Congressional ‘drug warriors’ and U.S. policy towards Colombia

Abstract

In the late 1990s, the Colombian National Police became the central channel for U.S. material and symbolic support to that country, thanks in large part to the work of a cohort of Republican members of Congress known as the ‘drug warriors.’ In the Congressional sphere, debates over the impact of illicit drug use often began with the abused bodies of American youth, but debates over the appropriate response frequently focused on the bodies of Colombian police and military as the site of suggested state intervention. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of what deaths are grievable in the public sphere, I examine how the Colombian National Police came to be positioned as the central object of policymaker solidarity. Travel played a central role in the construction of distinct sensory, affective and moral geographies: Congressional delegations focused on militarized technology, weaponry and enacted scenarios of counternarcotics operations. These excursions were channeled into larger political fields valorizing militarized expertise and delineating the boundaries of appropriate policy debates. This analysis illuminates the ways in which Congressional debate and practice played a central role in U.S. foreign policy during this period, through an examination of how Congressional expertise was constructed and deployed, which foreign policy actors were selected as the object of U.S. official solidarity, and how the boundaries of policy debate was constructed through a focus on military knowledge.

Keywords

Policy expertise militarization travel United States

In the late 1990s, the Colombian National Police became the central channel for U.S. material and symbolic support to that country, thanks in large part to the work of a cohort of Republican members of Congress known as the ‘drug warriors.’ In the Congressional sphere, debates over the impact of illicit drug use often began with the abused bodies of American youth, but debates over the appropriate response frequently focused on the bodies of Colombian police and military as the site of suggested state intervention. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of what deaths are grievable in the public sphere, I examine how the Colombian National Police came to be positioned as the central object of policymaker solidarity. Travel played a central role in the construction of distinct sensory, affective and moral geographies: Congressional delegations focused on militarized technology, weaponry and enacted scenarios of counternarcotics operations. These excursions were channeled into larger political fields valorizing militarized expertise and delineating the boundaries of appropriate policy debates. This analysis illuminates the ways in which Congressional debate and practice played a central role in U.S. foreign policy during this period, through an examination of how Congressional expertise was constructed and deployed, which foreign policy actors were selected as the object of U.S. official solidarity, and how the boundaries of policy debates were constructed through a focus on military knowledge.

The so-called War on Drugs has been a central framework for U.S. domestic and foreign policy for the past three decades. Within the U.S., programs designed to ostensibly to minimize the traffic and consumption of illicit narcotics have transformed systems of governance, including the social welfare, prison, and legal system systems (Bertram et al., 1996, Caulkins, 2005; Massing, 1998). In the post cold war, pre war on terror decade, drug war efforts were primary channels for U.S.–foreign military relations. Anthropologists have compellingly illuminated the effects of drug war policies on minority and poor communities (Bourgois, 2002; Bourgois and Schonberg, 2010; Campbell, 2009; Garcia, 2010). Here, I am interested in exploring one corner of the drug war by considering not the impact but the ‘enabling discourses, mobilizing metaphors, and underlying ideologies’ that naturalize foreign police as the objects of U.S. policymakers’ solidarity and military technology as its only appropriate incarnation (Wedel et al., 2005: 34). The growing field of anthropology of policy is particularly well suited to illuminate these issues. Beyond focusing on questions of assessment and impact, anthropological considerations of policymaking is particularly concerned with ‘questions of origins…where these policies come from, how the ‘truths’ that underlie them were created,’ as Greenhalgh (2008: 308) argues. Tracing the emergence of distinct geographies and of the Colombian National Police as grievable bodies in drug war debates requires understanding the evolution of zero tolerance drug policies in the United States, the cultural politics of partisan debates during the late 1990s, and the ways in which travel constituted forms of policy expertise. My project contributes to the ethnographic exploration of how policy creation remains embedded in fraught political fields that both respond to and produce cultural norms and practices.

