Every once in a while, a voice emanates from the chamber and echoes around the world: Vijay Prashad on Colombian President Petro’s speech at the U.N.
Óscar Muñoz, Colombia, “Línea del destino” or “Line of Destiny,” 2006.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Each year, in the last weeks of September, the world’s leaders gather in New York City to speak at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly. The speeches can usually be forecasted well in advance, either tired articulations of values that do not get acted upon or belligerent voices that threaten war in an institution built to prevent war.
However, every once in a while, a speech shines through, a voice emanates from the chamber and echoes around the world for its clarity and sincerity. This year, that voice belongs to Colombia’s recently inaugurated president, Gustavo Petro, whose brief remarks distilled with poetic precision the problems in our world and the cascading crises of social distress, the addiction to money and power, the climate catastrophe and environmental destruction.
“It is time for peace,” Petro said. “We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.”
Heriberto Cogollo, Colombia, “Carnival Los Cabildos de Cartagena” or “The Carnival of Cartagena’s Cabildos,” 1999.
Colombia has been gripped by violence since it won its independence from Spain in 1810. This violence emanated from Colombia’s elites, whose insatiable desire for wealth has meant the absolute impoverishment of the people and the failure of the country to develop anything that resembles liberalism.
Decades of political action to build the confidence of the masses in Colombia culminated in a cycle of protests beginning in 2019 that led to Petro’s electoral victory. The new centre-left government has pledged to build social democratic institutions in Colombia and to banish the country’s culture of violence. Though the Colombian army, like armed forces around the world, prepares for war, President Petro told them in August 2022 that they must now “prepare for peace” and must become “an army of peace.”
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When thinking about violence in a country like Colombia, there is a temptation to focus on drugs, cocaine in particular. The violence, it is often suggested, is an outgrowth of the illicit cocaine trade. But this is an ahistorical assessment.
Colombia experienced terrible bloodshed long before highly processed cocaine became increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards. The country’s elite has used murderous force to prevent any dilution of its power, including the 1948 assassination of Jorge Gaitán, the former mayor of Colombia’s capital of Bogotá, that led to a period known as La Violencia or “The Violence.”
Liberal politicians and communist militants faced the steel of the Colombian army and police on behalf of this granite block of power backed by the United States, which has used Colombia to extend its power into South America. Fig leaves of various types were used to cover over the ambitions of the Colombian elite and their benefactors in Washington. In the 1990s, one such cover was the War on Drugs.
Enrique Grau Araújo, Colombia, “Prima Colazione a Firenze” or “Breakfast in Florence,” 1964.
By all accounts — whether of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime or the U.S. government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) — the largest consumers of illegal narcotics (cannabis, opioids and cocaine) are in North America and Western Europe. A recent U.N. study shows that “cocaine use in the United States has been fluctuating and increasing after 2013 with a more stable trend observed in 2019.”
The War on Drugs strategy, initiated by the United States and Western countries, has had a two-pronged approach to the drug crisis: first, to criminalise retailers in Western countries and, second, to go to war against the peasants who produce the raw material in these drugs in countries such as Colombia.
In the United States, for instance, almost 2 million people — disproportionately Black and Latino — are caught in the prison industrial complex, with 400,000 of them imprisoned or on probation for nonviolent drug offences (mostly as petty dealers in a vastly profitable drug empire).
The collapse of employment opportunities for young people in working-class areas and the allure of wages from the drug economy continue to attract low-level employees of the global drug commodity chain, despite the dangers of this profession.
The War on Drugs has made a negligible impact on this pipeline, which is why many countries have now begun to decriminalise drug possession and drug use (particularly cannabis).
Débora Arango, Colombia, “Rojas Pinilla”, 1957.
The obduracy of the Colombian elite — backed by the U.S. government — to allow any democratic space to open in the country led the left to take up armed struggle in 1964 and then return to the gun when the elite shut down the promise of the democratic path in the 1990s.
In the name of the war against the armed left as well as the War on Drugs, the Colombian military and police have crushed any dissent in the country. Despite evidence of the financial and political ties between the Colombian elite, narco-paramilitaries and drug cartels, the United States government initiated Plan Colombia in 1999 to funnel $12 billion to the Colombian military to deepen this war (in 2006, when he was a senator, Petro revealed the nexus between these diabolical forces, for which his family was threatened with violence).
As part of this war, the Colombian armed forces dropped the terrible chemical weapon glyphosate on the peasantry (in 2015, the World Health Organization said that this chemical is “probably carcinogenic to humans” and, in 2017, the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled that its use must be restricted).
