Drugs and U.S. Foreign Policy
excerpted from the book
Imperial Alibis
by Stephen Rosskamm Shalom
*****
Merchants of Death
Illegal narcotics are far from the only harmful substances
pushed on innocent victims around the world. U.S. firms have exported
to the Third World vast quantities of pesticides that have been
banned for use in the United States. One government study found
that 30 percent of U.S. pesticide exports were not approved by
the Environmental Protection Agency for use in this country, and
one-fifth had actually had their approval canceled or suspended
by the EPA. Ironically, food products grown in the Third World
with the aid of these unsafe pesticides are then imported into
the United States. The Food and Drug Administration estimated
that some 5 percent of U.S. food imports contained illegal pesticide
residues, a figure likely to underestimate the threat to U.S.
consumers' health given that there were more than 170 pesticides
for which the FDA didn't test. This "circle of poison"-in
which harmful U.S. pesticides show up on the American dinner table-finally
moved liberals in Congress to act in 1990. They tried to amend
a farm bill to include a ban on the export of pesticides not approved
for use in the United States. Chemical companies argued that since
the FDA inspected so little of the food entering the United States,
foreign farmers would simply buy the banned pesticides from manufacturers
in other countries, costing U.S. jobs. The amendment did not make
it into the final bill.
An even bigger trade in dangerous substances is the export
of unsafe medicinal drugs to the Third World. Pharmaceutical companies,
of course, try to make a profit everywhere, and they push drugs
that have serious side-effects in any country they can. For example,
Hoffman-La Roche marketed the sedative Versed in the United States,
which (according to internal company documents) was known to be
unsafe; and Upjohn, the manufacturer of the sleeping pill Halcion,
has been charged with hiding evidence of the drug's dangers. But
it is in the Third World, with their weaker regulatory structures,
where the multinational drug companies have run rampant. Drugs
that in the United States are banned or severely restricted have
been pushed on poor countries by U.S. firms. The painkiller Dipyrone,
for example, sometimes causes severe hemorrhaging, yet it has
been advertised in Mexico for the relief of menstrual pain. In
1977 the drug was banned in the United States even for the terminally
ill, yet it continued to be sold by U.S. and other firms in Malaysia
and Singapore for the treatment of headache and flu. More generally,
the warnings and contra-indications routinely distributed with
prescription drugs in the United States are sanitized or omitted
entirely when U.S. firms sell their products in the Third World.
The pharmaceutical companies claim they are doing nothing
illegal. Prescription drug laws and regulations in the Third World
do tend to be relatively weak, but some countries have laws requiring
disclosure of drug hazards and contra-indications; the laws may
not be enforced, but they are on the books and the U.S. firms
are often in violation of them. Most Latin American countries
now have laws allowing the sale of imported drugs only if the
drugs are approved for marketing in the country of origin. But
U.S. firms have gotten around this requirement by setting up plants
to produce (or put the finishing touches on) the drug in some
third country which has no restrictions so that this third country
can be counted as the country of origin.
U.S. drug marketing has also been helped along by lavish bribery.
In 1976, 22 U.S. pharmaceutical and health product companies reported
making more than $30 million in what were delicately termed "questionable
overseas payments." In 1977 a U.S. law made it illegal for
U.S. firms to bribe foreign officials, but there is no reason
to suspect that such payments have ended. In any case, it is still
legal under U.S. law to bribe foreign doctors, and this is widely
done. A Nigerian expert estimated that perhaps one-third of the
total wholesale cost of all prescription drugs went for bribes
and graft, and in other parts of Africa the situation may be even
worse. A television documentary in the Philippines revealed that
a multinational drug firm in that country ran seminars for doctors
complete with prostitutes and pornographic films to entertain
the physicians at night.
Modern medicine undoubtedly is beneficial, but each year at
least one million people in the Third World die from adverse reactions
to medical drugs. Some of these deaths are the inevitable result
of the primitive state of our medical knowledge, but many must
be attributed to the reckless marketing practices of multinational
firms, practices tolerated by the U.S. government.