Congressional travel to Colombia became a privileged site for the articulation of moral concern and political identification for policymakers who viewed domestic drug consumption as a significant national threat. Through this affective geography, military hardware and training for counternarcotics operations was naturalized as the only appropriate policy response, and the requirements of human rights legislation and bureaucratic procedures were portrayed as moral failings. Travel allowed some members of Congress and their aides to intervene in opposition to official policy as defined by the State Department, as well as producing a human and political geography of Colombia limited to militarized counternarcotics operations, official heroes and criminal villains. A Congressional cohort of Republicans enacted these political visions in Congressional hearings that valorized experiential, militarized expertise. In both travel and Congressional hearings, expertise was gendered, the result of mastery of masculine realms of danger, weaponry and military strategy. Borrowing from Catherine Lutz’ description of technofilia as ‘a cultural and political-economic phenomenon’ that has influenced foreign policy as well as the evolution of the U.S. military and the growing militarization of American industry (Lutz, 2006: 594), I argue that the focus on technology defined the limits of appropriate policy debate, silencing dissent and obscuring alternative possible policies, geographies and histories. Policymaker solidarity, understood as an articulation of political identification resulting in material commitments in transnational politics, is critical in this political terrain. Anthropologists and others critique simplistic calculations of solidarity, arguing instead that we must be attune to ambivalence (Bähre, 2007), issues of scale and geographies of blame in transnational social movements (Fitz-Henry, 2011), and its limits in the new global regimes of labor and consumption (Gill, 2009). Just as political scientist Clifford Bob extends the consideration of transnational activist networks to right-wing political projects (Bob, 2012) and Rutherford (2009) describes the role of sympathy in colonial administration, here I extend an analysis of solidarity to policymakers’ imaginaries of their role in transnational policymaking. My discussion of policymaker solidarity expands Butler’s discussion of the ‘politics of moral responsiveness’ in the case of the Middle East to debates over Latin America. She argues politics is expressed through support of those ‘who are recognizable to us’; here I chart how that recognition is constituted and performed. This process is central to how solidarity is imagined and enacted, drawing on a moral landscape engendered through travel and embodied in acts focusing on the commemoration of particular wounded and dead. I argue that such political justifications play a central role in the way that policymakers mobilize and justify support for particular policies. This political recognition is a fundamental structuring logic of U.S. political culture and a central way in which Americans imagine themselves as to be acting in concert with transnational political projects in other countries as a justifying logic of intervention, particularly in the case of neo-colonial U.S.–Latin America relations (Grandin, 2007).

This article is part of a larger project examining the origin and impact of the Plan Colombia aid package. My fieldwork includes archival work with declassified documents at the National Security Archive, and phone and in-person interviews with members of Congress, Congressional aids and other policymakers. This case study, like many efforts to produce ethnographies of policymaking processes, demonstrates the need to employ multiple methodologies while emerging from a previous embeddedness in the process being analyzed (Greenhalgh, 2008, Mosse, 2004; see Tate, 2007: 13–20 for a discussion of embeddedness). In my case, the issues raised here emerged in part from my participation in policy debates, when as a policy advocate I was repeatedly confronted by the accusation that I was grieving the wrong injuries and concerned with the wrong bodies. From 1998–2001, I was the Colombia analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a progressive advocacy organization that opposed the military assistance to Colombia on human rights grounds and argued that U.S. drug policy was ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst. During that time, I participated in strategy sessions with activists, met with Congressional staff, Defense and State Department personnel, and traveled frequently to Colombia, where I met with embassy staff and other experts. I was frequently instructed that rather than focus on human rights defenders and peasant communities under attack by right-wing paramilitary groups allied with the Colombia security forces, the true victims were others: I should be devoting my political resources to kidnap victims and the police killed in the line of duty. When I began to examine U.S. policy debates as a scholar and ethnographer, I returned to these encounters as I considered the place of Colombia in the U.S. policy-making imagination.

Drug war histories

Public debates over drug use in the United States have historically been focused on bodies out of place and out of control, with deep roots in exclusionary racial histories and the expansion of government bureaucracies and regulatory practices. Prohibition was closely linked to racialized fears of urbanizing immigrants as well as efforts to control black communities, as were early efforts to outlaw cocaine, while anti-marijuana laws were used to terrorize Mexican migrants along the border (Morone, 2004). The institutional interests and agendas of professionalizing medical associations and expanding government regulatory and enforcement bureaucracies have also been a driving force of such efforts since the turn of the past century (Gootenburg, 2008). Following Richard Nixon’s declaration of the first ‘war on drugs’ in 1971, the links between illicit drugs, counterculture political challenges to traditional parental and governmental controls, and new social formations were vociferously decried by pundits and policymakers, focused on white middle class youth rejecting social norms, and black lower class youth emerging from the civil rights movement as a criminalized underclass. Concern about white middle class drug use came to a head in the 1980s, with the creation of what became one of the ‘most powerful lobbying group in the country,’ the National Federation of Parents for Drug Free Youth (Gladwell, 1998). During the Reagan administration, these parents redefined drug policy around the adage, just say no. Reacting to the widely perceived decline in parental authority and so-called traditional values, this first wave of what became the culture wars of the 1980s viewed any exposure to drugs as inevitably leading to addiction (Massing, 1998). These parents and policymakers rejected ‘the notion of recovery meant that addicts could get well—a message that, they felt, undermined their warning to young people not to use drugs’ (Gladwell, 1998, see also Bertran et al., 1996). At the same time, black drug use was an increasing target of law enforcement, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 resulted in racial disparities in sentencing through dramatically harsher penalty structures for crack compared to powder cocaine, resulting in what some legal scholars call ‘the new Jim Crow’ (Alexander, 2010; Reinarman and Levine, 1997). Anthropologists, sociologists, and critical criminologists have critiqued the shifts in political culture and punitive practices of surveillance, incarceration, and law enforcement linked to the war on drugs and broader criminalization of minority and poor populations (Natapoff, 2011; Wacquant, 2009; Simon, 2009).

