Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Material reprinted from Winifred Tate, Accounting for Absence: The Colombian Paramilitaries in U.S. Policy Debates, in Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict, edited by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill. Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

Material by Winifred Tate reprinted with permission from Human Rights Law and Military Aid Delivery: A Case Study of the Leahy Law. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34 (2): 337–54, 2011; Proxy Citizenship and Transnational Advocacy: Colombian Activists from Putumayo to Washington, DC. American Ethnologist 40 (1): 55–70, 2013; and Congressional ‘Drug Warriors’ and U.S. Policy Towards Colombia. Critique of Anthropology 33 (2): 214–33, 2013.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tate, Winifred, 1970- author.

Drugs, thugs, and diplomats : U.S. policymaking in Colombia / Winifred Tate.

pages cm — (Anthropology of policy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9201-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-9566-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. United States—Foreign relations—Colombia.   2. Colombia—Foreign relations—United States.   3. Drug control—United States.   4. Drug control—Colombia.   5. Military assistance, American—Colombia.   6. Counterinsurgency—Colombia.   7. Paramilitary forces—Colombia.   8. Colombia—Politics and government—1974–   I. Title.   II. Series: Anthropology of policy (Stanford, Calif.)

E183.8.C7T29 2015

327.730861—dc23

2015004650

ISBN 978-0-8047-9567-8 (electronic)

Designed by Bruce Lundquist

Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services in 10.5/15 Brill

Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats

U.S. Policymaking in Colombia

Winifred Tate

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Anthropology of Policy

This book is dedicated to the women of the Women’s Alliance of Putumayo, Weavers of Life, and, in particular, to Nancy Sánchez

And to my family:

Scott, Beatrice, and Owen

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Anthropology of Policy

PART I: Militarization, Human Rights, and the U.S. War on Drugs

1. Domestic Drug Policy Goes to War

2. Human Rights Policymaking and Military Aid

PART II: Putumayo on the Eve of Plan Colombia

3. Paramilitary Proxies

4. Living Under Many Laws

PART III: What We Talk About When We Talk About Plan Colombia

5. Origin Stories

PART IV: Advocacy and Inevitability

6. Competing Solidarities

7. Putumayan Policy Claims

Conclusion: Plan Colombia, Putumayo, and the Policymaking Imagination

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I HAVE INCURRED MANY DEBTS during the years spent gestating this book, only some of which I can acknowledge here. First, I must thank those who schooled me in foreign policy advocacy while at the Washington Office on Latin America. I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to work with some of the most thoughtful, perceptive, and smart people around, including Adriana Beltran, Peter Clark, Rachel Farley, Laurie Freeman, Dave Mattingly, Rachel Neild, Eric Olson, Bill Spencer, George Vickers, and Coletta Youngers. I also thank my colleagues on the Colombia Steering Committee, especially Lisa Haaguard, Alison Giffen, and Adam Isacson, for their political insights.

I first conceptualized the project while a postdoctoral fellow in the Culture, Identity, and Politics Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Among the many Brown colleagues who deserve my thanks are Peter Andreas, Keith Brown, James Der Derian, Cathy Lutz, Simone Pulver, and Kay Warren. Under the auspices of the Watson Institute, I organized a workshop on the Anthropology of Foreign Policy, and I am grateful for the thoughtful contributions of the participants, especially Catherine Besteman, Keith Brown, Jason Cross, Gregory Feldman, Hugh Gusteron, Catherine Lutz, María Clemencia Ramírez, Nina Siulc, Stacey Van Der Veer, David Vine, Kay Warren, and Janine Wedel. My research benefited greatly from time spent with the document collection at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., where I was fortunate to work with Michael Evans.

In Colombia, Nancy Sánchez was my first guide in Putumayo. María Clemencia Ramírez was extremely generous with her time, contacts, and insights. I am grateful beyond words for the patience, guidance, and wisdom of the Women of the Alliance, especially Fatima, Elena, Carmen, Amanda, Ana, Yesenia, and the many others who spent hours with me.

Financial support for research in Colombia was provided by a grant from the U.S. Institute for Peace; faculty development funds from Colby College; and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Drugs, Security, and Democracy Program of the Open Society Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. During a sabbatical in Colombia, the Political Science Department of La Universidad de los Andes provided me with an institutional home.

