Sao Paulo--
With president Obama's State of the Union speech giving notice that free trade with Colombia is not a priority in Washington, Colombia's ability to attract foreign capital now depends on the security provided by US forces and trade incentives linked to the war on drugs. With the promise of free trade, more than $7 billion in foreign investment poured into Colombia last year, powering the growth of a modern services sector in cities like Medellin, where commuters ride to work on a french designed metro system. But renewal of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), due to expire in a few weeks, is now critical if the Obama administration is to maintain its strategic alliance with the nation that remains the world's largest grower of coca leaves.
ATPDEA is a decade old policy tool that provides Colombia with trade preferences to host US drug war personnel who help contain the FARC, right wing paramilitary units and others seeking to control coca producing land and prices. Thanks to ATPDEA over 90 percent of Colombian exports, including cut flowers, already enter the United States duty free without the need for the free trade agreement that's stalled on Capitol Hill.
Colombian vice president Angelino Garzon will visit Washington on Friday to lobby counterpart Joe Biden and secretary of state Hillary Clinton to renew ATPDEA. Garzon will also listen to NGOs and union officials share their concerns about human rights and labor issues in Colombia.
A former leader of Colombia's Workers Confederation (CUT) from a humble background, Garzon is a sharp contrast to president Juan Manuel Santos whose family owns El Tiempo, the Bogota newspaper that has been a beacon for Reaganomics for three decades. He has negotiated agreements with the FARC and is no stranger to the ATPDEA process. As governor of Cauca, a major coca growing state, he helped then-president Alvaro Uribe persuade the George W. Bush administration to renew the agreement in 2007.
But ATPDEA can't reduce the global demand that's made the crack house the new opium den. And it can't stop Colombia's narcotics industry from being too big to fail. While Americans still go to jail for possessing a gram of cocaine for personal use, Colombia passed a law decriminalizing possession of that amount in 1994. Colombia's Constitutional Court has refused on six occasions to rule that law unconstitutional.
With Colombian veterans of the drug war now assisting counterparts in Mexico and Peru, the conflict has escalated into an inter-American operation that has less to do with stopping the flow of drugs than with attempting to direct product and profits through politically reliable channels. In this context, renewal of ATPDEA reflects the contradiction-- fighting to control the supply but failing to quell the demand -- that is inherent in Washington's drug war policy and renews questions about the moral and ethical credibility of US policy in Latin America.
US and Colombian claims that the drug war is winning hearts and minds has been called into question in a recent study by Colombia's National Repatriation and Reconciliation Commission. The study indicates that 8,250 right wing paramilitary forces and leftist guerrillas (including FARC associates) who joined the government's demobilization and re-education program have dropped out, returning to their militarized lifestyles in rural coca producing regions.
In Washington, President Obama has warned the media to avoid associating drug violence in Mexican border towns like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez with the Colombian experience. But the war on drugs has pushed Colombian traffickers, including the FARC, to augment their relatively low margin, labor intensive paramilitary operations that control the gathering and manufacturing of product with the more lucrative front end of the business in Mexico that exploits the huge US market.
The war on drugs has also pushed Colombian cartels south into Brazil, which, according to Interpol, is the second largest consumer of cocaine products after the United States. President Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla who spent three years in prison courtesy of a US-backed military regime, is now using the army to help clean up the nation's drug infested favelas. While cutting back on some social programs, Brazil is spending $5 billion on aircraft and $7 billion on radar and other tracking systems that is turning the Amazon bordering Colombia into the new Rio Grande.
While it's probable AFTDEA will be renewed over the objections of human rights and union groups, Colombia is looking beyond Washington for economic partners. China is now Bogota's second largest trade partner. And President Santos met Wednesday in Paris with President Sarkozy to discuss investment and cultural programs and french support for agricultural projects that can provide an alternative to coca as a lucrative cash crop.
The strategy being employed in Colombia to promote development while mediating the FARC and the global drug trade is dynamic, cuts both ways and is not pretty. It's as if President Santos borrowed a page from the late Richard Holbrooke's playbook on statecraft. A legendary US diplomat and former investment banker, Holbrooke never had moral qualms about negotiating with people who do immoral things.