Author Description

Professor Luz E. Nagle has never been a believer in Plan Colombia as the solution to her native country's array of problems. Now she has again published on the subject, in an article which is eloquently critical about the plan's results during the administration of President Andrés Pastrana, yet which holds out hope for a better turn of events in the new administration of President Alvaro Uribe. It is a study written with passion and commitment. But also, as befits a law professor, it is scholarly in its degree of documentation and factual content. In Nagle's view, practically everything was wrong with Plan Colombia that could have been wrong, although she acknowledges that to do nothing would have been even worse. The plan was, in her view, doomed from the beginning-prepared without adequate consultation with the Colombian people, therefore lacking in consensus and support. It was inadequately funded by the Colombian government for the most part, but drew on large amounts of aid from the United States, $1.7 billion, which was largely restricted to fighting narcotics trafficking when insurgency was the real problem. It failed to attract the expected funding from Europe and Japan and was largely ignored by Colombia's Latin American neighbors, who often seemed to be in a state of denial as to how the problems of Colombia affected them. A particular strength of Nagle's well documented article is a detailed explanation of the multiple failures of the Pastrana administration in every aspect of Plan Colombia's implementation. The ill-fated peace initiative of Pastrana simply consigned over to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas a piece of Colombia's territory the size of Switzerland with no positive results. The FARC were strengthened by having the territory, as was predicted by the Colombian army. Kidnappings and assassinations continued unabated. Eventually, this year the army had to be sent in to retake the zone. Rampant corruption at every lev