The zero-tolerance paradigm also allowed domestic drug consumption to become a national security issue requiring militarized responses, as all drug production, trafficking and consumption must be targeted and America’s youth must remain innocent of any exposure to drugs. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Directive 2221, formally declaring drugs a national security threat. The drug war played a major role in the immediate post-cold war search for new roles and missions for the U.S. military and for new internal enemies justifying expanded police powers (Reinarman and Levine, 1997). Military equipment and technologies initially designed for the cold war were now employed in – and their budgets justified by – militarized transnational law enforcement efforts. Major U.S. military research centers, including Los Alamos laboratories, began including counternarcotics technologies as part of their agenda; weapons makers and other corporations sponsored national conferences on the issue (Andreas and Price, 2001: 40). Defense contractors began to play an expanding role in developing counternarcotics and law enforcement hardware in the post cold war era in what a Wall Street Journal article called the ‘Cold War of the ‘90s’’ (Thomas, 1994).

Domestic drug concerns dovetailed neatly with growing concern about the rising power of the Colombian cartels. During the 1980s, the Medellín and Cali family-based empires came to control a billion-dollar cocaine industry, employing bribery and violence to permeate all facets of Colombian society. Violently opposed to extradition treaties pushed by the U.S. government, a group of drug lords known as the ‘extraditables’ declared war on the Colombian government; their business tactics and intimidation campaign included bombings and assassinations (Thoumi, 2003). Domestic and foreign drug war politics converged in President George Bush I’s Andean Initiative, announced on in September 1989 in a speech declaring that the ‘gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs.’ The aid package included $231.6 million in primarily military assistance for Colombia, as well as Bolivia and Peru, where the U.S. played a major role in reconfiguring domestic policing operations and legislation regulating illicit narcotics production and trafficking.

By the mid-1990s, the Colombian National Police played a disproportionate and unprecedented role in U.S.–Colombian relations. U.S.–Colombia relations deteriorated significantly during the Ernesto Samper administration (1994–1998), following allegations that were leaked by the DEA immediately following the election that he had accepted campaign contributions from the Cali Cartel. The U.S. decertified Colombia and revoked Samper’s visa.¹ A bifurcated policy emerged in which U.S. hostility towards Samper was mitigated by the ongoing enthusiastic support of Colombian National Police and especially Police Chief José Serrano. Close U.S. ties contributed to Serrano’s success in Colombia; U.S. officials had demanded that he be named chief to replace a general rumored to be implicated in corruption (Crandall, 2002: 106). Once in office, Serrano carried out a highly publicized purge of the police forces, and created elite counternarcotics units that were rigorously vetted, making him the celebrated favorite of U.S. policymakers. The CNP were heralded for their success – with significant U.S. assistance – in killing Pablo Escobar along with several other major traffickers and capturing many of the leaders of the Cali Cartel. During this period, the Republican Congressional ‘drug warriors’ differentiated the Colombian police from the military, which was widely viewed as corrupt, inefficient and abusive by U.S. policymakers (Office of Asian Pacific and Latin American Analysis, 1997; Passage, 1998; Tate, 2007). Perhaps most significantly, during this period the Colombian military viewed their mission as exclusively counterinsurgency, viewing counter-narcotics as separate and less urgent, and a growing rivalry with the CNP – exacerbated by U.S. assistance – led to cases where the military refused to assist the CNP in their missions (Office on Asia and Latin America, 1997). At the same time, CNP supporters minimized and in some cases completely erased their ongoing corruption and colluding with brutal paramilitary forces (Tate, 2010a).

U.S. policy debates over counternarcotics assistance to Colombia relied on a differentiation between Colombian police and soldiers initially framed as diametrically opposed; the one noble and sacrificing, working alongside the U.S.; the latter ineffective, lazy, corrupt, caring only for their own agenda. By the end of the 1990s, however, these debates shifted. Colombian cartels were no longer viewed as the primary engine of the illicit drug trade; U.S. officials increasingly labeled the guerrillas as major drug traffickers, collapsing the distinction between counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations and incorporating the latter into a military response (Tate, 2010b). At the same time, the Colombian military began to accept the counternarcotics mission. Following the election of a new president in 1998, the U.S. signed a new military-to-military agreement in December and began funding a series of U.S.-trained and equipped Colombian army counternarcotics battalions. By 1999, President Clinton proposed a large aid package that would continue aid to the police while dramatically expanding aid to the military. Some CNP supporters were deeply concerned that this would shift the focus from the CNP, viewing the package's origin in the Clinton Administration with skepticism. However, as the Colombian military began participating in counternarcotics efforts, and their counterinsurgency campaigns were portrayed as targeting drug trafficking insurgents, the category of deserving U.S. allies was expanded to include the Colombian army, despite the long-held view that they were inept, corrupt and inefficient. The constant thread in these debates was an articulation of the war on drugs as requiring military equipment and training for the foreign officers who risked their lives in defense of the U.S. public, putting their bodies on the line.

