President Donald Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the U.S. government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen. Trump has boasted of the killings by the U.S. military but claims all the targets were drug smugglers. He has threatened to suspend all U.S. government handouts for the Colombian government. Trump warned Petro that he “better close up” cocaine production “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”
Tapping his own psychiatric expertise, Trump proclaimed that Colombia has “the worst president they’ve ever had – a lunatic with serious mental problems.”
Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? In 1989, President George H.W. Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that they were “no match for an angry America.” But Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of U.S. government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government.
The Bill Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars as they literally deluged Colombia with toxic spray. The New York Times reported that U.S.-financed planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill. Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared last year that the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, “We can’t permanently fumigate the country.”
As I wrote in The American Spectator in 1999:
“Colombia has received almost a billion dollars of anti-narcotics aid since 1990. Coca production is skyrocketing–doubling since 1996 and, according to the General Accounting Office, expected to increase another 50 percent in the next two years. Colombia now supplies roughly three-quarters of the heroin and almost all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”
The Clinton administration responded to the failure of its drug war by championing a far more destructive solution. As I noted in the Las Vegas Review Journal, Clinton officials “intensely pressured the Colombian government to allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be dumped across the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher altitudes, Kosovo-style. Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton administration decreed clean-air standards severely curtailing Americans’ exposure to chemicals that pose little or no health threat, it sought to deluge a foreign land with a toxic chemical in a way that would be forbidden in the United States.” Dow Chemical, the product’s inventor, protested strongly that SPIKE 20 was not safe for use in the Andes and surrounding areas. Didn’t matter.
Colombia at that time was wracked by a civil war—a fight between a corrupt government and corrupt leftist guerillas. The Dallas Morning News noted reports that “tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf War veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in Central America during the 1980’s.”
Like Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan boats, Clinton’s aid for Colombia was lawless. Congress in 1996 prohibited any U.S. foreign aid to military organizations with a penchant for atrocities. The Colombian army had a poor human rights record but almost nobody in Congress gave a damn. Democrats winked at illicit conduct by their president and Republicans didn’t care about any crimes committed in the name of eradicating drugs.
In a Baltimore Sun piece in June 2000, I observed, “The war on drugs is as unwinnable in Colombia as it is in the hills of Kentucky, where natives continue growing marijuana despite endless raids by police and the National Guard.” I whacked the Clinton administration for “bumbling into a civil war.” Colombia’s ambassador to the United States vehemently attacked my piece, claiming that the Clinton administration aid package was carefully targeted to “strengthen law enforcement institutions and help protect human rights.” Alas, U.S. aid was diverted to “carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices,” The Washington Post reported, crippling the nation’s judiciary.
At the same time that the Clinton administration was sacrificing the health of Colombian children in its quixotic anti-drug crusade, top U.S. antidrug officials made a mockery of the entire mission. Laurie Hiett, the wife of Colonel James Hiett, the top American military commander in Colombia, exploited U.S. embassy diplomatic pouches to ship fifteen pounds of heroin and cocaine to New York. She pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in narcotic profits. After she was caught and convicted, she received far more lenient treatment than most drug offenders—only five years in prison, “the same sentence a small-time dealer would get if he were caught with five grams of crack in his pocket,” I noted in Playboy. Her husband—ridiculed as the “Coke Colonel” in the New York Post—received only six months in prison for laundering drug proceeds and concealing his wife’s crimes.
Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, explained the double standard:
“If Colonel Hiett had been Mr. Hiett, he would have been charged with conspiracy to traffic in more than a kilogram of heroin, with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. He would possibly face life without parole…Mr. Hiett would, at a minimum, have been charged with aiding and abetting his wife’s money laundering, facing 20 years.”
Most drug warriors pretended either that the Hiett case had never happened or that it didn’t matter. Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey shrugged off the scandal:
“What a tragedy…There are 3.6 million chronic cocaine addicts in America and every one of them produces that kind of criminality and tragedy.”
“But when any of those 3.6 million is caught, they don’t get coddled,” as I wrote in Playboy.
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election did not entitle him to micromanage every acre of land in this hemisphere. The U.S. war on drugs has dismally failed in Colombia for more than a third of a century. There is no excuse for Trump or any other U.S. government official to burn American tax dollars by perpetuating Colombian pratfalls.
