-Caveat Lector- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Progressive Response 16 July 1999 Vol. 3, No. 25 Editor: Martha Honey -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in PR. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents *** COMMENTS ON U.S. DRUG POLICY IN LATIN AMERICA *** by Peter Zirnite and Coletta Youngers *** FURTHER LOOK AT THE CIA-CONTRA-COCAINE CONNECTION *** Intro by Martha Honey, excerpt from Peter Dale Scott's report -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *** COMMENTS ON U.S. DRUG POLICY IN LATIN AMERICA *** (Editor's note: This summer, the Foreign Policy In Focus project and the Drug Policy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies are co-sponsoring a weekly speaker and film series entitled "Rethinking the Drug War." The July 8 session, "Addicted to Failure: U.S. Drug War Overseas," featured Peter Zirnite and Coletta Youngers, both experts on the militarization of the U.S. antinarcotics efforts in Latin America. Both are also FPIF writers. Below are excerpts from their talks.) Peter Zirnite: South of the U.S.-Mexican border, the United States is engaging militaries as its primary partners in narcotics control. This is at a time when fledgling democracies are trying to solidify their power, keep military involvement in the barracks, and limit military activities to national defense--their rightful role. Washington has had a long love affair with Latin American militaries. And I find this even more scandalous than that illicit liaison that dominated the headlines last summer. While in both cases we have an extremely powerful figure that's taking advantage of a weaker yet willing party, Washington's strengthening of its arms' ties in the name of drug control has given rise to high crimes and misdemeanors that truly undermine the foundations of democracy. And this raises the question, why then has this unseemly relationship failed to attract the media spotlight or generate a loud public outcry? To really understand why we haven't had the outcry that this issue should generate, we have to look at the roots of how U.S. policymakers came to believe that local militaries are the best partners in the war on drugs. And this is a relationship that has deep, deep roots nurtured by two well-documented proclivities of the U.S. The first is the U.S.'s penchant to blame social ills such as drug abuse on outside, foreign influence. An impulse that gives rise to a drug control policy that doesn't focus on demand (almost every other nation's policy does), but instead addresses the supply. The second, and I think this is really the one that addresses the issue of militarization, is our propensity to call in the Marines. You've got a problem, whenever there's a national threat, call in the Marines. President Nixon put the process in motion when he declared drug trafficking a national security threat. Ever since that declaration, national security has been the rallying cry for everyone who advocated more firepower and money for the war on drugs. Last July, for instance, national security was invoked by Republican leaders when they announced their Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act. Republicans ludicrously claim that their $2.6 billion plan will reduce drug flow into this country by 80% by the year 2001. Yet the goal of our actual national drug control strategy is to reduce drug trafficking by 15%, despite the fact that in recent years the flow of drugs has not declined but increased. A decade after Nixon first declared drugs to be a national security threat President Reagan launched a rapid expansion of U.S. military involvement in drug control efforts which remains unabated today. The Reagan administration rationalized the expansion of the military role, in part by linking drug trafficking to leftist guerrillas and governments, specifically in Cuba and Nicaragua. This guerrilla-drug link facilitated the U.S. shift from a cold war posture to a drug war posture by bringing in many of the same old foes. Thus, the Pentagon employs the same tactics used to fight commies to fight drug traffickers. In 1988, when Congress passed the national defense appropriations and authorization, it made the Defense Department (DOD) the lead agency in the detection and monitoring of aerial and marine transit zones into the United States. Congress required DOD to integrate it's communications and technical intelligence networks with other various federal agencies and it also required DOD to coordinate the increased use of the National Guard in anti-narcotics activity. In 1993, President Clinton did shift the emphasis of military operations--at least in terms of energy, if not in terms of spending--from interdicting cocaine as it moved through the transit zones to the so-called "air bridge" that connects coca growers and coca paste manufacturers in Bolivia with Colombian refiners and distributors. The ever-resourceful drug traffickers responded by abandoning the use of aircraft and taking to the rivers. So now U.S. emphasis is on riverine interdiction. Traffickers also decided to start growing coca in Colombia rather than transporting it from Bolivia and Peru, making Colombia the leading source of coca in the world. Not only is the coca production doubling, the Colombian manufacturers have introduced new coca plants that have a higher alkali content that make stronger cocaine and they've also developed new methods of refining coca into cocaine. They have a new product called "black cocaine" that is almost impossible to detect through our standard interdiction efforts, such as the use of drug sniffing dogs. So, as we shift our policy, the drug traffickers shift theirs. Not only did Clinton change the focus to the air bridge in Peru, he also increased the emphasis on the military's role in drug control in Mexico by placing the Mexican armed forces at the forefront of the fight against drugs there. Mexico is a country where, traditionally, the military has stayed in the barracks (one of the few such