
Plan Colombia: Cashing-In on the Drug War Failure
Plan Colombia began in 2000 as a multibillion-dollar US aid package meant to cut coca production and weaken the FARC, wrapping military funding, aerial fumigation, and development promises into a single policy. This film traces what that money actually built: fumigated farmland, an expanded Colombian army, and a drug trade that kept adapting faster than the eradication campaigns meant to stop it. It weighs the official case for the program against the visible results on the ground, where displaced rural families, unbroken cocaine exports, and a war that outlasted several US administrations complicate the success story told in Washington. The film treats the program less as a finished chapter than as a case study in how counter-narcotics funding gets absorbed into a longer counterinsurgency conflict, with the human cost falling hardest on the communities the eradication flights passed over.