I was fortunate to benefit from conversations and comments shared with me while presenting parts of this project at Lawrence University; Franklin and Marshall College; the International Affairs Program at the New School for Social Research; Vassar College; the Off-Centered States conference in Quito, Ecuador (sponsored by Emory University, the Carnegie Corporation, and FLASCO-Ecuador); the Cold War and Afterwards seminar of the History Department at New York University; the Human Rights in the United States conference at the University of Connecticut; the Issues in the Critical Study of Armed Forces workshop at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University; the Empire and the Americas Conference: Rethinking Solidarity workshop at the University of New Orleans; the Conference on International NGOs at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá; the Politics of Numbers workshop at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University; and at meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the Latin American Studies Association.

At Stanford University Press I greatly benefited from the graceful guidance of Michelle Lipinski; Anthropology of Policy series editors Cris Shore and Susan Wright provided thoughtful comments and much needed feedback. While this book was still in process, I benefited from the insightful comments on all or partial drafts from Jeffrey Anderson, Teo Ballvé, Chandra Bhimul, Catherine Besteman, Heath Cabot, Michael Evens, Paul Gootenberg, Britt Halverson, Jenna Hunter-Bowman, Ben Fallaw, Adam Isacson, Erica James, Ramiza Koya, Mary Beth Mills, David Nugent, María Clemencia Ramírez, Maple Razsa, David Strohl, Bill Tate, and Kimberly Theidon. I greatly appreciate all their wise counsel over the years. I also benefited from conversations with Sibylla Brodzinsky, Jessica Cattelino, Elena Florez, Daniel Garcia-Peña, Olga Gutierrez, Bridget Guarasci, Sherine Hamdy, Arlene Tickner, Alex Wilde, and Jessica Winegar. I thank Alex Fattal, Julie Chu, and Caroline Yezer for their particularly wise thoughts in the final round. All remaining errors are, of course, my own.

Figure 1   Community residents wave from the bank of the Putumayo River, 1999.

Photograph by Winifred Tate.

Introduction

Anthropology of Policy

WORKING WITH COLOMBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS groups in the 1990s was first exhilarating, then depressing, but most of all frustrating. As a volunteer and then freelance researcher, I was immersed with my colleagues in a frantic world of daily emergencies. Paramilitary gunmen occupied villages for days, killing and dismembering their victims. Activists were pulled off of buses and shot by the side of the road. Families fled their homes in the cover of darkness with only what they could carry. Our job was to document atrocities, producing lists of the dead and, when possible, obtaining eyewitness testimony of events. We found that paramilitary forces working with local military commanders were responsible for the majority of cases. Faced with grieving families and fleeing survivors improvising shelter in urban shantytowns, merely producing the mounting piles of documentation seemed heartbreakingly inadequate. In late-night conversations with my Colombian colleagues and friends, we voiced our collective frustration, despair, and outrage over our inability to halt the violence, achieve justice, or even attract international attention and aid. Such conversations frequently ended with references to the United States as a powerful foreign power that seemed to be secretly dictating Colombian policy, as well as to my own provenance as a gringa. We were all well versed in the long history of U.S. support for abusive military forces in Latin America. My friends challenged me to find the real power: to go to Washington, D.C. Instead of criticizing the effects, they told me to go to the source: the policies producing this violence and misery.

And so, when offered a chance to do policy work, I went to Washington. In 1998, I began work as the Colombia analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a small advocacy organization dedicated to promoting human rights in Latin America. WOLA’s mission was, and is, changing U.S. policy toward Latin America. Founded in 1974 by U.S. activists horrified by official U.S. support for military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, WOLA has shifted its focus over the years to address the major U.S. policy initiatives in the region. No longer simply listing deaths and describing violence, I would now be trying to change U.S. policy in order to address the issues in the Southern Hemisphere at their roots. Its staff, myself included, viewed WOLA’s mission as critiquing existing programs, offering alternatives, and connecting grassroots activists to policymaking. Often, we had to settle for changing the debate, rather than the policy itself, by providing analysis and information for the media, volunteer organizations, and activists far from Washington who lacked the insider knowledge critical to participation in the process. As the Colombia policy analyst, I developed advocacy campaigns with the Colombia Steering Committee, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on Colombia. In this role I wrote policy memos, conducted research trips, led delegations to Colombia, briefed members of Congress and their staff, and gave media interviews. Along with other NGO staff in Washington, I served as a gatekeeper for Colombians, deciding whom to invite to Washington, setting up their meetings, and serving as a translator—literally from Spanish to English, during their presentations, but also in a larger political sense, as I attempted to instruct them in the ways of Washington and to fit their stories into existing policy narratives.