Congressional travel to Colombia

In the U.S. Congress, assistance for the Colombian National Police was championed by a cohort of Republican representatives who were informally known as the ‘drug warriors,’ institutionally linked through the Congressional Drug Caucus. The Caucus is a voluntary group without legislative powers designed to raise awareness and educate policymakers on particular issues; they can convene hearings. After the Republicans gained the majority in the House of Representatives in the 1994 mid-term election, the drug warriors came to occupy institutionally powerful positions. Among them were Speaker of the House (1995–1998) Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Speaker of the House (1999–206) Dennis Hastert (R-IN), head of the House Government Reform Committee Dan Burton (R-IN), chairman of the House International Relations Committee (1995–2001) Benjamin Gilman (R-NY), and Asa Hutchinson (R-AR 1997–2001, then named director of the DEA), among others. These positions allowed them to control the legislative agenda, as well as to convene hearings debating appropriate drug policy, sponsor Congressional delegations to Colombia and orchestrate material assistance for Colombia.

During this period, numerous members of Congress and their staff traveled to Colombia on official Congressional delegations (known in Washington as ‘codels’). Congressional travel is generally ranked in two categories: ‘windshield tours,’ luxury junkets in which the local population is observed only from the windshield from the airport to the resort, and trips orchestrated to educate and increase Congressional interest and engagement in particular issues.² Colombia codels were colloquially known as ‘drugs and thugs tours’; the typical tour consisted of a 2 or 3-day trip to Colombia, meetings with Colombian civilian and military officials and a tour, often by helicopter, of U.S.-sponsored operations, frequently in the southern jungle regions. The majority party must approve all official travel, with a member of the majority party leading each Congressional delegation and the chair of the authorizing committee (controlled by the majority party) signing off.

Congressional travel is what Susan Greenhalgh calls a hidden site of policymaking, occurring largely out of the public eye but deeply shaping policymaking debates and practices (2008). Direct contact with foreign officials allowed members of Congress to express alternative policy priorities and support particular projects that they felt were not sufficiently championed by official State Department policy positions. In some cases, members of Congress went so far as to explicitly oppose official policy, or orchestrate their own policy initiatives.³ Cass Ballenger, who represented North Carolina from 1986 until his retirement in 2005, led seven codels to Colombia as chair of the Subcommittee of the Western Hemisphere of the House International Relations Committee (now the Committee on Foreign Affairs), and as a champion of U.S. assistance to the Colombian National Police, and later the Colombian military. During an extensive phone interview from his home in North Carolina, Ballenger told me one of the big advantages of the Congressional role in foreign policy was that they were not limited by official policy positions. ‘You need the independence we had to go off on our own, as legislators,’ he said, describing the presidential role as ‘restricted’ because it was channeled through official institutions. His trips to Colombia provided him an opportunity to convince Colombian officials what the best policy would be, such as when he ‘had to kick some real big tail’ to get the Colombian generals to accept one model of helicopters (Huey IIs) over another (Blackhawks) ‘after a hell of a fight.’

The most blatant case of opposition to official policy occurred during a 1997 Congressional delegation and revealed in an embassy cable declassified in 2004. This case is also an example of the ways in which support for counternarcotics operations was articulated as a moral posture in opposition to human rights concerns. The Leahy Amendment, first attached to U.S. security assistance programs in 1996, required the State Department to certify that U.S. counternarcotics funds were not delivered to foreign military units facing credible allegations of human rights abuses. Complying with this provision required the State Department to negotiate a formal end-use monitoring agreement with the Colombian Defense Ministry, which was opposed to the conditions (Tate, 2011). While these negotiations were going on, a codel led by Dennis Hastert (R-IL) traveled to Colombia and met with senior Colombian military officials. Hastert promised that he would ‘remove conditions on assistance’ and complained about the ‘leftist-dominated’ U.S. Congress that ‘used human rights as an excuse to aid the left in other countries.’ He said that he would correct this situation and expedite aid to allies in the war on drugs, and urged Colombian military officials to ‘bypass the U.S. executive branch and communicate directly with Congress’ (cable 1997).

Participants in codels believed that their expert knowledge of Colombian counternarcotics operations required them to perform oversight of program implementation by State Department and other U.S. officials. Ballenger explained, ‘We had to maintain constant vigilance on what was going down there, making sure that it was going in the right direction and to the right people… We had to hold constant hearings, to get the complaints to the State Department about what was getting there wrong.’ Such efforts included frequent frustration with the career diplomats, based on competing claims to ‘on the ground’ expertise. Ballenger continued, ‘The embassies too, they have a different perspective, have the idea that if you don’t live there every day, you don’t know what is going on. The Foreign Service, they think they know better who to do things, I live here and you don’t, so they won’t carry things out.’ Another aide explained how he used the policy tools at his disposal – including freezing funding for particular initiatives, threatening bad publicity, and forcing officials to testify. He reported threatening one official that if he did not implement a program to the aide’s satisfaction, ‘then you are going to come to Congress and tell us why you won’t do it, come to a committee and testify in a hearing – they knew they were going to brutalized in a committee hearing.’

