Panama Update Archives
Number 25, December 1998An emergency budget bill for fiscal year 1999 signed into law by President Clinton on October 22 contained a series of appropriations first introduced in the House and Senate as the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act (WHDEA). On September 16, the House of Representatives passed it by a whopping 384 to 39. It wasn't voted on in the Senate, but incorporated into the Omnibus Appropriations Bill. The $6.9 billion bill authorizes a total of $670 million in military hardware, training, and personnel for Latin America over the next three years, and spends much of the remainder drawing the U.S. Customs and Coast Guard deeper into the failed drug war. The Washington DC-based Latin America Working Group calls the WHDEA "next year's nightmare.""LOGIC"
In its first finding, the WHDEA claims that "teenage drug use in the United States has doubled since 1993." It asserts that "a prerequisite for reducing youth drug use is increasing the price of drugs. To increase price substantially, at least 60 percent of drugs must be interdicted." It further states that "at present, the United States faces few, if any, threats from abroad greater than the threat posed to the Nation's youth by illegal and dangerous drugs." Based on these findings, the WHDEA elaborates a military strategy focused on supply and transit interdiction, in order to protect the nation's youth from cheap drugs.
The WHDEA cites the 'success' of counternarcotics efforts of the late 1980's and early 1990's, "specifically in protecting the borders of the United States from penetration by illegal narcotics through increased seizures by the United States Coast Guard and other agencies," and "imbalances" in more recent strategies, which have spread efforts among demand reduction, domestic law enforcement, and international interdiction efforts.
The WHDEA makes it U.S. policy to enhance "drug interdiction effort[s] in the major drug transit countries [to] achieve the goal of reducing the flow of ilegal drugs into the United States by 80 percent by as early as January 1, 2003."
To carry out this policy, the WHDEA calls for a reordering of the Department of Defense Global Military Force Policy priorities. The Policy currently lists military allocations in the following order of priority: 1) war; 2) military operations other than war, such as peacekeeping; 3) exercises and training; 4) operational tasks like counternarcotics activities and humanitarian assistance. The WHDEA calls for counternarcotics activites to be treated as "military operations other than war," elevating it to the military's highest priority short of war.
CONTENTS
Besides about $1 billion per year for three years dedicated to aircraft and equipment transfers to the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs Service, the WHDEA's major targets are "source countries" in the Andean region. For Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru the WHDEA appropriates $221,250,000 and $180 million each year for three years for eradication and alternative crop development programs, respectively.
In an interesting elaboration of U.S. policy, the law discourages the Colombian peace process, while leaving a window for U.S. "national interests." An initial clause bars any of the above-mentioned aid to Colombia if, in its efforts for a peace agreement with rebels, the Colombian government "negotiates or permits...a demilitarized zone in which the eradication of drug production by the security forces of Colombia...is prohibited." A second clause authorizes the President to override the prohibition for a period of up to 90 days if "providing such assistance is in the national interest of the United States."
PANAMA
In the case of Panama, direct appropriations are limited to $1 million per fiscal year for counternarcotics training of its Coast Guard. With the failure of the Multilateral Counternarcotics Center negotiations in September of this year, the WHDEA also calls for a report to study "options available in the source and transit zones to replace Howard Air Force Base in Panama," still seen as crucial to U.S. regional counternarcotics efforts.
In Cartagena, Colombia at a conference of defense ministers of the Americas, Defense Secretary William Cohen reported December 1 that the Pentagon has already initiated talks with Honduras, Peru, Ecuador and other nations for "forward operating locations" which would divide up Howard's current traffic, up to 15,000 missions a year. Latin American governments have so far shown little interest in hosting the Air Force, perhaps because, as The New York Times noted, negotiations with Panama fell through "over the Americans' insistence that the United States still be able mount other military operations from the base, not just those involving drugs."
Separate from the WHDEA initiative, Representative Ben Gilman (R-NY) introduced a proposal in October offering Panama the opportunity to participate in the North American Free Trade Agreement along with the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, as well as a special scholarship program for Panamanians to study in the U.S., in return for allowing the U.S. to maintain troops in Panama after 1999. Gilman specifically said his proposal "asks Panama to continue being our partner in the war against drugs and other matters of regional security." While it was introduced too late for action in this congress, Gilman plans to move forward on it in the new congress if Panama shows interest.
CRITICISM
Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey issued a statement on September 16 calling the bill "an ill-conceived exercise in micromanagement possibly motivated by election-year politics," although the Washington Office on Latin America says his statement came too late to influence the bill's crushing victory in the House.
In fact, public criticism of the U.S.-promoted "war on drugs" has increased in the past year. In January, The New York Times published an editorial which asserted that "past [drug war] efforts have not reduced the flow of drugs into the United States. A Rand Corporation study showed that source-country control was by far the least cost-effective way of reducing cocaine use. Treatment for addicts, it found, could have the same impact at 20% of the price." On June 8, the opening day of a three-day United Nations special session on the "drug war," the Times ran a two-page advertisement in the form of an open letter signed by 600 prominent individuals from throughout the hemisphere which criticized the strategy, saying it "is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself."
Criticism of the domestic "War on Drugs" has also become more visible, referring to increasingly militarized police forces, three-strikes and other similarly harsh penalties for minor drug crimes. Despite this, the fact that a bill like the recent WHDEA can pass so overwhelmingly and with so little debate proves that the logic behind the "War on Drugs" has been well inculcated into both U.S. domestic and foreign policy over the past decade. In fact, it has been institutionalized in domestic and hemispheric diplomatic discourse. It appears that criticizing this failed and deadly strategy has become tantamount to criticizing the old Cold War against the communist scourge.
