When President Bush sets foot Thursday in the old colonial port city of Cartagena, Colombia, he will find little enthusiasm for an expanded U.S. military role in the war on drugs.
Bush and the leaders of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru will issue a joint
”Declaration of Cartagena” that instead emphasizes increased U.S. economic and material aid to the Andean nations that grow most of the world`s coca plants and process their leaves into tons upon tons of cocaine.
”For the first time, we are acknowledging that there must be economic support to compensate for the loss of coca revenues and to spur economic development as an alternative to the drug trade,” said a senior
administration official. ”But we don`t have a lot of money to throw around.”
South American officials already are complaining that the $423 million in assistance, $175 million of it in economic aid, isn`t nearly enough. So far, they say, the U.S. approach to the complex supply side of the drug problem amounts to a policy of insufficiency.
”This is only a start, but obviously it is not enough,” said a senior Bolivian official. Coca cultivation and cocaine production in Bolivia is estimated to pump $1 billion a year, one-fourth of that nation`s gross national product, into the economy.
In Bolivia alone, hitting drug traffickers where it hurts would leave thousands of peasants out of work and drain scarce hard-currency reserves from the nation`s heavily indebted economy.
”If we were to magically eliminate coca cultivation overnight in Bolivia, it would be our economic death knell,” this official said. ”It cannot be done without substantial economic development aid to offset the negative consequences.”
Multiply that lament in country after country across South America. A decade of economic decline makes U.S. financial aid desperately attractive, but American combat forces are unwelcome because of a history of U.S. military intervention, most recently the invasion of Panama.
”For us in Colombia, economic aid is much more important than military aid or sending troops,” said Victor Mosquera Chaux, Colombia`s ambassador to the U.S. ”We don`t want your troops, ships or planes. But without your economic assistance we could face a reversal in public attitudes in our country toward the struggle against narcotics traffickers.”
Those views were echoed in dozens of conversations with South American officials and in interviews with Latin diplomats and U.S. officials in Washington.
The Bush administration will try to ease some Latin American concerns by agreeing to fund new crop substitution programs and to crack down on exports of American-manufactured weapons and chemicals such as ether that are smuggled to drug traffickers and used in the production of cocaine.
Latin American pleas that the drug war include massive new economic aid programs present a quandary for U.S. policymakers facing severe budget restraints and similar requests from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Panama. There is just not enough to go around.
And unlike in Panama, where a frustrated Bush finally turned to military force to topple dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega and his allegedly drug-corrupted government, sending in the troops is not so easy in this case.
That is why the U.S. military, in its expanded role, will do most of its drug interdiction close to American borders.
Sending U.S. troops into Latin America to combat drug traffickers would entail going up against Maoist guerrillas in Peru and no less than six major leftist rebel groups in Colombia, not to mention patrolling a continent larger and more populous than the U.S.
Moreover, Latin American leaders of weak governments reeling from an economic crisis are in no mood or condition to face the public resentment and political backlash that would be unleashed by introducing U.S. troops to fight drug traffickers on their home turf.
The sensitivity was recently seen in the highest government circles in Colombia, the top U.S. ally in the drug fight. President Virgilio Barco was enraged at American plans to send a Navy aircraft carrier to interdict drug ships and planes off Colombia without consulting him first.
The Bush administration was embarrassed, and it backed off. Officials of both countries insist there are now no plans to move a carrier there.
So Bush`s strategy for controlling the cocaine supply at its source does not include involving U.S. troops in South America, senior administration officials and Latin diplomats said.
But the number of U.S. military advisers in those countries will rise. No ceiling has been set, but they could number 50 to 100 at any given time, spread over the three Andean nations.
U.S. intelligence-sharing and military assistance to Bolivia, Colombia and Peru will increase, along with shipments of equipment expected to include sophisticated radars, helicopters, transport aircraft and communications gear. No decision has been made about who will staff the radars each country wants to put up in remote no man`s lands that have become the domain of drug traffickers and, in some cases, Marxist guerrillas, U.S. officials said.
But Latin officials are insisting that, after an initial training period, their soldiers operate the radars alone. ”Any equipment coming to our country is appreciated,” a Bolivian official said. ”But we must control it ourselves to defend our sovereignty.”
Even without the direct use of U.S. troops, there are risks to American personnel. Agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration will continue their most dangerous assignment, accompanying Peruvian anti-drug police on raids against laboratories and other facilities in Peru`s Upper Huallaga Valley.
Traveling in U.S. State Department helicopters flown by American contract pilots, many of them Vietnam War veterans, the agents are under threat and often come under fire from Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas who control the valley and protect coca growers.
Agents of the drug agency also accompany anti-narcotics police on raids in neighboring Bolivia, where intelligence reports indicate that new influxes of Colombian gunmen and weapons could make narcotics work more dangerous.
