Exclusive Series: Bidens Foreign Policy History and What it Portends for
his Presidency
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - January 11, 2021
Vice President Biden and his wife Jill at a ceremony in Bogotá honoring
Colombian soldiers. (May 26, 2013) [Source: cancilleria.gov.co]
[As factions of the U.S. political elite grapple with the waning days of the
Trump presidency, one cannot help but be left with a sense of irony. From
election meddlingwhether it be legalized bribery (lobbying),
disenfranchisement and gerrymandering at hometo lethal interference abroad,
including violent regime-change operations, war and other overt and covert
assaults on foreign soil, the U.S. elite, capitalist class under Republican
and Democratic banners engage in similar and often worse heinous activities
on a regular basis.
While front-line soldiers are often tormented for decades by the horrors
they experience in endless wars conducted by the U.S. governmentnot to
mention the hundreds of thousands who have been maimed and/or lost their
livesthe political elite in the U.S. is not known to suffer from
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because they are, perhaps in their own
minds, too far removed from the scene. The events of January 6 seem to have
left factions with a taste of their own medicine.
Notwithstanding, newly-elected president Biden characteristically does not
appear to be haunted by any of his past actions; rather he is often boastful
about policies that caused great misery. In this exclusive series of
articles reviewing Bidens positions on U.S. foreign policy, Kuzmarov
focuses on some of the skeletons in Bidens political closet.
[Source: Steve Brown]
When Biden first campaigned for the Senate in 1972, he positioned himself as
a dove who opposed the Vietnam War and even supported a bill that called for
banning all covert operations. However, converging with elite political
winds of the time, Biden morphed into a neoconservative hawk. After getting
a medical deferment from the draft, he derided anti-Vietnam War protestors
at Syracuse University and subsequently told the Senate Intelligence
Committee in 1976 that he had no illusions about Soviet intentions and
capabilities in the world. Further, he agreed with Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan (D-NY) that isolationism was a dangerous and naïve foundation upon
which to rest our foreign policy or the intelligence community which must
serve that policy.
These statements were not surprising considering that one of Bidens chief
political mentors was W. Averell Harriman, the coordinator of the Marshall
Plan and father of the Cold War.[1] By the 1980s, Biden supported increases
in intelligence and counterintelligence funding after Jimmy Carter had tried
to cut the CIAs staff by one-third. After the Reagan administrations
invasion of Grenada and bombing of Libya, Biden stated [Reagan] did the
right thing and there can be no question that Gaddafi has asked for and
deserves a strong response like this, respectively. In the 1990s, Biden was
a chief proponent of the war in the Balkans, and in 2002 played an important
role in building Senate support for the preemptive war on Iraq. In Bidens
own words, he proclaimed that he is a liberal only when it comes to civil
rights and civil liberties; on other issues, he said Im really quite
conservative.[2]
Our aim in this series is to shed light on some of the corrupt, murderous
and failed foreign policies Biden has backedall of which may give an
indication of what we can expect from a Biden presidency. We hope ultimately
to inspire people to work for political change from the grass roots
up.Editors]
Biden speech supporting the War on Drugs in 1989. [Source: cspan.org]
Part 1: The Forgotten Story of How Joe Biden Helped Ramp Up the War on Drugs
in Colombia
President-elect Joe Biden is not known for being either tight-lipped or
humble. Throughout his long political career, he has often divulged
information or bragged about things that were in reality quite shameful.
A good example is Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion anti-drug program initiated
by the Clinton administration in 1999, which Biden boasted last January
about being the guy who put it together [as head of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee].[3]
War on Drugs in Colombia. [Source: pri.org]
In a New York Times op-ed five years earlier, Biden credited Plan Colombia
with helping to transform Colombia in the realm of security, governance and
human rights, and preventing it from becoming a failed state[4]a theme
which Biden promoted again in an October 2020 article in the Colombian
newspaper El Tiempo.
Bidens assessment does not match the reality for most Colombians.