PEACE AND JUSTICE
The human rights abuses committed both by Latin American militaries, and by implication by their U.S. trainers and arms suppliers have been well documented over the years, and continue to mount. The "War on Drugs" is also used to justify U.S. involvement in and support for Latin American governments' counterinsurgency operations, using the image of the "narcoguerrilla." This additional step implicates the United States in serious violations of the national sovereignty of its "partners," as well as of its own stated policy.
The Dallas Morning News reported in August that, in response to recent guerrilla advances which threatened both U.S. counternarcotics work and the Colombian government's stability, the United States had skirted around legislation to revamp its support for the Colombian armed forces by hiring mercenaries through private firms such as Dyncorp and East Inc., former Green Berets, Gulf War veterans, and even "veterans" from CIA-backed operations in Central America during the 1980s. Former chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Colombia, Joe Taft, was quoted as saying that "to get somebody out there to do those operations, you almost have to have that shady past." The Defense Department issued a statement the next day denying that the contractors were mercenaries, or that they were engaged in "any other activity not fully sanctioned by the U.S. Congress and the executive branch."
In Bolivia this past April, U.S.-organized and trained counternarcotics troops known as the Mobile Rural Patrol Unit (UMOPAR) were involved in violently repressing popular demonstrations. Coca leaf growers (known as cocaleros), workers, students, and their supporters were demanding an increase in the minimum wage and that the government maintain last year's level of compensation for voluntary coca eradication, and were protesting recent educational reforms. In the Chapare, the major coca-producing region of the country where UMOPAR is based, at least 10 people were killed, dozens injured, and over 100 arrested during the weeks of the strike.
The New York Times reported in June on U.S. encouragement of an increasingly confrontational strategy by the Bolivian government in dealing with cocaleros citing as a "reason for optimism" the work of a CIA-trained and -financed anti-terrorism unit, which had already "captured a list of terrorist leaders and a code book for terrorist operations belonging to one of six coca unions that are planting illegal crops in a national park." Cocaleros continue to march in protest of the government's harsh new plan for coca eradication, known as Plan Dignidad.
CERTIFICATION
The annual certification process established by Congress in 1986 is another way in which the U.S. government ensures the expansion of a military response to the social problems of physical, emotional, and economic drug dependence. Through this process, the administration creates a list of major drug-producing and drug-transit countries, which then must be certified as fully cooperating with U.S. counternarcotics efforts in order to continue receiving various forms of U.S. aid and loans not directly related to counternarcotics efforts.
Certification is criticized throughout the hemisphere, seen as a unilateral and hypocritcal ratings system designed and implemented by the world's largest consumer of illegal drugs. As such it inhibits the development of the respectful and open relationships necessary for true cooperation. Beyond this, Latin American governments’ concern with U.S. criticism of their drug policies, institutionalized in the certification process, leads governments throughout the region to adopt draconian drug eradication plans. Connection to the Americas points out that for small countries whose trade with the U.S. is not significant enough to influence certification decisions, politicians must "try to project the correct image of drug-warrior bellicosity," largely measured in forced eradication, arrests, and prosecutions, in order to ensure the continued U.S. aid on which their countries depend.
One result of this frantic bellicosity are increasingly overcrowded prisons across Latin America- as well as in the United States- which owe much of their recent population growth to new drug enforcement laws which give harsher sentences to the whole gamut of drug offenders. In Bolivia, for example, whole families who depend on coca production for their livelihood go to jail together. In addition to overcrowding, prisons across the hemisphere suffer from increasing violence among prisoners, abuse of prisoners by guards, and lack of adequate facilities.
CORRUPTION
On November 10, customs officials at Fort Lauderdale International Airport seized 1600 pounds of cocaine from a Colombian Air Force cargo plane, only the most recent example of well-documented connections between the region's militaries and drug traffickers. On the other hand, a report by the Bolivia-based research group Accion Andina cites revelations in a Fort Lauderdale trial of bribes to U.S. functionaries which allowed Pablo Escobar's cartel to evade the scrutiny of counternarcotics efforts in Florida for years. The CIA's drug war partner in Peru and head of Peru's National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, in addition to an abominable human rights record has been mentioned in at least 49 U.S. intelligence reports for suspected narcotics smuggling. Despite records like these, through legislation like the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act, U.S. policy makers continue to enlist these people and institutions in its "war."
CONCLUSION
Why do policy makers perpetuate the failed "War on Drugs"? Source country strategies have not made drugs inaccessible-- to youths or adult users-- in the U.S. by increasing prices here, nor have they made coca and cocaine production unprofitable by decreasing prices for coca and cocaine paste in the Andean region. Meanwhile, the War involves the region's militaries in domestic law enforcement activities and serious human rights abuses. Besides consistent criticism by non-profit and research organizations in the United States and abroad, Rand Corporation and General Accounting Office studies and government officials also attest to the War's failure and its destructiveness.
Despite all this, the War continues. In its militaristic "logic," it ignores the real problems of physical, emotional, and economic drug dependence and their origins. The goal of raising the prices of illegal substances is a poor excuse for increasing militarization throughout the hemisphere. Once again, the question arises: what are the "real" motivations and goals of this War?
TAKE ACTION!
Call your congressperson and ask him or her if he or she voted in favor of the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act, and if so, why. Explain why this strategy is an extremely harmful failure.
Sources: Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act 1998; WOLA alerts 9/11, 9/21/98; LAWG update 10/1/98; LatinAmerica Press 3/19/98; Connection to the Americas 6/98; In Focus 9/98; Air Bridge Denial: el exito de un fracaso, 11/ 98; Dallas Morning News 8/19/98; New York Times 1/24, 6/27, 12/2/98; Weekly News Update 6/28, 8/23, 10/25, 11/22/98.