Another million Third World citizens-these exclusively children-
are estimated to have died each year from malnutrition and diarrhea
resulting from the use of infant formula. Experts agree that mother's
milk is by far the healthiest food for infants, particularly in
poor countries where nutritional deficits are common. Human milk
is also the cheapest source of nutrients. Mothers who bottle feed
are frequently forced by financial hardship to dilute the formula
with water, often contaminated, with grim results. The international
companies that sell infant formula don't make money when mothers
breast-feed, and so they have invested heavily in encouraging
Third World women to switch to formula. Among the marketing techniques
favored by the companies for securing their multi-billion dollar
market have been slick advertising campaigns associating bottle-feeding
with modernity, free samples given out in hospitals (if the mother
can be kept from breast-feeding long enough, her milk will dry
up), and the use of "milk nurses," employees of the
infant-formula firms disguised as health professionals.
The dominant firm in the Third World infant-formula business
has been the Swiss-based Nestle company, but three U.S. corporations
have also been major exporters of the product and have engaged
in hard-sell marketing. An international consumer boycott of Nestle
products helped to mobilize public opinion, and in May 1981 the
World Health Organization voted to adopt a non-binding code restricting
the promotion of infant-formula products. The code prohibited
giving free samples to pregnant women, having salespeople contact
mothers, and advertising infant formula to the general public
(as opposed to doctors). The vote was 118-1. The lone dissenting
vote was that of the United States. The State Department's Elliott
Abrams explained that the U.S. government considered the code
to violate First Amendment guarantees of free speech.'
*****
The Washington Connection
Koop, however, understated U.S. hypocrisy. It is not that
Washington has been consistently fighting the cocaine and heroin
trade while pushing nicotine. It has in fact given support to
and cooperated with the illicit drug traffickers when doing so
would help other U.S. foreign policy goals, particularly its global
crusade against indigenous nationalist and Left forces.
This sordid history has been meticulously documented by Alfred
McCoy. In 1947 and again in 1950, the CIA provided arms and money
to the Corsican syndicates who controlled the heroin trade in
Marseilles. The gangsters were paid to break strikes by Communist-led
unions. Washington claimed to see a threatened Communist attempt
to take over the French government, but in fact the State Department
was secretly reporting that Communist leaders "could no longer
hold back the discontent of the rank and file" in the face
of wages that were lower than during the depths of the Depression.
With U.S. backing, the syndicates came to dominate Marseilles
and from 1948 to 1972 they were responsible for 80 percent of
the heroin entering the United States.
U.S. involvement with drug dealers was far more extensive
in Southeast Asia. Beginning in 1950, remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's
Kuomintang army m Burma were organized by the CIA to conduct raids
into China. These KMT units supported themselves by appropriating
the opium harvest that grew in the Burmese highlands and shipping
it to northern Thailand.
There it was purchased by Thai General Phao Siyanan. The KMT
units remained in Burma with U.S. support until 1961 when they
moved into Laos and Thailand, still in control of the opium traffic.
General Phao was head of the Thai police and the CIA's most important
Thai client. The CIA provided him with naval vessels, armored
vehicles, aircraft, and hundreds of overt and covert advisers;
in 1954 he was awarded the Legion of Merit for "exceptionally
meritorious service" by the U.S. Secretary of the Army. His
police force was also the largest opium trafficking syndicate
in Thailand.
When the French controlled Indochina, their intelligence agencies
participated in the opium trade in order to fund covert operations.
When Washington replaced the French in 1954, it installed its
own puppet, Ngo Dinh Diem, who for three years cracked down on
the opium trade. By 1958, however, in the face of growing insurgency
in southern Vietnam, the opium trade was revived by Diem's brother
Nhu, head of the secret police, as a way to finance counter-insurgency
operations.
In neighboring Laos, leading rightist politicians whom the
United States backed against the leftist Pathet Lao and often
against neutralists as well were key figures in the drug trade.
In 1960, the CIA began organizing a secret army among the Hmong
tribespeople which, at its peak, numbered some 30,000 guerrillas
under General yang Pao. The Hmong's main cash crop was opium,
so to keep its anti-communist army in business, the United States
first winked at the opium trade and then in the late 1960s provided
CIA aircraft-Air America-to carry the opium to market. The proceeds
from the opium gave yang Pao the clout to round up from the war-weary
and impoverished Hmong villagers the young boys who made up his
army.
Through the mid-'60s, most of the opium grown in Southeast
Asia was consumed locally. But with the huge build-up of U.S.
forces in Vietnam, shrewd entrepreneurs realized the extraordinary
market provided by these soldiers from the wealthy United States.