places in Latin America). It's interesting to note, for instance, that Mexican military officials constitute the largest percentage of students at the School of the Americas, which has also joined the drug control game. We have thousands of troops deployed annually throughout Latin America in support of our drug war, operating ground-based radar, flying monitoring aircraft, providing operational and intelligence support and, perhaps most controversially, training the host nations' security forces. The exact number of U.S. military personnel involved is difficult to ascertain, as is the full extent and nature of U.S. assistance, because there are so many agencies involved. As a result of this lack of oversight and restriction, we end up working side by side with some of the most egregious human rights violators in the world. And our decision to work with foreign military officials has allied us with some of the world's foremost drug traffickers. Drug-related corruption is endemic and widespread throughout the region. From Mexico on south, armed forces have all been linked to drug trafficking. Just last month, some of the highest members of the Brazilian air force were found to be involved in a drug money laundering ring. Last November, DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] and Customs officials searching a Colombian air force aircraft in Florida discovered 415 kilos of cocaine and six kilos of heroin, which led to the arrest of a number of air force officers and enlisted personnel. Despite the failings of our marriage to Latin American militaries, we can't expect that there will be any divorce soon. Peter Zirnite is as Washington based journalist and author of "Militarization of the U.S. Drug Control Program" (FPIF vol.3, no.27, available at http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol3/v3n27drug.html) and "Reluctant Recruits: The U.S. Military and the War on Drugs" (supported by Washington Office on Latin America, August 1997) Colletta Youngers: All the statistics show that drugs are just as readily available, cheaper and purer than ever before despite the fact that we've been throwing billions of dollars into the drug war over the last fifteen years. The problem is that drug war politics make it a lot easier for politicians to keep upping the ante by sending more money, than to really question why these policies aren't working and to look at how the real problems of drug abuse and violence in this country could be conquered. So instead of reanalyzing, we've been steadily increasing the amount of resources that we're putting into what is very much a failed policy. But not only is it not working, it's also doing a great deal of harm in the so-called source countries of Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and increasingly Mexico, an important transshipment point, where the bulk of the resources and U.S. military attention is focused. In Colombia and Peru, the U.S. is forging close ties with what may be the most abusive police and military forces in the hemisphere today. In Bolivia, U.S. pressure to eradicate coca crops has generated significant social unrest, political violence, and armed conflict. In country after country, you can document the way in which this policy, which is very much a real war for these countries, is damaging trends toward democratization, demilitarization, and respect for human rights that have tenuously started to develop over the last several years. I'd like to take a snapshot look at three different countries, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, and describe the impact of U.S. drug policy. I'll conclude with Colombia because I think that's the country where right now the present policy is the most dangerous, and the U.S. has started down a very slippery slope of increasing involvement in the Colombian counter insurgency war in the name of fighting drugs. Colombia is currently the third-largest recipient of U.S. security assistance in the world and also has, by far, the worst human rights situation in the hemisphere. Bolivia Bolivia is the one country where the impact of U.S. policy is very clear. There's not a counterinsurgency war taking place, no guerillas, no other factors that make it difficult to discern the impact of U.S. involvement. Basically you have a very clear scenario of U.S. insistence on antinarcotics policies (primarily coca eradication) that have led directly to a range of human rights abuses. There are four important elements to consider. First, you have to distinguish between coca and cocaine. Coca is the plant used to make cocaine. It has traditional, religious, social and cultural uses in the Andean countries, particularly Bolivia and Peru, and for most Andean cultures it is not an illicit crop. Cocaine is what you get when you mix coca with cement and kerosene and other horrendous things and process it. Second, coca farmers have basically gone into coca production because they've been pushed out of the mines in Bolivia. In some cases, factories where they once worked have been shut down due to neoliberal economic policies. In other cases, they've been pushed off their land in Colombia by paramilitary warlords and emigrated to Bolivia. These are poor farmers who are struggling to survive. They earn enough to feed their families if they're lucky. And they will tell you, "I'd grow something else if I could make a living out of it. Right now coca is the only thing that lets me feed my family." And unfortunately, the brunt of U.S. policy tends to fall on them, rather than larger traffickers and high ranking government officials who may be linked to the drug trade. Third, the coca growers are very well organized, which means that they can make demands on the government and therefore are seen as a threat. I think that factor is significant in shaping the way the U.S. government has treated them. Fourth, the only two Latin American countries that really have a tremendous amount of economic dependence on the U.S. are Bolivia and Haiti. That is, they