Early in my initial six-month contract, the U.S. government prepared to launch a major aid package, which came to be known as Plan Colombia. At the time, Colombia was widely described as a country in crisis; it was facing an economic downturn, escalating guerrilla war, and a growing illegal drug trade. When Colombia’s then newly elected president, Andrés Pastrana, visited Washington in October 1998, President Bill Clinton promised to expand the bilateral agenda beyond drugs to include human rights, trade, and peace. During that and subsequent visits, Pastrana requested support for the nascent peace process with the guerrillas and assistance for his Marshall Plan for rural Colombia. His proposal involved economic and development aid for the small farmers growing coca, in hopes that the international community would respond to the devastation caused by drug production and trafficking just as it had to ravaged Eu rope after World War II. Instead, in 1999 Congress tripled assistance for militarized counternarcotics programs, making Colombia the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt. At the same time, the Clinton administration convened the Plan Colombia Interagency Task Force to design an aid package.

Passed in 2000, the Emergency Supplemental in Support of Plan Colombia was going to help Colombia do it all: reduce drug trafficking, defeat leftist guerrillas, support peace, and build democracy. More than 80 percent of the assistance, however, was military aid, at a time when the Colombian security forces were linked to abusive, drug-trafficking paramilitary groups. The bulk of this assistance—$600 million—was destined for the Push into Southern Colombia and was used to train and equip elite battalions of the Colombian army. Although U.S. officials classified the entire Colombia proposal as counternarcotics aid, many of the military campaigns in southern Colombia, a stronghold of the country’s largest leftist guerrilla group, were identical to counterinsurgency operations. Over the next five years, more than US$5 billion was spent under the umbrella of Plan Colombia.

Although a relatively minor project compared to the massive ongoing U.S. interventions in the Middle East, Plan Colombia is a critical site for interrogating U.S. policy formation. Pundits and policymakers have heralded Plan Colombia as a success: U.S. aid brought the country Back from the Brink, according to one Washington think tank 2007 report.¹ Plan Colombia is now a model for U.S. efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It also demonstrates the continuities among the major paradigms of U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the twenty-first century: the lingering Cold War preoccupation with defeating communist insurgents and the drug war against the illicit narcotics trade, both of which set the stage for the war on terror’s focus on nonstate actors employing particular tactics. Cold War histories weighed heavily in these debates through the eruption of contentious memories of the U.S. role in Central America, particularly El Salvador.² In the most literal sense, these debates involved many of the same people and organizations. The State Department and Pentagon officials now focused on Colombia had been instrumental in designing and implementing U.S. Cold War programs in Central America. U.S. activists and their allies opposing the plan employed institutional channels and political practices developed during the Central America peace movement. Plan Colombia also demonstrates the endurance of Cold War ideological apparatus, discursive practices, and mobilization strategies involved in formulating U.S. policy. The dominant role of military institutions and expertise in establishing the parameters of policy is one such central thread that can be traced throughout these paradigms. Another is the mobilization by policy officials of affective dimensions of solidarity and fear to justify specific programs.

I worked at WOLA for three years as Plan Colombia was designed and its implementation began. My job—lobbying policymaking officials and explaining U.S. policy to activists around the country—seemed straightforward enough. But as I worked, I saw the contradictions between the bland platitudes issued by U.S. officials in staged press conferences and the material resources—helicopters, miniguns, chemical herbicides—sent in their name. I did not see the proposals, hopes, or experiences of Putumayan residents reflected in these policy formulations. I began to question both what I observed and what I participated in. What exactly is policy? How does policy get made? What constitutes successful policy, and how are such assessments generated?

My quest to answer these questions took me back to Washington, but now as an anthropologist instead of an advocate.³ In late 2001, I had returned to Colombia to research human rights activism, completing my doctorate in anthropology in 2005. Beginning in 2008, I focused on policy as an object of anthropological analysis. I sat in on congressional hearings, read declassified embassy cables, interviewed congressional aides and my former colleagues, and traveled to the U.S. Southern Command military headquarters in Miami to question officers and civilian contractors.⁴ In Putumayo, I listened to coca farmers in remote villages, attended public meetings with small town mayors, and joked with priests over hot bowls of sancocho, the chicken and plantain soup typical of the region. As I considered policy not as an advocate circulating recommendations but as an ethnographer intent on the study of policy production, my object of investigation seemed to disappear before my eyes. Distinguishing and isolating foreign policy seemed more and more like grasping at smoke. What I found was not policy as a specific guideline or articulated vision. Instead, there were stories, multiple narratives of justification and positioning that knit together existing programs of governance.