From the time of Plan Colombias implementation through the present, the
Colombian army, funded and emboldened by the United States, has killed
thousands of civilians, falsely claiming that many were guerrillas killed in
what became known as the false positives scandal.
Images of Colombians killed in the dirty war supported by Biden. [Source:
nacla.org]
During the same period, more than seven million Colombians have been
displaced. These human costs were never part of the policy calculus for Joe
Biden, said John Lindsay-Poland, author of a seminal book on Plan
Colombia.[5]
[Source: colombiapolitics.com]
Stan Goff [Source: commondreams.org]
Plan Colombia built off earlier American counter-narcotics programs, which
were heavily militarized in their approach. These programs were designed not
only to fight narco-traffickers but also to assist in the Colombian
governments long war against the leftist Fuerzas Armada Revolucionario de
Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.
Stan Goff, a former Special Forces officer in Colombia, stated that
you were told, and the American public was being told, if they were told
anything at all, this was counter-narcotics training. The training I
conducted was anything but that. It was pretty much updated Vietnam style
counterinsurgency doctrine. We were advised that this is what we would do,
and we were further advised to refer to it as counter-narcotics training
should anyone ask.[6]
When the Office of Management and Budget proposed taking $100 million out of
Plan Colombia for the treatment of U.S. addicts, President Bill Clintons
drug czar, retired General Barry McCaffrey, made sure it was nixed.
Instead, $400 million dollars was appropriated for the purchase of 30 Black
Hawk helicopters, made by United Technologies of Connecticut [now part of
Raytheon Co.], and $144 million for training and equipping two new
anti-narcotics battalions.
More than 75,000 Colombian soldiers were also trained at U.S. military
academies under the plan. In addition, laser-guided bombs were provided to
go along with real-time intelligence used to locate, bomb and kill FARC
leaders who were accused of being narco-traffickers.[7]
Green Berets, 7th Special Forces Group, training with the Colombian Army.
[Source: smallwarsjournal.com]
Biden, the War on Drugs and Plan Colombia
Biden played a key role lobbying for Plan Colombia in the Senate, where he
invoked the age-oldalbeit tweakedU.S. imperialist doctrine: in the
interests of our children and the interests of the hemisphere
to give them
[Colombia] a fighting chance to keep them from becoming a narco-state.[8]
Bidens support for the War on Drugs went back to his first campaign for the
U.S. Senate in 1972, when he saw that he could please crowds with tough
talk. In one rally, Biden proclaimed that, when we find the pusher, we must
deal more severely with him than with any other element of the criminal
society. There should be no mercy.[9]
Once elected, Biden called for greater pressure on Turkey and Southeast Asia
to stop poppy cultivation and to use spy satellites to search out heroin
supplies.[10]
Biden campaigning for Senate with his dad. [Source: nytimes.com]
The product of a middle-class upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s, Biden had
always been hostile to the 1960s counter-cultural movement, which embraced
marijuana and other mind-altering drugs as a form of societal rebellion.
Biden, University of Delaware class of 1965, was always a square. [Source:
nytimes.com]
Biden admitted that, by the time the [1960s] movement was at its peak, I
was married, I was in law school, I wore sports coats. Youre looking at a
middle class guy
. Im not big on flak jackets and tie dyed shirts.[11]
In the 1980s, Biden embraced the War on Drugs with as much zeal as drug war
guru Ronald Reagan. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he helped
pass two bills establishing mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses,
and another that expanded penalties for marijuana production and
trafficking, and which gave federal agents nearly unlimited powers to seize
assets from private citizens.[12]
Further, Biden co-authored two anti-drug abuse acts in 1986 and 1988 that
imposed stricter sentencing for crack cocaine compared to powder cocaine and
bolstered prison sentences for drug offenders.[13]
Senator Strom Thurmond, left, served with Mr. Biden, center, on the Senate
Judiciary Committee. Together, they wrote roughly a half-dozen crime bills.