are two countries that, if decertified, will loose important assistance from the international financial institutions (IFIs) that the U.S. government provides through certain accounts, in particularly the Inter-American Development Bank. The U.S. grades the antidrug performance of thirty countries throughout the world, and if you don't make the grade you are decertified. That means you face a range of sanctions, one of which is U.S. no-votes on loans from IFIs. So Bolivia is very very susceptible to U.S. pressure. If the U.S. says, "You have to eradicate 7,000 hectares of coca," Bolivia must do it or risk a whole range of sanctions that will jeopardize them economically. So you have a situation where the brunt of the policy is on the coca growers. Then you had a new element thrown into the picture a couple of years ago when General Hugo Banzer was elected president. Banzer was a brutal dictator in the seventies and came back this time through democratic means. He has a very close relationship with the Bolivian armed forces and one of the things he's tried to do as President is recreate the image of a strong and powerful Bolivian army. Although Bolivia had resisted for some time getting the army involved in counternarcotics efforts, Banzer incorporated them almost immediately. Shortly after taking office, he launched a five-year plan to eliminate all of what is called "excess coca," or coca that's not used for legal purposes, in Bolivia within five years. In other words, he really upped the ante from what we've had in the past in Bolivia regarding an eradication program. What this means is that the cycles of violence have accelerated. There are certain dates when eradication targets have to be met, at which time the Bolivian government will step up eradication efforts. Then the army and police go in and chop down the coca plants by hand. Now if you're a poor coca farmer and you're seeing your kids milk go down the drain because these guys are chopping down your coca fields, you get angry. And so you get a huge amount of tension and conflict that emerges as a result of these operations. As tensions rise, violence inevitably occurs. Peru There is a different twist on U.S. drug policy in Peru. The U.S. is supporting the Peruvian intelligence services, SIN, which is the political police force of Peru, the country's KGB in a sense. They are run by a very shadowy figure named Vladimiro Montesinos who was literally kicked out of the Peruvian army for being a double agent spying for both the CIA and the KGB at the same time. After getting out of jail, he reemerged when Fujimori took office in 1990 as the president's right-hand man and top national security advisor. He is the de facto head of SIN and still rumored to be on the CIA payroll, but nobody knows for sure. In the early 1990's, SIN was the operating base for a number of death squads which were responsible for some of the worst human rights violations that occurred in Peru at that time. One Peruvian journalist has documented that the anti-drug unit of SIN, which was receiving CIA assistance at the time, was in fact engaged in death squad activity. And as the situation in Peru has evolved, SIN has conducted widespread intimidation and harassment campaigns against anyone who is opposed to Fujimori. They're responsible for the setbacks to democratic institutions that we've seen over the last decade, including the decimation of the judiciary and the Peruvian Congress, as well as orchestrating Fujimori's election to office. So who are we giving antinarcotics assistance to? SIN. The U.S. government claims that they are the Peruvian government's point agency in the war on drugs, and therefore the U.S. has to assist them. There have been continual allegations of Montesinos' personal ties to drug traffickers over the last ten years, but every time those allegations surface the government quickly puts the lid on and doesn't allow them to go any further. The U.S. has basically supported that position by never once calling for an investigation into the repeated allegations of corruption either by Montesinos or SIN. Colombia In Colombia counternarcotics and counterinsurgency have become inextricably intertwined. For many years, the U.S. government refused to acknowledge that there was anything going on in Colombia besides the drug war. And everybody else at Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), Institute for Policy Studies, and other NGOs and activist groups were saying, "Wait a minute. Colombia has incredibly high levels of political violence. 3,000 people are being killed a year. You have this horrible paramilitary phenomenon. There is more to Colombia than just fighting the drug war." Over the last couple of years the U.S. has broadened its vision and realized that there is a civil war going on that deserves attention. Now there is a convergence of interests between the drug warriors who still want to fight the drug war and the national security apparatus, which now wants to fight the guerilla war, because they're concerned about Colombia's violence and instability spilling over into neighboring countries. These two sectors of policymakers in Washington have united in the call for more resources for fighting the narco-guerilla war in Colombia. They combined the guerilla threat with the drug trafficking threat and turned it into one war. As a result, the U.S. has dramatically increased both the precedence and the kind of assistance it's providing to Colombia. In Colombia you don't just have the traditional human rights problem, where the bulk of the violations are carried out by right-wing paramilitary groups, bankrolled and trained by drug traffickers, which is how they became armies. Instead you have the added problem where these paramilitary groups have been operating over the last twenty years very closely in collaboration with sectors of the Colombian armed forces. There is a very close connection between human rights abuses perpetrated by the paramilitary groups in compliance with elements