In 2020, the following assessment was offered in The Harvard International Review: “Instead of reducing cocaine production, Plan Colombia has actually caused cocaine production and transport to shift into other areas. Additionally, militarisation in the war on drugs has caused violence in the country to increase.” This is precisely what Petro told the world at the United Nations.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Chile, “Los Vientos” or “The Winds,” 2016.
The most recent DEA report notes that cocaine use in the United States remains steady and that “deaths from drug poisoning involving cocaine have increased every year since 2013.” U.S. drug policy is focused on law enforcement, aiming merely to reduce the domestic availability of cocaine. Washington will spend 45 percent of its drug budget on law enforcement, 49 percent on treatment for drug addicts, and a mere 6 percent on prevention.
The lack of emphasis on prevention is revealing. Rather than tackle the drug crisis as a demand-side problem, the U.S. and other Western governments pretend that it is a supply-side problem that can be dealt with by using military force against petty drug dealers and peasants who grow the coca plant. Petro’s cry from the heart at the United Nations attempted to call attention to the root causes of the drug crisis:
“According to the irrational power of the world, the market that razes existence is not to blame; it is the jungle and those who live in it that are to blame. Bank accounts have become unlimited; the money saved by the most powerful people on Earth could not even be spent over the course of centuries. The empty existence produced by the artificiality of competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to possessions has another face: the drug addiction of people who lose the competition in the artificial race that humanity has become. The sickness of loneliness is not cured by [dousing] the forests with glyphosate; the forest is not to blame. To blame is your society educated by endless consumption, by the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of the powerful to fill with money.”
The War on Drugs, Petro said, is a war on the Colombian peasantry and a war on the precarious poor in Western countries. We do not need this war, he said; instead, we need to struggle to build a peaceful society that does not sap meaning from the hearts of people who are treated as a surplus to society’s logic.
Fernando Botero, Colombia, “La Calle” or “The Street,” 2013.
As a young man, Petro was part of the M-19 guerrilla movement, one of the organisations that attempted to break the chokehold that Colombia’s elites held over the country’s democracy. One of his comrades was the poet María Mercedes Carranza (1945–2003), who wrote searingly about the violence thrust upon her country in her 1987 book Hola, Soledad or Hello, Solitude, capturing the desolation in her poem “La Patria” or “The Homeland”:
In this house, everything is in ruins,
in ruins are hugs and music,
each morning, destiny, laughter are in ruins,
tears, silence, dreams.
The windows show destroyed landscapes,
flesh and ash on people’s faces,
words combine with fear in their mouths.
In this house, we are all buried alive.
Carranza took her life when the fires of hell swept through Colombia.
A peace agreement in 2016, a cycle of protests from 2019, and now the election of Petro and Francia Márquez in 2022 have wiped the ash off the faces of the Colombian people and provided them with an opportunity to try and rebuild their house.
The end of the War on Drugs, that is, the war on the Colombian peasantry, will only advance Colombia’s fragile struggle towards peace and democracy.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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I also need to apologize to Vijay Prashad. My intention was to never down play what he provided here. His effort here should be lauded. His efforts at CN have been stellar and this another brilliant example.
His piece lays out a summary of the recent history of the of US involvement in South and Central America. The US history there has been abysmal when considering the incestuous programs against communism and drugs. A history of lies, theft and murder, one that all Americans should be ashamed of sixty years of covert efforts to maintain chaos in the homelands of our southern neighbors.
My attempt was to reveal the U.S. “War on everything, mentality” and the resulting failures. The won / lost record of these failures speaks for itself. The only winners were the government contractors and the MICCIMAT both profiting from vast incomes by way of gun markets for warring factions and from the materials and equipment needed to sustain these fruitless programs. And then we also have the profits enjoyed by the US government from very drug trade President after president condemned, that ended up being used by intelligence officials tasked with stopping the drug trade.
All this failure that the US taxpayer has been on the hook for.
The ruthless actions of a group of government officials , never held to account, who wrecked havoc on poor, underdeveloped peoples, and who engaged in these practices with impunity. Still it continues.
This all adds up to what amounts to a very pathetic showing for this experiment we call the United States of America, especially considering the wealth and talent at the disposal of the wealthy leadership class.
Never let if be forgotten, GHW Bush was behind a large part of this travesty a member of the same bush family who know owns a very large portion of Paraguay. If your not familiar check out these sites.
hXXps://news.climate.edu/2010/04/13/the-guarni-acquiafer-a-little-known-wat3r-source-in-south-america-gets-a-voice
hXXps://5minforcast.com/2015/04/24/why-did-george-bush-buy-nearly-300000-acres-in-paraguey/
Apparently, crimes against humanity do pay, is that what we as Americans stand for?