[Source: nytimes.com]
One of Bidens campaign ads from the era characteristically called drug
dealers potential killers who should be tracked down like we track down
killers.[14] The drug trade in his view was as much a threat to the
international security of the U.S. as anything the Soviets are doing, and
should be treated as a national defense problem, requiring military
solutions.[15]
Bidens support for Plan Colombia followed from this latter position.
In April 2000, Biden traveled to Colombia and met with its president, Andrés
Pastrana, and the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Curtis W. Kamman, while
observing military operations in southern Colombia.
Biden then prepared a report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations in which he urged Congress to quickly approve President Clintons
request for supplemental funding on the grounds that Colombia was the
source of many of the drugs poisoning our people.[16]
Harry J. Anslinger [Source: timeline.com]
This language was reminiscent of the inflated rhetoric pioneered by Harry J.
Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) from 1929-1962,
that fueled the growth of Americas War on Drugs.
Bidens report specified that the security crisis in Colombia warranted
U.S. counter-measures and that guerrilla fronts had a heavy presence in
Southern Colombia and significant role in protecting drug trafficking
operations, which the U.S. needed to stop.[17]
[Source: theguardian.com]
Effects of Plan Colombia
In practice, Plan Colombia did little to mitigate drug-related corruption or
stop the drug traffic, as Biden has claimed. A December 2020 report released
by Eliot Engel (D-NY), the outgoing chairman of the House Committee on
Foreign Affairs, specified that Plan Colombia was a counter-narcotics
failure, though it was a counterinsurgency success.[18]
This latter claim is dubious if we consider the human rights atrocities
carried out by military and police forces that were empowered by U.S.
military assistance.
Engels report though brings to light the previously suppressed fact that
the central aim of Plan Colombia was to combat the FARC.
FARC were branded as narco-guerrillas beginning in the 1980s, even though
they were not directly involved in cocaine processing or trafficking but
taxed coca profits in their domain.
In fact, the major drug-trafficking cartels were primarily allied with the
government against FARC, whose ideology they deplored since the FARC
advocated for land redistribution.[19]
Carlos Castaño [Source: radionacional.co]
Colombian army officers worked intimately with Carlos Castaño, Colombias
chief paramilitary leader and a reported CIA asset. Castaño stated that 70
percent of the income for his group called the United Self Defense Forces of
Colombia (AUC), a de-facto wing of the Colombian army which carried out
70-80 percent of noncombat killings, came from drugs.
Castaño was close with the powerful Henao-Montoya drug-trafficking cartel
and was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2002 and
charged with trafficking more than 17 tons of cocaine.[20]
The AUC had been placed on the State Departments list of terrorist
organizations because of its role in the August 1999 assassination of TV
host Jaime Garzón, who advocated for peace with leftist guerrillas.[21] The
AUC was also implicated in the murder of dozens of trade union activists at
the behest of wealthy ranchers and managers of U.S. corporations, such as
Drummond Co. of Alabama, which helped transform Colombia into the worlds
fourth largest coal exporter.
Santiago Uribe Vélez, brother of former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, was
accused of training a paramilitary group on the Uribe family ranch, La
Carolina. [Source: nsarchives.gwu.edu]
Bidens report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee acknowledged the
problem of paramilitaries but emphasized that the human rights climate could
only be improved if Plan Colombia were extended.
Biden was particularly supportive of aid to the Colombian national police,
which in 2004 was tied to one of the largest U.S. drug trafficking
indictments in history when a police Colonel, Danilo González, was accused
of being an enforcer for the North Valley drug cartel.[22]
In the ten years after Clinton left office, the U.S. government spent $10
billion for counter-narcotics under Plan Colombia, which Biden continued to
endorse as Vice President. Yet in 2016 Colombia remained the world leader
in coca production.[23]
Senator Paul Wellstone advocated switching $225 million from military aid to
drug treatment programs at home. [Source: startribune.com]
Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) had promoted an alternative to Plan Colombia
in 1999 that would have switched $225 million from military aid to drug
treatment programs at home. He argued that weve been down this road
forever, forever, and that more soldiers and more guns have not and will
not defeat the source of illegal narcotics.