of the armed forces. You hear a lot in Washington about how only 5% of the human rights abuses in Colombia are committed by the military. And that's true. But 70% are committed by their allies, the right-wing paramilitary groups. We are currently giving nearly $300 million to the Colombian Security Forces. This is in an era of tremendous budget cutting, when development assistance to Latin America is $270 million, and yet we're giving more than that just to Colombia for its military forces to combat narcotics. The U.S. military is presently training and equipping a 1000-man counternarcotics battalion within the Colombian army with the expressed purpose of protecting the counternarcotics police against the insurgence. U.S. officials are not even trying to pretend that these guys will be involved in counternarcotics activities; they're saying that it's specifically set up to combat the guerillas in order to allow antinarcotics efforts to go forward. Much of this is oriented around the aerial fumigation of coca plants, precisely at a time when the United States should be using its political leverage in Colombia to promote respect for human rights, to dismantle paramilitary groups, and to most importantly support what was until recently a move towards a peace process. Peace talks were put on hold for a couple of more weeks, but still an incipient peace process appears to be under way in Colombia. But instead of promoting this, the U.S. seems only interested in strengthening the hand of the military, which is only going to lead to more violent deaths. I had the opportunity to meet with five Colombian generals at once last January. I was actually shocked at some of the things these different generals, all of whom had held regional command positions, said in regard to their present operations in Colombia. One of the things they emphasized repeatedly was, "We have no intention of going forward with any kind of peace process in Colombia. We're getting ready for the war! And the U.S. is helping us do that and we're just waiting for these talks to fail and then we'll be ready to go." The other big problem is that we are dumping tons of chemical herbicides on rainforest in Colombia where coca is being grown. Now some people would say, "If coca is being grown there, the land is already being degraded anyway." But the herbicides are, one, contaminating the environment--these are herbicides that are not to be used in areas of extensive river networks, which is what you have in the jungle--and two, causing people go deeper into the jungle to grow more coca. So the more we spray, the worse the toxic contamination and greater the deforestation. I think it's incredibly ironic and tragic that in the one country in the hemisphere where the U.S. has a significant aerial eradication program going forward, coca production has increased by more than 50% since that program was launched. Now in Peru and Bolivia, where you don't have aerial fumigation, coca production has actually declined. Some would think there was a problem with the analysis here, but no, Washington's response is send more helicopters, more chemicals, to get that coca. Coletta Youngers is a Senior Associate at the Washington Office on Latin America and author of the FPIF Special Report, "U.S. Policy in Latin America, Problems, Opportunities, Recommendations," available at http://www.zianet.com/irc1/bulletin/bull53/index.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *** FURTHER LOOK AT THE CIA-CONTRA-COCAINE CONNECTION *** (Ed note: The following is the introduction and summary of findings from a new report, "The Official Story: What the Government Has Admitted About CIA Ties to Drug Traffickers," being issued by IPS' Drug Policy Project. The complete report summaries and analyzes investigations by both the CIA and Justice Department (three volumes of which have been released) into allegations of CIA ties to drug traffickers. FPIF Co-Director Martha Honey wrote the introduction and Peter Dale Scott, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, who has written extensively on the CIA-contra-cocaine connection, wrote the report. The full report is available from IPS for $3.00. Please email the project director, Sanho Tree, at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or write to Drug Policy Project, IPS, 733 15th St. NW, suite 1020, Washington, DC 20005.) Introduction By Martha Honey In August 1996, investigative reporter Gary Webb published a three part series in the San Jose Mercury News alleging connections between the CIA, the Contras, cocaine traffickers, and the emergence of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. In the firestorm of controversy that followed publication of the Dark Alliance series, the Inspector Generals of the CIA (Frederick Hitz) and of the Justice Department (Michael Bromwich) were ordered to conduct internal investigations into the specific allegations as well as the broader issue of CIA ties to Latin American drug traffickers in the 1980s. Then-CIA Director John Deutch pledged at a South Central Los Angeles town meeting November 15, 1996 that the Inspector Generals' findings would be open, stating: "anyone in the public who has a wish to look at the report will be able to do so.... the results will be made public. And finally, if any wrongdoing is discovered, we will pursue it, and those responsible will be brought to justice." (Transcript of meeting) This never happened. When, after several delays, the reports were released--two volumes by the CIA in January 1998 and October 1998 and one volume from the Justice Department released in December 1997--they were the declassified versions only. Little has been learned of what information was withheld under the broad category of "national security." The release of the three declassified volumes followed similar patterns: they were made public with little fanfare, often on busy news days, and with press releases and executive summaries that downplayed their content and insisted that little to none of