Colombia was in chaos when Andrés Pastrana was inaugurated as president of Colombia in 1998. Drug lords and the widespread production and sale of narcotics—especially the native grown coca—was at the height of national and international concern. Pastrana was faced with opposition and threats from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other armed groups and looked to the United States for assistance. With the rising threat of the drug war spilling over into North America, the United States set forth plans to help Pastrana combat it. An interagency effort worked intensively to design, obtain funding, and implement “Plan Colombia,” which sought to train and equip Colombian police and security forces and promote economic growth and stabilization in the region.
Peter Kranstover was the deputy in the Agency for International Development’s Washington (USAID) Office of South America and Mexico during the formation and implementation of Plan Colombia. After a few short fact-finding visits, he worked with his team in Washington and Bogotá to design USAID’s “soft-side” strategy to develop and stabilize Colombia through alternative and economic development as well as to provide support for displaced persons, judicial reform, and significant work to protect human rights. Initial efforts focused on providing farmers in the southern province of Putumayo with economic alternatives to growing coca. Limited resources, dangerous conditions, and bureaucratic obstacles all posed challenges to the effort. However, the frank recognition of the limits of the alternative development strategy eventually allowed USAID to shift aid and support for Colombia to more precise interventions in alternative development and push much needed humanitarian programs, judicial reform, and institutional strengthening. USAID remains a vital player in the U.S. government’s efforts to help Colombia and promote stability and democracy in the region.
Kranstover recounts USAID’s alternative development efforts and the setbacks met in the initial stages. Although aspects of Plan Colombia’s first alternative development efforts failed, these failures carved new developmental paths that led to success in the region.
Peter Kranstover’s interview was conducted by Robin Matthewman on February 6, 2022.
Read Peter Kranstover’s full oral history HERE.
Other insightful accounts from former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Peter Romero, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Reeve Pickering, and former Department of State Director, Office of Andean Affairs James Mack during Plan Colombia can be found HERE.
Drafted by Taylor Nydam
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Excerpts:
“An interagency group is formed…”
Prelude to Plan Colombia:
Q: I also got back to Washington in 1999 and became the Venezuela desk officer. My colleagues working on Colombia, it was Alex Lee and a couple of other people who were working on developing Plan Colombia during the late 90s.
KRANSTOVER: That was the big thing. I was going to bring it up. Colombia was the first thing on my agenda. July, August 1998 I’m back in the States.
I walked into the office in August of ’98. Colombian President Pastrana wins the election that month of August, and of course, as I quickly discovered that week, Pastrana was planning a trip to the U.S. for October that year and wants to go to the White House. Well, I hadn’t been to Colombia before, but was very much interested in it—I’m not entirely sure why, but it just struck me, given its history and the Bogotazo in the late forties and the violence there, as well as the fact that it was the major coca producing area in the world, it struck me as one of these interesting places that had a sophisticated group of people, a Gabriel García Márquez and this terribly interesting 20th century history.
…
So, Pastrana comes up in October of ’98, and we’re being apprised of the fact that the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia— Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Ejército del Pueblo/The People’s Army) is moving towards Bogotá and being commanded by Marulanda or Tirofijo, both nom de guerres for Pedro Antonio Marín. Pastrana is worried of course.
There was also the ELN [National Liberation Army], more urban based and smaller, initially run by Camilo Torres, in ’65 and ’66, who was a priest and was killed in 1966. Marulanda comes from a peasant background. As a teenager, he goes into the bush in the mid-fifties, after his village is attacked by conservative forces during what they called in Colombia “La Violencia.”
Security forces come into his area, kill a whole bunch of people. Part of the story of his radicalization is that his town sought government assistance regarding a land dispute. What his town got was a government armed force which attacked the peasants. Well, they go into the bush and the rest is history. And so, come ’98, they’re about thirty-five, forty miles south of Bogotá, and they’ve got some 12,000 guys country-wide, which is twice as much as they had five years before. So, Pastrana, who not unreasonably wants to make his mark and has four years to do so, comes to Washington and gets to the White House and, just to cut to the chase, this issue of what eventually comes to be called Plan Colombia, begins to coalesce.
An interagency group is formed and there’s meetings on occasion, initially chaired by Ambassador James Dobbins at the National Security Council and that brings together a number of actors including Treasury, the Intel community, DOD, State, and USAID —I sat in on a couple of those early sessions. USAID’s Bogota office in the Embassy was one very capable foreign service officer, Carl Cira, and a number of contractors and FSNs at the time.
“Alternative development came into usage to indicate a more inclusive developmental approach.”
The Alternative Development Approach:
Q: So, was it clear that for AID the main work would be alternative development? How did that come about?
KRANSTOVER: Well, yeah. I thought alternative development, or AD, was an unfortunate rubric, but it’s one that you may know comes from the late seventies, early eighties when the war on drugs was in full flower and AID had been directed by Congress to go after coca fields in Bolivia and Peru; when “crop substitution” became a misnomer.
Alternative development came into usage to indicate a more inclusive developmental approach. So, alternative development could take the form of a large regional development project in areas that were isolated and poor and happened to be coca producing areas. A regional development project would be one in which you go in and set up infrastructure, with roads, communications, schools and health clinics, what came to be known as “soft-side” activities, distinguishing them from interdiction and military and police training. A rough division regarding initial funds for Plan Colombia is some 70% for interdiction and “hard side” activities and 30% for “soft-side” activities, including human rights, support to the displaced and judicial reform.
