Drug trafficking, international pressures, and domestic influence: A study of United States-Colombian relations, 1986--1994

This dissertation explores the scope and limits of drug-producing and drug-exporting countries with less military, economic, and political power capabilities to respond to U.S. pressure on full cooperation. It seeks to inform three broader theoretical considerations. First, the questions on how target countries respond to U.S. coercive diplomacy. Secondly, the extent to which the premise of the supply-oriented U.S. drug policy---that rests on the assumption that the greater the extent of international pressures on target countries, the higher the degree of cooperation---is flawed. And, third, the utility of Robert Putnam's two-level game approach for sorting out the complex interactions of domestic and international factors.; The empirical case study concentrates on U.S.-Colombian relations on the drug issue between 1986 and 1994 and is embedded in broad terms in Putnam's two-level game framework that is concerned with all three levels of analysis (international, domestic, and individual). Both an event-centered technique and formal content analysis are used for interpreting a body of relevant official documents, such as congressional hearings and press material, both in Colombia and the United States.; The dissertation found that due to the high level of drug-related terrorism associated with a policy of full cooperation (extradition) during the Barco administration, the major political actors in Colombia forced the newly elected President Gaviria to choose a less costly international cooperative drug control strategy. This led to a new surrender policy and the constitutional prohibition of extradition of Colombian nationals to the U.S.; Colombia's policy shift provides insights into the following theoretical assumptions about international relations. First, developing countries mitigate domestic and international pressures through a foreign policy that falls in the range of acceptability of both the domestic constituencies and its international counterparts. Second, the U.S. politics of pressure on target countries does not result in full cooperation once the distribution of gains and losses of such cooperation is unequally distributed. And, third, the approach suggested by Putnam is useful to the analysis of different issue areas. It helps to go beyond either-or explanations, that is domestic or international, and to shed new light on the dynamics of international relations.