Particularly so following the inauguration of Alvaro Uribe as president in 2002, who unlike his predecessor Andrés Pastrana was unwilling to negotiate with the guerrilla groups and set about using the money to push the FARC back.

Almost as soon as it began to function, Plan Colombia had evolved into a strategy to secure Colombian democracy, reducing the production of cocaine meant cutting off the “gasoline” which fuelled the guerrillas and helping to defeat those had left the international community to view early 2000s Colombia as a failing state.

Plan Colombia´s tainted success?

In my first article on Plan Colombia I showed how production of cocaine has been reduced, and in the third article I will explore how the policy achieved success in reducing the threat posed by the FARC.

But while both these successes are undeniable, Plan Colombia will always also be tainted by the numerous human rights abuses that were carried out in its name – abuses by the Colombian military, the paramilitary groups, and the politicians with links to the latter.

These abuses ensure that while, yes, the immediate threat to democracy has passed, lasting and real damage has been done to the country´s institutions.

I will look briefly at three key criticisms – the Justice and Peace Law, the Parapolitics, and the False Positives scandals.

Justice and Peace Law

In 2005, President Alvaro Uribe passed the Justice and Peace Law in an effort to demobilise the paramilitary groups. Such groups were generated from wealthy land owners in the 1980’s in opposition to the leftist movement of the FARC and ELN. They soon became actively involved in the drug trade, however, and have only added to the complexity of the Colombian conflict.

The Justice and Peace Law called on demobilised paramilitary soldiers to provide a full record of their crimes in return for conditional amnesties. Failure to provide this detailed account would render the amnesty void and thus result in full punishment.

Supporters of the law point to its impact in achieving the successful demobilisation of several thousand paramilitary soldiers.

Critics on the other hand, argue that despite these achievements, the law has allowed – 1. High level drug traffickers to bypass prosecution, 2. Former paramilitaries to legalise properties that they acquired by violence. And worse still, civilians continue to be victimised by newly formed neo-paramilitary groups, such as the Aguilas Negras.

The Organisation of American States (OAS) has expressed concern at the ‘institutional frailty’ of the Justice and Peace Law. The report cited failure in the following areas:

A lack of interest in victims’ rights by the Uribe government.

Inadequate support for the institutional response

The persistence of the armed conflict – that the violence has not abated

And the inability to prevent the emergence of the new illegally armed groups.

Human Rights organisations remain concerned that the paramilitaries have not been held accountable for their crimes, and that by underreporting their illegally obtained assets, the militants have avoided paying adequate justice to their victims.

Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, argues too that the law has been incredibly slow in its implementation, revealing that until 2009, the law had not punished anybody, and that it had failed to return land and property that paramilitaries stole from hundreds and thousands of families.

And finally, in March 2010, a UN report claimed that ‘…the Justice and Peace Law has not achieved the transitional justice intended for paramilitary crimes.’

Parapolitics

Links between paramilitaries and politicians were uncovered in late 2006, in a scandal known as Parapolitics.

Initially 3 congressmen were arrested for their role in establishing paramilitary groups in the department of Sucre. Of the 268 congressmen from the period between 2006 and 2010, a staggering 128 were accused of having paramilitary ties.

Alvaro Uribe’s second cousin, Mario Uribe was arrested and convicted in early 2011, while the total number of politicians, businessmen and officials being investigated runs into the thousands.

False Positives

The False Positive scandal is the extra judicial killing of innocent civilians by the Colombian military – civilians who once murdered were later dressed in guerrilla uniforms (as a way of  increasing their body count against the FARC).

The motivations for such atrocities were said to be the awards offered by President Uribe for successes against the guerrilla group.

A report by the International Federation of Human Rights indicates that there were over 3000 cases of extra judicial killings in between 2002-2008. It must be pointed out, however, that these figures are disputed.

The most shocking case is alleged to have occurred in 2008. 19 young men from the Soacha region were said to have been promised employment by the Colombian military, driven hundreds of miles from their homes, only to be executed as if they were guerrilla soldiers.

No full marks for Plan Colombia

So despite the military advances, the Plan Colombia years do not emerge as a spotless success.

If the universal truth of political science that the primary role of the state is to provide security to its citizens then Plan Colombia can be said only to have had partial success.

The execution of innocent civilians as False Positives, the links between the ruling class in congress and the paramilitaries, and the legally questionable demilitarisation of these paras all taint the period which began in 2002.

Democracy is build on justice and on institutional stability, impunity and injustice are her enemies.

Without justice for the victims, Colombia will only fragment further.

Photo, Confidencial Colombia