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A big white teddy bear sat on top of one of the little coffin boxes, and red roses on the other three. The remains of the four sisters were finally being returned to their mother, Blanca Nieves Meneses.

“I never thought that this is the way they would be returned to me,” said their surviving sister Nancy. “I always kept hoping that they would be returned alive.”

This week marked the 10th year since the infamous U.S. aid package known as “Plan Colombia” was signed into law. And while some U.S. and Colombian officials have been celebrating it as a “success” and pushing to use it as a model for other countries like Afghanistan or Mexico, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) chose to commemorate this anniversary by releasing a report that describes exactly why that analysis is not only misguided but also dangerous.

Over two thousand civilians intentionally killed by army soldiers seeking to beef up their body counts and score days off. A massive illegal wiretapping operation by the president’s intelligence agency targeting Supreme Court judges, journalists, opposition politicians and human rights defenders. Seven human rights defenders and leaders of displaced communities killed in May alone, in a nation where threats and attacks against defenders are rarely effectively investigated and government officials’ denunciations of them place them in danger. In which authoritarian country opposed to the United States did these abuses take place? In none other than Colombia, often called “the United States’ best ally in the Western Hemisphere.” And we, the U.S. taxpayers, bankrolled this friendship to the tune of more than $6 billion.

The year was 2004. I was contacted by Colombian human rights activists. Would I please come to Colombia to join them in a book launch of the second edition of The Authoritarian Spell? They were worried that the book, a collectively written critique of what they saw as authoritarian tendencies by the administration of President Alvaro Uribe, would provoke a reaction, and wanted international accompaniment. I said yes, and went to one of the book launches in Medellín, where a professor at the local university spoke and introduced me and several of the book’s coauthors, and we had a genteel, scholarly discussion of current events, in an auditorium filled mainly with students and professors. 

Little did we know that the book, criticized by the government as exaggerated, was in fact far too light a critique of the government’s authoritarian tendencies.