Latinnews Archive

Andean Group - 17 November 1994

'Narco-democracy' row

When Colombia's constitutional court decriminalised the use of drugs last May, US President Bill Clinton's 'drug czar' Lee Brown said he was 'extremely disheartened' by the move while the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Thomas Constantine, said it could only exacerbate tensions between Washington and Bogota.

The illicit drugs trade has long been the main source of such tensions, the US officials frequently complaining that the Colombians have not been tough enough with drug traffickers. This was again a source of considerable irritation to the Colombians when, in an interview for a local television programme a day after his retirement, Joseph Toft, who had headed the DEA's office in Bogota for more than six years, accused Colombian politicians, including President Ernesto Samper, of a lack of will to wage an effective fight against the drug traffickers, with this helping to turn the country into a 'narco-democracy.'


The Spanish-language interview infuriated the Colombian government. 'Joseph Toft has offended national dignity' and the government 'will not accept under any circumstances' that a former US official 'denigrate a whole nation which has made the highest sacrifices in the war on drugs,' it was noted in a government statement.

'I really do think narco-democracy has arrived in Colombia,' Toft said in the televised interview. 'I know Colombians don't like the term, but it is real, very real,' he noted. 'I cannot think of any institution I know in this country, and which has anything to do with judicial or political influence, that does not have the problems of infiltration by drug traffickers.'

Referring to opposition claims that the Cali drugs cartel had helped finance Samper's presidential campaign (RA-94-07), Toft said that his intelligence information left him in no doubt that this was true. While acknowledging that the Cali cartel had offered his campaign US$ 3.6m, Samper has vehemently denied that the offer had been accepted. But just days before Samper was sworn into office last August, a senior State Department official told a House of Representative committee that the US government still believed the Cali cartel had helped finance Samper's campaign.

Toft was also critical of Samper's predecessor, the now OAS secretary-general Cesar Gaviria, saying that he was soft with the former boss of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar, when he was held at the Envigado maximum-security prison in 1991 and 1992. Toft said that Gaviria knew months before Escobar escaped in July 1992 (RA-92-07) that he continued to conduct his drugs business and was directing a gang war from inside the gaol, but did nothing to stop it. When the government did decide to act and move Escobar and nine of his lieutenants to a military installation, corrupted guards and members of the military allowed them to escape. At the time one foreign journalist in Bogota said the DEA was 'weeping with frustration'. The police eventually killed him in December 1993 (RA-93-10).

Although there is little doubt that Toft's remarks reflect the views of many in the DEA and the US State Department, the US government was quick to point out that he no longer spoke in an official capacity. 'Mr. Toft no longer works for the US government,' it was noted in a statement issued by the US ambassador to Colombia, Myles Frechette, in which he expressed 'sincere regret' that Toft decided to 'personally attack Colombia' after many years service in the country.


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