Heroin laboratories sprang up in Burma and Laos, many of them
in areas controlled by paramilitary groups at one time or another
supported by the CIA. Hmong army commander General yang Pao was
reported by the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics to be operating a heroin
lab at Long Tien, the CIA's headquarters for covert operations
in Laos. By 1971, some 10 to 15 percent of GI's were using high
purity heroin. In South Vietnam the heroin traffic was controlled
by three groups associated with the key political figures in the
country: the air force, especially its transport wing, under Vice-President
Nguyen Cao Ky; the civil bureaucracy under Premier Tran Thien
Khiem; and the army, navy, and National Assembly which answered
to President Nguyen Van Thieu. Both Thieu and Ky financed their
1971 election campaigns from the drug trade. Thieu won the election
and by 1973 the South Vietnamese army was responsible for distributing
heroin to U.S. troops.' Primed by the GI market, Southeast Asia
became the leading source for the world's illicit opium.
U.S. officials knew what their allies were doing and covered
up for them. In an internal report the CLA's inspector general
explained how the agency got involved in the drug trade: "The
war has clearly been our overriding priority in Southeast Asia,
and all other issues have taken second place in the scheme of
things."
A decade later Washington repeated its policy of complicity
with drug traffickers, this time in Southwest Asia. Even before
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter administration
had been providing covert assistance to Afghan guerrilla groups
battling the pro-Moscow central government. U.S. aid grew rapidly
after Soviet troops entered the country at the end of 1979 and
the aid was concentrated on those mujaheddin units recommended
by Pakistani intelligence. Washington's favored recipient became
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who headed a guerrilla force that had been
created by the Pakistani military to invade Afghanistan in 1975.
Hekmatyar himself had earlier organized a fundamentalist group
in Afghanistan whose activities included throwing vials of acid
into the faces of female Afghani students who refused to wear
veils; in Pakistan he had been associated with a fundamentalist
and quasi-fascist political party. Hekmatyar was brutal and corrupt,
terrorizing refugees to support him. He also used his U.S.-supplied
arms to become Afghanistan's number one heroin trafficker. By
the mid-1980s, Afghanistan was the largest single exporter of
opium in the world and the source for half of the heroin consumed
in the United States. In 1988, there were 100 to 200 heroin refineries
in the single Pakistani district bordering Afghanistan.
A White House drug adviser recalled warning in 1979 that "we
were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their
rebellion against the Soviets. Shouldn't we try to avoid what
we had done in Laos?" He was ignored. In 1983, an official
of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) returned from a fact-finding
trip to Southwest Asia reporting, "You can say the rebels
make their money off the sale of opium. " He added "There's
no doubt about it. The rebels kept their cause going through the
sale of opium. The reaction of the Reagan administration to this
revelation was to continue supporting the drug dealers, both in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The New York Times reported in 1988
that "The Reagan administration has done little to press
the guerrillas to curb the drug trade, according to senior State
Department and intelligence analysts."
"We re not going to let a little thing like drugs get
in the way of the political situation," said an administration
official who follows Afghanistan closely, emphasizing that narcotics
are relatively a minor issue in the context of policy toward the
Afghan guerrillas.
Contra-Indications
Also during the 1980s, Washington was working with other drug
traffickers closer to home, in this case as a way to facilitate
the war of the U.S.-created and controlled Contras against the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Contra war was one of
the few foreign policy issues during the Reagan years to which
the Democrats occasionally offered some resistance, and Senator
John Kerry's subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International
Operations did more digging into the unsavory alliances surrounding
U.S. Nicaragua policy than was usual for the Congress. On the
basis of extensive testimony and documentary evidence, the subcommittee
reported:
"... it is clear that individuals who provided support
for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply
network of the Contras was used by drug-trafficking organizations,
and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial
and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one
or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding
the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately
thereafter."
The Subcommittee found that the Contra drug links included:
Involvement in narcotics trafficking by individuals associated
with the Contra movement.
Participation of narcotics traffickers in Contra supply operations
through business relationships with Contra organizations.
Provision of assistance to the Contras by narcotics traffickers,
including cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and
other materials, on a voluntary basis by the traffickers.
Payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department
of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance
to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted
by Federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others
while traffickers were under active investigation by these same
agencies.
