Did Trump's Colombia drug policy fail because of mafia collusion?

[Judi Lynn]

Ivan Duque (L) and Donald Trump (Image: President's Office)


by Adriaan Alsema November 2, 2020

The governments of Colombia and the US in 2018 agreed to cut cocaine production in half by 2023. Here’s how that became a catastrophic failure.

Fifteen months before US assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon and Colombia’s former Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin met in Bogota in March 2018, Colombia’s FARC guerrillas began their demobilization.

Three weeks after the beginning of Colombia’s peace process, US President Trump took office and made it clear he had no intention to fulfill commitments made by his predecessor Barack Obama to support the peace process that included a new counternarcotics policy, the substitution of coca crops, as part of a strategy called “Peace Colombia.”

The peace process was opposed by Trump allies US Senators Lindsay Graham and Marco Rubio, an ally of Colombia’s far-right former President and admitted former Medellin Cartel associate Alvaro Uribe.

The crop substitution program was also opposed by former ambassador and the director of the International Narcotics and Law Affairs chief, William Brownfield, another associate of Uribe and of the cousin of Pablo Escobar, Senator Jose Obdulio Gaviria.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/did-trumps-colombia-drug-policy-fail-because-of-mafia-collusion/

This story is BEYOND embarrassing. Of course we will never be seeing it in any corporate US "news" account.

From the article:

Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin expressed her despair about Trump’s ignorance about counternarcotics and persistent efforts to resume a counternarcotics strategy that never worked.