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was killed by a mob, his body dragged to the steps of the presidential palace. Army tanks advanced on the palace, and students took over a radio station, demanding the incumbent president, Mariano Ospina, resign and flee. Possibly to fuel the case of the strongly anti-Communist coalition at the conference and remove suspicion from Ospina’s ruling Conservative party, Ospina immediately accused Gaitán’s shooter of being a Communist. Kremlin-inspired revolutionaries were said to be responsible for orchestrating the violence. But in reality, there was no proven Communist link to the assassination or to the unrest. A 1960s declassified CIA document analyzing the violent uprising—referred to as “El Bogotazo”—reported, “The government preferred to blame the riots on communist agitation and foreign intrigue, rather than to address itself to the underlying causes of popular discontent.” About the assassin, the document stated, “The murderer was apparently one of those fanatics or psychopaths we say may never be excluded from calculations on the safety of dignitaries. His motives cannot be known for certain, for he was battered to death on the spot by frenzied bystanders. Inevitably, charges were raised of the complicity of the Conservative Party, of the Communists, and of the U.S. But no strong evidence of a political plot has ever been produced.”
    By 1960, after continuing to come up empty for more than a decade in its pursuit of the Red threat, the U.S. government believed it had found proof of a real Communist rebellion in Colombia—a ragged group of fighters in the central Colombian mountains, led by peasant revolutionary Pedro Marín. To help Colombia fight the rebels (whose ideology at the time was more nationalist and anticapitalist than Communist), President Alberto Lleras signed a military-aid agreement with the United States. The Colombian military received twenty-five fighterjets and sixteen light bombers and lessons from U.S. pilots in how to napalm insurgent settlements. In 1964, the Colombian army, trained and funded by the United States, went to wipe out Marín and his cohorts with a bombing raid on their camp. When troops arrived on the ground, the rebels were nowhere to be found. The raid had forced Marín and forty of his men to become mobile guerrilla warriors, disappearing into the impenetrable Colombian countryside. It was the beginning of a new kind of war, one that the Colombian government—for more than four decades—would be powerless to end.
    The United States remained dedicated to helping keep communism in check, and in 1962, the government developed a counterinsurgency program called Plan Lazo. The policy included a dramatic increase in aid and the training of Colombian soldiers and citizens “to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions, and as necessary, execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.” The relationship between the two countries morphed in the late 1970s when the sale and use of illicit marijuana and cocaine trafficked through Colombia became a social crisis and a fiscal drain in the United States.
    In the early 1980s, the white powder that had once been a white-collar drug exploded into American inner cities in the form of crack cocaine. By 1985, use of cocaine among young adults reached an all-time high with over 8 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and 6 percent of those between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four admitting to using the drug. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan called drug abuse “a repudiation of everything America is” and implored Americans to join a “national crusade against drugs.” With the increasing fervor over this issue, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (378–16) in favor of a $1.7 billion Omnibus Drug Bill. While the money and military aid allocated in