3. The Success and Its Monsters: Disputing the Metrics, Dodging Criticism

Foucault explains as follows the relation between the three mechanisms ordering the discourse: “Of the three great systems of exclusion which forge discourse—the forbidden speech, the division of madness and the will to truth (…) it is towards this third system that the other two have been drifting constantly for centuries. The third system increasingly attempts to assimilate the others, both in order to modify them and to provide them with a foundation. The first two are constantly becoming more fragile and more uncertain, to the extent that they are now invaded by the will to truth, which for its part constantly grows stronger, deeper, and more implacable” (Foucault 1981: 55–56).

The mobilization of numbers in government practices was not invented in the 1980s. According to Foucault, the use of statistics as a technical knowledge considered as indispensable to the exercise of power emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, particularly in the calculation of states’ resources (Foucault 2007: 274). Indeed, the administrative apparatus invested in the quantification of the strengths and weaknesses of the state allowed for a more productive ordering of the social body and, consequently, to the increase of state forces. The conditions for the emergence of this technical knowledge are not exclusively found in the state apparatus, however: universities played a major role in its development as well. One of the instances in which Foucault locates this symbiotic relation more explicitly is the police. Facing the problem of scale when disciplining societies with increasing urban populations, the police found in statistics a technique that made the abstraction of social complexities possible (Foucault 2007: 315). As an example, Foucault refers to the central role played by German universities in the development of what was by that time known as Polizeiwissenschaft (“the science of police”) (Foucault 2007: 318). More than suggesting an osmosis between universities and the state administrative apparatus, Foucault points to the “statization” of this technical knowledge and other practices that could be useful to the ordering of the social body (Foucault 1995, 2007). Although preserving statistics as an anchor to the art of government, New Public Management does re-articulate this rationality especially as regards its mobilization to the measurement of public policies’ impact.

Known as Grupo de los 30 (“Group of the 30”), this technical commission was led by a civil advisor and was integrated by numerous police professionals.

According to Huysmans (2006: 8), the routine of security professionals produces crystallized framings of social phenomena as security problems that need to be solved. At the same time, the production of specialized knowledge by these professionals is the very source from which they derive authority to speak about those phenomena (Huysmans 2006: 13). Bureaucratic routine thereby embeds visions of security, providing a grid of intelligibility with which specific phenomena are rendered as security problems (Huysmans 2006: 147–148). Because the solutions to these problems are claimed to be found within that very expertise, securitization processes are always claims to power, as much as they are claims to truth. That is, advancing a specific problematization as a priority in the domain of security is inescapably also a way of promoting your own expertise to solve it. Thus, the disputes among professionals of security also reveal the technocratic competition in the institutional architecture these experts are inscribed in.

That is, the destruction of illicit crops and drug processing laboratories, or the seizure of key precursor chemicals.

That is, any endeavor aiming to prevent drug shipments to penetrate the U.S. territory.

The full text of “Plan Colombia: Plan for Peace, Prosperity, and the Strengthening of the State” is available here: https://​www.​usip.​org/​sites/​default/​files/​file/​resources/​collections/​peace_​agreements/​plan_​colombia_​101999.​pdf. Accessed on 20 January 2021.

Although Objective No. 4 did not present any specific goal, it did suggest that the number of arms seized was to be considered a key indicator when mentioning, among its lines of action, to “halt the acquisition of arms by those groups that profit from drug trafficking”. Contrastingly, Objective No. 4 did not set any guideline so that “increase security for citizens against kidnapping, extortion, and terrorism” could be achieved. As for Objectives No. 2 and 3 (respectively, “Strengthen the judicial system and combat corruption” and “Neutralize the drug trade's financial system and seize its resources for the state”), words such as “strengthen” (institutions, for instance), “reinforce” and “support” (e.g., anti-corruption groups) were mentioned without any further specification regarding how that would be assessed. Likewise, Objective No. 5 (“Integrate national initiatives into regional and international efforts”) lacked specifications on how or what kind of “information and intelligence [would be shared] with other security agencies in the country”, much less how Colombian agencies could “Contribute to and coordinate with regional and international operations and efforts”. Following a series of actions related to interdiction and eradication, only Objective No. 6 presented a contrasting approach: “Strengthen and expand plans for alternative development in areas affected by drug trafficking”. It was expected that this would be achieved through the provision of “job opportunities and social services to people living in the cultivation zones” and promotion of “public information campaigns on the dangers of illegal drugs”.

The Colombian Army also started to publish the numbers of its own counternarcotic performance—although their systematic presentation only came to constitute a regular practice by the mid-2010s, years after the Colombian National Police. The achievements of military operations are regularly reported with focus on the seizure of war material, the destruction of drug trafficking infrastructure, the seizure of drugs and precursor chemicals, and the capture or surrender of illegal armed groups members—that is, basically the same indicators used by the Colombian National Police. See, for instance: https://​www.​ejercito.​mil.​co/​informes_​noticias/​noticias/​importante_​balance_​operacional_​387289#. Accessed on 21 January 2021.

In the original: “Si se tiene en cuenta que la producción estimada de cocaína por hectárea cultivada es de 4.7 kilos, quiere decir que, con la cantidad erradicada en 2005, 812.8 toneladas métricas de cocaína dejaron de entrar a la cadena de distribución. Se evitó así la comercialización de aproximadamente 812 millones de dosis personales y 80,000 millones de dólares dejaron de ingresar a las arcas de los narcotraficantes y los grupos armados ilegales”.

