Military hardware flooded the country, including state-of-the-art military equipment and even “smart bomb” kits (highly advanced guided bombs) that targeted FARC and ELN leaders. As The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reported in 2016, Plan Colombia “gave the country a vast, sophisticated intelligence-gathering system to hunt the rebels, as well as the lethal hardware to strike them from the skies.” The Colombian security forces became the best-armed in the region, flying Black Hawk helicopters into combat along with using other advanced hardware. Often these same forces did little to differentiate rebels, drug lords and the civilian population, leading to documented atrocities.
For the most part, U.S. leaders portrayed the operations as counternarcotics measures. The United States provided aerial pesticides and manual means of destroying crops. Colombian security forces, aided by U.S. intelligence, also concentrated on laboratories and other facilities used to produce narcotics.
As a counterinsurgency, Plan Colombia was effective, and the FARC and ELN came to the negotiating table and reached agreements in 2016 to disarm and join the political structure of the country rather than seeking its violent overthrow. But the implementation of the peace plan faltered and the groups reignited their insurgency with an eye toward seizing power. Violence has followed, including an attack on the national police academy by the ELN in January 2019 that killed 22 people and wounded many others.
Plan Colombia’s aim to undermine drug production had more-limited successes. The number of hectares of coca production shrank, but $4.5 billion remained in Colombia’s drug-related economy, according to the Brookings Institution. It curtailed drug production but left rural people highly impoverished. “Alternative livelihood programs … have with few exceptions been poorly implemented by the Colombian government,” the Brookings report stated.
The operations also resulted in many civilian deaths, similar to those in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Often, Colombian military sources shared the intelligence gathered by the CIA and U.S. Defense Department with right-wing paramilitaries that committed numerous atrocities, including against human rights and labor activists. “The military was able to outsource violence to the paramilitaries,” Winifred Tate, author of a critical history of Plan Colombia, told The Post in 2016. “So they were not directly accountable, but it was still a fundamental part of counterinsurgency strategy.”
Ultimately, nearly $10 billion of U.S. aid flowed into Colombia between 2000 and 2016, the vast majority for security forces. In the aftermath of the 2016 peace, U.S. policymakers, including President Barack Obama, praised the successes of Plan Colombia and argued for its replication elsewhere, including in Mexico and Central America.