Biden rose immediately to President Clintons defense in the Senate, stating
that Congress would wreak a whirlwind if Plan Colombia failed to strike
back at the drug traffickers, and that Colombias President Andrés Pastrana
was the real deal.[24]
The war lovers: Biden and Clinton. [Source: businessinsider.com]
Colombias leading newsweekly, Semana, denounced Pastrana, however, for
going along, after obvious pressure, with the opportunism and hypocrisy of
U.S. officials, and accepting U.S. aid which was a recipe for
destruction, indefinite war and indebtedness.[25]
President Pastrana with then-Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey. [Source:
ultimasnotias.com]
His successor, Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010), was listed in a DIA report as
a Medellín cartel collaborator and has been under house arrest while the
countrys Supreme Court investigates his role in helping to create illegal
paramilitary death squads with his brother Santiago, among other crimes.
President Álvaro Uribe Vélez addresses an audience at U.S. Southern Command
in Doral, Florida, on March 4, 2004. SOUTHCOM commander Gen. James Hill is
at left. [Source: financecolombia.com]
In a classic essay in CovertAction Magazine, from the Spring/Summer 2000
issue, journalist Mark Cook observed that U.S. policy in Colombia in the
1990s was run by a remarkable number of veterans of the dirty war in El
Salvador in the 1980s.
Examples included Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas
Pickering, who had justified mass killings of civilians as ambassador to El
Salvador in 1984, and Assistant Secretary of State Peter Romero, who
believed that the Salvador solution could be the model for Colombia.[26]
Ambassadors Thomas Pickering (right) and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, U.S.
ambassador to the UN (left), in El Salvador in 1985. Pickering went on to
run U.S. policy in Colombia. [Source: gettyimages.com]
The Salvador solution entailed paramilitary and death-squad activities and
state-sanctioned terrorism.[27] Biden knew all about this as he had backed
money and training for El Salvadors death squads in the 1980s. Despite
mostly opposing Reagans foreign policy in Central America, Biden said there
was a need to send U.S. military equipment to the region [Central
America].[28]
Black Hawk helicopters provided to Colombia under Plan Colombia. [Source:
wikipedia.org]
Besides El Salvador, Colombia in the early 21st century also came to
resemble Vietnam, with the presence of foreign military advisers, high-tech
listening posts, aerial defoliation, river boats, and helicopter assaults on
the countryside.[29]
Chemical Warfare
One of the lesser-known and worst aspect of Plan Colombia was the aerial
defoliation program, which drove villagers away from FARC-controlled areas
and made way for mega-projects benefiting multinational corporations.
Chemical spraying that Biden supported. [Source: U.S. Embassy in Bogota via
latimes.com]
Glyphosate or Roundup weed killer, manufactured by Monsanto, one of the
companies responsible for manufacturing Agent Orange used in the Vietnam
War, was sprayed at one hundred times the concentration which was allowed in
the United States. Though the State Department claimed that it was no more
toxic than common salt, aspirin or caffeine, a 2015 World Health
Organization (WHO) study found that glyphosate probably causes cancer.[30]
Baby who developed skin rashes from spraying in Aponte, Colombia, November
2000. [Source: tni.org]
Gonzalo de Francisco, a Colombian national security adviser, likened the
fumigation program to chemotherapy as sometimes you end up killing the
patient.[31] Elsa Niva, a Colombian agronomist with the Pesticide Action
Network, reported that in two months alone 4,289 Colombians suffered skin or
gastric disorders from the chemical spraying while 178,377 creatures were
killed, including cattle, horses, pigs, dogs, ducks, hens and fish.[32]
An unknown number of farmers died from dehydration, fever and other
sicknesses, and thousands were displacedan outcome known in advance as the
initial Plan Colombia package backed by Biden included $15 million for
emergency resettlement and employment of persons displaced by the Push into
Southern Colombia program.[33]
Environmental destruction from spraying in Cananguchal. [Source: tni.org]