In addition to these direct policy interventions, codels are part of a broad category of political travel intended to educate and transform political subjectivities and motivate particular forms of political action, one example of a growing number of forms of political tourism that have emerged as a central form of transnational encounter. Scholars are beginning to turn their attention to how tourism encounters engender particular histories (Babb, 2010) and its role in diplomacy (Merrill, 2009) as well as how tourism of sites of tragedy, conflict and pollution produces political practices and identities (Pezzullo, 2009; Sharpley, 2009; Stein, 2008). Anthropologists have been particularly attune to the performance of suffering such travel generates (Allen, 2009), while scholars of the Central American peace movement have examined the ways in which travel played a central role in developing solidarity networks and new activist identities (Perla, 2008; Smith, 1996). Congressional representatives and staff who traveled to Colombia did so as a form of form of political witnessing and activism, to construct particular relationships and genres of policy expertise as part of a clearly articulated strategy. In one example, a staffer told me of his office ‘targeting’ William Delahunt (D-MA), who opposed military aid, by inviting him on a codel intended to change his political priorities. In describing the transformative power of travel, the staffer told me with pride, ‘he voted one way before he left, and voted another after he came back.’

Expertise produced through travel was based in part on the ontological status of having experienced conditions ‘on the ground,’ in which direct witnessing provides insight and authority. As one former Republican staffer who traveled frequently to Colombia told me, ‘I had the chance to see stuff I had only read about, or seen in the documents.’ One member of Congress who led three codels to Colombia in one year spoke frequently about the importance of being able to say ‘first hand’ what they learned. He went on to critique U.S. and European human rights organizations that claimed that violations had occurred: ‘the view from Bogotá looks very different’ (Davis, 2004). One Republican staffer, who had been on six delegations to Colombia in four years, told me, ‘We [use travel] to build bridges, educate members in the complexity of the challenges that the Colombian government is facing, so that members can feel at the table.’ In this case, ‘at the table,’ means empowered by expertise to participate authoritatively in policy design, with insights to contribute that will be accepted as appropriate and important by other members. The staffer went to explain how travel was essential for constituting such qualities. ‘There is no way that briefing materials [i.e. written reports] can match what the members see and experience on a trip.’

Codels provided access to conflictive regions and restricted knowledge that was unavailable to others, valued expertise of that which is “inaccessible or illegible” (Carr, 2010: 21). Congressional delegations allowed members of Congress, their aides and allies access to forbidden landscapes within Colombia through travel in military vehicles to remote jungle bases and outposts, with armed guards and military escorts. ‘In country,’ codel members had access to restricted information through briefings with U.S. and Colombian officials; staffers frequently mentioned the classified status of these meetings, reminding me that they could share the fact of their occurrence but not their content, which was valued in part because of its secrecy (Masco, 2010). The value of this knowledge was further increased by the association with danger, and the willingness to travel in ‘dangerous’ areas that were outside the perimeter of permitted places, to be, as one staffer put it, ‘in a place where no gringos had ever been.’ This travel produced sensory and affective geographies (Carter 2010) of Colombia that were defined by counternarcotics operations and concerns, controlled by official military and police forces. Codels were orchestrated to present participants with particular geographies, spectacles of technological performance and personal suffering, and spur them to political action.

These geographies are necessarily restricted and partial, product of the ideological and material constraints placed on official codels. Opposition civilian geographies were unavailable through such trips, as my own experience with Congressional travel made clear. During my work at the Washington Office on Latin America, I organized a non-official congressional delegation consisting of two members of Congress and six staff members. The trip was paid for by a private foundation, allowing members to escape the restrictions of official travel; while we met with Colombian military and state officials, I organized the itinerary to focus on civilian human rights and peace efforts. During the trip, we visited the peace community of San José de Apartadó in northern Colombia, one of several organized with the support of the Catholic church and non-governmental organizations that forbid all armed actors from entrance, including state security forces. The community suffered frequent attacks by paramilitary forces acting in concert with local military commands; at the time of our visit in 2001, community leaders told us that nearly 100 people, almost 10% of the community, had been killed since its founding in 1997. The U.S. Embassy opposed our travel there; when I called the local military commander to arrange an interview he admitted, confused – thinking that I was embassy personnel – that he had been instructed not to meet with us. Embassy personnel traveled with us as far as the regional urban center, leaving our company as we embarked down the dirt road to meet with community leaders and peasant families to hear their testimony of persecution and abuse.

In a 2008 interview, I asked Jim McGovern (D-MA), who had participated on the delegation, to reflect on Congressional travel. One of the most liberal members of Congress, McGovern and his staff have gone to Colombia six times, on trips organized and paid for by NGOs. One these trips and other non-official codels, NGOs created their own restricted geographies, privileging civilians and opposition activists, among them human rights, peace, labor and religious leaders who had for several generations articulated critiques of existing counternarcotics and counterinsurgency programs. As a Congressional aide, McGovern had worked for the Speaker’s Task Force investigating the killing of four Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter by an elite U.S.-trained Salvadoran military squad in November 1989. As a result of this experience, he told me, ‘I don’t trust what my government says on human rights. Not anyplace. I want to see for myself. That is why I don’t ask the embassy to put together my trips’. He described how official codels reinforced support for existing policies through their carefully orchestrated encounters.

The U.S. embassy says, there is no problem. The English-speaking president says there is no problem … They can count on members of Congress to go to Colombia on codels, to spend between 24 and 48 hours in Bogota, at most they go to one area that is fully prepared to look like a raging success.

