CIA activities in Colombia

As part of transnational counterdrug activity, the CIA financed a military intelligence network in Colombia in 1991. Speaking on behalf of the Deputy Director for Intelligence, David Carey, director of the DCI Crime and Narcotics center, spoke about

Carey described that the illicit drug trade could spill over into other areas, including the smuggling of illegal aliens. "Although organized crime groups appear to be only peripherally involved in the gray arms market—which is dominated by freelance brokers, corrupt exporters, and import front companies—conflicts in the Balkans and in the former Soviet Union have encouraged Italian and Russian criminal organizations in particular to expand their involvement in arms trafficking.

"As criminal organizations grow in sophistication and expand their networks, they could become increasingly involved in supporting proliferation and terrorist activities. Their networks and mechanisms for illicit financial deals could also make them greater players in international sanctions violations.

Dr. Bruce Michael Bagley, of the University of Miami, found that US counterdrug policy in Colombia was counterproductive.

This essay examines the impact of U.S. and Colombian government drug control policies on the evolution of drug cultivation, drug trafficking, and political violence in Colombia during the 1990s. Its central thesis is that the Washington/Bogota-backed war on drugs in Colombia over the decade did not merely fail to curb the growth of the Colombian drug trade and attendant corruption, but actually proved counterproductive. Among the most important unintended consequences were the explosion of drug cultivation and production activities, the dispersion and proliferation of organized crime, and the expansion and intensification of political violence and guerrilla warfare in the country. As a result, Colombia at the outset of 2000 faced more serious threats to its national security and political stability than it had in 1990. ... the massive escalation of the flawed anti-drug strategies of the past decade proposed by the Clinton administration in January 2000 is more likely to worsen Colombia’s ongoing problems of spiraling violence and insecurity than to resolve them.

One author, independent journalist Frank Smythe, writing in The Progressive, a journal with a pronounced leftist perspective, alleged that CIA counter-narcotics efforts were linked with covert support for right-wing death squads:

In the name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new military intelligence networks there in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop drug traffickers. Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups into their ranks and fostered death squads. These death squads killed trade unionists, peasant leaders, human-rights monitors, journalists, and other suspected "subversives." The evidence, including secret Colombian military documents, suggests that the CIA may be more interested in fighting a leftist resistance movement than in combating drugs.

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