In Colombia’s case, these types of activities in the mid and late nineties concentrated on aerial spraying. INL [The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs] was very keen on this, and the Colombians agreed to it in the mid, late 1990s. INL received additional appropriated funds under Plan Colombia which supported what were known as “spray packages,” as you may remember. A spray package was a certain number of spray planes and usually a helicopter or two for cover. Approaching drugs as a matter of “demand-side” attention was not on the radar.
The money not only went for purchasing Blackhawks or at least some type of helicopter for that element of Plan Colombia, but it also went towards such things as security training, all of which had implications, as I alluded to earlier, regarding the Leahy amendment wherein Colombian military and police personnel needed to be “vetted” by the Embassy,
Ultimately this huge package, “soft side” and “hard side” activities, is put together in a piece of legislation, reflecting inter-agency work on a strategic plan, of which twenty to 25 percent is to be managed by USAID. And what are we responsible for? Well, we’re responsible for the alternative development side, support for the displaced, judicial reform, even some policy dialogue regarding financial reform later.
“First of all, the projects we are trying to do down there are not functioning, it’s a bust.”
Success After Failure:
KRANSTOVER: I’m sorry, in Putumayo, right, on alternative development in that area. First of all, the projects we are trying to do down there are not functioning, it’s a bust. We have to fix it. We get a friend and seasoned private consultant, Bob Gersony, to head off to Colombia for some time and make some recommendations on improving our AD approach. He returns and suggests that USAID moves into places like Nariño and Cauca—provinces where it’s a little more populated and where there is some economic activity, where markets exist, where communication is better, and frankly, where you’re able to accomplish a few more things simply because of the structures that you’ve got in place.
KRANSTOVER: I’m sorry, in Putumayo, right, on alternative development in that area. First of all, the projects we are trying to do down there are not functioning, it’s a bust. We have to fix it. We get a friend and seasoned private consultant, Bob Gersony, to head off to Colombia for some time and make some recommendations on improving our AD approach.
He returns and suggests that USAID moves into places like Nariño and Cauca—provinces where it’s a little more populated and where there is some economic activity, where markets exist, where communication is better, and frankly, where you’re able to accomplish a few more things simply because of the structures that you’ve got in place.
As you can imagine, this caused a little bit of a kerfuffle amongst a number of people, including our higher ups in AID. Gersony’s briefings, which I was not privy to in late 2001, but about which he has told me, made it clear that the Pastrana administration was not going to follow through on eradication, neither on spraying the coca nor on voluntary eradication. The Colombians were saying by then that the alternative development strategy would not work. The Colombian government’s agreements with local farmers in Putumayo, done by the GOC entity PLANTE, to voluntarily eradicate coca, were, to be frank, a bit of a subterfuge.
Well, Gersony comes back to Washington and he lays his findings out exhaustively in a dozen briefings with the interagency [community] in the fall of 2001, and it gets up to, certainly, the higher levels of the State Department and USAID—oh, and we get the inspector general down there too, USAID’s inspector general. And the inspector general’s report basically says no results are going to come from alternative development if we keep concentrating in this particular area. And so, the whole focus shifts in late, if I am not mistaken in late 2001. Gersony had been through there in the summer, fall of 2001. At this point, I had just moved over to be Director of Central American and Mexican Affairs.
To give you some of the back and forth during 2001, AID wrote to the Colombian Government around Christmas 2001, laying out frankly a few of its own conclusions from the Gersony report, saying, “……that under current conditions the alternate development (AD) programs in Putumayo are headed for failure. The Colombian government does not control the area in which they are being implemented. The level of violence associated with the trouble between the FARC and the AUC [right-wing militia group] to control Putumayo’s drug trade and the protection of illicit drug production by these two groups make it almost impossible for the AD programs to succeed.”
It goes on to say that it’s not a good place, even agriculturally. “It seems, however, that the best options are those associated with cattle and crops like African palm and rubber but growing them on a scale sufficient to be profitable to farmers could have severely negative consequences for the department’s ecology. The producer associations are weak and lack the necessary techniques to implement the projects. Alternative development per se doesn’t eradicate illicit crops. Eradication should precede alternative development.”
And that shift in our approach was quite a big deal because, of course, a number of people in different sections of the government had invested their time and reputation in some projects that just did not produce, and in pushing stuff to happen in those particular areas. In fairness, there was tremendous pressure coming from the Hill early on and other quarters to produce results and quickly in Colombia. An upside to Gersony’s report and the subsequent refinement of USAID’s strategy was that we were able to do several different things in Colombia in a much more efficient way.
This was an important report. After the Pastrana administration left office, spraying went into high gear and produced dramatic results in some areas. In the meantime, our AID program strategy had shifted quite a bit and I understand that we had some real successes in various parts of Colombia with it. And as I say, the displaced persons program, the GOC (Government of Colombia) justice sector stuff, the human rights reporting, and frankly, cultivating several local as well as international NGOs for civil society activities all reflect important successes.
TABLE OF CONTENTS HIGHLIGHTS
Education
B.S., Pol. Science Holy Cross 1973
Diploma Economic Development, Oxford University, 1977
M.A. Agricultural Economics, U. of Wisconsin, 1980
Joined USAID in 1981
Served in Sudan, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Pakistan, Washington, D.C.
Director of Central American and Mexican Affairs, 2001–2004
State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), 2007–2011