In those ‘prepared’ areas, travel produced a sensory geography linking their visceral experiences of technological displays and vulnerable bodies to political action supporting military aid. Through travel, participants experienced the sensory pleasure enabled by military machinery – the physical sensations of helicopter and ‘go fast’ boat travel, the sound and smell of munitions exercises, the dramatic explosive destruction of captured cocaine. Codel participants had the opportunity for embodied participation in counternarcotics operations, including members of Congress ‘doing manual eradication,’ physically pulling up coca plants and assisting with their destruction. Congressional aids and members of Congress described the physical sensations of peering out helicopters flying over ‘triple canopy’ jungle and impressive displays of technology. The aesthetic experience of military training exercises, exotic forms of militarized travel, and mortar exercises shaped how they understood and valued the weaponry supplied by the U.S. (Gusterson, 1998; Masco, 2004, 2006). One staffer who traveled on six codels to Colombia emphasized the importance of such issues when considering which mini-gun model to supply to the Colombian police for ‘softening the enemy.’ In addition to the material requirements of sufficient force to break through lush jungle,

it has a psychological effect, the barrel is this big [holds his hands in a circle as wide as his face], with individual barrels around it, it can fire 3,000 rounds a minute… The psychological effect in part is because of the sound, a very distinctive sound [vvvvooot], you know that there are 600 rounds coming at you. That is very productive from a military perspective.

Codels also produced an affective geography of relationships and networks of reciprocity. Codel encounters were designed to inspire forms of solidarity and affective political commitment between Colombian officials and U.S. policymakers. During interviews, participants repeatedly stressed that the highlight of these trips were the personal relationships developed with Colombian ‘front-line’ officials; according to Ballenger, on his trips, ‘the most important thing was the people themselves.’ General Serrano enjoyed the closest relationships with U.S. officials at the time, as demonstrated by his weekly contact with supporters on Capital Hill. One aide critical of U.S. policy towards Colombia reflected on the importance of personal relationships created through travel, and their impact during policy debates. ‘You come back really liking these people,’ she said of her encounters with the Colombian president and vice-president. ‘Then you are placed in the position of defending them, not analyzing the effect of the policy on people…the consequences on the ground.

Codel encounters with both high ranking public figures like General Serrano as well as more anonymous low-ranking officials cemented a system of reciprocity, in which Colombian military and police personnel risked injury and death in counternarcotics operations, offering their bodies as a sacrifice in the front lines of the war on drugs, while the U.S. provided military hardware and training in return. These relationships draw on a long history of proxy military intervention in Latin America dating from the turn of the past century. In the immediate post cold war period, militarized counternarcotics operations came to occupy a privileged place in U.S. foreign policy. Masculine calculations of responsibility, courage and military honor were central to these relationships, in which both Colombian officers and U.S. politicians positioned themselves as defenders of American children. During interviews, the emotional intensity of these commitments and encounters – and the role of classic American male-bonding behaviors such as leisure beer drinking after dangerous operations – was communicated nonverbally, with pauses and extended eye contact. One former staffer described getting to see the CNP ‘in action’ after hearing guerrilla gunfire as the codel arrived at a remote airport. After the police ‘went out and took care of the situation,’ they returned to the pool in the complex where the staffers were drinking beer.

I asked one guy, why do you keep doing this? He said, [looking really seriously, meaningfully at me], I love my country, and you guys are helping us. Without you, we couldn’t do the things we do…Every time I catch guerrillas, kill guerrillas, that means less drugs on your streets killing your children, he said. Maybe someday, they will stop killing mine [a pause while looking at me]. So he was a pretty serious guy.

In staffer accounts, the wounded bodies of the CNP embodied their commitment and sacrifice, while the wounded addict bodies of addicts were invoked not to be included in a feminized world of physical care and treatment, but as justifying a military logic of technological intervention and combat. One senior republican foreign policy aid, a former FBI agent who boasted of his close relationship with the police both in his home district and in Colombia, told me in a phone interview that during his frequent trips to Colombia he would always visit wounded counternarcotics police in military hospitals. ‘It would eat my heart out to see these young kids who had lost their legs, had no feet, because of land mines. I would go on every trip.’ At the conclusion of the interview, he returned to the bodies of the Colombian police. When I asked what his strongest memories of Colombia were, he responded

Of the physical recovery room of the CNP hospital, all the crippled, maimed, distorted bodies of young men and women who had been in the counternarcotics fight. Those young bodies, and the young kids lying on the stairs [overdosing heroin] in Harlem.

Other staffers described the pilgrimages to the hospital to see wounded police as a constant feature of their trips to Colombia. Like other forms of collective mourning and memorialization of war dead contributing to particular political, national and ethnic identities such as public naming, monuments and shrines (Borneman, 2011, Kwon, 2006), these commemorative practices were intended to enshrine the CNP as war heroes fighting for the U.S. cause. In the case of the CNP, these practices included public reading of lists of names of officers killed in action during Congressional hearings, and publishing their names in the Congressional record. Their role as front-line fighters was frequently referenced, as speakers lauded the CNP as ‘bravest men and women in the world,’ ‘honest’ and ‘heroic,’ in marked contrast to the presumed corrupt and cowardly Colombian drug producers and the inept and career-minded State Department officials. Connections between U.S. officials and Colombian military and police personnel were also displayed through commemorative clothing and objects, such as hats and paperweights with CNP insignias.