Journalist Hugh OShaughnessy visited the indigenous Cofän community of
Santa Rosa de Guamuez, whose pineapples were stunted and shriveled because
of the chemical spraying and once-green banana plants were no more than
blackened sticks. The children were underweight, suffering from respiratory
problems and stomach pains.[34]
A local health worker in Putumayo, where thousands of villagers were
displaced, recalled how the spraying turned everything yellow; not a green
leaf on a tree. Many jungle animals dead, dead monkeys, dead birds, fish
farm tanks with thousands of dead fish floating in them.[35]
In a class action lawsuit, a group of farmers alleged that DynCorp of Falls
Church, Virginiaa CIA-connected company, which was awarded a five-year,
$170 million contract to carry out the fumigationcaused severe health
problems (high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, dermatological problems) and the
destruction of food crops and livestock of approximately 10,000 residents in
the region bordering Ecuador. Further, the toxicity of the fumigant caused
the deaths of four infantsfacts Biden has of course ignored.[36]
Locals protest fumigation on the Colombia-Ecuador border with sign: Stop
fumigation. [Source: ejatlas.org]
Pirates Who Benefited
The primary beneficiaries of Plan Colombia were large defense contractors,
which provided Bidens campaign over $436,000 more than Trumps during the
2020 presidential election campaign.[37]
[Source: narconews.com]
At the time of Plan Colombias passage, a congressional aide stated that
every pirate, banditeveryone who wants to make money on wartheyre in
Colombia.[38]
These pirates included Monsanto, Bell and Sikorsky, which manufactured Black
Hawk helicopters, and the CIA-connected energy giant Enron, which owned
Centragas, a 357-mile natural gas distribution system in northern Colombia.
Another of the pirates was Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleumwhich held
controlling interests in the Cano-Limon Convenas oil field and pipeline
running from the Venezuelan border.
Vice President Al Gore, who supported Plan Colombia with Biden, happened to
have more than $500,000 worth of family stock in Occidental, which
contributed at least $250,000 to the Clinton-Gore ticket.[39] The companys
founder, Armand Hammer, had been a key benefactor of Gores political
career, along with that of his father, Senator Al Gore, Sr.[40]
The Clinton-Gore ticket received at least $250,000 from Occidental
Petroleum, which benefited from Plan Colombia. [Source: economictimes.com]
During the 2020 campaign, Occidental gave $12,765 to presidential candidate
Joe Biden, perhaps in part as a reward for his support for Plan
Colombia.[41]
In June 2001, a Colombian court heard how a U.S. security firm working for
Occidental had played a fatal role in an ill-starred army raid against FARC,
directing helicopter gunships that mistakenly killed eighteen
civilians.[42]
This was a great example of the nexus between large corporations, the
Colombian army, U.S. intervention, and human rights abuseswhich were
intensified under a policy that the new so-called liberal president is
proud to have helped put together.
[Source: Steve Brown]
What to Expect from President Biden
If the past is any indication, Biden will likely sustain the U.S. drug war
and extensive aid program in Colombia, which reached $448 million in 2020,
the highest in nine years.
On the campaign trail, Biden characterized Colombia as the keystone of
U.S. policy in Latin America. This is in spite of Colombias rightward drift
under President Ivan Duque (2018-present), a protégé of Álvaro Uribe Vélez,
who has taken measures to undermine a 2016 peace deal with FARC.
Human rights groups reported 68 massacres by the Colombian army in the first
three quarters of 2020, mostly targeting ex-FARC commanders and regional
Afro-Colombian leaders.
Colombias strategic significance is accentuated by the presence of seven
U.S. military bases and the political crisis in neighboring Venezuela, where
Biden has recognized the right-wing renegade regime of Juan Guaidó, and
labeled socialist President Nicolás Maduro a dictator plain and simple.
The latter language makes clear that Biden will go forward with
regime-change operations that rely on strong bilateral relations with
Colombia, irrespective of its abysmal human rights record.
