Drug Control: Financial and Management Challenges Continue to Complicate Efforts to Reduce Illicit Drug Activities in Colombia Page: 3 of 21
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Mr. Chairman and Members of the Caucus:
I am pleased to be here to discuss GAO's work on U.S. counternarcotics
assistance to Colombia. Today we will highlight the preliminary findings
from our ongoing review of U.S. assistance to Colombia. Our draft report
is with the responsible agencies for comment; we expect to issue a final
report in mid-June. I will focus my comments on (1) the status of U.S.
counternarcotics assistance to the Colombian Army in fiscal years 2000-03
and how this assistance has been used, (2) what the U.S.-supported
Colombian National Police aerial eradication program has accomplished
in recent years, and (3) what challenges Colombia and the United States
face in sustaining these programs.
In 1999, the Colombian government introduced Plan Colombia-a
$7.5 billion program that, among other things, proposed reducing the
cultivation, processing, and distribution of illegal narcotics by 50 percent
over 6 years.' A key component of the Colombian-U.S. counternarcotics
strategy was the creation of a Colombian Army 2,285-man
counternarcotics brigade, for which the United States agreed to provide
helicopters to help it move around southern Colombia to reduce cocaine
production and trafficking. Closely allied with this objective was U.S.
support for the Colombian National Police's aerial eradication program to
significantly reduce, if not eliminate, coca and opium poppy cultivation.2
Summary In fiscal years 2000-03, the United States provided about $640 million to
train and equip the Colombian Army counternarcotics brigade and supply
the army with 72 helicopters and related training, maintenance, and
operational support. Most of this assistance has been delivered and is
being used for counternarcotics operations. However, some problems
were encountered. For example,
After a successful first year of operations, the brigade's results dropped off
in 2002. U.S. and Colombian officials attribute this, in part, to coca
'For more information on U.S. assistance for Plan Colombia, see U.S. General Accounting
Office, Drug Control: U.S. Assistance to Colombia Will Take Years to Produce Results,
GAO-01-26 (Washington, D.C.: Oct. 17, 2000).
2The leaves of the coca plant are the raw ingredient of cocaine, and opium poppy is used to
produce heroin. The aerial eradication program involves spraying the coca and poppy
plants from low-flying airplanes with an herbicide that attacks the root system and kills the
plant.GAO-03-820T
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United States. General Accounting Office. Drug Control: Financial and Management Challenges Continue to Complicate Efforts to Reduce Illicit Drug Activities in Colombia, text, June 3, 2003; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc290072/m1/3/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.