The role of the United States in this Contra link to narco-traffickers
remains murky, but there is no doubt that U.S. officials knew
about it, winked at it, and helped to cover it up. Oliver North's
notebook and memos from North's assistant, Robert Owen, contain
references to the drug connection. When the General Accounting
Office decided to look into the issue of drugs and foreign policy,
the White House ordered the CIA and the Defense and State Departments
not to cooperate. Attorney General Ed Meese told the U.S. Attorney
in Miami to suspend his inquiry into drug trafficking in Central
America. And the indictment against a major drug smuggler, Michael
Palmer, was dropped as "not being in the interest of the
United States."
The Honduran military was a major U.S. ally in its war against
Nicaragua. "Without the support of the Honduran military,
there would have been no such thing as the Contras," acknowledged
a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat. The Contras used Honduras
as their northern base and worked with Honduran death squads set
up by Argentine and CIA advisers. The Honduran military was also
a key participant in the narcotics trade, and the country became
a significant transshipment point for drugs headed to the United
States. The response of Washington to Honduras's growing role
in the drug trade was to close down the DEA station in Tegucigalpa
in 1983, just two years after it opened, ensuring that no evidence
could be produced linking the military to narco-trafficking. In
1986, Honduran General Jose Bueso-Rosa was arrested in the United
States by the FBI in a plot to assassinate the Honduran president
in order to facilitate drug trafficking. The Justice Department
called the plot "the most significant case of narco-terrorism
yet discovered." Key administration officials, however, privately
urged that Bueso-Rosa receive a lenient sentence because, as a
deputy assistant secretary of state later explained, "He
has been a friend to the U.S....involved in helping us with the
Contras."
On the southern front of the anti-Sandinista war, a key figure
was John Hull, an American rancher who owned property on the Nicaraguan
border and who was paid $10,000 a month by the Contra command
at the direction of Oliver North. Five different witnesses told
Kerry's subcommittee that Hull was involved in drug trafficking,
and the Costa Rican government has been trying, despite U.S. obstructionism,
to investigate Hull's activities
Gen. Paul F. Gorman, former head of U.S. Southern Command
acknowledged that "if you want to go into the subversion
business, collect intelligence and move arms," you have to
deal with drug traffickers. One of the "transport" firms
that the United States hired to get supplies to the Contras was
an outfit that Customs had earlier reported had been set up by
narcotics traffickers linked to Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a major
drug figure among whose other credits was involvement in the killing
of a DEA agent in Mexico. Only after the situation was revealed
in the New York Times did Washington try to bring Matta to justice.
The Kerry subcommittee identified four companies owned and operated
by narcotics traffickers who were hired by the State Department
to supply the Contras. "In each case, prior to the time that
the State Department entered into contracts with the company,
federal law enforcement had received information that the individuals
controlling these companies were involved in narcotics."
The subcommittee reported that although there was "substantial
evidence of drug smuggling
drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual
Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked
with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region,"
it "did not find that the Contra leaders personally were
involved in drug trafficking." This conclusion, however,
represents a considerable sanitizing of the actual evidence gathered
by the subcommittee. As Kerry himself put it in a closed session
statement, later released: "It is clear that there is a networking
of drug trafficking through the contras, and it goes right up
to Calero, Mario Calero, Adolpho Calero, Enrique Bermudez. And
we have people who will so testify and who have. " And, presumably,
the evidence would have been even stronger had higher-ups not
called off a government sting operation against Bermudez, the
Contra commander.
*****
High in the Andes
The standard U.S. view portrays Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia
as nations terrorized by powerful drug-trafficking cartels, often
working in alliance with left-wing guerrillas. According to this
view, the hard-pressed Andean governments may need U.S. support
in order to protect their populations and prevail against the
narco-terrorists. This standard view is almost totally incorrect.
The real problem facing the people of these countries is grueling
poverty caused by the astounding greed of local elites and the
grim workings of the international economic system, maintained
by equally greedy elites in the industrialized nations.
In Bolivia in the first half of the 1980s, gross national
product declined 2.3 percent per year, official unemployment went
from 5.7 percent to 20 percent, and inflation stood at 10,000
percent in 1985. The world price of tin declined 57 percent between
1980 and 1988; over the five-year period 1983-87, Bolivian exports
shrank 38 percent. The government closed most state-owned tin
mines, throwing thousands of miners out of work.' More than one
out of every six Bolivian children die before their fifth birthday.'
