What’s behind Trump’s rift with Colombia?

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0:36Gustavo Petro:The other day here on this show, we covered the U.S. military attacks off the coast of Venezuela. Today, we're talking about Colombia. And you might think this sounds familiar. President Trump clashing with another leftist leader from Latin America. But this is a very different story. For decades, Colombia has been one of the United States' closest allies in the region, working side by side with Washington in the war on drugs. And over the years, that relationship has grown, with Colombia becoming a hot tourist destination for many Americans. But now that friendship is under serious strain.

1:14William Marquez:They are a drug manufacturing machine, Colombia. And we're not going to be part of it. So we're going to drop all money that we're giving to them. The U.S.

1:24Gustavo Petro:government says Colombia is officially not cooperating in what it calls the war on drugs. Trump has accused Colombia's president of being a drug dealer. And Colombia's president has accused U.S. officials of trying to orchestrate a coup against him.

1:42Gustavo Petro:From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. And I'm Tristan Redmond in London. And today on The Global Story, if the U.S. and Colombian presidents fall out with each other, who stands to lose most?

2:00William Marquez:Well, I will start briefly and trying to skip through the decades.

2:07Gustavo Petro:William Marquez is a journalist with BBC Mundo. That's the Spanish language arm of the BBC World Service. He's from Colombia himself, and he has been covering the country for decades.

2:18William Marquez:I'm 71 years old. I started with the BBC in 1991, first as a freelancer. And you can tell he's a radio man because he's got an incredible voice.

2:29Gustavo Petro:You should have a sort of a kind of evening storytelling show, I would say,

2:34William Marquez:where you just read, you know, great stories so people can listen to them when they're going to bed. I would listen to that. All right. I'll make you my agent. Okay.

2:44Gustavo Petro:William, for many Americans, Colombia really registered on their radar in the 80s and the early 90s during this period of Pablo Escobar. Right. A lot of Americans may have heard of Pablo Escobar, but can you just remind us, who was he?

3:00William Marquez:Pablo Escobar was the biggest drug lord the world has ever seen, I would say. Perhaps nowadays someone in Mexico has taken up that mantle. but Pablo Escobar dominated the drug trade in Colombia. He was the head of the Medellín cartel. He had armies at his disposal. He had a huge zoo with wild animals that he opened up to the public. He had a fleet of airplanes that flew cocaine to the U.S. He managed to be elected to the Colombian Congress. He had political power. It was throughout a decade that he dominated the Colombian scene in every way from the early 80s to the early 90s when he was killed.

3:51Gustavo Petro:What are your memories of that period? You grew up in Colombia, you're Colombian, you were there during that time period now?

3:57William Marquez:I grew up in Colombia. I left when I was 19 to go to university. But I did return to work in Colombia from the mid-80s to the late 80s, which were the very difficult years during Pablo Escobar's reign. And I can tell you it was a very, very difficult period of daily killings, massacres, shootouts on the streets. It was – I remember one time going to work and all of a sudden traffic stopped. and two or three minutes later you would see all this debris on the road because a bomb had just gone off. The cartels had ordered the killing of a police chief. And that happened all the time. Was it frightening to live in Colombia at that time?

4:40William Marquez:I mean, you sort of get used to all of that stuff. But, I mean, it was just something that happened every single day. And so the drug cartels had the sort of informal private army of these youngsters that would kill for money. and that happened all the time. I remember being in Medellin one time and you could smell the fear and the danger in the atmosphere. After five o 'clock in the afternoon, you wouldn't be caught dead in the city because they were killing one person every hour there. I mean, drugs, the drug trades have permeated every single sector of society and of government, even the church in Colombia.

5:24William Marquez:I mean, people close to you might have been involved in drug trade. And you just, you know, you would just point them out, you know, that guy, that guy's a narco, you know. And everyone would, you know, sort of laugh. Oh, really? The little gossip and that. But that was it. No one really paid attention to what was happening because it was all over the place. And it was horrible. And obviously, this became a U.S. problem.

5:47Gustavo Petro:Well, I was going to ask, William, how was the U.S.-Colombia relationship during this time period, during the Escobar period?

5:54William Marquez:Well, it became a problem for the U.S. because it realized that its streets were being flooded with drugs. And where were they coming from? They were coming from Colombia. So there were agreements struck between both countries to try and curtail this and try and go after the drug lords. This became a central part of the government's operation in 1989. That was a year when a lot of presidential candidates were assassinated. And the government hadn't really done anything because most of those candidates were left-wing, the people who had been killed, until around August of 1989, when Luis Carlos Galán, the liberal candidate, the person who everyone thought was going to be the next president, was assassinated during a political rally.

6:49William Marquez:That's when the president at that time, which was Virgilio Barco, declared war against the cartels. Bush's father, President George H. Bush, flew to Colombia, met with Barco, and that's where they started a strategy to try and hunt down Pablo Escobar.

