Plan Colombia stands as a defining initiative of the War on Drugs, with mixed legacies surrounding its success and humanity. Its use of aerial fumigation with a toxic herbicide as the primary means to eradicate coca crops has drawn both criticism and support, making it a critical case study for assessing the effectiveness of illicit crop eradication strategies and understanding the environmental destruction tied to such eradication. As cocaine trafficking from Latin America to the United States reaches unprecedented levels, an inclusive investigation into Plan Colombia's many legacies becomes increasingly relevant.
This thesis positions Plan Colombia at the often-overlooked intersection of the War on Drugs and the climate crisis, analyzing its use of aerial fumigation through the lens of environmental political theory. Drawing on Sharon Krause' framework of environmental domination, I argue that the aerial fumigation campaign systematically exploited Colombia's natural environment and rural communities while simultaneously implicating and harming even relatively privileged populations in the United States. To do so, I pair an analysis of firsthand journalistic accounts and nonprofit reports of rural Colombians' lived experience with an evaluation of Environmental Protection Agency reports used to justify aerial fumigation. Together, these disparate accounts of aerial fumigation' risks to human and nonhuman health reveal the institutional failings and unchecked power that enable widespread environmental and, subsequently, human harm. By resituating Plan Colombia as the War on Drugs' most prominent output, this thesis articulates how those of us sitting in distant and often complacent positions are also entangled in the initiative' exercise of domination. Ultimately, I assert that environmental domination is not simply collateral damage in the War on Drugs but a fundamental feature of its logic. Such entrenchment necessitates an awakening to the ways human freedom is innately tied to the nonhuman world and how human institutions systematically dismiss and degrade that relationship and, therefore, human freedom.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 56129