Preface
This essay examines how the United States transformed Colombia from a Cold War battleground into a long-term laboratory of state terrorism: a system in which Washington designs the doctrine, funds the armies, and defines the enemy, while Colombian forces carry out the violence in its name. What began as an anticommunist crusade became the model for later interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the same language of security and modernization masked the persistent architecture of control.
In Colombia, this system endures under new names: “stability,” “development,” and now “environmental protection.” Under the banner of conservation and carbon offsets, U.S. and corporate interests seize land, militarize the countryside, and displace rural communities -- a Green New Colonialism that converts ecology into another instrument of extraction and surveillance. Its first victims are those long made expendable by empire: the Black and Indigenous Colombians whose territories hold both biodiversity and rebellion, and whose disappearance is recast as progress.
The aim of this essay is to trace that continuity: how an empire that once ruled through open war now governs through partnership, aid, and moral disguise; how domination survives by learning to speak the language of peace, reform, and the planet itself.
The Blueprint (1962–1975)
Yarborough’s Mission and the Invention of Internal Enemies
Colombia, by any measure, ought to have been among the most promising nations in Latin America. It is endowed with fertile land, vast mineral and oil reserves, a wide range of climates, and one of the most biologically diverse territories on the planet. It also possesses a deep intellectual and artistic tradition that could have made it a regional model of development. Yet for more than half a century, Colombia has been defined not by abundance but by a fusion of state violence, paramilitary terror, and foreign supervision. This composite structure has turned it into one of Washington’s most obedient pupils in the hemispheric curriculum of discipline.
The modern era of that relationship began in 1962 with the administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, which redirected the mission of Latin American militaries away from external defense and assigning them the task of suppressing "threats" inside their own borders. The official doctrine, later known as the National Security Doctrine, redefined the battlefield. The enemy was no longer external but domestic. The “internal enemy” included not only armed insurgents but anyone capable of mobilizing the majority, specifically unionists, peasant organizers, human-rights workers, priests, and teachers.
In February 1962, General William P. Yarborough arrived in Colombia with a U.S. Special Warfare team as part of Kennedy’s counterinsurgency experiment. His classified report, later declassified by the National Security Archive, urged the Colombian government to organize “paramilitary, sabotage, and terrorist activities against known communist proponents.” The term "communism" did not refer to parties aligned with the Soviet Union, but simply anyone threatening the global order of Western neoliberal hegemony. The phrase was intentionally elastic. “Communist” soon came to mean any citizen who resisted the existing social and global order.
Yarborough’s mission was not a deviation from U.S. policy but its logical extension. The United States had entered the Cold War determined to prevent any redistribution of power in the hemisphere, and Colombia provided a convenient laboratory. The Yarborough report’s recommendations shaped Colombian doctrine for the next four decades. "Counterinsurgency" was to be fused with internal governance, terror with development, and fear with political obedience.
Development as Counterinsurgency
"Counterinsurgency” was, and remains, one of the most deceptive terms in U.S. strategic language. In Colombia, it meant a U.S.-designed system in which military, economic, and psychological warfare were coordinated by Washington and the Colombian elite, imposed on the rural and urban poor, to prevent peasants, workers, and reformers from organizing against oligarchic and foreign control.
Throughout the 1960s, Washington’s aid packages presented themselves as humanitarian ventures. The Alliance for Progress, launched by Kennedy in 1961, promised to modernize Latin America through education, infrastructure, and reform. In Colombia, however, these programs were inseparable from military planning. “Civic action” projects built roads and schools, but they also mapped territories for occupation. Villages designated as communist strongholds received development teams accompanied by special-forces instructors. The official language of progress masked the logistical infrastructure of counterinsurgency.
By 1965, Colombian authorities, following U.S. guidance, legalized the formation of civilian defense groups. These militias were funded by landowners and coordinated with the army, creating the first formal paramilitary networks. U.S. military advisers supplied the doctrine, while the Colombian elite supplied the justification: the need to defend order from subversion. The lines between state and private violence disappeared.