Peru too faces desperate conditions. In the mid-1980s, its
economic crisis surpassed the Great Depression of the 1930s; according
to the World Bank, "The overwhelming majority of Peruvians
are markedly worse off than in 1970." Under the country's
new president, Alberto Fujimori, Peru has adopted unhindered free
market policies (despite his campaign promises to the contrary)
in order to reintegrate itself into the world capitalist system.
The result of "Fuji-shock," the New York Times reported,
has been "increased unemployment and poverty," with
estimates of the number of Peruvians living in extreme poverty
nearly doubling in three years. Fully 80 percent of the workforce
is either unemployed or underemployed. Gross national product
fell 20 percent in a single year. One quarter of the country's
population live in urban slums. Schoolteachers' children are not
eating three meals a day any more, tuberculosis is up, and cholera-a
characteristic disease of poverty-claimed 2,540 lives last year.
In the highlands, peasants have a standard of living "closer
to that of sub-Saharan Africa than coastal Peru."
A guerrilla army, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), today controls
an estimated 40 percent of the country. Sendero is a Maoist organization,
highly authoritarian and extremely ruthless-it has killed hundreds
of leftists, and regularly executes homosexuals-but is considered
by many Peruvians the country's only salvation.' One-sixth of
Peruvians are willing to admit to pollsters that conditions in
their country justify subversion.'
The government's response has been to wage a counter-insurgency
campaign of incredible brutality. Peru topped the list of "disappearances"
reported to the United Nations four out of the last five years.'
57 In April 1991, the Organization of American States identified
86 documented cases of human rights abuses by the military in
South America; 50 of them took place in Peru.' And the victims
of military terror are rarely guerrillas, but rather community
activists and the civilian population more generally, which is
routinely subjected to bombing, strafing, murder, and rape, thus
generating more recruits for Sendero.' The military exercised
absolute authority in emergency zones covering two-thirds of the
country; no member of the armed forces has yet been punished for
a human rights violation. The Fujimori government sharply increased
the authority of the military, while denouncing human rights organizations
as "the legal arm of the subversives."' And the Bush
administration recently declared that Peru had improved its human
rights record enough to justify the release of millions of dollars
of military aid, despite the fact that human rights groups insisted
the situation remained as bad as ever.
In April 1992, Fujimori dissolved the Congress and suspended
the constitution. He claimed that his assumption of absolute power
was necessary in order to fight Sendero and corruption. In fact,
however, the coup has played right into Sendero's strategy. Democratic
niceties had never restrained the armed forces in their counter-insurgency
campaign, and the main target of the military crackdown seems
to be legal opposition groups.' As for corruption, Fujimori's
own family has recently been implicated in a scheme to misappropriate
charitable donations,' and one of the president's closest aides
is thought to be tied to drug traffickers.'
Colombia has one of most skewed income distributions in Latin
America, with 40 percent of the population living in absolute
poverty. Two factions of the elite fought a bloody civil war from
1948 to 1958 in which several hundred thousand people (mostly
not members of the elite) were killed; the agreement ending the
fighting provided for the two factions to alternate turns at the
presidency, thus continuing the historic exclusion of the mass
of the population from power.' Over the years, opposition groups
developed, some of them waging guerrilla war and others trying
to pursue legal means of struggle. The repression has been monstrous,
and concentrated most viciously against the legal Left. More than
100 right-wing death squads exist, many of whose members are active
or retired military and police personnel. Military collaboration
with these death squads may not be centrally coordinated, but
the national government has not made much effort to curtail the
terror. In March 1990, for example, the Interior Minister charged
that the legal left-wing Patriotic Union (UP) was the "political
arm" of a guerrilla group; the UP's presidential candidate
warned that this was a death sentence for his party's leaders
and sure enough he himself was murdered a few days later. More
than 1,000 UP activists were killed between 1985 and 1990 And
these were not the only victims: from 1981-86 some 3,500 journalists,
students, trade unionists, and opposition party members were assassinated,
and from 1986-90 8,000 members of the legal Left were killed.'
The right-wing paramilitary groups that cooperate with the military
also have ties to the drug cartels.'