It’s easy to imagine that the new Colombian president will be attacked from the right-wing in his own country, from the U.S. government, and demonized in our media as an “evil socialist”; in other words, same old shyte. I wish him well…the “War On Drugs” has always been a farce, and anyone who has thought about this in depth understands that it’s a demand-side problem. Of course drugs are kept illegal because it generates more $$$ for the elitist scumbags who profit the most from it, be it the cartels, government contractors, or Big Pharma.
I would like to take this opportunity posit my view of the Who, Why and What the War on drugs was all about.
If you tend to be wary of conspiracy theories you may want to set this one out. IMHO you might need to catch up on your reading of some of the recent history of the US. Say from 1945-47, forword.
During the last year of of his first term Nixon created the DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration, by Reorganization 2 of 1973, on July 1, 1973, signed by Nixon of July 28, 1973. The effort sold as combining all Federal into drug efforts under on organization. Whether a coincidence or not, the CIA had recently experienced the hated “rift”, reduction in force.
James R. Schlesinger was director CIA from Feb1973 to July 1973, during this time the agencies staff was reduced by 7%, making very unpopular there. It should not be glossed over that this reduction in force occurred in tandum to Nixon’s (this would the same RM Nixon who declared war on drugs June 1 1971) Reorg plan 2 that created the DEA. It has been noted that many who left CIA walked across the street and applied for placement in the newly minted DEA. Suffice to say that if ones identity had been classified at CIA , that individual likely had seriously high security clearance.
From this moment forward trouble was afoot at DEA and CIA. Judging from the Kerry report on the International Drug Trade and Organized Crime , Dec 8, 1988.
Knowing what we know today of the loyalty of employees to CIA I feel it is fair to claim many direct conduits existed from the new DEA to the “New CIA”. This was to become one the the most detrimental incestuous relationships in what has become, IMHO a government now laboring to be functional because of the dominate affect of the most vile of incestuous orgies. The one created by the Unpatrotic, Patriot act.
From this moment forward trouble was afoot at DEA and CIA. Judging from the Kerry report on the International Drug trade and Organized Crime, Dec 8, 1988.
hXXps//nsarchives2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/north06.pdf
The title of this report is ironically, “Drugs Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy ” “A Report , prepared by the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, NARCOTICS AND INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS of the COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS UNITED STATES SENATE
John Kerry was so close to catching GHW Bush with his “Reagan White house CIA” , should have smelled.
How does the head man for the DEA’s International Organized Crime not know about CIA being responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic on the west coast in California ? That answer to that question is likely he did but was sworn to secrecy and bowed to the power of CIA. Read the Kerry report.
So we go from the War on Communism, to the war on poverty LBJ 1964, to the war on illiteracy Nov 1967, [ hXXp://internztional-review-icir.org/article/war-illiteracy ] to the War On Poverty, poverty now being out of control in the U.S. , to the War On Drugs, per crook Richard M Nixon , June 1971,. How quaint!
And finally to the War on Terror, September 16, declared by non-other than the Village Idiot from Crawford Texas.
Notice those early wars on communism, illiteracy, poverty and drugs were wars to be pursued in the neighborhoods of our southern brethren, no coincidence there either.
I’m just saying there is much more to this than we see from the out side. One misguided war after another that never accomplished squat. And before haters start to hate, remember the wars on illiteracy and poverty were filled with CIA front organizations same as the war on communism and the others.
Check it.
Thanks CN
MY apologies to every on
I would like to take this opportunity to posit my view of the Who, why and What the War On drugs was all about.
Id you tend to be wary of conspiracy theories you may want to set this one out. IMHO you also might need to catch up on your reading of some of the recent hisotry of the US. Say from 194×5-47 to present.
During the last year of his first term Nixon created the DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration, by the Reorganization 2 of 1973, on July 1, 1973, signd by Nixon on July 28, 1973. The effort sold as combining all Federal efforts to stem drug trade under one organization. Whether by coincidence or not, the CIA had recently experience the hated “rift”, the reduction in force.
