In the 19th century it actually took less time to cross from the Caribbean port city of Cartagena across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris than to Bogota, 500 miles south and 8,600ft up in the Andes.
The Colombian central government based in Bogota has never effectively controlled most of rural Colombia. For a great deal of the late 19th and the early 20th century the only contact most rural people would have with government would be periodic incursions of government troops or the private militas of the elite landlord classes, as the supporters of the Conservative and Liberal parties of Colombia kicked the everliving shit out of each other in a series of devastating civil wars which culminated in La Violencia - a conflict triggered by the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a popular Liberal politician, in 1948. This assassination sparked a massive armed uprising of Liberal peasants across the country. In traditional style the Liberal party elite, fearful of a popular revolution outside of their control, conspired with the Conservative government to put down the uprising via a military crackdown, which failed.
A military coup followed in 1953 and a general amnesty was offered to all involved in the conflict. Many of those who took advantage of the amnesty to lay down their arms were killed or imprisoned anyway (this is a pattern in Latin American insurgencies), while those communities which refused to disarm were subject to massive military incursions. A large number of peasants abandoned their traditional communities and fled to previously uninhabited areas of Colombia - followed closely by the military and the landlord militias.
Back in Bogota, around 1958, the Conservatives and Liberals managed to topple the military dictatorship and arrange a power-sharing agreement called the National Front (taking 4 year turns at the Presidency and splitting all government posts 50/50) but kept up the military pressure on the rural peasants who, by this point, were establishing "Autonomous Republics" with assistance from the Communist Party of Colombia which organised peasant militias. It's around this time that in rural areas the perceptions of the violence began to shift away from a sectarian Conservative/Liberal conflict, to a class-based struggle, which saw these "autonomous republics" experimenting with socialist modes of organisation.
The government response was to ban the Colombian Communist Party and launch military offensives against the peasant enclaves, backed by the US military. Initial offensives displaced peasants from Sumapaz, just south of Bogota. The displaced peasants resettled in the eastern areas of Meta and Caqueta, as well as southern Tolima. These regions would become the strongholds of FARC.
In the 1964 the Colombian military launched Operation Marquetalia, comprising 16,000 troops supported by B-52 bombers supplied by the USA. The target of this massive offensive was the small village of the same name, occupied by a formidable 50 peasant guerillas - one of whom (Jacob Arenas) would become the political leader of the FARC, All the guerrillas escaped, but not before holding a public conference with the peasants of the village which approved a guerrilla strategy and laid out proposals for agrarian reform. Two years later this guerrilla group held a conference with several others that had been loosely associated under the name "Southern Bloc" and officially formed the FARC, completing the final transformation of the peasant self-defence communities into a revolutionary guerrilla army that aimed to overthrow the government.
Time to step back for a moment (I'm getting to the drugs bit, I promise!)
In 1961 the Colombian government had passed the Agrarian Social Reform Law which was supposed to "address the basic needs of a long-suffering population" by helping peasants get credit to purchase legal ownership of their land. It was also supposed to address the distribution of arable land through confiscation and redistribution.
In 1960 1.7% of landowners owned 55% of Colombia's farmland, while 62.5% of the farmers subsisted on less than 1% of the arable land. Ten years after being passed, however, the law had resulted in less than 1% of the land that fell under the law being redistributed, because (in what might been seen as a slight oversight), most of the Latifundios (large estates owned by landowning elite) were specifically exempt from the reform law. The actual result of the decade that the law was in effect was a further concentration of land in the hands of the landowners, and large numbers of peasants were forced from their lands and relocated to the cities in search of jobs - however a bad recession in the mid-1960s saw unemployment jump from 4.9% to 13% in about 3 years.
The peasant response to failed land reform, loss of farms, inability to find work in the cities, and state repression and violence, was to carry out their own kind of land reform by colonising the jungle in Eastern and Southern Colombia, In 1964 just shy of 400,000 peasants ('Colonos') migrated to these areas which they proceeded to deforest so that they could farm - among them were the armed peasants that formed FARC. As before, these groups were followed by the landowners and their paramilitaries who sought to exploit the peasants and the lands which had been claimed for agriculture at no cost to themselves.
According to the author Alfredo Molano
"In the zones where the FARC had no influence in the 1960s, the process of dismantling peasant colonisation and transferring land to large landowning interests proceeded without interference."
