Winifred Tate

Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats

U.S. Policymaking in Colombia

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Winifred Tate is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (2007).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Juni 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 522g
• ISBN-13: 9780804792011
• ISBN-10: 0804792011
• Artikelnr.: 41751622

Autorenporträt

Winifred Tate is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (2007).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction focuses on defining the central terms and agenda of an
anthropology of policy. The chapter argues that policy narratives play a
central role in making politics legible, that is, coherent and
comprehensible, rather then setting out a concrete plan for future action.
This chapter analyzes the process of policy problematization, through which
particular social relationships, identities and practices are defined as
requiring institutional intervention from the state, and how policy
production generates alliances and support among competing bureaucracies
through strategic ambiguity providing an appearance of institutional
coherence and consensus among disparate programs. Such ambiguity also
limits dissent and opposition. This chapter analyzes the challenges of
ethnographic research on policy, developing the concept of "embedded
ethnography," in which ethnographiers have taken on positions within
organizations not as researchers, but in institutional roles gain valuable
insight that enrich their later anthropological analysis.
1Domestic Drug Policy Goes to War
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that the zero tolerance paradigm that the U.S. embraced
domestically in the 1980s provided the ideological architecture for the
subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. It begins with
the history of the contemporary US war on drugs beginning with the Nixon
Administration and traces how illegal narcotics emerged as a national
security threat, requiring the war-fighting machinery of the U.S. to be
applied in concert with foreign militaries throughout the Western
Hemisphere and the reorientation of the military industrial bureaucracy.
Increased military roles bolstered a range of institutional interests,
including the U.S. Southern Command's efforts to increase their mission
profile and Democratic concerns about the culture wars. The labeling of
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as a narcoguerrilla meta-threat
merged lingering Cold War fears of Communism with the escalating concern of
hyper-violent traffickers.
2Human Rights Policymaking and Military Aid
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 tells the story of how an increasingly professionalized human
rights lobby attempted to transform their documentation of abuses into
specific policy reforms. Many of these activist practices originated with
the Central America peace movement of the 1980s. One of the most important
examples of human rights legislation was the Leahy Law, which prohibited US
military counternarcotics assistance to foreign military units facing
credible allegations of abuses, and its unintended consequences. First
passed in 1997, the law emerged from strategic alliances between elite NGO
advocates, grassroots activists and critically located Congressional aides.
This chapter explores the resulting transformation of aid delivery: rather
than suspend aid when no "clean" units could be found, US officials
convinced their Colombian allies to create new units consisting of vetted
soldiers. Implementation of the law reveals the knowledge practices
inherent in policy implementation, the social production of credibility,
and erased some forms of violence.
3Paramilitary Proxies
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 examines evolving forms of counterinsurgency violence, arguing
that the paramilitaries emerged as state proxies in part because of the
human rights legislation that demanded accountability from official actors.
4Living Under Many Laws
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 describes the strategies employed by Putumayans to shape their
political future while living in a region contested by multiple actors
claiming the right to govern during the coca boom of the 1990s. For much of
the 1980s and 1990s, the FARC were the dominant power in the region,
regulating local conflicts, organizing collective work, and imposing their
rules. The Catholic Church played a critical role in developing a vision of
peasant autonomy and political participation. Despite repeated protests and
ongoing lobbying efforts, local farmers were unable to shift the
counternarcotics program imposed by the US: aerial spraying of chemical
herbicides. Beginning in the late 1990s, United Self Defense Forces
paramilitary forces working with military commanders terrorized the region
in order to consolidate their social and territorial control. Despite their
criminalization and repression, peasant farmers in Putumayo used a range of
tactics to encourage state presence in the region.
5Origin Stories
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 employs origin stories produced through oral history interviews
with policymakers to reveal agency and institutional action frequently
hidden in public policy debates. The officials describe Plan Colombia as
emerging from a range of policy priorities: a domestic counternarcotics
policy intended to address the Clinton's administration moral crisis, a
peace plan to bolster Colombian President Andres Pastrana's negotiations
with the FARC, or a counterinsurgency program to defeat the Colombian
guerrillas. This strategic ambiguity enabled the range of institutional
alliances to coalesce in support of military aid. This chapter explores the
functioning of the Plan Colombia Interagency Task Force, charged with
creating Plan Colombia. The Colombian diplomatic corps also played an
active role in shaping the aid package to fit their political agenda. Yet
some lower ranking officials disputed the description of Plan Colombia as a
consensus plan; they were the losers in the bureaucratic battles dominated
by militarization.
6Competing Solidarities
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how solidarity emerges from the resonance of a
particular issue or population has with a set of could-be advocates and
materially made through institutional and organizational channels.
Supporters and critics imagined themselves as acting in solidarity with
distinct categories of Colombians, from counternarcotics soldiers to human
rights activists. For critics of Plan Colombia, this process reactivated
activist identities and commitments, legacies of the Central American peace
movement. The focus of this chapter is travel as a technique of emotional
management, producing new forms of political subjectivities accompanied by
expectations of political action. Travel played a central role in the
construction of distinct sensory, affective and moral geographies.
Congressional delegations focused on militarized technology, weaponry and
enacted scenarios of counternarcotics operations. These excursions were
channeled into larger political field valorizing militarized expertise
delineating the boundaries of appropriate policy debates.
7Putumayan Policymaking
chapter abstract
Chapter 7 explores how elected officials and local residents resisted
criminalization and exclusion, attempted to engage distant powers and
mobilized to shape the policies impacting their region, presenting policy
alternatives through scientific efforts to document the harms of
fumigation, depoliticized development proposals, and testimony. Although
these efforts were invisible or discounted in official Washington
policymaking arenas, the policy imaginaries and practices of the targets of
intervention are a critical site for apprehending the full process of
policymaking. Putumayan activists participated in proxy citizenship, the
mechanism through which certain rights of citizenship-the ability to make
claims for redress to a state-are conferred on activists through
relationships with NGOs. This process generated political opportunities,
created new citizenship subjectivities but also involved political costs,
as activists were forced to transform their claims and their profound
critiques of US policy were remade into support for US programs.
Conclusion: Plan Colombia in the US Policymaking Imagination
chapter abstract
U.S. intervention in Colombia has been widely praised as a success to be
replicated in other sites. The conclusion analyze these claims to success
and what constitutes "the Colombian miracle," as the title of a 2010
National Standard article put it. The life stories of three residents of
Putumayo challenge this triumphal narrative, offering in their place sober
assessments of damage in the region, including the failures and
catastrophic results of counternarcotics programs, the economic and
political legacies of paramilitarism, and the complexities of community
security. This chapter argues that an anthropological approach necessarily
includes the appraisals of policymakers and analysts and the targets of
policy, their efforts to shape these programs and their reflections on the
process. Examining democracy promotion and nation-building efforts reveal
that such projects are less involved with encouraging widespread
involvement in governance than facilitating specific policy outcomes.