James R. Schlesinger was director of CIA from Feb 1973 to July 1973, during this time the agencies staff was reduced by 7%. 7% of a relatively large number of employees, making Schlesinger very unpopular there. This action should not be glossed over, the reduction in force occurred in tandem to Nixon’s (this would be the same RM Nixon who declared the War On Drugs June 1, 1971) Reorg Plan 2 that created the DEA. Nixon would become fond of reorganizations. It has been noted that many who left CIA walkd across the street an applied for placement in the newly minted DEA. Suffice to say that if ones identity protected by the CIA, that individuyal likely would have had a serioulsy high security clearance.
From this point forward trouble was afoot at DEA and CIA. Judging from the Kerry report on the International Drug Trade and Organized Crime, Dec 8, 1988.
hXXps//nsarchives2.gwu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113,north06.pdf
The tit of the report is ironically, “Drugs Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy
Knowing what we know today of the loyalty of employees to CIA I feel it is fair to say many direct conduits existed from the newly minted DEA to the “New CIA”. This was to become one of the most detrimental incestuous relationships in what has become , IMHP a government now laboring to be functional because the dominate affect of the most vile of incestuous orgies, specifically the Unpatriotic, “Patriot Act s”, Homeland Security Act, The Patriot Act and the Freedom of Information Act
John Kerry was so close to catching the wily GHW Bush with his hand in the drug trade jay he could have smelled him.
How does the had man for the DEA’s International Organized Crime and Foreign Policy not know about CIA being responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic on the west coast in California? The answer to that question is likely be did but was sworn to secrecy and bowed to the power of CIA.
So we go from the War on Communism, to the war on poverty LBJ 1964, to the War on Illiteracy , Nov 1967 , { hXXp://international-reveiw-icir.org/article/war-literacy ] to the War On Poverty LBJ, to the War on Drugs, per Nixon June 1971.
And finally the War on Terror Sept 16, 2001, declared byi non-other that the Village Idiot from Crawford Texas.
Notice especially shoes early wars on communism, illiteracy, poverty and drugs were wars to be pursued in ghe neighborhoods of our southern brethren, no coincidence there either.
I’m simply saying there is much more to his tan we see from the out side of government.
Again my appologies to CN and Crew.
The USA always has to have a war on something, somebody or some country. It can never put its own house in order or even try to help its own people, while pretending to be a democracy. Inequality increases, the laws ensure that only the rich benefit from laws passed, and the courts are partisan.
Leave other countries alone, even if they have different governments than your “democracy”. Let them solve their own problems.
Excellent analysis of the problems the US imposed on Columbia and Latin America:
thegrayzone.com/2019/07/28/biden-privatization-plan-colombia-honduras-migration/
Despite “American democracy” and other euphemisms, the US goal seems to be to pick winners in the Drug Wars and send the losers in exploited caravans to be cheap expendable labor in the US and thus keep American citizen workers’ wages where they have been since 1980. Despite all the Happy Talk, money always wins out.
Glyphosate (Roundup) destruction of cocaine cash crops can easily be overcome by molecular biology pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0603638103
No doubt “boutique” coca plants are available now (probably from the CIA), and the REAL purpose of glyphosate spraying is to destroy the rain forests and their unequalled diversity of plant life and ecosystems.
Just a gut feeling…isn’t the ‘war on drugs’ nothing more than a pretext for the US to attack any nation at will?
The “war on drugs” was always a class war. It was also always a piggybank for the police. It was never about public health or safety. Placing cannabis on schedule 1 was a political move, and a nod to the police that they had another took in their toolkit to go after anyone they didn’t like (black and brown people, war protesters, etc.). The war on drugs has always been a scam perpetrated by those in power, who are never held to account for their own drug abuse.
War on marijuana targeted the peacenik hippies (and whom we called ‘mexicans’); war on heroin targeted Blacks; who did the war on cocaine target?
Look at disparity in sentences between powder cocaine and crack. War on cocaine also war on black and brown people.
The disparity in sentencing was demanded by black leaders whose community was being decimated by crack in the 80’s.
In my view, this is primarily not about racism. It’s, like many things, mostly about power and money: how to recycle middle class money into the pockets of the 1% and who gets the jobs. How much do big banks make from the prohibition (and thus excess profits) of the illegal drugs trade?
If you are interested, read “Smoke Signals” by Martin Lee. The drug laws were mostly about police control and extortion (think civil forfeiture). Joe Biden was big on imprisoning black kids for crack cocaine, and everyone knows that Wall Street types and other rich people never got in any trouble for their massive use of cocaine. Nixon had just gotten the Schaffer Report on cannabis completed in 1973 I think, which concluded that cannabis was far less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. But he had intended on making it illegal anyway, so he put it on Schedule 1. That allowed police to start arresting all the Vietnam War protesters. It has always been a political and police power grab.