Book Review: European police and criminal law co-operation (Swedish Studies in European Law)

Abstract

The United States-Colombian relationships reached its lowest level while Ernesto Samper was the Colombian President (1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998). During his presidency, Colombia was decertified twice and the United States denied Samper a visa. When Andres Pastrana took office in 1998, his main concern was to restate this relationship and assure his loyalty to his U.S. counterpart. However, his primary concern differed from Clinton's. For Pastrana, inequality and land reform was a priority. For the Clinton administration, the war on drugs and military strengthening antinarcotics policy was a priority.Pastrana shared the Clinton's concern about drugs, but he understood drug trafficking as the consequence of the humanitarian and economic crisis that his country had been experiencing for decades. Pastrana's primary goal in the first version of the Plan Colombia was to promote peace. Specifically, his plan was to conduct a peace process with the FARC. However, the Clinton administration did not want to get involved in the internal Colombian conflict because it knew that it was unlikely that such a plan would get any traction in the U.S. Congress. As Rosen explains, Colombia's plan, which was originally focused on a peace process, was transformed into, and implemented as, an antinarcotics policy. One of the most important and controversial strategies of that plan was, and is, the aerial eradication with Roundup (a compound of Cosmo-Flux and glyphosate), despite extensive interdisciplinary research findings that glyphosate has disastrous impact not only on human health but also on the environment.By 2002, as Rosen points it out, both the U.S. and the Colombian interests converged. Alvaro Uribe Velez took office as the Colombian president. His primary focus was to combat the guerrillas militarily, and he needed the Plan Colombia financial resources to do so. By then, the Bush administration's foreign policy was focused on the global war on terrorism; therefore, Mr. Uribe Velez's denial of the long history of internal conflict in Colombia presented an opportunity for the Bush administration to reorient the Plan Colombia and made it part of the war on terrorism. By 2010, a new approach to Plan Colombia emerged when current presidents Barak Obama and Juan Manuel Santos shared a more humanitarian approach to the Colombian conflict. Facing the most challenging economic times since the 1930s, the U.S. administration reviewed Plan Colombia and its outcomes. Mr. Santos, on the other hand, ended his predecessor's denial and recognized the internal conflict in his nation. Plan Colombia was reviewed and its budget dramatically reduced.At the end of his analysis, Rosen asserts that Plan Colombia, in terms of reducing cultivation, production, and trafficking in narcotics, has been a failure. While the total number of hectares of coca cultivation has decreased in Colombia, it has increased in neighboring countries such as Peru and Bolivia. Not to mention the cost of the environmental damages to Colombia's, flora and fauna, from the ...