The consequences were immediate. Thousands of peasants were displaced from their lands, and entire communities labeled as sympathetic to the left were destroyed. Colombian human-rights archives estimate that between 1962 and 1975, approximately 20,000 civilians were killed by the combined actions of security forces and paramilitaries. Most of the victims were unarmed farmers and local organizers. No senior official was prosecuted. Instead, the United States increased its aid budget to reward Colombia for its “successes in internal stabilization.”
Birth of the Logic of Terror
By the early 1970s, Yarborough’s blueprint had been institutionalized. The National Security Doctrine divided the population into three categories: guerrillas, subversives, and collaborators. The third was the most important, as it encompassed everyone who questioned inequality or authority.
The School of the Americas at Fort Benning in the U.S. state of Georgia became the training ground for Colombia’s officer corps. Between 1960 and 1980, more than 10,000 Colombian soldiers and police trained under U.S. supervision. The manuals used in these programs (later released through declassification requests) taught that “the use of terror and selective violence is necessary to neutralize the will of the population.”
In practice, terror became the grammar of governance. The Colombian state did not need to annihilate every dissident; it only needed to establish that dissent could be annihilated. By staging disappearances, mutilations, and public executions, the security forces demonstrated the cost of opposition.
The results were measurable. Trade-union density collapsed by half. Rural organizing networks disintegrated. The press learned silence. U.S. officials in Bogotá reported these developments as indicators of stability. To them, peace meant the absence of resistance.
By 1975, Colombia’s political order was secure and its population subdued. The rural elite maintained its estates, foreign investors expanded their concessions, and the United States held up the country as a model for the rest of Latin America. The architecture of control was complete: a dependent state governed by fear, fortified by U.S. aid, and disciplined by the illusion of partnership.
The Laboratory (1976–1990)
Institutionalizing Violence
Under Colombia's President Julio César Turbay’s 1978 “Security Statute,” mass arrests, disappearances, and torture became official instruments of order. The CIA and U.S. Embassy provided intelligence technology, training, and funding. Colombia became a testing ground for “integrated intelligence centers,” the prototypes of the later fusion centers used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These centers (first refined in Colombia’s cities and countryside) would reappear three decades later in Baghdad and Kandahar, where U.S. and allied forces combined military surveillance, police databases, and local informant networks to neutralize “insurgent populations.” The consequences were catastrophic. In Iraq and Afghanistan, these same methods contributed to an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 direct civilian deaths (with the full death-toll in the millions) and millions more displaced, echoing the same logic first perfected in Colombia: that order can be engineered through information, terror, and impunity.
The scale of violence accelerated. From 1978 to 1982, human-rights organizations recorded over 50,000 arbitrary detentions and at least 5,000 extrajudicial killings. The Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos confirmed systematic torture in military installations built with U.S. aid. Every major escalation of repression corresponded with new tranches of U.S. security funding.
The Narco Nexus
As the Cold War rhetoric waned, the “war on drugs” emerged as a convenient replacement for anti-communism. The United States shifted its justification from ideological security to criminal eradication. In practice, both wars targeted the same populations.
The Medellín and Cali cartels dominated headlines as responsible for drug-related crime and homicide, but the majority of drug-related killings were carried out by state security forces and paramilitary groups operating under the cover of anti-narcotics campaigns. These forces, financed and trained through U.S. counter-drug and military programs, often acted with intelligence and logistical support from Washington. Declassified DEA and CIA documents show that U.S. agencies were aware of collaboration between Colombian military units and traffickers yet continued assistance. Narcotics profits became an informal arm of counterinsurgency, funding death squads that expanded the reach of U.S.-sponsored doctrine without appearing in official budgets.
By the end of the 1980s, Colombia’s homicide rate had tripled. The Colombian National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH) estimates more than 80,000 political killings occurred between 1976 and 1990. The majority were civilians. Washington responded by increasing aid again, declaring Colombia “a frontline state in the war on drugs.”
The Economics of Fear
Where violence cleared the land, capital followed. Throughout the 1980s, regions such as Antioquia, Cesar, Meta, and Chocó (areas once dominated by peasant cooperatives) were emptied of their populations and opened to foreign mining and agribusiness investment, especially in coal, oil, palm oil, and cattle production. U.S. and European corporations moved into territories “pacified” by state and paramilitary terrorist campaigns, acquiring concessions for open-pit mines, energy infrastructure, and export agriculture. The United Nations reported that over one million Colombians were displaced during the decade, most from zones newly transformed into extraction and export corridors serving foreign capital.