The economic crisis in the Andean nations has been exacerbated
by a staggering foreign debt owed to U.S. and other banks, and
by an increasingly inhospitable market for their exports in the
industrialized world. The United States, for example, placed non-tariff
barriers on about a quarter of its commodity imports in the mid-'60s,
but on more than half of them by the mid-'80s.' In 1989 Washington
scuttled an international agreement on coffee prices, causing
significant harm to the Colombian economy. According to a UN report:
"The decline of prices for commodities like sugar (by 64
percent), coffee (30 percent), cotton (32 percent) and wheat (17
percent) between 1980 and 1988 motivated farmers to turn to cash
crops like the coca bush and the opium poppy to avoid economic
ruin.") In Peru and Bolivia in particular, many poor peasants
have been forced to turn to coca cultivation in order to survive.
There is simply no crop as profitable. The campesinos, however,
earn very little from their coca growing; the great bulk of the
profits go to the major drug-trafficking organizations.
In Bolivia, the traffickers come from the rural elite.' In
1980 in the "cocaine coup"-the 189th coup in Bolivia's
history-the country's leading drug kingpin took over the government.
Although the Carter administration refused to recognize the new
government and cut almost all aid,' a key DEA agent believes that
the CLA supported the coup and thwarted an undercover operation
against the drug lord. A witness told Kerry's subcommittee of
funneling money on behalf of Argentine military intelligence to
support the coup, with CIA knowledge. In March 1991, the head
of the country's anti-drug police resigned amid charges of drug
trafficking; he had been appointed to his post despite having
served in the cabinet during the cocaine coup regime.'
In Peru, major government officials have been involved in
the drug trade. When the military was sent into the coca-growing
Upper Huallaga Valley region to fight guerrillas in 1984, drug
traffickers experienced what one observer called a "golden
age," with individual military officers making bonanza profits.'
Today, officers bribe their superiors to get assigned to the lucrative
coca areas
Most of the Andean drug trade, however, has been dominated
by Colombian traffickers, particularly associated with two cartels,
one based in Medellin and the other in Cali. The Medellin cartel
was formed in 1981 when leftist guerrillas kidnapped the sister
of a major drug lord; Medellin traffickers banded together to
form right-wing death squads to terrorize the Left. In 1983, the
Colombian Attorney General asserted that 59 active military personnel
were members of these assassination teams. But the Medellin cartel
fought the government too, killing many judges and politicians,
and the government responded with intermittent crackdowns. Ultimately,
the government and the cartel called a truce, with the drug lords
accepting prison, built to their own specifications and from which
they could continue their drug operations. The Cali cartel, however,
has come to control 75 percent of the cocaine trade. These traffickers
do not target the state and are far better integrated into the
Colombian elite than were those from Medellin and as such the
government is disinclined to interfere with them. The Cali cartel
is particularly thought to have the support of those sections
of the military who collaborate with far-right paramilitary groups
in killing leftists.
Some Colombian guerrilla groups operate in coca-growing regions,
taxing and at times even managing coca cultivation and processing
of their own; occasionally guerrillas and traffickers opportunistically
cooperate; but generally those who control the cocaine refining-the
most profitable part of the drug trade-are the cartel lords who
have acquired a great deal of rural property and behave like other
rich landlords, that is, they try to smash the Left. As one mainstream
expert put it, relations between Colombian guerrillas and traffickers
"have involved far more bloodshed than cooperation."
In Peru, Shining Path is the dominant political force in the
coca-growing Upper Huallaga Valley. U. S. officials claim the
guerrillas are in partnership with the drug traffickers, but in
fact they are allied to the peasant coca-growers, helping them
get a better price for their crop, and protecting them from the
lawless violence of the traffickers and the government. Sendero
thus plays a role with respect to the drug trade similar to the
legal trade unions in Bolivia that represent the coca-growers,
while it is the military and government officials who are linked
to the traffickers. Shining Path makes money from the drug trade
by taxing the peasants, but if the guerrillas were making the
$100 million a year that some U.S. analysts have claimed, they
would probably have far more expensive weaponry.
A few years ago, CIA director William Casey ordered a study
of the links between drug traffickers and leftist guerrillas.