7:10Gustavo Petro:Colombia's drug bosses struck back today, bombing and burning buildings and homes in Medellin. Among the first targets, the party headquarters of the late Senator Luis Galán, who was murdered by drug assassins last week.

7:24William Marquez:But after that, the Medellin cartel retaliated with putting bombs at a large secret police facility. Police also found and disarmed 40-pound bombs

7:38Gustavo Petro:at two of the country's biggest radio stations. And just outside Medellin, the estates of another Colombian senator and a leading industrialist were burned to the ground.

7:50William Marquez:They also bombed an aeroplane. They bombed it because they thought a presidential candidate was on it. And I remember I was living here in London. But when I read about the aeroplane blowing up, I realized that the pilot was married to a friend of my then wife. Oh, wow. And I also, reading the list of the passengers, there was someone I had gone to school with. So in many, many ways, all of this really not only touched me, but it touched a lot of people. Well, the United States eventually did get Escobar in 1993.

8:36Gustavo Petro:Good evening. The Colombian drugs baron Pablo Escobar has been killed in a shootout with security forces in the city of Medellin.

8:43William Marquez:They cornered him. There was a shootout.

8:46Gustavo Petro:Reports from Colombia say he was shot after a gun battle involving 500 police. The government will be hoping the problem has finally been solved. Colombia, though, holds its breath.

8:57William Marquez:After that happened, who filled the vacuum in Colombia in terms of power and influence? All right. So when Escobar was killed and the Medellín cartel basically disbanded, the drug trade didn't go away. It atomized into small parts and several different people started controlling the trade. And one of those groups that started controlling the trade were the FARC. FARC stands for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces. They were a group that started in the early 60s with a left-wing group that started in a small town that grew into the largest guerrilla group in Colombia.

9:44William Marquez:and it sustained a confrontation with the government for over 40 years. The thing with the FARC was that the FARC realized that the cocaine trade was a rather good source of income, number one. Number two, most of the territories where the crop was being cultivated were areas that they controlled. So they already knew the system. They already knew the trade. They knew what was going on. So this coincided with the fall of the USSR. The USSR gave support to the FARC. And they found that this was, you know, an enormous source of income for them. And they switched over from becoming an insurgent group to becoming drug traffickers, basically.

10:38William Marquez:And what's the U.S. response to this kind of evolution of the drug trade? Well, in 2000, President Clinton came to Colombia.

10:48Gustavo Petro:Our program is anti-drugs and pro-peace.

10:53William Marquez:The president at that time was Andrés Pastrana. And they came to an agreement and they had, the Colombian government had elaborated a plan called Plan Colombia, the Colombian plan.

11:04Gustavo Petro:I reject the idea that we must choose between supporting peace or fighting drugs. We can do both. Indeed, to succeed, we must do both.

11:14William Marquez:That included a lot of military aid, armaments, strategy, education, but also it had sort of a social development side to it. All of that, all of those elements. And that went on for about 10 years. It was billions of dollars. Colombia became the largest recipient in the hemisphere of U.S. aid. So the armed forces got a lot of support, the police as well. But then that created also a large and very deadly paramilitary force in Colombia as well. and during that time, Colombia suffered a lot of human rights violations. There were massacres because the whole thing is about controlling the areas where the cocos grew and controlling the routes to export cocaine and the cocaine labs and all that.

12:13William Marquez:So it depends who you ask whether the Plan Colombia had any good results. Well, maybe during some period, it strengthened the Colombian army, But in terms of cocaine production, well, you know, you can see that the results haven't been that positive. Can you explain to us, please, what happened in 2016? Because there was a peace deal, wasn't there, with the FARC?

12:36Gustavo Petro:And to what extent that contributed to a kind of calming of the situation generally in Colombia?

12:42William Marquez:So in 2016, there was a big turning point in Colombia when President Santos signed a peace treaty with the FARC. It had taken a very, very long time to arrive at that. And the members of the movement disarmed and were reintegrated. And there's a process of establishing justice and culpabilities. But there was a dissidence that rejected the process. And they continue to be active. Plus, there's also another group called the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the National Liberation Army, that also has yet to disarm, and they also are involved in all sorts of violence and drug trafficking. And so that's what the situation is at the moment.

13:33William Marquez:But definitely there was a change in 2016. There was a sort of a sigh of relief, even though a lot of people found it hard to swallow, that the FARC were all of a sudden being able to be candidates it's for the Senate and the Congress.

13:51Gustavo Petro:And William, I recall if we fast forward a few years later, in 2021, when Joe Biden was president, his administration removed FARC from the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. It seemed like the relationship between the U.S. and Colombia was on kind of a progressive upswing over the years. And from the American perspective, it's also meant that Colombia has become a really attractive tourist destination. I mean, I know so many people who go and want a vacation there. You see U.S. hotels, American various airlines making trips there. How does that translate with what we've seen?

14:27Gustavo Petro:Because I would say in decades past, Colombia might not have been as hip and hot of the destination for Americans.