What economists called modernization was, in reality, the enforcement of economic orthodoxy: a doctrine of free-market fundamentalism imposed through violence and endorsed by international financial institutions. This ideology treated privatization, deregulation, and foreign investment as the only path to stability, while quietly accepting that terror was the price of reform.
The World Bank and the IMF praised Colombia’s “investor confidence” and “export growth,” ignoring that these achievements were built on massacres, land seizures, and the destruction of peasant unions. Human-rights researchers later showed that the regions receiving the most U.S. aid and exhibiting the highest paramilitary activity also recorded the steepest rise in foreign investment.
By 1990, Colombia had become both a killing field and an investment frontier. For Washington, it was proof of concept: counterinsurgency could be fused with market liberalization to produce a stable authoritarian democracy.
Plan Colombia and the Neoliberal Counterinsurgency (1990–2008)
Clinton’s “Drug War Democracy”
When the Cold War ended, Colombia’s geopolitical usefulness for Washington did not. In 1999, the Clinton administration introduced Plan Colombia, a $7.5 billion aid package that was presented to the U.S. public as an anti-narcotics initiative and to Colombian elites as an instrument of modernization. In both cases, it was a continuation of 'counterinsurgency' (that is, state-directed terror against the civilian population) by other means.
The plan was designed jointly by the Pentagon, the State Department, and Colombian military advisers trained at Fort Benning, Georgia. Eighty percent of the funds went to the armed forces and police, with the rest nominally assigned to social programs that rarely reached rural communities. Washington insisted on aerial fumigation of coca crops using glyphosate, a chemical banned in several U.S. states for its carcinogenic properties. Over the next decade, more than two million hectares were sprayed. The toxic runoff destroyed food crops, contaminated rivers, and displaced entire villages.
The human cost was immense. Between 2000 and 2010, roughly 5.7 million Colombians were internally displaced: one of the largest figures in the world. Peasant farmers, forced off their land, migrated to slums on the peripheries of Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. Simultaneously, multinational corporations acquired vast tracts of cleared land for palm oil and mining projects financed by international lenders.
Plan Colombia’s public narrative focused on reducing coca cultivation. In reality, production levels barely changed; they shifted geographically, returning to pre-Plan levels by 2007. What did change was the structure of control: the countryside was militarized, dissent criminalized, and foreign capital protected under new legal frameworks.
Terror as Stabilization
In the early 2000s, the administration of President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Washington’s most loyal ally in Latin America, perfected the marriage between neoliberal economics and militarized governance. Vélez's “Democratic Security” doctrine claimed to restore order and growth. It achieved both by redefining terror as stability.
Paramilitary groups were nominally demobilized in 2005 under Colombia’s Justice and Peace Law, a framework designed by the Uribe administration (with strong U.S. and OAS backing) to facilitate the reintegration of right-wing militias into civilian life. In practice, it functioned less as justice than as amnesty. The law offered drastically reduced sentences (often as little as eight years) in exchange for confessions, while leaving the economic and political structures of paramilitary power untouched. Many units rebranded as “criminal bands” and continued to exercise territorial control, extortion, and targeted assassinations. Human Rights Watch documented over 30,000 killings and disappearances during Vélez's first term, many linked to the army’s “false positives” scandal, in which soldiers murdered civilians and presented them as guerrilla combatants to inflate body counts and secure rewards.
These crimes were not aberrations. They were the arithmetic of a policy that rewarded results over lives. The U.S. continued to certify Colombian military conduct as improving, releasing new installments of aid every fiscal year. The rhetoric of democracy provided diplomatic cover for state terror.
Economically, the model succeeded for its intended beneficiaries. Foreign investment more than tripled, and trade agreements with the U.S. and Europe solidified Colombia’s integration into global markets. Violence became not a cost of stability but its precondition.
By the end of Vélez's presidency in 2010, Colombia’s internal displacement had exceeded 7.5 million people. Independent human-rights monitors estimated that more than 220,000 civilians had been killed in the internal conflict since the 1960s, with at least 80 percent of those deaths attributable to state or paramilitary forces. All the while, Washington’s officials called Colombia a success story.