In areas protected by the FARC this incursion by the landowners was resisted, and the FARC both protected the Colonos and implemented an agrarian reform programme: "We put forward an effective revolutionary agrarian policy that would change the social structure of the Colombian countryside, providing land completely free to the peasants who work it or want to work it on the basis of confiscation of large landholdings for the benefit of all working people."
The rest of the 1960s and most of the 70s are important to the growth and development of FARC as a revolutionary army, but not so much to its relationship to the drugs trade. Suffice to say that the government became more repressive, granting greater powers to the military and police, which resulted in many brutal abuses of human rights.
American Diplomat Robert Drexler on the Turbay government, which came to power in the late 70s: "The Turbay administration faced widespread charges that the army was engaging in arbitrary arrests, using torture, and causing people to 'disappear' in the worst tradition of Latin American military brutality. Some of these excesses were covered up by government's severe repression of the press". Further, the government was "implementing the most repressive regime Colombia had known since Rojas Pinilla".
Government repression, combined with Colombia's dire economy (which only seemed to get worse - by the late 80's 51% of urban workers, and 68% of rural workers lived in absolute poverty) only added to the appeal of the FARC, which grew rapidly from an estimated 500, to over 3,000 fighters by 1982.
So, drugs.
The cocaine boom in Colombia started in the late 70s and exploded in the 80s, and and was initiated by a flood of the urban unemployed and landless peasants to FARC-controlled regions so that they could cultivate the coca plant, which provides the raw material for cocaine.
It needs be said first off, that the FARC agricultural programme has an explicit goal of helping the peasants to shift away from cultivation of coca, but the reality of the situation is that the peasants are dependent on this crop as a staple. Many farmers are compelled to cultivate coca due to decades of government neglect. The failure of the state to provide necessary infrastructure to allow farmers to transport perishable food crops to distant markets (remember how rugged Colombia is) has made coca the only viable cash crop in remote regions. Even if farmers can get a food crop to market there is no guarantee that they can earn a living from the sale. Conversely, coca can be harvested several times a year, sold locally (the same isolated remoteness that makes food farming difficult is what draws the cocaine producers) and cocaine processors will buy literally everything they can lay their hands on, for obvious reasons. This provides reliable income so that the farmers can buy necessities which can't be grown.
In regions FARC controls it permits coca growing so that peasants can supplement their food crops with income from the coca. It has simultaneously sought to implement alternative agricultural models, but success has been limited because many coca farmers were formerly poor urban workers who colonised remote regions in order to grow coca, or they are 2nd or 3rd generation farmers whose parents long ago quit farming food crops, as a consequence many farmers have little or no knowledge about growing traditional crops. FARC commander Simon Trinidad said:
"We are planning a different solution for the problem of narco-trafficking. It consists of providing a better life for the poor campesino through agrarian reform, by giving them good lands, technical assistance, and low-interest loans to change from growing illicit crops to legal crops, such as coffee, yucca, bananas, sugarcane and ranching. [...] But it's a slow process to change them, it's not just destroying the illicit crops and then telling them to grow different ones. We have to educate the campesinos about how to produce them. Give them tools, credits, and time so they can make a living from these crops and become a different kind of campesino."
In some areas the FARC has asked the coca growers to devote 3 out of every 10 acres of their coca-growing land to traditional crops. In other regions, they've tried a crop-ratio programme that limits coca to 1/4 of the farmer's total cultivation. The FARC also attempts to alleviate the difficulties of getting food-crops to markets by building infrastructure including roads and bridges (funded by a progressive income tax in FARC-controlled regions. FARC also levies a war-tax on anybody in Colombia who has more than $1million, regardless of where they live. Non-payment of these tax arrears is considered a crime for which the FARC will imprison the offender - the origin of FARC's kidnapping programme), and establishing regular mutual trade between the autonomous peasant communities, to provide a consistent, reliable demand for traditional crops.
The other major actor in the drug scene of Colombia was, of course, the cartels. In the 1980s the FARC, in attempting to levy its war-tax on the wealthy drug kingpins, kidnapped members of Pablo Escobar's family (as well as those of other cartels) and held them for ransom. The drug barons of the Medellin and Cali cartels responded by forming paramilitary groups to defend their land from guerrillas, and to terrorise and displace entire peasant communities in a counter-agrarian reform campaign, which allowed the drug cartels to increase their already vast land holdings. By the end of the 1980s the drug cartels were the largest landowners in Colombia.
