The 1990s: Haiti, Colombia, and the Growing Pains of Democracy

Following the first round of U.S. post-Cold War military operations, such as Just Cause and Desert Shield/Storm, the combatant commands spent the next decade participating in a variety of small but significant military operations across the globe. For SOUTHCOM, this meant a change in focus away from Cold War contingency operations to becoming a partner with other U.S. government agencies and departments to undo the tangle of American policy initiatives dating to the end of World War II. The emphasis on counter-drug efforts continued, and the command implemented a multinational initiative to synchronize Bolivian, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and U.S. counter-drug operations. In 1994, Joint Interagency Task Force-South (a two-star intelligence fusion and planning operation located in Key West, Fla.) was stood up to plan, conduct, and direct interagency counter-drug operations in Latin America.

In addition, SOUTHCOM ran a vast array of multinational training and assistance operations in Latin America throughout the 1990s. Some of these, like UNITAS, were continuations of annual exercises dating back to the Cold War, and have continued to the present day.

Other operations included humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as well as peacekeeping, including Operation Uphold Democracy, a multinational intervention in Haiti in 1994 to remove a military regime that had ousted the democratically elected government, which stepped down peacefully. Follow-on peacekeeping, relief, and infrastructure-building operations lasted through March 1995. In addition, SOUTHCOM ran a vast array of multinational training and assistance operations in Latin America throughout the 1990s. Some of these, like UNITAS, were continuations of annual exercises dating back to the Cold War, and have continued to the present day. Other missions, like those run under the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program funded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, though small in size and manpower footprint, greatly improve the professionalism and skills of a number of Latin American military and internal security forces. But SOUTHCOM would face a long and tough, though ultimately worthwhile, fight alongside Colombia as it fought its war against the drug cartels and FARC (which translates as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgency.

Ever since the days of the “Cocaine Cowboys” of the 1980s, narcotics trafficking to the United States from South America had become a greater national problem and a genuine threat to the regional security of northern South America, Central America, and nations of the Caribbean. Every year, hundreds of tons of refined cocaine made their way north into the United States and Canada, generating billions of dollars in profits for drug producers and traffickers along with untold woe and violence in North America. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations made interdicting narcotics traffic a major priority for a variety of governmental agencies and departments. Included in this effort was SOUTHCOM. Late in 1988, the U.S. military’s active participation was expanded by the Bush administration through Public Law 100-456, which amended USC Title 10, Chapter 18. The changes required DoD “to serve as the lead agency for the detection and monitoring of aerial and maritime transit of illegal drugs into the United States.” The Secretary of Defense was now authorized not only to make available military equipment and facilities for law enforcement authorities, but also to train equipment maintenance and operation personnel.

Because the majority of the production and transport of illegal drugs took place in the SOUTHCOM AOR, the command took on the lion’s share of the mission, partnering with nations in the region like Colombia to aid its internal efforts, as well as stepping up interdiction of drugs in transit on the high seas and in the air.

The JTF faced an uphill battle against corruption, bribery, and the very real threat of violence from Escobar and his organization. Escobar had no scruples regarding violence to protect his drug empire, including blowing up an airliner and the Colombian Supreme Court, along with killing a presidential candidate.

Colombia had been ravaged by an ongoing rural insurgency, which had been further complicated by the rise of a number of cocaine-producing cartels. In the early 1990s, the worst of these, the so-called “Medellín Cartel” headed by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, was in virtual control of the country, and Colombia was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Following a request from the government of Colombia, in 1992 SOUTHCOM and U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) dispatched a joint task force (JTF) along with personnel from the Drug Enforcement Administration and other departments, to help the Colombians hunt down and (hopefully) capture Escobar. The JTF faced an uphill battle against corruption, bribery, and the very real threat of violence from Escobar and his organization. Escobar had no scruples regarding violence to protect his drug empire, including blowing up an airliner and the Colombian Supreme Court, along with killing a presidential candidate.

Much of the U.S. effort centered around training and supporting a unit of the Colombian National Police force known as Search Bloc. Search Bloc had a single mission – the elimination of Escobar and his organization – and it would be a long and bloody task to bring Escobar to justice. Specialized signals intelligence units from both the United States and Colombia had to be brought in to help hunt down Escobar, who, by this time, was on the run and only communicating via radiotelephone. On Dec. 2, 1993, Search Bloc finally ran down Escobar in a suburb of Medellín. In the gun battle that followed, Search Bloc killed Escobar and a bodyguard, bringing his bloody reign of terror to an end. Sadly, however, the death of Escobar ended neither the insurgency nor the drug trade in Colombia, and it would take another decade to get control over both of those problems.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 1, 1996, the first part of a two-phased transition for SOUTHCOM began under a new Unified Command Plan laid out by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under this plan, SOUTHCOM assumed responsibility and control for maritime waters around Central and South America out to the 12-mile limit. For the first time since the 1950s, SOUTHCOM had a maritime role in the Latin American AOR. On June 1, 1997, the second part of the new Unified Command Plan’s transition gave SOUTHCOM operational responsibility for the Caribbean islands and waters – a region highly prone to natural disasters. This required the command to elevate humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to a primary mission, a task made easier by the relatively low level of conflict in the region. SOUTHCOM headquarters also began relocation from Panama to Miami, Fla., a move that was completed on Sept. 26, 1997. After two particularly severe storms struck the Caribbean and Central America in 1998, SOUTHCOM responded with a massive transnational aid effort and coordinated more than 20,000 personnel carrying out disaster relief operations. One positive outgrowth of the disasters was renewed relations with Nicaragua, which had been strained at best.