The Peace That Wasn’t (2008–2025)
The Santos Moment
Vélez's successor, President Juan Manuel Santos, was celebrated abroad as a reformer. In 2016, he signed a historic peace accord with the FARC guerrilla movement, earning the Nobel Peace Prize. The accords promised rural reform, land restitution, and political reintegration. The Obama administration supported them as proof that militarized aid could produce peace.
Yet the peace was largely transactional. The accords left untouched the economic foundations of inequality: land concentration, foreign investment privileges, and the criminalization of protest. While formal combat ended, structural violence persisted.
Between 2016 and 2022, over 1,300 social leaders and human-rights defenders were assassinated. The CNMH documented that at least 1 activist was killed every 3 days, often in regions newly opened to mining or agribusiness concessions. The United Nations verified continuing collusion between local security forces and successor paramilitary units. Fumigation campaigns resumed in defiance of court rulings.
By 2020, coca cultivation had reached record highs again. The supposed transition to peace had only repackaged war. As Colombian sociologist Francisco Gutiérrez observed, “the state did not demobilize terror; it privatized it.”
Duque’s Regression and Petro’s Constraint
Under President Iván Duque Márquez (2018–2022), Colombia experienced a full regression to the security and austerity politics of the Vélez era. Duque, a former senator and protégé of President Álvaro Vélez, came to power promising stability and economic growth while continuing to receive unwavering U.S. support. His government dismantled many of the 2016 peace accord’s core mechanisms, especially land restitution and rural reform. U.S. security aid remained constant at around $400 million annually, rebranded under new terms such as “counternarcotics modernization” and “security cooperation.” Nationwide protests erupted in 2021 over austerity measures and police brutality, leaving at least 80 civilians dead and thousands injured. The U.S. State Department expressed “concern” but continued arms transfers.
The election of President Gustavo Petro in 2022 marked the first time in Colombia’s history that a leftist held the presidency. His government faced immediate structural constraints: massive public debt, entrenched military autonomy, and dependence on foreign investment. While Petro pledged to end fumigation and advance peace with remaining armed groups, U.S. policy toward Colombia remained effectively unchanged.
Bilateral agreements between the United States and Colombia continued to bind foreign aid to military and intelligence cooperation. In 2023, a new memorandum of understanding between Washington and Bogotá expanded intelligence-sharing under the banners of migration management and environmental “security.” In practice, this meant deploying U.S.-supplied drones, satellite networks, and surveillance infrastructure throughout Colombia’s border and forest regions, ostensibly to combat deforestation and organized crime. Behind the language of partnership lay a familiar dependency: Colombia’s armed forces, intelligence systems, and even environmental monitoring programs remained financially and technologically reliant on the United States. This dependency was not merely logistical but political. It ensured that Colombia's national policy priorities aligned with Washington’s regional objectives, constraining Colombia’s autonomy in security, energy, and foreign affairs. What had once been labeled counterinsurgency or counter-narcotics was now rebranded as environmental cooperation, sustaining the same hierarchy of control beneath the rhetoric of sustainability.
Petro’s early reforms on tax equity and energy transition triggered capital flight and elite backlash. His foreign policy independence was tolerated only within limits. The pattern remained intact: every Colombian administration could alter the rhetoric but not the architecture.
Climate, Migration, and the Next Justification
As of 2025, Washington’s narrative has adapted once again. The same machinery of U.S. domination and intervention in Colombia that once operated under the slogans of anti-communism and counter-narcotics is now justified through the language of environmental security and migration management. Colombia is described by U.S. officials as a “strategic partner” in protecting the Amazon and stabilizing human flows, but in practice this partnership functions as a renewed form of subordination. Every new ecological initiative carries the familiar clauses: U.S. oversight, U.S. technology, and U.S. conditionality.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Pentagon’s Southern Command, and the State Department now coordinate “green security” programs that fuse climate policy with military infrastructure. Aid is tied to surveillance contracts and intelligence-sharing agreements, not to ecological autonomy. Drones and satellite systems are deployed over the Amazon, Chocó, and Pacific corridors under the pretext of monitoring deforestation, yet these same tools map indigenous territories and resistance zones for future extraction. In parallel, the World Bank and IMF package debt relief and “sustainability lending” on the condition that Colombia privatize conservation areas, open carbon markets, and guarantee access for foreign energy companies seeking lithium, oil, and rare-earth deposits. The result is a Green New Colonialism in which ecological discourse conceals the same hierarchy of dependency that once operated through anti-communist and anti-drug campaigns.
