From Counter-Terror to ‘Counter-Drugs’: the Ideologies of Enforcement and Democracy Promotion in the US Congressional Debate Over Plan Colombia

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar Presents: Dialogues about Communication and Culture
  In Paper Session: A Scholar to Scholar Roundtable: Crossing Borders, Crossing Swords: Bridging Divides in Contemporary Foreign Policy Discourse

Abstract

This paper examines the 2004 US House of Representatives Hearing “Drugs and Thugs: A Status Report on Plan Colombia.” I trace the link drawn within the hearings between a policy of drug enforcement framed in terms of US self-interest and an ideology of democracy promotion and nation-building in Colombia through three rhetorical moves: the conflation of drug cartels with anti-government guerilla groups such as the FARC (framed using anti-terrorism rhetoric), the articulation of US anti-drug policy to support for a specific national political regime and the use of this articulation to defend Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s human rights record against critics, and a permeable rhetoric of US borders which conflates the tropes of legitimation for the US justice system (fairness, democratic objectivity) with the military rules of engagement effective in Colombia. I argue these moves provide examples of a larger set of assumptions about foreign policy relative to drugs which have been in force since the Reagan era, assumptions which mix a logic (and justification) of expansive drug enforcement policy as police work with the criteria for success and operational mindset of a military operation.

Author

• Matthew Bost, Univ of Minnesota