Those of us who have experienced the fight against drugs firsthand know that it is an immoral, unjust and violent war. At the point of painstaking and irreparable blows, we Colombians understood before anyone else that this war could not be won. That is why President Biden’s announcement that he will pardon those convicted of marijuana possession at the federal level and that he is going to review its classification as a hard drug is so relevant. Despite how lukewarm it may seem, it is the first time that a North American president changes his script and departs from that failed policy.
For Colombia, the war on drugs has been a costly farce that stigmatized us before the world and made us even more genuflex and submissive in front of Washington. After decades of seizures, hundreds of extraditions, worn knee pads and concessions that should not have been made, we are left with sin and without gender.
Despite the fact that we put the dead and that we gave ourselves away to Washington, this war on drugs, with its double standards and its bad vibes, made us undesirable and the bad guys in the movie. Now, being Colombian is a stigma. We are required to have a visa to enter almost all countries, we are requisitioned at customs as if we were potential mules, and the United States, our partner in this war, has imposed a three-year waiting list on Colombians who want to take out or renew your visa. And of course, while it becomes increasingly difficult for us Colombians to move around the planet, it is easier for the fortunes derived from drug trafficking to be laundered in the financial centers of the world. That is what this failed war has served for: to launder fortunes and to stigmatize countries like Colombia.
Plan Colombia, that ambitious strategy against drug trafficking that lasted for 15 years at a cost of more than nine billion dollars, also has nothing to show: cocaine trafficking to the United States has not been reduced and according to data from several agencies, more cocaine is processed in Colombia today than 15 years ago. The hectares cultivated with coca are more than those in 2001, when Plan Colombia began and the fumigation for which so much was wagered and which was carried out in an unbridled manner until a ruling by the Constitutional Court stopped it in 2015, no it managed to reduce supply but, on the other hand, it did expand coca crops.
Today it is known that Plan Colombia was above all a business that enriched many North American contractors, beginning with those who sold glyphosate.
Under the Colombia plan, intelligence and interception equipment purchased with US money were also used to illegally intercept the opposition, journalists and negotiators who signed the peace in Havana. What is being discovered today in Mexico with the revelations of the emails from the Secretary of National Defense (Sedena) is a carbon copy of what has already happened in my country.
This war not only affected institutions. It also had a devastating impact on the Colombian psyche because it filled us with guilt and forced us to show that we were not a country given over to drug trafficking. We were so servile and condescending that we came to believe that saying no to Washington was heresy.
Countries like Mexico and Ecuador restricted the work of the DEA, but Colombia was not capable. Its agents today move around the country as if they were in the old west. They give themselves the luxury of protecting drug traffickers claiming that they are their informants and mount entrapment operations, a figure that does not exist in our penal code, with the purpose of influencing internal politics.
During the Trump administration, the war on drugs served as an excuse to try to influence the rulings of the Constitutional Court and even threatened to take away the visa of several magistrates.
The war on drugs has also been deeply unfair to the victims left by the violence in Colombia because it ended up extraditing drug traffickers who committed heinous crimes in Colombia with the perverse argument that American justice had to be served first and then the victims. .
After 30 years, the balance is in the red. The United States is facing an opiate epidemic that has claimed the lives of thousands of people, Mexico is experiencing the same levels of violence that Colombia had when the Colombian cartels owned all the business, and the only triumph it has to show this stupid war is that of having managed to get the Colombian drug traffickers to now work for the Mexican cartels.
Changing drug policy is a moral imperative that the United States must embrace. For Colombia it is an urgent need because this senseless war is undermining the dignity of the country and causing serious damage to our well-known democracy. This is known to President Gustavo Petro, who in his speech before the UN went ahead of Biden to tell the world that the war on drugs had failed.
It is time for this useless war to end and for us not to be invited to his funeral.
#Colombian #stigma