In this book, I argue that foreign policy is not a discrete, fixed plan for future political action. Rather, policymaking consists of producing narratives that justify political action in the present and unite disparate bureaucratic projects. This is not an investigative exposé of the financial interests that shape how the U.S. government operates. Rather, I am concerned with how policy narratives play a central role in making politics legible; that is, coherent and comprehensible. In his discussion of how we can study the state, anthropologist Michel Trouillot argues for a focus on the ways in which state processes and practices are recognizable through their effects. He goes on to define the legibility effect as the production of both a language and knowledge for governance and of theoretical and empirical tools that classify and regulate collectivities.⁵ Contemporary policymaking is a central site for this process, beginning with the process of what Susan Greenhalgh calls policy problematization, through which particular social relationships, identities, and practices are defined as requiring institutional intervention from the state.⁶ Policymaking as a political project must first establish the problems to be resolved in order to manage, regulate, and shape both individual behavior and collective social life.⁷

At the same time, a central task of policy production is to generate alliances and support among competing bureaucracies.⁸ Efforts to marshal the fullest range of institutional allies and to create coherence among disparate programs that are already underway produce strategic ambiguity as a necessary feature of contemporary policymaking. This ambiguous discursive scaffolding provides an appearance of institutional coherence and consensus among disparate programs, allowing distinct and even apparently contradictory programs to appear as a seamless unified initiative. Such ambiguity also limits dissent and opposition. Understood this way, policy is a state effect: not produced in anticipation of state programs but through the recategorization of existing efforts at governance and state relations.⁹

This book presents a biography of an aid package as a way to analyze foreign policy production, the conditions under which it was produced, and the ways in which multiple actors attempted to shape it. The natives in this anthropological tale of contemporary American political life are self-proclaimed policymakers, among them congressional staff, embassy officials, military officers, and Foreign Service personnel. Their social worlds were connected through the chain of bureaucratic command, the circulation of diplomatic correspondence, and the institutional framework of the Plan Colombia Interagency Task Force—convened by the State Department to coordinate the efforts of the various agencies involved in its creation, including the Pentagon, the CIA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Justice Department. Numerous congressional delegations visited Colombian military installations and toured coca fields by helicopter, and high-ranking administration officials met repeatedly with government representatives in Bogotá. In Washington, the Colombian diplomatic corps was instrumental in shaping the package according to their own agenda, even while working within the constraints of the American political system.¹⁰

Broadening the analytical field in the study of policy to include the targets of policy, their political allies, and others excluded from these efforts is one of the central contributions of an anthropological approach to policymaking. Although they were frequently absent from official policy narratives, U.S. activists and advocates and Colombian local officials, activists, and target populations all attempted to participate in policy production. They employed a range of political tactics, including protests, lobbying, and the production of alternative policy visions. Marginalized Colombians, including Putumayan state officials, activists, and coca farmers—the targets of Plan Colombia—built transnational political coalitions and presented their proposals and claims in a variety of knowledge genres in their ongoing efforts to shape policy production. Understanding these attempts requires a focus on what could be considered hidden sites of policymaking, far from Washington office buildings.¹¹ In this case, they were hidden in plain sight in southern Colombia, in mayors’ offices and peasant forums held in damp concrete school buildings. Coca farmers, priests, and politicians in the region operated publicly and held strong opinions about how policy operated, but these policy actors were excluded from Washington as criminal and dangerous.

Foreign policy production necessarily obscures and misrepresents events in the regions that are its policy targets. This is particularly true of U.S. foreign policy, which emanates from a hegemonic power with a long history of viewing Latin America as its backyard. Thus, an additional central objective of this project, alongside illuminating the cultural dimensions of policy production as a sphere of social life, is to explore the ways in which ethnographic research among the target populations of policy interventions reveals not only competing policy agendas but also the inaccuracies of official policy formulations.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s project applying her ethnographic expertise to the creation of policy around Muslim women is an important model for this dimension of the critique of policy. Although Abu-Lughod does not explicitly address the issue of policymaking, her 2013 book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? centers on the ways in which mobilizing discourses of particular policies—in this case, concern for Muslim women as justifying military interventions—employed frameworks that fundamentally misconstrue local cultural logics, social practices, and material conditions in the targeted countries. Drawing on more than thirty years of fieldwork with Muslim women in the Middle East and writing in conversation with contemporary political theorists including Edward Said and Wendy Brown, Abu-Lughod interrogates the multiple ways in which Muslim women are positioned as needing saving, through concern about veiling, honor crimes, and particular sexual and marriage practices attributed to Islamic tradition. She argues that such campaigns fulfill Orientalist fantasies and justify imperialist interventions, but do not contribute to understanding the complexities and multiplicities of Muslim women’s experiences, which include but are not limited to suffering and oppression. The practices frequently condemned as representing traditional culture are often the result of transnational economic inequalities, are viewed as aberrations by Islamic authorities, and are negotiated by women within the context of family and community entanglements far beyond the binary of free or oppressed. Her work brings a deep ethnographic engagement to the critique of particular policy framings, using anthropology to illuminate the ways in which these discourses fundamentally misrecognize and distort the experience of policy by its targets and their political claims.

