Plan Colombia was originally conceived in 1999 as a peace initiative on the part of then-Colombian president Andres Pastrana. In her concise, well-informed, and sharp-edged primer, Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War, Grace Livingstone describes how Pastrana's Plan Colombia was hijacked by the United States and transformed into the military program it has since become. This process was facilitated by the spectacular collapse of the Pastrana administration's larger peace initiative. As part of that plan, Pastrana granted FARC what was often referred to as a "Switzerland-sized" autonomous zone in the southern part of the country, a zone that had been largely controlled by the guerrillas anyway and soon came to be known as "Farclandia." The creation of Farclandia was supposed to impress the guerrillas with the seriousness of the government's desire for peace, but FARC somehow remained unimpressed, and the collapse of negotiations between FARC and Pastrana is usually attributed to uncooperative behavior on FARC's part. FARC representatives repeatedly failed to show up for negotiation sessions and, over the course of the peace process, killed the attorney general's wife (who also had a career as a popular folk singer), kidnapped a diplomat traveling in a UN vehicle and captured and executed the chair of the Colombian House of Representatives Peace Commission while he was on his way to negotiate with the guerrillas. FARC has a long history of political obstructionism, a tendency that may reflect what Alma Guillermoprieto described in the New York Review of Books as "the cocoon of isolation and paranoia that clandestinity generates."

But FARC's seeming political ineptness can also be attributed to an understandable skepticism about the Colombian government's intentions. Colombia has a long history of duplicity and betrayal toward FARC, the most dramatic example of which is described by Steven Dudley in Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia. Dudley's book tells the sad chronicle of the Unión Patriótica during the late 1980s and early '90s. The UP was FARC's attempt at a legal political party. Despite its candidates' considerable appeal, the government was unable or unwilling to protect them, and paramilitary death squads ruthlessly picked them off--even assassinating the party's popular presidential candidate in broad daylight at the Bogotá airport. This series of assassinations not only crushed the UP as a party but, by eliminating FARC leaders who might have had the flexibility to negotiate with the government, strengthened the militaristic and even Stalinist tendencies in FARC.

Since the mid-1960s, FARC has been led by a tough, wily, countryman named Manuel Marulanda, known as "Tirofijo," or "Sureshot." Tirofijo has long survived by force of arms and does not appear to have been unduly troubled by the massacre of the UP's leadership. But Tirofijo is well into his 70s, and there are published reports that he is suffering from prostate cancer. Despite this, FARC's militaristic tendencies are likely to prevail for the foreseeable future. Tirofijo's heir apparent is Jorge Briceño Suarez, known affectionately as "Mono Jojoy," a rotund, fair-skinned man who is said to be a military genius with little or no interest in politics. According to Kirk, he once explained to a journalist that "I was nothing when I was a civilian. I was created by weapons."

Throughout Pastrana's term in office, the paramilitaries grew enormously. Under the leadership of Carlos Castaño, a charismatic psychopath who never finished high school, the paramilitaries wrested control of the cocaine trade from the cartels and, like FARC, seized control of large sections of the countryside, particularly in the north. The zone of undisputed government control was reduced, in many ways, to the area around Bogotá, and FARC correctly perceived that whatever peaceful intentions the government might profess, its ability to restrain the paramilitaries was another matter. Such was the dissipation of the government's power by the end of Pastrana's term, writes Kirk, that a joke circulated around Bogotá that Pastrana was the best president Colombia ever had because "he was given one country and made it into three!"

In many ways, the ascendancy of the paramilitaries reached its logical conclusion with the election for a four-year term, in May of 2002, of the current president, Álvaro Uribe. Uribe is from a prominent ranching family and had been governor of Antioquia, a state at the very nexus of Colombia's cocaine trade. He was the undeclared candidate of the paramilitaries. His father had been killed by FARC and FARC twice tried to assassinate him during his campaign. For his promise of a military solution to Colombia's problems, Uribe came to be known as "Colombia's Ariel Sharon." He has been unreservedly supportive of every aspect of Plan Colombia, from strengthening the country's military to--especially--reducing the growth of coca.

Coca reduction is close to the heart of Plan Colombia. The United States has been involved in heavy, Vietnam-like aerial spraying of Colombia's coca fields. Guarded by a small fleet of Black Hawk and Huey helicopters, crop-dusting planes have sprayed hundreds of thousands of gallons of the herbicide Roundup Ultra (which has the EPA's highest toxicity rating), combined with a Colombian surfactant of unknown toxicity called Cosmoflux. The planes are piloted by independent contractors, eleven of whom have been killed and three of whom are being held captive by FARC. A few months ago, in connection with the campaign to renew Plan Colombia, the Bush Administration announced that in the year 2003 alone, spraying in Colombia had reduced the number of coca fields by 20 percent--this on top of a 14 percent reduction the previous year. Peasants in the spray zones have complained of respiratory problems, temporary blindness, the destruction of non-cocaine crops and the death of their farm animals, but no one seems much concerned. The spraying continues.

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