Photographs from these travels were also displayed as evidence of the enjoyment of military technology and the affective relationships and political commitments embodied in codel travel. One former aid concluded our interview by rifling through a stack of photographs of his travels to Colombian military bases with Colombian military officers; he also proudly displayed the multiple visa stamps on his passport. During phone interviews, codel participants frequently described photographs of themselves in remote jungle locations, standing with military hardware. Former member of Congress Ballenger recalled with pride during our phone interview of the ‘ton of pictures’ of himself, with then Colombian president Andres Pastrana and the Huey helicopters that commemorate his important role in promoting military assistance. Photographs of members of Congress in the field were sometimes circulated as campaign materials; one aide described codel photos of members of Congress participating in counternarcotics operations as ‘a great shot for the constituents.’

Congressional hearings, material politics and the production of militarized expertise

Congressional debates over counternarcotics policy during this period were dominated by the question of which technology was the most appropriate, focusing on the provision of miniguns, helicopters, and other weapon systems. The emphasis on specialized military vocabulary and knowledge is both profoundly gendered and determining of the content of these debates (Cohen, 1989). For many staffers who are former military officers, policemen or FBI agents – or who identified with such professions – the focus on weapons technology allows them to further position themselves as experts in the specialized, hyper-masculine domain of military knowledge. In these hearings, members of Congress presented the drug war as winnable, provided that the correct technology was applied. Representative Gingrich stated in 1997 that ‘by 2001, this country could be drug free,’ a claim he himself acknowledged ‘seems absurd,’ but reminded the audience of the time during his childhood when drugs were not readily available. His statement typified several of the major themes of Republican counternarcotics claims: the ‘cultural war’ emphasis on childhood, a nostalgic past, and the possibility of absolute victory through technology. Now a lobbyist with a high-profile Republican firm in Washington, one former aide located his authority in policy debates in his superior knowledge of weaponry and military training gained during his 6 months as a Marine officer. He launched into an extended discussion of the forms and functions of different makes and models of miniguns, their helicopter placement, and their impact on targets, asserting that this knowledge distinguished him from civilians familiar with such weapons from movies and other popular culture representations. In his accounting, his military experience and travel to remote Colombian military bases, where he was able to witness training exercises and weapons displays, provided him embodied expertise. He went on to describe a confrontation with the senior Republican leadership, where he was able to convince them to support the kind of helicopters he advocated.

Much of discussion of assistance to Colombia focused not on the efficacy of military assistance of the substance of the policy, but which kind of helicopter to provide. The Blackhawk vs. Huey debate reflected real differences in their capabilities, in terms of personnel carrying capacity (24 vs. 11), altitude flying ability (20,000 vs. 16,000 feet, important for eradication in mountainous areas and to keep them out of reach of guerrilla artillery), and expense ($13 million vs. $1.8 million to upgrade a recycled Huey to Huey II). Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Randy Beers was involved in the extended dispute with Congress over whether to provide Blackhawk or Bell helicopters. He described a senior female State Department official involved in the Congressional debates telling him, ‘you have to stoke those boys with toys.’ A former infantry officer, Beers concluded that his military expertise effectively silenced the Congressional opposition.

Congressional policy was not simply the product of affective relations or technophilia, however, but was also rooted in the material politics of foreign aid. Military contractors played a direct role in generating support for the military assistance to Colombia, including campaign contributions by helicopter manufacturers of $1.25 million between 1997 and 1999 (Isikoff and Vistica, 2000). The site of manufacture – Connecticut-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, stood to gain $360 million for 30 Blackhawk helicopters, while Texas-based Bell Helicopter Textron Inc gained $66 million for 33 Hueys – led to Congressional support by district of production. The final package split the difference, with 16 Black Hawks ($234 million) and 30 Huey IIs ($81 million) for the Colombian military and two Black Hawks and 12 Huey IIs for the Colombian National Police. In a February 2000 hearing, then-drug czar Barry McCaffrey called Black Hawks ‘the best helicopter on the face of the Earth; the next time you see me, I’ll probably be peddling them, I hope.’ He went on to serve the board of DynCorp; other officials supporting the aid package went on to work for defense contractor Betchel (Assistant Secretary of State for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict Brian Sheridan) and as lobbyists (Textron retained Charles ‘Tony’ Gillespie, a former ambassador to Colombia; former official Michael Skol founded his own consulting group and was a spokesman for the Colombia Business Partnership).