Bush himself is defying reported death threats from Colombian cocaine cartels to travel to Cartagena for the summit. U.S. and Colombian officials insist the president will be safe.
But experts warn that U.S. businesses, diplomatic missions and other installations across the region face increased terrorism.
U.S. diplomats and drug agents in the region brave those risks daily. But more difficult to confront are a number of obstacles frustrating Washington`s anti-drug efforts in the region, they said. These obstacles include:
– A longstanding struggle between Peru`s military and anti-drug police over how aggressively to chase drug traffickers in the Upper Huallaga Valley. In recent months, senior army officers have turned a blind eye to drug traffickers, preferring to go after Shining Path guerrillas. As a result, the drug fight has come to a virtual stop in Peru, the world`s single largest producer of coca leaf, officials said.
– The ”almost total failure,” in the words of one senior U.S. official, of State Department-sponsored coca plant eradication efforts. A recent secret U.S. government report documented low morale, disorganization and poor results in coca eradication programs in South America. Some eradication work will continue under the new Andean strategy, but it has a lower priority, officials said.
– The ineffectiveness of extraditing key traffickers to the U.S. despite expending major amounts of time, money and energy to do so. More than anything, top Colombian drug kingpins fear extradition to the U.S. to face criminal drug charges; but beyond serving as a symbol of government resolve, extradition does little to slow the flow of illegal narcotics, officials admitted. ”Every time you extradite one big fish, 100 more are waiting to take his place,” a senior Colombian official said.
– Continuing corruption among anti-narcotics police and military forces across South America. From Colombia to Bolivia to Brazil, the incredible wealth of the cocaine cartels has bought official protection, infiltrated government institutions and frustrated anti-drug efforts, U.S. officials said. In Colombia, an intense five-month government war against the Medellin and Cali cartels has netted hundreds of arrests, tens of millions of dollars in property seizures and the killing of cocaine boss Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha in a firefight with police.
Other top cartel leaders are described as being on the run, and they have publicly offered to surrender, claiming they have lost the war. Few Colombian or U.S. officials believe this was anything other than a ploy. But these cocaine barons continue to elude capture-often, officials said, because police tipped them off.
One Bolivian official admitted that his nation was reluctant to get its army directly involved in the drug war for fear cocaine money would make new inroads through its ranks.
Even in the U.S., the Drug Enforcement Administration and other law-enforcement organizations have seen the powerful lure of the international cocaine dollar suborn agents. The temptation is far greater in Latin America, where police work for abysmally low wages, and where cocaine traffickers often follow up bribe offers with death threats if officials resist.
The obstacles to interdiction also include new distribution networks and shipment routes.
At first glance, focusing the drug war on the Andean nations might seem logical, because Peru and Bolivia are the world`s top producers of coca, the plant that is the base material for cocaine, and because Colombia is the region`s top producer and exporter of cocaine.
But trying to get a grip on the multinational cocaine trade is more complicated than that, experts said. A U.S. official in South America likens it to squeezing a balloon: You attack drug traffickers in one location and they shift operations elsewhere.
That already has happened in South America as Colombian cocaine cartels have diversified their distribution routes to make nations such as Venezuela and Brazil major cocaine transshipment points to the U.S. and Western Europe. ”The spread of narcotics trafficking is a problem that none of us has been able to avoid,” a senior Argentine official said. ”We are all, to one degree or another, affected by this plague now.”
On the demand side, Western Europe is an increasingly lucrative market for South American cocaine exporters.
”If nothing is done, in five years the Europeans will have a crack and cocaine problem as bad as ours is right now,” said an agent with the U.S. drug agency in Colombia.
Dramatizing the reality that illegal drugs are an international problem is a goal of the summit in Cartagena, where the major partic-ipants plan to call for more concerted cooperation from other consuming nations in the industrialized world. Up to now, anti-drug aid from Western Europe has amounted to a small fraction of U.S. assistance.
”The idea is to extend a truly global effort, to create a worldwide war on drugs and every aspect of the trade from production to consumption to money-laundering,” said one South American ambassador in Washington. ”We know we can`t solve it all there, and that Bush isn`t coming down as a big Santa Claus handing out a lot of money.”
To stretch U.S. aid, Latin officials say, Washington should move to assure better prices and to remove trade barriers for Latin American commodity exports such as Colombian flowers and coffee. Bush plans to announce initiatives to foster investment in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, and open more markets for their legal exports. The Latin countries are waiting to see how far his plan goes.
”Giving a country $10 million aid in a direct grant means nothing if later they have to pay that much in the long run in duties,” another South American ambassador said.
In the end, though, progress in the drug war can only come at the point where it begins: with the millions of users of cocaine and other illegal narcotics in the U.S., officials said.