The USA, angry about the rivers of coke flooding into America, pressured the Colombian government to crack down on the cartels. The result of this crackdown was open street fighting between the government and the cartel militias, a wave of urban bombings and assassinations, and, eventually, Escobar being gunned down on a rooftop as the Medellin cartel disintegrated. The rival Cali cartel, which had always maintained a lower profile, survived a while longer, but was decapitated a few years later as most of its leadership was arrested. In the chaos that followed dozens of smaller cartels erupted like mushrooms.
Unlike the Medellin and Cali cartels, which controlled the entire trade from production, to processing, export, and distribution in the USA, the new cartels outsource most of the operation. They contract individuals to pick up coca leaves or opium latex (used to make heroin) and deliver those raw materials to processing labs. They use independent mules and groups to ship the product north, usually to Mexico, where local gangs handle the distribution of the coke and heorin to the USA.
There are three stages to processing coca leaves into cocaine:
1: Harvesting and crushing the coca leaves, and mixing them with sodium bicarbonate, gasoline, and other shit to form a brown paste which is about 40% pure cocaine. This is usually done by peasant farmers.
2: The farmer sells the paste to processing labs, where labourers turn it into cocaine base by mixing it with sulphuric acid, potassium permanganate, etc... this mixture is drained and cooked until it dries into a solid white mass that's broken up into rock. The result of this is 90% pure.
3: In large, remote jungle labs the base is processed into cocaine hydrochloride, or powder cocaine, which is 99% pure. The finished product is then shipped to dealers in the USA, Eu, Mexico, etc... where that good, pure shit gets turned into stepped-on trash.
In the early years the FARC and drug traffickers co-existed uneasily. The FARC taxed the drug traffickers and their operations, and mandated that the coca farmers were paid in cash, and not "basuco" - an addictive waste product of the cocaine production process. The cartels tolerated the taxes because they couldn't compete with the military strength of the guerrillas in coca-growing regions, but as their wealth increased they formed their own paramilitary groups to challenge the rebels militarily in order to take control over the coca-cultivating zones, culminating in open conflict in the 1980's. Despite this, the FARC consolidated and expanded its control over the coca-growing regions in the 80's and 1990s, by which point coca plantations had gradually become the main mode of economic survival for more than a million peasants and colonos. The guerrillas protected the peasants who worked in their areas and, by levying taxes of 7-10% on the market value of a kilo of coca paste, were earning an estimated $100m a year by the early 90's.
The taxation of the drug trade was, however, only a part of the FARCs income - they taxed legal business too, many of which benefited from the cocaine boom through the sale of precursor chemicals, and from the increased prosperity of the coca growers themselves. Revenue generated by FARCs taxes on the cocaine trade and businesses it turned over to community leaders and used to fund social projects and infrastructure along with its military operations. During the 1990s many small towns in eastern and southern Colombia experienced significant infrastructure improvements as a result of FARCs public works programmes. The FARC, acting as the defacto government, built electrical grids, schools, hospitals, and hundreds of miles of roads that connected dozens of communities to each other. In 2003 Efrain Salazar, the FARC's public works director in Meta claimed to have an annual budget of $1million and to pay those civilians who worked for him a monthly salary of $125 - the Colombian minimum wage at the time being slightly above $100 a month.
The Colombian military, however, systematically destroys this infrastructure. In 2003 the Colombian air force bombed a 70 foot long, 40 foot high FARC-built bridge (the largest ever built by the guerrillas) that spanned Yarumales Canyon in Meta, which cost $110,000.
According to economist Francisco E. Thoumi there is no evidence that individual guerrilla leaders have personally enriched themselves by the cocaine trade, rather "[FARCs] expenditures support mainly subversive activities and their political agenda." and further that "there is no evidence that they have developed international marketing networks. In that sense, therefore, there is no guerrilla cartel." Many FARC fronts are not engaged in the drug trade, or operate in regions with no coca growing trade.
Concerning the drug trade generally, FARC's Simon Trinidad says:
"We know that the campesinos grow illicit crops of necessity. It is specifically a socio-economic situation. They are obligated to cultivate illicit crops because of a government that has neglected them for many years. We have made it clear that we will not take the food out of the mouth of the poor campesino. We will not leave them without jobs. They work with the marijuana and coca leaf because they don't have any other work. The problem is caused by the economic model of the Colombian state, and it is the state that has to fix the problem. We are the state's enemy, not their anti-narcotics police. The state has to offer people employment, honest work and social justice to improve their lives".
US Army Major Maddaloni:
"At first, the FARC leadership forbade the development of coca and marijuana as counter-revolutionary, counter to the social contract with the people, and viewed the illegal drugs as an elitist disease. They changed their minds when they realized the poor farmer, the FARC support base, had little choice but to grow drugs and they would ostracize this group with a hard-line stance."