Those who suffer most are indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities in the Amazon and Pacific lowlands. Their ancestral lands, once targeted for 'counterinsurgency', are now seized in the name of conservation. Peasant associations that oppose mining or palm oil expansion are labeled “security risks.” Environmental defenders are assassinated at the highest rate in the world, often with the complicity of local authorities who receive U.S. training and funding. Entire villages are displaced for “protected area” designations that serve corporate reforestation projects owned by foreign investors seeking carbon credits. The rhetoric of sustainability has become a weapon: forests are protected, but the people who live within them are criminalized or erased.
Migration policy follows the same logic. Under U.S. guidance, Colombia is pressured to act as a containment wall for northward migration from Venezuela, Ecuador, and Haiti. Aid for “migration stabilization” is allocated to militarize border zones and expand detention facilities rather than to support refugees themselves. Once again, the burden of enforcement falls on Colombia, while the architecture of control and the flow of profit remain American.
The consequences are measurable. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, over 9.3 million Colombians have been uprooted since the 1960s, most due to state-linked violence and corporate land acquisition. Around 70,000 remain disappeared, their fates unrecorded and their families ignored. The cumulative death toll from Colombia’s internal conflict and its foreign-engineered derivatives exceeds 260,000 lives. Each reinvention of U.S. policy adds new victims under new pretexts, proving that the logic has never changed.
This continuity cannot be explained by error or inertia. It reflects a coherent doctrine: violence is permissible when it sustains the order of investment. What once was empire by military intervention has become empire by sustainability discourse, where ecological virtue serves as camouflage for extraction, displacement, and control.
Conclusion: Empire Without Exit
Continuity as Design
From Kennedy to Biden, every U.S. administration has described its actions in Colombia as benevolent intervention. Each has claimed to fight crime, communism, or instability. Yet the consistent pattern reveals something simpler: an empire that cannot exit without threatening its own structure.
The United States has never been an observer of Colombia’s tragedy but its architect. Its programs have produced predictable results. When U.S. aid flows increase, killings rise in Colombia. When the pretext changes, the victims do not. This is not failure: it is equilibrium. The fusion of militarism and market orthodoxy has created a self-sustaining model in which violence is both means and end.
The institutions involved (USAID, the Pentagon, the IMF, private contractors) constitute a bureaucratic ecosystem. Each justifies the other’s existence, ensuring that no reform can challenge the premise of domination itself. In this sense, Colombia’s subordination is not accidental but systemic.
Moral Arithmetic
The numbers speak with a clarity that language cannot soften. Over six decades, the Colombian conflict has claimed more than a quarter million lives, displaced nearly ten million people, and disappeared tens of thousands. More than half of all recorded murders of trade unionists in the world have occurred in Colombia.
These statistics are not the residue of chaos but the accounting of design. Every bomb, every fumigation, every massacre bears the imprint of a policy choice justified as progress. The moral arithmetic is inverted: the success of U.S. strategy is measured by the extent to which Colombian democracy remains contained within parameters acceptable to Washington and the global market.
Toward an Honest Vocabulary
To describe U.S. actions in Colombia as “foreign policy” is to mistake form for substance. What persists is a colonial relationship executed through finance, training, and coercion. It is not an alliance but an occupation without troops, a war without declarations, and an empire without exit.
An honest vocabulary must name this system for what it is: the sustained use of terror to enforce obedience under the guise of partnership. Its victims are the dispossessed whose lives mark the boundaries of permissible freedom.
If there is a lesson in this history, it is not that U.S. policy failed to bring peace to Colombia but that peace was never its goal. The system functions precisely as intended: to transform the geography of a nation into an instrument of empire, to render resistance invisible, and to make the permanence of US. domination appear as progress.
Until that logic is broken, Colombia will remain what it has long been: the living proof that empire does not end when it loses interest, only when it loses power.
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