The coming of the 21st century began a new era for SOUTHCOM, as American attention focused across the oceans following the terrorist attacks on 9/11. However, just because the command did not have a primary mission in the Global War on Terrorism (Operation Enduring Freedom) or the invasion of Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) did not mean that SOUTHCOM was not a busy place in the early days of the new millennium. On the contrary, the continuing war against narcotics trafficking, one element of “transnational organized crime,” became even fiercer, with SOUTHCOM gaining real traction against the cartels but also shifting the fight elsewhere as a result of its success.

However, just because the command did not have a primary mission in the Global War on Terrorism (Operation Enduring Freedom) or the invasion of Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) did not mean that SOUTHCOM was not a busy place in the early days of the new millennium.

Unveiled by Colombian President Andrés Pastrana in 1999, Plan Colombia was a multinational effort to not only choke off the drug trade to North America and Europe, but also to deal with the long-term civil war that had been going on for decades between the government and the FARC leftist rebel insurgency group. This combined U.S./Colombian effort was designed, much like the effort with Search Bloc a decade earlier, to improve the capabilities and capacity of Colombian military and security forces, while at the same time providing sustained planning and support to help defeat both the FARC and the drug cartels. While much of this has taken place in Colombia itself, improved interdiction efforts thanks to Joint Interagency Task Force-South resulted in intercepts approaching 50 percent of the refined cocaine and other illicit cargo moving toward North America and Europe, driving the FARC to the negotiation tables and imposing a significant imposition on the drug cartels – so much so that efforts to transport drugs and other illegal items directly to U.S. shores have been virtually eliminated, and now occur in Central America and Mexico.

Along with making a significant dent in the flow of illicit drugs and goods toward North America, SOUTHCOM has also conducted some of the most important and far-reaching humanitarian/disaster relief efforts of the new millennium. While Latin America has always been a region prone to natural disasters (volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), SOUTHCOM has consistently made itself ready to respond, even in the worst and most unexpected of circumstances. Perhaps the most impressive example of this came in 2010, when on Jan. 12, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince, destroying many parts of the city along with most of the country’s infrastructure. All ports and airfields were severely damaged or destroyed, and initially, there was no way for relief and aid to reach the shattered country.

SOUTHCOM quickly dispatched an aerial task force, drawn from Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), to reopen the airport at Port-au-Prince, and organized a naval task force to move to Haiti and provide relief to the thousands of survivors. What became known as Operation Unified Response delivered a vast stream of relief supplies and evacuated hundreds of injured Haitians to medical care overseas. In addition, SOUTHCOM helped nongovernmental organizations gain access to the disaster area and supported them and their lifesaving and rebuilding efforts.

SOUTHCOM continues to this day to run hundreds of different training, partnering, and multinational exercises throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Along with these large and very public operations, SOUTHCOM continues to this day to run hundreds of different training, partnering, and multinational exercises throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. This includes everything from medical civic action programs (MEDCAPs), including visits by U.S. Navy hospital ships, to multinational exercises to help build relationships, capacity, and operational experience with partner nations throughout the region. And while SOUTHCOM currently has no real areas of conventional military conflict, the command remains functionally and structurally ready to deal with any contingency that might arise within its AOR.

 

Conclusion

Over the decades, U.S. SOUTHCOM has, with its various names and missions, provided the United States and Latin America with strong, central military leadership around which the region can rally in times of war and trouble. And while for much of its history SOUTHCOM was viewed as something of a “backwater” command, the end of the Cold War in 1989 destroyed any notion that Latin America is anything but an area of critical U.S. interest. The Americas constitute a region with as much or more promise economically and socially as any other. As SOUTHCOM moves into the middle of the 21st century, it does so as the only combatant command not facing a major conflict, and, with one notable exception (Cuba), virtually every nation within its sphere of influence has some form of democratic government. Its key role of facilitating partnership among nations of the Americas today places U.S. SOUTHCOM among the most successful regional combatant commands in the U.S. military.

This article first appeared in A Half-Century of Service: SOUTHCOM.