THE U.S DESTABLISED COLOMBIA!

Colombian commentator @andres.on.earth breaks down in this video how Washington was not a bystander in Colombia’s long internal conflict. At the turn of the millennium, the United States launched Plan Colombia, a 1.7 billion dollar aid package sold as a counternarcotics mission. 80% of that money went straight into military spending, and almost none of the decision-making passed through Colombia’s own democratic institutions. It was a top-down executive deal that bound Colombia’s war to Washington’s priorities.

The video unpacks how those funds circulated back into the US economy through the military-industrial complex. Black Hawk helicopters were bought from Sikorsky, now part of Lockheed Martin. Glyphosate, the chemical sprayed from those helicopters, was produced by Monsanto. And the men operating this machinery were not US soldiers who would trigger political scrutiny; they were mercenaries from the Virginia-based private military contractor Dyncorp. The United States could shape a conflict while insisting it had “no boots on the ground.”

Meanwhile, campesino or farmer communities were paying the cost in real time. Glyphosate was dumped directly over rural populations at levels far beyond agricultural use, contaminating water, burning skin, wiping out food crops, killing animals, and deepening displacement in a country already torn apart by civil war. Entire regions saw their soil damaged and their livelihoods erased in the name of a drug policy designed in Washington and enforced through privatisation.

The creator makes a point that matters; acknowledging US involvement does not absolve Colombian elites or internal armed actors. But ignoring Washington’s footprint erases the extent to which foreign policy, corporate interests, and neocolonialism have shaped local realities. Plan Colombia was not a charity; it was a geopolitical project that entrenched dependency, expanded US influence, and left rural Colombians to carry the fallout.