The study concluded that there were no significant links. Casey
then ordered a second study which found that the two groups "fed
at the same trough," that is, they sometimes operated in
the same areas, and sometimes shared landing strips. Less compromised
experts have summarized the evidence this way: "Although
there are linkages between the cocaine industry and revolutionary
organizations, these linkages do not add up to an alliance. Indeed,
cocaine traffickers and guerrillas have usually been competitors
and sometimes mortal enemies."'
Uncle Sam to the Rescue
The U.S. government has taken a number of approaches to dealing
with Andean drug trafficking, all based on the premise that the
U.S. drug problem can be solved abroad.
First, it has pressured Latin American countries to undertake-or
more typically, to allow the United States to undertake-aerial
spraying to eradicate the coca crop. Since the coca plant is so
hardy, highly toxic herbicides must be used, with consequent danger
to the environment and humans. The head of the Agriculture Department's
Narcotics Laboratory quit in protest over the government's reckless
attitude toward ecological hazards, and Eli Lilly and Dow Chemical-no
friends of the earth-refused to supply the U.S. government with
their herbicides unless they were held blameless for any environmental
damage. (Washington said no.) But in any event, spraying cannot
overcome the economic realities; less than 1 percent of coca land
is eradicated annually and far more new acreage comes under coca
cultivation each year than is sprayed.'
What little eradication has taken place has largely been counter-productive.
In Bolivia, rather than discouraging peasant growers, eradication
has operated like farm price supports that stabilize prices by
keeping marginal land out of use. Worse, Peruvian peasants whose
livelihood is destroyed by eradication campaigns become eager
recruits for Shining Path.' The Peruvian military is well aware
of this problem, but some U.S. policy-makers seem oblivious to
the consequences. As one State Department official put it: "If
you are saying that coca farmers won't be able to make a living
after spraying, that's right. That is the point of the exercise.
A second U.S. approach to the South American drug problem
has been trying to promote crop substitution. This approach, however,
is doomed to failure. For starters, the United States is not really
interested in creating economic competitors. For example, when
U.S. foreign aid officials tried to foster Bolivian soybean exports
as an alternative to coca, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
objected that this would compete with U.S. products, and the idea
was dropped. But in any case the scale of U.S. aid is woefully
inadequate: as one Latin American scholar asked, "How could
a crop-substitution investment of $5.3 million per annum conquer
an economy that brings Peru some $2 billion each year? Without
government solvency, crop substitution has no chance of success;
likewise, highly unequal land distribution patterns make it suicidal
for peasants to give up the lucrative coca plant. The United States
provides Peruvian peasants with loans to encourage crop substitution,
but the interest rates are over 100 percent because of Peru's
economic crisis; the only crop that brings in enough money to
pay back such loans is coca; so peasants use the money to plant
coca. Those farmers who do plant alternative crops clear additional
jungle lands to expand coca production as well. An international
agricultural expert who works on promoting alternative crops in
Peru summed up the dilemma: "We could spend $1 billion to
turn around the Upper Huallaga, and then two years later there
would be a new Upper Huallaga somewhere else." In February
1992, Bush told Latin American leaders that they would have to
deal with the drug problem without any new U.S. funds to create
alternatives to the drug trade.
The third U.S. approach to the drug problem-and the one increasingly
being emphasized-is the military approach. This involves training,
funding, and arming the Andean armed forces and police, with some
direct participation by U.S. personnel. Starting in 1985, armed
DEA agents were operating in the Upper Huallaga Valley of Peru.
The following year, 160 U.S. soldiers played a supporting role
in Operation Blast Furnace, a large-scale anti-drug raid in Bolivia;
the U.S. troops stayed for four months, and when they pulled out,
army trainers remained behind. As the State Department boasted
in 1988, "U.S. border patrol agents, U.S. military trainers
and DEA personnel in the [coca-growing] regions are providing
constant supervision over Bolivian interdiction operations."
In 1989, U.S. Marines were secretly authorized to train Peruvian
Marines, and Green Berets began providing instruction to Peruvian
police. By January 1992, some 200 U.S. military personnel were
stationed in South America on anti-drug missions, and the United
States was providing $150 million in counter-narcotics military
aid.
The Andean governments have very little interest in pursuing
the war on drugs. Their own links to the traffickers, their fear
of pushing peasants into the arms of guerrillas, and the dependence
of their economies-especially in Bolivia and Peru-on the drug
trade make them reluctant participants in the U.S. crusade.