These material interests were not explicitly referenced in Congressional hearings as members of Congress performed their affective and political commitments to Colombian security forces. The moral landscape mapped in these Congressional hearings pitted Republican drug warriors as passionate defenders of America’s youth against an inept and bureaucracy-driven administration. Members of Congress frequently described their support of the CNP as motived by the threat of drugs to American children, locating their care in their own patriarchal position as fathers, and as the protectors of the children in their districts. In once such hearing, the chair described the hearing as about ‘the heroic efforts of certain Colombians in the drug war…but it is also about the youth of America, our children, and, frankly, our future.’ Clinton administration officials, on the other hand, were accused of political and moral failings for the inability – or refusal – to implement policies designed protect the Colombian National Police. Drug policy became a way of differentiating the political parties, part of a larger partisan struggle. Republicans accused officials of not caring about the impact of drugs on American youth, and attempted to implicate them in the deaths of Colombian police because of their failures to deliver Congressionally mandated assistance. The decertification of Colombia required some aid to be suspended during the Samper administration; drug warriors were outraged that the extension of the Leahy amendment – requiring the U.S. to suspend aid to units facing credible allegations of abuses – meant that aid was suspended during the negotiations over end-use monitoring. Members also objected to the failure of the embassy to expand their counternarcotics staff when provided with earmarked funding from Congress.

These disputes were displayed in passionate Congressional hearings, in which the competing expertise of the Congressional drug warriors – gained through their travel to Colombia, close connections to Colombian National Police and other officials, and intimate knowledge military weapons technology – were positioned against State Department official’s concern with legal protocol, human rights safeguards and bureaucratic procedure. In one of the most dramatic examples, Hastert accused the U.S. ambassador to Colombia – who was testifying in the hearing – of ‘protecting the human rights of people who want to transgress against the children of this country’ for attempting to implement the Leahy law prohibiting aid to abusive units. Ambassador Myles Frechette explained that he was following official policy and adhering to administrative rules established within the State Department bureaucracy. In response, Representative Bob Barr (R GA) demanded State Department officials consider

whether or not those brave men [Colombian police officers] would be alive today had it not been for the bloviation, the obfuscation and the delays which we have been witnessing with the last many months in providing the helicopters, the guns, the ammunition, the armor plating, the vests and all the other equipment that is designed to save lives (Subcommittee 1997).

Conclusion

During the second half of the 1990s and into the first years of the new century, the United States government, led by a cohort of Republican members of Congress, channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment and training to the Colombian security forces for counternarcotics operations. This article has explored the cultural and material work that positioned this policy as a natural response to concern about U.S. illicit narcotics consumption, in particular the support for the Colombian National Police from a cohort of Republican Congressional Representatives. These policies resulted from the convergence of material interests – in the form of campaign contributions, constituency economic opportunities and post-government employment – and political subjectivities.

Travel in official delegations organized and paid for by Congress is critical in the production of sensory and affective geographies linking U.S. and Colombian officials in affective relationships and calculated reciprocity. The masculine realm of military sacrifice is witnessed, commemorated, and rewarded. Policy expertise is produced through the sensory pleasures of travel to restricted military bases, the embodied awareness possessed by former military officers of distinct weapons systems, and the conviction of technological superiority. By claiming such knowledge as superior to other forms of expertise, Congressional supporters of militarized counternarcotics operations erased alternative policy arguments, creating the boundaries of what was politically possible to discuss. In the case of nuclear weapons testing, Masco (2004) argues that the changing technoaesthetics bounded the scientists’ political analysis of the stakes of these operations. Similarly, in Congressional disputes over miniguns, Huey IIs and Blackhawks, there was no opportunity to debate their effectiveness or alternatives in the case of the zero tolerance drug policy paradigm. The ongoing failure of source-country drug policies to impact the availability of illegal drugs is positioned not a substantive critique but the failure of technology. The robust, extensive and long standing critiques produced by both academics and think tanks of U.S. counternarcotics policies were excluded, as were alternative policy formulations produced through the ‘harm reduction’ paradigm and implemented in Europe (McCoun and Reuter, 2001) and the multiple ways in which users experienced their drug consumption and its effects (Garcia, 2010).

These debates also chart a moral discursive and political terrain in which policymakers passionately claim to speak for victims of violence enmeshed in a transnational chain of material and symbolic relationships. Congressional members of the drug warriors and their staff and supporters articulated a moral geography positioning themselves as acting in solidarity with some suffering Colombians – that country’s national police force – while arguing that those policymakers acting on behalf of other suffering Colombians by attempting to enforce human rights legislation were in fact characterized by moral failings, as inept, driven by bureaucracy and careerism rather than legitimate moral concerns. While such analysis is often applied to human rights and humanitarian non-governmental organizations, this case reveals the complexity of the sensory geographies, affective relationships and moral commitments of policymakers as articulated within policy debates. Tracing the origins and impacts of such debates, as well as their absences and exclusions, is a critical task for contemporary anthropology.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Winifred Tate is an assistant professor of anthropology at Colby College and currently a post doctoral fellow with the Drugs, Security and Democracy Program of the Social Science Research Council and the Open Society Institute. She is the author of the Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (University of California Press 2007), winner of the Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association and the Sharon Stevens Prize from the American Ethnological Association. Her current research includes an ethnographic exploration of the origins of the US aid package known as Plan Colombia and its impact in southern Colombia, as well as fieldwork examining women's political participation in ares of entrenched political violence and illegal economies.

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