In the late 1990s, while engaged in peace talks with the government, the FARC cooperated with the UN in a $6m alternative crop project and in some regions rebel fronts began actively discouraging farmers from planting coca. The guerrillas oversaw the substituting of coca with alternative food crops; they also held a public conference to discuss alternative development strategies. The conference was attended by hundreds of representatives from Colombian and foreign civil society organisations. Proposals by the FARC to expand the projects were opposed by both the Colombian and US governments, who feared that they would provide legitimacy for the guerrillas.
By this point FARC was making as much as $900m a year and launching massive offensives against military bases in eastern and southern Colombia. In 1997 the US Defense Intelligence Agency wrote "Colombian armed forces could be defeated within five years unless the country's government regains political legitimacy and its armed forces are drastically restructured (NACLA Report on the Americas, May/June 1998), Around this time the Clinton administration shifted its sights away from the drug cartels and towards the FARC and peasant coca growers in rebel areas. By labeling FARC narco-guerrillas the USA used the war on drugs to justify escalating military intervention in the Colombian civil war.
However, Donnie Marshall, chief of operations of the US Drug Enforcement Administration denied before Congress that the FARC was involved in drug trafficking. He said:
"The FARC factions continue to raise funds through extortion, by providing security services to traffickers, and charging a fee for each gallon of precursor chemicals and each kilo of coca leaf and cocaine HCL moving in their region... To date, there is little to indicate the insurgent groups are trafficking in cocaine themselves, either by producing cocaine HCL and selling it to Mexican syndicates, or by establishing their own distribution networks in the United States,"
A week later the US Attorney General, who apparently didn't get the memo, announced the indictment of 50 of the FARCs leaders on drug trafficking charges.
By 1999, after a decade of gradual neoliberal reforms, unemployment in Colombia had reached 20% and the economy had its worst year since the Great Depression. The result was an IMF loan of $2.7billion, contingent on "structural adjustment" to further open up Colombia's economy, privatise public companies and cut social spending. Hundreds of thousands more poor urban Colombians flocked to the jungles to cultivate coca.
At the same time as the IMF loan, the Colombian government also asked for, and received, a large aid package from the US government. Attached to the aid package was "Plan Colombia" - the objective of which was to slash coca production by 50% in 5 years via fumigation of crops, in order to undermine FARCs funding and bring the conflict to an end.
Under Plan Colombia, US-piloted spray planes routinely fumigated coca crops in southern and eastern Colombia. Hundreds of thousands of hectares were fumigated, but the spraying obviously didn't only destroy coca crops, it also devastated food crops, affected the health of children and the elderly, and displaced tens of thousands of people.
The carrot to the stick of crop fumigation was the (paltry) 8% of US aid that was earmarked for alternative crop programmes, but Jair Giovani Ruiz, an agricultural engineer with the Ministry of the Environment's Corpoamazonia claimed that peasants received little of the funding: "maybe a cow or three chickens, but the farmers can't live off these. Maybe the money got lost on the way, or maybe the government contracted a lot of experts in order to supply a cow." (lol)
Mario Cabal, of the National Plan for Alternative Development (PLANTE), the government agency tasked with control of the alternative crop programme said: "We have money for helicopters and arms for war, but we don't have money for social programmes."
Despite $4billion of US funding in its first five years, Plan Colombia never reduced coca production by 50%. According to the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, coca cultivation in Colombia was higher in 2005 than when Plan Colombia was initiated. Further still, coca cultivation had spread from 6 to 23 of the country's 32 departments in the intervening 5 years.
The plan continues under the Obama administration.
Worst of all: most of the farmers who did participate in the alternative crop programme by voluntarily uprooting their coca plants in return for $1,000 in materials, technical training, and the promise they would not be fumigated, were fumigated anyway. Doctor Ruben Dario Pinzon of PLANTE: "Growers financed by PLANTE have been fumigated because they are in a small area in the middle of coca growers. It is impossible to protect them because the pilots can't control exactly where they fumigate. They fumigate the whole area."
Peasants who have been fumigated have two choices: displacement or replanting. Sometimes the replanting takes place on the same land which was fumigated; at other times peasants cut down more rainforest. Usually coca is the first crop replanted because it produces four or five harvests a year, thereby providing the farmer with a means of subsistence far more quickly than food crops, some of which require several seasons to produce their first harvest.
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