipe as always, that of coca substitution and alternative development; it could not get out of the trap.
The prohibitionist dispossession manual celebrates the anything goes in the fight against drugs, starting with the liberation or selection of strategic targets by local elites and the US government, to then deploy troops, place them. This far from our eyes. From there the fiction of the enemy is created (communist, drug dealer, deforester) and then the processes of militarization and over-penalization begin, which flood our daily lives. The fearful society, without political clarity, demands to be saved from the new evils, and then legislative changes are made that play very well with political campaigns. They create the narratives, move the troops, make the agreements, legally support the dispossession. Meanwhile, the government right or official left feeds these narratives against the popular left; and the latter have the whole challenge of constructing counter-narratives, our readings, the popular narratives.
All my support for Ecuador, which has the strength in its streets, in its women, in its intellectuals, its political voice to be an example in Latin America and not allow dispossession, prohibitionism.