Politics, Proxies, and Sentiment

Policy is produced in a wide range of settings, from relatively small single institutions to complex transnational networked organizations, and has come to shape and dominate human encounters with bureaucracies in ever-proliferating spheres of social life. Anyone who has been treated at a hospital, enrolled in school, or gotten a driver’s license has encountered the social world of policy. Here, my focus is on policy production by state officials and agencies. My project examines one particular realm of such policy production known as foreign policy: how governmental agencies and officials set their agenda for relationships with other governments. I am interested in understanding the cultural assumptions that shape how the U.S. government sets the official agenda for interaction and exchange with Colombia. As such, this is a story about contemporary U.S. views of illegal drugs, military aid, state-sponsored development initiatives, and nation-building, as well as the histories of these views. At the same time, policymaking is a dynamic process occurring through transnational circuits and involving U.S. and Colombian officials as well as activists and targeted populations.

Policy analysts frequently present policy as a concrete, linear process, in which the responsible authorities identify an existing problem and design a proposal to address the issue. They imagine policy as responsive, diagnostic (usually of situations in the world, on the ground, and outside of the policymaking institutions), and a blueprint for governance. Such an imagined policy process is temporally organized, moving from the beginning (recognition of the problem) to policy formulation and implementation, and culminating in assessment of whether the policy was successful in addressing the problem. These assumptions often underlie writing about policy, including many of the accounts of official policymakers, media reporting, and much of the political science and policy studies literature.

However, policy action does not have discrete beginnings and endings; such temporal markers must be produced through the stories told about policy. The issues addressed through policy are also never separate from state action. The situations defined as problems targeted by drug policy, for example, are produced in part through the actions of the state to rein in, regulate, and control illegal economies and the reconfiguration of political power. They are produced, in other words, by previous policies.

Policymaking involves profound emotional work.¹² Ethnographic research reveals how both oppositional activists and policymaking officials (primarily U.S. congressional staff) locate the origins of their policy practice in emotional transformations and commitments. Policymaking is frequently imagined as the dispassionate, rational assessment of specific forms of expert knowledge. Here, I explore the ways in which policy mobilization involves the opposite: emotional commitment, couched and explained in terms of affective relationships and passionate obligations. Anthropologists have long argued that, in the words of Michelle Rosaldo, feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell.¹³ For example, in her work in Melanesia, Catherine Lutz argues against a universal theory of affect, instead exploring the distinct emotional ranges and registers in different cultural contexts.¹⁴ The work of critical and feminist international relations theorists examines how emotions constitute a fundamental realm of contemporary political practice.¹⁵ These emotions, inner states described as feelings, as defined by Crawford, include anger, disgust, pride, despair, and joy.¹⁶

Policy narratives are also ghost stories, haunted by the dead who call out to us. As Judith Butler reminds us, grievable deaths are those that are made visible in the public sphere, and this process of public mourning reveals and generates political values.¹⁷ It was through this process of politicized and partial public mourning that I first became aware of the role of sentiment and affect in policymaking. In the course of my advocacy work, U.S. and Colombian officials frequently instructed me that the true victims were not the human rights defenders and peasant communities under attack by right-wing paramilitary groups allied with the Colombia security forces. The true victims were others, and I should be devoting my political resources to them, the victims of kidnapping and the police killed in the line of duty. As I explored the ways in which state officials described their policy visions, I became increasing attuned to how policy reflects and produces structures of feeling, the characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought.¹⁸

