From Peril to Partnership: U.S. Security Assistance and the Bid to Stabilize Colombia and Mexico

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Recent scrutiny from Congress on U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan has stimulated among both scholars and practitioners an increased interest in the topic of security assistance. One book that neatly bridges the gap between these two communities is Paul J. Angelo’s From Peril to Partnership. In this comprehensive and detailed account, Angelo conducts a comparative historical analysis of two multibillion-dollar security assistance initiatives—Plan Colombia in Colombia from 2000 to 2011 and the Mérida Initiative in Mexico from 2007 to 2016—to assess the effects of security-sector reform in different domestic contexts.

Both aid packages sought to institute reforms that would “modify oversight and accountability of military and law enforcement organizations in accordance with democratic principles.” But while Plan Colombia is lauded as a successful example of security cooperation, the Mérida Initiative is generally seen as a complete failure. Angelo contends that differing levels of private-sector engagement, interparty consensus regarding the country’s security strategy, and security-sector centralization explain the divergent outcomes in these cases.

Angelo bolsters his thorough research and academic credentials (he currently serves as the Director of the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies) with his previous experience as a Naval officer responsible for interagency planning in support of Plan Colombia. Drawing on his background as a practitioner-scholar, he offers important insights and analysis for understanding why and under what conditions similar security-assistance initiatives can have such dramatically different outcomes.

Angelo makes a theoretical and empirical contribution by developing an outcome measure that incorporates two dimensions of security governance: effectiveness and accountability. While he relies primarily on qualitative data obtained through interviews with government and civil-society officials, Angelo leverages quantitative measures where possible. For example, public opinion and victimization data supplement his qualitative assessment of efficacy while various measures of corruption and impunity, where available, augment his measure of accountability.

Using this information, he argues that Plan Colombia should be considered a security-sector reform success because it enabled the increased operational effectiveness of the Colombian armed forces, setting the conditions for an eventual peace agreement and increasing accountability of the military for human rights abuses. In contrast, he shows that the Mérida Initiative largely failed in improving the effectiveness and accountability of Mexico’s security forces. Two years after the program’s conclusion, the Mexican government recorded the highest homicide rate since the country’s revolution, while human rights abuses and corruption among the security forces, as well as impunity for these offenses, also increased.

According to Angelo, three factors ex- plain the results of U.S. security assistance in each case. First, the engagement of private business differed in the two countries. In Colombia, business elites maintained strong ties with the government and saw their interests fundamentally threatened by the violence. The Colombian government took advantage of this dynamic to gain support for a tax on big business and the country’s most wealthy, which proved an important revenue stream for security reforms. Conversely, Mexico’s private sector did not suffer the most direct consequences of the country’s crime and violence; indeed, many entities negotiated with criminal networks to protect their interests. All this, combined with skepticism among business elites that the Mexican government could transparently manage its budget, limited the involvement of the private sector as a partner in addressing insecurity.

The nature of the threat also shaped the behavior of political elites. In Colombia, the major ruling parties agreed in their perception of the country’s instability and on the use of international assistance and security-sector reform as the solution to the problem. In contrast, Mexico failed to develop a consistent security strategy because political elites dis- agreed about the causes of insecurity and therefore proposed different policies to address it. The lack of a professional civil service in the security sector and the high turnover resulting from Mexico’s mandatory term limits led to a politicization of the security strategy in which politicians used failures to gain electoral advantage, ultimately undermining reform efforts.

Third, the bureaucratic structure of each country’s security sector also influenced prospects for success. Here Angelo pushes back against the recent emphasis on the importance of “local solutions” by arguing that Colombia’s centralized, top- down organizational design facilitated dialogue with the United States, enabled efficient aid disbursement and program implementation, and allowed for coordination with local representatives to address challenges at the subnational level. Conversely, Mexico’s decentralized federal structure complicated coordination across the enterprise and created more opportunities for criminal groups to undermine reform initiatives.

While From Peril to Partnership offers an important assessment of the impact of U.S. security-sector reform, the book’s conclusions should be taken as an initial hypothesis outlining the conditions that moderate the effects of security assistance. Angelo himself acknowledges that considering three variables across only two cases limits the power of his argument. Future work should seek to incorporate additional cases to further test his theory about the importance of the private sec- tor, strategic continuity, and a centralized security sector. Broadening the analysis may reveal different outcomes because of interaction effects between variables. For example, the value of support from business elites notwithstanding, Angelo does not fully acknowledge the risk of involving a group motivated by profit and unaccountable to the electorate in supporting security-sector reform. It may be that Colombia’s political structure and centralized security sector create the conditions in which business elites’ involvement is sufficiently subject to government oversight to prevent corruption and abuse.

This book makes an important contribution to the study of security cooperation and security-sector reform. Angelo provides the first comprehensive analysis of Plan Colombia, which should prove useful to both security cooperation practitioners and scholars while highlighting the challenges to achieving stability in the Mexican context—condi- tions that persist today. By focusing on the context in each country, Angelo acknowledges the limits of U.S. strategy in shaping outcomes and advocates for increased awareness of these domestic factors when designing and implementing security assistance. JFQ