A Nation-Building Failure in Colombia

Colombia's new president-elect Gustavo Petro, a career far-left politician who probably hangs a Che Guevara poster on his parlor wall, is scheduled to be inaugurated next month. Many observers predict he will join the Havana-Caracas-Managua club of Marxist radicals.

The U.S. has been intensely involved in Colombia for decades

• The story is a complicated one that was not supposed to culminate in the election of a radical leftist like Petro.
• When Colombia's security situation became dire in the late 1990s, most foreign-policy conservatives agreed that genuine U. S.S national interests were tied to the fate of this key Andean country.

The Clinton White House and National Security Council gave counternarcotics assistance priority in justifying the mission to the American public

• They empowered State Department and USAID to devote probably half of the total aid to institutional, social, and economic development programs
• While U.S. military advisors, diplomats, and security contractors on the ground were always counted in the many hundreds, not thousands, American financial aid rolled over year after year, eventually skyrocketing into the billions

The Clinton administration emphasized counterterrorism and counterinsurgency cooperation in support of President Álvaro Uribe’s worthy efforts to defeat the FARC on the battlefield.

• The staggering count of violent deaths in Colombia, which had climbed to over 80,000 a year in the early 2000s, began to fall dramatically, down to under 1,000 by 2015.

On the counternarcotics scorecard, Plan Colombia proponents argue that when launched, Washington's anti-drug trafficking strategy not only enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support, but was the only plan on the table (with all due respect to the libertarian decriminalization option).

• On review, it seems at best a mixed bag and arguably a failure.
• Drug-trafficking cartels facing resistance in one country typically shift coca cultivation and cocaine production to other sites, such as Peru and Bolivia in this case. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-nation-building-failure-in-colombia/