Rasmussen and Benson claim that the same rationality ascribed to actors in the legal markets must be incorporated in any analysis aimed at understanding the behavior of actors in the illicit market: “there is no reason to believe that entrepreneurs in illicit drug markets are any less likely than those in legal markets to engage in these efforts [technological change and product development]”—terms used by the authors in order to describe rational responses to changing incentives and constraints in the market (Rasmussen and Benson 2003: 700).

Available at: http://​www.​wola.​org/​history_​of_​wola. Accessed on 20 January 2021.

The US federal government's “Fiscal Year” (FY) is the budget approved by the Congress for a 12-months period, starting on October 1. The FY 2003, for example, stretches from October 1, 2002 to October 1, 2003.

According to him, “Police surveillance provides the prison with [law] offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of the police supervisors, which regularly send back certain number to prison” (Foucault 1995: 282). Although Foucault does not explicitly contemplate the intelligence apparatus in his analysis of the carceral system, its relevance to the latter echoes in the central analytical position that the production of knowledge about the social body have in his account of ordering practices and the knowledge-power nexus in government practices.

Following a series of scandals related to systematic phone interceptions of court magistrates, journalists, and activists, and to the involvement of the DAS with paramilitary groups, the intelligence agency was dismantled in 2011, and its functions were redistributed among different branches of the Colombian National Police and Military Forces.

The creation of multiple intelligence systems suggests that intelligence information does not circulate evenly among the different agencies inscribed in the Colombian security architecture. If we consider the pressure for efficient results over these agencies and intensified by the competition among them, the restrictions over the circulation of intelligence information may have created the need for these agencies to search for short-term solutions in the domain of intelligence.

This is the technical jargon used to refer to the extraction of information from human sources for intelligence purposes. Importantly, during the 1980s, most of the training for Latin American countries on “Human Resource Exploitation” was based on manuals produced by the U.S. CIA and the U.S. Army Special Forces (Gill 2004). The 1983 version of the CIA intelligence manual was developed in cooperation with British military officers (CIA 1983: n.p.) and preserved the emphasis laid by the renown Kubark Intelligence Manual on “coercive questioning” (CIA 1983: K-1).

According to a report published by the Coordination Colombia-Europe-United States (CCEEU, in Spanish) (2016a), the number of forced disappearances of leaders of campesinos’ movements is impressively high in Colombia. While singling out the case of Henry Pérez, a campesino leader in Tibú (Northern Santander), a region disputed by the military forces, the FARC and paramilitary groups, the document reports that, since his disappearance, seven additional leaders were threatened.

The concern with protecting the infrastructure used for extractivism is so central to military operations that, in the context of Plan Colombia, the Army created Brigades specialized in the protection of Caño Limón-Coveñas (Rojas 2006: 54; Vargas V. 2014). The oil pipeline stretches across the territories of the following departments: Córdoba, Sucre, Bolívar, Magdalena, Cesar, Norte de Santander and Arauca.

In the original: “Hoy en día, así el Ejército quiera hacer las cosas, no puede porque está maniatado por los derechos humanos. Por eso yo le digo al gobierno nacional que le preste apoyo al Ejército y que desaparezca eso de los derechos humanos porque eso le está dando resultado a la guerrilla pero no a nosotros”.

Two observations are noteworthy here. The first one is that the paramilitary action is not naturally absent of legal brakes: it is made so. In other words, there is a selectivity running through the functioning of the Colombian penal system that results in making most of paramilitary operations a blind spot to these institutions. Needless to say, this reveals a systemic complicity of judicial institutions with paramilitary action, in addition to that of the military and the private sector to which I have already called the attention. Secondly, paramilitary operations are far from exclusively focused on the guerrillas. Although it falls outside the argumentative scope of this book, we could even go further and show that massacres against civilians constituted a regular paramilitary practice and also yielded economic gains to the private sector. These violent practices often resulted in the expulsion of local inhabitants, who either abandoned their properties or sold them at very low prices, benefiting land grabbing and the formation of large rural estates in Colombia to be used for agribusiness purposes. For more on this, see: Viana (2018).

According to Foucault, the use of specific delinquencies is a historically persistent feature of practices of government, dating back at least to the nineteenth century. In this sense, it does not refer to a problematic specificity of Colombia, nor a “new” phenomenon. According to Foucault, “Arms trafficking, the illegal sale of alcohol in prohibition countries, or more recently drug trafficking show a similar functioning of this ‘useful delinquency’ (…). The political use of delinquents—as informers and agents provocateurs—was a fact well before the nineteenth century. But, after the Revolution, this practice acquired quite different dimensions: the infiltration of political parties and workers’ associations, the recruitment of thugs against strikers and rioters, the organization of a sub-police—working directly with the legal police and capable if necessary of becoming a sort of parallel army—a whole extra-legal functioning of power was partly assured by the mass of reserve labour constituted by the delinquents: a clandestine police force and standby army at the disposal of the state” (Foucault 1995: 280).

A recurrent argument for the rejection of human rights reports is the “lack of credible evidence”, which is mostly related to the form they present the denunciations. Anticipating these accusations, a report prepared by FOR (2010: 6) underlined that: “reports of extrajudicial executions that result in the Prosecutor General’s office or Inspector General’s office opening a formal investigation constitute credible evidence that the military committed the violation. We also are aware of the strict standards used by the human rights organizations that constitute the Working Group on Extrajudicial Executions, and contend that reports of extrajudicial executions from these organizations also constitute credible evidence”.

Chernick (2008: 133) and Isacson (2005: 141–142) argue that these concerns with human rights were merely apparent, given the continuous flux of U.S. foreign aid to Colombia despite a series of scandals of abusive violence involving the Armed Forces.