But in Peru and Colombia the governments are willing to accept
U.S. military aid because this can be used-and is used-against
guerrillas. In Colombia, military officials told U.S. congressional
staff investigators that more than 95 percent of their 1990 anti-drug
aid would support a major counter-insurgency operation in an area
not involved in narcotics trafficking. Rural communities are subjected
to aerial bombing by the Colombian armed forces, using planes
provided by U.S. military aid. As human rights analyst Coletta
Youngers has remarked, U. S. military aid which is supposed to
protect Colombia's democracy from narco-terrorism is in fact "facilitating
one of the most brutal counter-insurgency campaigns in Latin America."
The General Accounting Office reported that U.S. oversight was
unable to tell whether anti-drug aid was being used against drugs
or primarily against insurgents and to abuse human rights. The
point, however, has become moot, as the Bush administration has
decided-at least in the case of Peru-to explicitly support both
the anti-drug and the anti-guerrilla wars on the grounds that
the two problems are "inextricably bound together.'' In fact,
the opposite is the case: the drug war alienates the peasantry
and augments the ranks of Shining Path. And the strategy of providing
more aid to the Peruvian military strengthens the forces of the
status quo that are the greatest obstacle to the social, economic,
and political reforms that are prerequisites for ending the insurgency.
The U.S. military has failed miserably in combating drug trafficking
in the Andes. In the 1986 Operation Blast Furnace in Bolivia a
grand total of one person was arrested, a teenage boy; as soon
as U.S. forces pulled out, the traffickers returned and business
resumed as before. Not only has the drug war been unable to suppress
the cocaine trade in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, but Colombian
cartels are now branching out into heroin, and trafficking is
spreading to Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Surinam, Chile,
and elsewhere. In 1989 the Bush administration announced as its
goal a reduction of 15 percent in cocaine availability by the
fall of 1991; but cocaine production in South America increased
28 percent in 1990 and another 8 percent in 1991.
The U.S. military has been equally unsuccessful in stopping
the flow of drugs at the U.S. border. Although the Pentagon budget
for counter-narcotics operations jumped from zero before fiscal
year 1989 to more than a billion dollars in 1991, the Defense
Department's efforts "have not had a significant impact on
the national goal of reducing drug supplies," in the words
of the General Accounting Office. The failure has not been due
to Pentagon incompetence (though the proposal to have National
Guard members dress up as cactuses so they could sneak up on smugglers
left something to be desired). The Rand Corporation, the GAO,
the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and the Inter-American
Commission on Drug Policy all agree that the economics of drug
smuggling guarantee that even a more effective interdiction effort
would have negligible impact on the availability of cocaine in
the United States.
Why then does the U.S. government pursue this futile drug
war? It does so because the drug war serves a functional role
for many important sectors in U.S. society
For the Pentagon, counter-narcotics operations provide a rationale
for continued bloated budgets. "It's their new meal ticket
now that the commies are not their big threat," a congressional
staffer told Newsweek. The war on drugs, commented a New York
Times correspondent, is "one of the few growth areas the
Pentagon has left." Some years ago the military-afraid of
getting stuck in a quagmire-had resisted taking on an anti-drug
mission, but, as one general confessed, "With peace breaking
out all over, it might give us something to do. Particularly for
the Panama based U.S. Southern Command, the Latin American drug
war was "the only war we've got."
Drug wars also are functional for those who want to legitimate
U.S. interventionism in the Third World. Army Colonel John Waghelstein,
former chief of U.S. military advisers in El Salvador, has written
that fighting the combination of leftist guerrillas and narco-terrorists
would allow the United States to "regain the high moral ground"
lost to religious and academic groups who oppose U.S. intervention
in Latin America.
For the Bush administration, fighting drug wars represents
a way to appear to be dealing with a problem that is wracking
American society- without having to admit the ugly truth, that
drug abuse is not forced on the United States from the outside,
but is the result of lives made desperate by the poverty, the
unemployment, and the alienation of American society.
The war on drugs cannot be won in the Upper Huallaga Valley
or on the Mexican border. It cannot be won in the urban centers
of the United States by jailing or shooting those most victimized
by U.S. capitalism. It can be won only when our national priority
becomes the rebuilding of our cities, our schools, our hospitals,
and the very lives of our people.
Imperial
Alibis