the Dark Alliance series was proven. As Inspector General Hitz told the House Intelligence Committee in March 1998, CIA investigators "found no evidence...of any conspiracy by CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States." Similarly, in the Executive Summary of the Justice Department's report, IG Bromwich wrote, "our review did not substantiate the main allegations stated and implied in the Mercury News articles.... Moreover, the implication that the drug trafficking by the individual in the Mercury News articles was connected to the CIA was also not supported by the facts." (Justice, p. 3,4) Most of the major press either ignored the reports altogether or based their stories primarily on the CIA and Justice press releases and wrote that the agencies had been exonerated of wrong-doing. In addition, these voluminous and complex reports are not presented in a straight-forward manner that would make them easily understood. Rather, the litany of evidence is laid out in snippets of internal memos, field communications, and interviews with CIA personnel. Most of the leads were never followed up and often they are accompanied by unsubstantiated denials or convoluted rationales intended to discredit or minimize their importance. In addition, a number of prominent drug traffickers who assisted the Contras are not fully discussed or are discussed only in passing in these reports. This includes Panamanian military leader Manual Noriega who, for unexplained reasons, was not among those surveyed in the CIA's second report, which was intended to cover "any alleged drug-trafficking by the Contras and persons or organizations who supported the Contra program in the 1980s." (CIA/2, para 5) Also given little or no mention are other major Contra-connected traffickers such as Honduran General Jose Bueso Rosa, Salvadoran General Juan Rafael Bustillo, Mexican Miguel Felix Gallardo, Cuban money launderer Ramon Milian Rodriguez, pilot Marcos Aguado, arms buyer Sebastian Gonzales, or cartel kingpin Carlos Lehrer; nor is there a systematic examination of drug corruption involving the Honduran and Panamanian militaries. In addition, key CIA and National Security Council figures in the Contra war were omitted, including Duane Clarridge, Joseph Fernandez, and Oliver North. The CIA reports, in particular, reflect and sometimes intensify the CIA's traditional bias: to deflect attention away from the drug activities of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), the CIA's preferred Contra faction. The official campaign to discredit the independent-minded Contra leader Eden Pastora intensified after 1984 when, for other reasons, the CIA broke with him. (CIA/2, para 241) The Inspector Generals' methodology was also flawed. Inspector General Hitz's method was to go back into CIA files and to interview CIA officers, even though both have in the past covered up Agency links to drug traffickers and money launderers. Allegations remain just that, "allegations," when only a little checking with the public record would have shown them to be true. In general, the CIA reports prove the inadequacy, falsity, and occasional perjury of earlier CIA official statements about Contra connection to drug-trafficking. All of this illustrates the severe limitations of the CIA reports as a vehicle for truth. Despite these road blocks to public understanding, the picture that emerges from the CIA and Justice Department reports is clear: the CIA's contra operations were riddled with ties to drug traffickers, far more extensive than the Norwin Meneses-Danilo Blandon network described in Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series. The evidence indicates that all Contra factions and scores of persons on the U.S. government payroll, including many top level Contra leaders, were involved with drug trafficking. The evidence presented in these volumes undercuts the repeated efforts by CIA, National Security Council, and other government officials overseeing the Contra war to minimize the extent of drug trafficking and blame it on rogue elements or rebel commanders such as Eden Pastora, who had fallen from favor. The reports document that the CIA itself was contracting with and covering up for major drug traffickers. Much of this has already been revealed in press reports dating back to the mid-1980s, in more than a dozen books on the Contra war, and in government documents, reports, and hearings--most importantly the December 1988 Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations report, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (popularly known as the Kerry Report, after its Chair, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry). None of these earlier findings led to any official action against those on the government payroll who were involved in, covered up for, or simply ignored the links between drug traffickers, money launderers, and a major covert military operation. Instead, it has been the poor at both ends of the cocaine network: the peasant growers in the coca fields of Latin America and inner city youths of color, who have been the primary targets of the war on drugs. The evidence contained in three reports, as summarized below, should form the basis for new, substantial, well-funded, and independent congressional hearings into th ================================= Robert F. Tatman [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Remove "nospam" from the address to reply. NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml POSTING THIS MESSAGE TO THE INTERNET DOES NOT IMPLY PERMISSION TO SEND UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL E-MAIL (SPAM) TO THIS OR ANY OTHER INTERNET ADDRESS. RECEIPT OF SPAM WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE NOTIFICATION OF THE SENDER'S ISP. ____________________________________________________________________ Get your own FREE, personal Netscape WebMail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com. 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