Profiting from the Drug Trade

by Doug Morris

It is well known that the best approaches to drug problems are education, treatment and prevention. Therefore, addressing issues of poverty, nutrition, health, employment, education, creative opportunities, democratic participation, and perhaps legalization, would be logical steps to ending drug abuse. Drugs are more of a problem in the United States than in Colombia. The problem in Colombia is poverty, poorly distributed land, concentration of wealth and power, unemployment, displacement, hunger, and on top of all of this, U.S.-imposed violence. There is a war going on in Colombia, and it is related to drugs. But drugs are not the driving force behind the conflict, though they do provide a justification for the huge profits earned by U.S. corporations involved in Washington's drug war.

There was an international meeting recently that attempted to establish some restrictions on the global advertising and distribution of tobacco products. Tobacco is an extremely lethal drug, contributing to about 400,000 deaths a year in the United States alone. Essentially, as one would guess, Washington blocked it on the grounds that any restrictions would interfere with the free speech rights of U.S. corporations. In other words, any restrictions would interfere with the assumed right of U.S. corporations to earn enormous profits through poisoning and killing people.

The same principle applies in Colombia where multinational corporations and the country's economic elite control the legal economy in a society marked by grotesque inequalities in wealth and land distribution. Neo-liberalism--under International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank programs--states that subsidies for farmers are illegal and unfair. That is, they are illegal and unfair for Colombian farmers, but not for U.S. agribusiness, which receives huge public subsidies including more than $100 billion last week. These policies have resulted in a process of "reverse land reform" in Colombia because poor Colombian farmers cannot compete with huge U.S. agribusiness. This is illustrated by the fact that 140,000 agricultural jobs have been lost over the last several years.

U.S. and IMF/World Bank programs are one reason why 86 percent of rural Colombians live in absolute poverty. It is also one of the reasons why people turn to coca cultivation; it is often a matter of survival. The IMF/World Bank rules basically force farmers to grow export crops that bring profits to huge agribusiness, rather than growing food for local consumption.

It is an upside down world when the value of food is measured not by how many people it will nourish, but by how much profit it will produce. It is an upside down world when the people with the most land get more land, and those with the least, the campesinos, get the cemetery. Which brings us to another form of reverse land reform: Large landowners and businesses hire paramilitary forces to expel small farmers from their resource-rich lands in order to steal them.

Massacres and fumigation that displace people makes sense from the perspective of a corporate-dominated economic system that must produce and expand in order to profit and survive. When people are displaced it opens up access to the land for various forms of exploitation: mining, oil drilling, crops for export, plus it creates a pool of workers forced into the cities where they will provide cheap labor for businesses.

It also makes economic sense to murder labor organizers in Colombia who are looking out for the interests of the workers by seeking better hours, wages and working conditions, all of which undermine competitive advantage from the perspective of corporate power. Since 1986, there have been 3,800 union organizers and activists killed. Additionally, 800 indigenous leaders have been killed in the past 10 years; 1,800 campesino leaders; and more than 3,000 members of the Patriotic Union--an alternative and legal political party formed as part of an agreement between the FARC and the Colombian government in 1980s--were assassinated.

Plan Colombia is also "rational" from the perspective of the dominant economic institutions. Fumigation campaigns bring money to those who produce the poisons, such as Monsanto. Fumigation also guarantees more fumigation because people forced deeper into the jungle have to grow even more coca to cover increased production costs, which means more land to fumigate.

Fumigation also requires someone to oversee the program. DynCorp, which receives a huge handout of hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers, fills this role. Of course, Blackhawk attack helicopters are needed to protect the fumigation planes, which sends hundreds of millions of dollars to United Technologies. And then drug war proponents argue that Huey helicopters are required for rapid troop transportion because of a FARC presence in the fumigation regions, which sends a huge chunk of money to the Huey people.

The head of U.S. military operations in Colombia told me that by 2004 they would have the capacity to fumigate all of the department of Putumayo. He said this quite proudly, failing to note that the map to which he was pointing represented more than just land, it also represented people who live on the land. But that is too obvious a fact for the U.S. military to consider. Or, probably more to the point, the value of campesino lives from the perspective of U.S. planners is so minimal, that poisoning them is of little concern, except as a military and economic tactic.

In order to survive, campesinos have had to learn globalization's basic economic lesson: Grow the crops that bring the highest profit for the export market. And for many Colombian farmers that crop is coca. We create the economic conditions that compel them to grow coca, and then we attack them. We poison and displace them for cultivating the one crop that guarantees them an income.

In the end, we leave displaced farmers with only three choices: go to the city and either become a beggar in the streets or participate in the informal, often illegal, big city economy; move deeper into the jungle and grow more coca; or join one of the illegal armed groups. All three options make vacated land available for exploitation. The second and third options also escalate drug production and the armed conflict, which in turn results in greater profits for U.S. corporations participating in Washington's war on drugs.

Doug Morris is director of the Brattleboro Area Peace and Justice Group.

This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).

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