My discussion of policymaker solidarity expands Butler’s discussion of the politics of moral responsiveness in the case of the Middle East to debates over Latin America. She argues that politics is expressed through support of those who are recognizable to us; here I chart how that recognition is constituted and performed.¹⁹ This process is central to how solidarity is imagined and enacted, drawing on a moral landscape engendered through travel and embodied in commemorative acts focusing on memorialization of particular wounded and dead. This political identification plays a central role in the way that policymakers mobilize and justify support for particular policies. Anthropological analysis thus reveals the multiple ways in which policymaking works through the mobilization of sentiment and solidarity. The politics of recognition is a fundamental structuring logic of U.S. political culture and is a central way in which Americans imagine themselves as acting in concert with transnational political projects in other countries: it is a justifying logic of intervention, particularly in the case of neocolonial U.S.- Latin America relations.²⁰

Policy stories are also a central site in which the future is deployed in the present, haunted not only by the past but also by the fears of possible things to come. Policies are future oriented, but contain the possibilities of multiple futures.²¹ Through scenarios, modeling, and other forms of threat assessment and prediction, dystopian visions are constructed as possible futures that present policy must militate against. These imagined futures constrain and shape the possibilities for action in the present. Some of the possible futures that weigh most heavily on the present are threats, imagined future dystopias, and the making real of worst-case scenarios. These threats of futures not yet realized, and the work done to conjure them, are a critical site for the analysis of how policy problems are constituted and how they can be solved through state action.

This study of policymaking requires examining bureaucracies in relation to each other, an ethnographic approach that is oriented both toward the horizontal, across a particular political field, and to the vertical—from the most powerful state agents to the subjects of governance. At the same time, an anthropology of policy is attuned to the ways in which policy-mobilizing discourses work in myriad spheres, what Susan Greenhalgh calls policy assemblages.²² In this case, I analyze a broad political field that includes distinct governmental agencies, NGOs, and other institutional realms; a range of knowledge genres and forms of expertise; and the dynamics of Colombian armed conflict. Dissecting the role of these assemblages in policymaking requires an examination of bureaucratic practice, encounters between officials and citizens, and the material products and processes of governance.²³

Scholars of state formation frequently examine the ways in which states classify and make legible a range of populations and social practices. Here I reverse the gaze: what is the work done by the state to make the state’s own action legible both outwardly—by subjects and publics—and inwardly, by the range of bureaucratic agencies that constitute the state? Policy, as a form of state speech, not only wields particular power as a transformative speech act but also works through concealment and denial. Policy narratives make political action legible, locating specific programs within broader spheres of political value. Yet they also erase, elide, and obscure. Here, I ask how these stories perform the work of enframing—naturalizing domination, as Timothy Mitchell describes how modes of power are presented as outside local life, time and community.²⁴

Policy in many ways embodies the ideal of the modern state, laying out its action plan in ways that are transparent, accountable, and equally accessible to all. Yet each of these attributes has emerged as a political artifact of late capitalism and free-market democracy. These demands for transparency are entangled with historically situated notions of accountability, auditing, and systems of measurement.²⁵ In Latin America, transparency became a locus of political concern during the decades-long process of democratization following military authoritarianism and civil wars; a similar process occurred in Eastern Eu rope during the post–Cold War era. These processes of accounting necessarily obscure as well as reveal, however.²⁶ Ethnographic inquiry in the policymaking process reveals both the ways in which the existing power structures subvert the public stance and performance of transparency and accountability and the ways in which transparency and accountability engender new forms of occult power and alternative politics. In this case, I am particularly concerned with how transparency projects organized around audits and particular forms of knowledge production can hide the workings of state power through proxies and other concealment strategies.²⁷

Democratization during the 1980s, 1990s, and on to today has been equated with the return to procedural electoral democracy and the emergence of the neoliberal state, with its emphasis on reduced state services, unregulated (though frequently subsidized) corporate activity, and the privatization of previously state-managed enterprises, including health care and education.²⁸ The resulting outsourcing of multiple spheres of governance has been well documented throughout Latin America. State proxies providing these services include NGOs (some of which are vast multinational networks) and for-profit consulting firms. Flexibility, intended to yield dynamic and efficient services, is the salient dimension of the relationship between state agencies and these proxies.²⁹ However, this flexibility also provides political cover for state officials, who are distanced from the state effects of action by these proxies. State officials’ ability to deny any knowledge or role thus also emerges as a critical impetus for outsourcing and the use of proxies.³⁰

Security is one of the central state functions that is currently part of this global process of privatization.³¹ Military entrepreneurs, defined as violence professionals who move in