Colombia

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The Paramilitary Right

Throughout the 1990s, the strength of the leftist guerrillas grew, and the government was unable to defeat them or negotiate their surrender. The situation gave rise to another armed contender in Colombia’s civil war, the paramilitary right. The government initially encouraged the forerunners of some of these paramilitary groups as a way to protect rural communities from the guerrillas. Other paramilitary groups evolved after large landowners, some of them newly rich from the drug trade, hired armed bands to protect them from extortion and kidnapping.

The main paramilitary group was the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC, United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia). Paramilitary groups were scattered throughout the country and were especially strong in areas of the southeast, where the FARC was most powerful, and the northwest, where much of ELN’s strength lay.

The right-wing paramilitary groups rarely confronted the guerrillas directly. Instead, they sought through terror to deny the guerrillas the support of the civilian population. International human rights organizations blamed paramilitaries for the bulk of human rights violations in Colombia. They also accused elements of the Colombian armed forces of working with paramilitary groups against guerrillas and their alleged sympathizers.

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The Drug Trade

Colombian governments also had to contend with major changes in the national economy. After 1980 Colombia began exporting large amounts of illegal drugs, primarily cocaine. The estimated value of illegal drug exports amounted to almost half the value of Colombia’s legal exports from 1980 to 1995. Earnings from the drug trade helped Colombia avoid the debt crisis that afflicted much of Latin America during the 1980s. But by cheapening the dollar and thereby overvaluing the Colombian peso, the drug trade also undermined the competitiveness of Colombia’s legal exports by making them more expensive than similar exports from other countries.

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The illegal drug trade led to the growth of an enormously wealthy and powerful criminal establishment centered initially in Medellín and Cali. In the late 1980s, under increasing pressure from the United States, Colombian governments began to crack down on these drug traffickers, threatening to extradite them to the United States, where punishment was both more effective and more severe than in Colombia.

In response, the head of the Medellín drug cartel, Pablo Escobar, unleashed a bombing campaign that killed hundreds of civilians in Colombia’s major cities. Drug money was also behind the assassinations of three presidential candidates in 1990. The Constitution of 1991 prohibited extradition, but the Colombian government reinstated it soon thereafter. Escobar was eventually apprehended and killed in 1993.

By the late 1990s Colombia’s drug war had shifted toward efforts to eradicate coca, plants that are used to make cocaine, and poppies, flowers that are used to make opium. In 1999 the Colombian government announced Plan Colombia, a program to decrease the cultivation of coca and poppies in areas of southeastern Colombia largely controlled by the FARC. The following year the United States announced that it would give $1.3 billion in aid, primarily for military hardware such as helicopters and planes, to support aerial fumigation of coca and poppy fields.

Critics of the plan claimed that the spraying was dangerous to human health and the environment, that the small farmers who grew the coca had no viable economic alternatives, and that the plan’s real purpose was to aid the Colombian military in its battle against the guerrillas. Supporters of Plan Colombia denied these allegations and claimed fumigation would significantly reduce coca cultivation. Early data indicated that Colombian coca production continued to rise.

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Recent Trends

In the 1990s the Colombian government implemented policies to liberalize trade by cutting tariffs, which had protected domestic industry and agriculture. These policies contributed to the country’s high levels of unemployment. By the end of the 1990s the official unemployment figure in Colombia had reached almost 20 percent, one of the highest levels in Latin America. Unemployment figures began to drop in the early 2000s.

The Colombian economy also suffered from insecurity spawned by the country’s violence. With the greatest number of kidnappings in the world and the highest homicide rate in the Americas, Colombia held little attraction for investors. The gravity of the economic situation also contributed to the frequency of common crime and to the pool of potential recruits for guerrilla and paramilitary groups, both of which pay their combatants salaries.

President Álvaro Uribe, a former Liberal who ran as an independent, was inaugurated in 2002 after winning the first round of the presidential elections. Uribe stepped up the military effort against the leftist guerrillas and pledged to double the size of Colombia’s military and police forces, winning the support of the Conservative Party in the process. Like his predecessors, Uribe also pursued negotiations with the guerrillas, and he emphasized the need for international mediation to end the conflict.

At Uribe’s request, the United States took a more active role in training and supplying the Colombian military in its war against the guerrillas. By 2003 U.S. forces were also actively involved in protecting Colombia’s northern pipeline. The FARC responded to these initiatives by detonating bombs in Colombia’s cities and targeting U.S. forces directly. By mid-2003 some observers believed that Colombia was on the verge of a full-scale civil war.

The government began formal peace talks with the paramilitary AUC in 2004, and the AUC announced that it would disarm several thousand of its members. However, the AUC wanted total amnesty on any charges related to drugs or human-rights violations. The United States sought extradition of a number of AUC leaders for drug trafficking. The outcome of the peace talks remained far from clear. In March 2006 political supporters of Uribe won a majority control of the Colombian congress. The same month his government finalized a free trade agreement with the United States.

Uribe was easily reelected in the May 2006 presidential elections, claiming more than 60 percent of the vote. Uribe again ran as an independent but with the backing of the Conservative Party, which did not field a candidate. Colombian voters credited Uribe with ending much of the daily violence that had plagued Colombia, while isolating and weakening the FARC.

Charles Bergquist wrote the History section of this article; the remainder was reviewed by David Robinson.

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