Newsgroups: soc.culture.colombia,talk.politics.drugs From: [S--Y--A] at [SUVM.SYR.EDU] (Sergio Rivera) Subject: Re: War on drugs Date: Tue, 28 Jun 1994 04:33:23 GMT Copyright 1991 Jonathan Marshall Drug Wars Corruption, Counterinsurgency, and Covert Operations in the Third World SECTION: Chapters I-II, Pages 1-28 HEADLINE: Going to the source-Drug enforcement as counterinsurgency BYLINE: By Jonathan Marshall DATELINE: Oakland, California International narcotics control rests upon the central premise -- or pretense -- that by helping foreign government stamp out drugs abroad, the United States can avoid curbing its own demand for them at home. The reality is all too different. Time after time, the very governments and foreign security agencies Washington supports with anti- drug assistance shield the drug kings or monopolize the traffic themselves. Corruption knows no borders. Exposure of the ''French Connection'' showed that drug profits ensnare politiicians, police and intelligence officials even in a First World nation like France, with its strong tradition of professionalism. (4) Plenty of drug corruption scandals in the United States itself prove the same point. Such corruption often follows a progression as it becomes entrenched. Drug enforcement is a form of market regulation and Darwinian selection. Police weed out traffickers less skilled at evading detection or buying protection. ''Efficient'' traffickers develop a symbiotic relationship with ambitious agents of the law. Police need underworld informants to make their cases; successful traffickers in turn need police to block their rivals. Both have an incentive to arrest large numbers of weak, unprotected competitors. These mutual needs may, and often do, promote outright cooperation and corruption. Over time police may come to realize that taking bribes offer fewer rewards than dealing the drugs themselves, while still using drug laws to eliminate independent competitors. In extreme cases, drug profits may even strengthen corrupt police or military elites vis-a-vis other government institutions to the point where they seize state power, as the Bolivian military did in the infamous 1980 ''cocaine coup.'' In the Third World particularly, where government institutions have short histories and questionable legitimacy, officials may rationalize their takeover of lucrative drug rackets as needed to preempt independent syndicates that threaten state power. Failure to bring those independent traffickers under control can lead to internal chaos, civil war or warlordism. As the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board noted in its 1984 annual report, ''Illegal drug production and trafficking financed by organized crime is so pervasive that the economies of entire countries are disrupted, legal institutions menaced and the very security of some states threatened.'' (5) Once again, the problem is not unique to the Third World. Even Italy had to send an anti- terrorist commander (Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa) to combat Mafia strongholds in Sicily -- and he was brazenly assassinated. Where efforts to suppress drugs produce instability, not security, authorities may try to take control of the drug traffic rather than wage continual war against it. Using drug laws and armed force as weapons against independent competitors, governments can create 'de facto' drug monopolies to help consolidate their power within the national territory. Chiang Kai-shek used that classic tactic in his campaign to unify China under his party, the Kuomintang (KMT). By seizing poppy fields and monopolizing drug marketing channels in the name of opium ''suppression,'' he undercut independent warlords financed from regional drug profits. Ironically, in the 1940s the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics trained Chiang's secret police -- who ganged up with the head of the Shanghai underworld to run what may have been the world's largest drug trafficking syndicate. (6) Similar symptons of gross corruption afflict country after country where drugs are produced or transshipped: [...] Peru Responsible for producing more than half the cocaine shipped to the United States, Peru depends on more than 200,000 acres of coca for as much as a quarter of its gross domestic product. (33) With hyperinflation raging in the four-digit range, foreign exchange reserves depleted, the economy shrinking and a fanatical left-wing insurgency terrorizing much of the country, coca production may be one of the few ''bright'' spots on the Peruvian scene. Or at least that's how it may seem to the tens of thousands of peasants who make their living growing and harvesting the traditional Andean coca leaf for export -- and to the countless underpaid government officials who look the other way in return for bribes. Peru ranks with Bolivia for the sheer ubiquity of corruption throughout government ranks. The military has had its hand in the cocaine trade ever since 1949, when the government established a state coca monopoly and set aside all profits for the construction of military barracks. (34) In the brief period from July 1984 to December 1985, when the army exercised emergency powers over the center of Peruvian coca cultivation, the Upper Huallaga Valley, drug production soared. The army confined the anti-drug police to their barracks while chasing leftwing Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas. Army officers reportedly raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars for protecting the drug lords during those operations. ''It's better for the narcos when the army is here,'' said one police official. (35) The government finally had to pull the army out before it became a total appendage of the drug elite. (36) When the army returned to the Upper Huallaga Valley in 1989, however, it once again declared major drug regions ''off-limits'' to Peruvian police and DEA agents. Soldiers loading cocaine paste onto transport planes have reportedly even fired on US-piloted anti-drug helicopters. (37) In 1982, a former Peruvian air force general was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being caught with 5 kilos of cocaine on his way to Miami. (38) The same year the war minister accused two former ministers of interior with conspiring to undertake a major cocaine deal. (39) In 1985, a huge drug scandal prompted President Alan Garcia to dismiss at least 100 air force personnel, more than 200 top officers from Peru's three national police forces and well over 1,000 policemen. Several hundreds judges also came under investigation for suspected corruption. (40) Yet corruption remains endemic to Peruvian law enforcement. In 1988, the State Department's top narcotics official admitted that allegations of corruption were still ''swirling around the PIP,'' Peru's FBI. (41) A congressional staff report confirmed that ''repeated compromises of DEA information [through PIP] eventually led to a virtual termination of relationship between the two agencies'' and added that ''corruption in all segments of the Peruvian government continues to impede meaningful antinarcotics efforts.'' (42) The politicians are no clearer. In late 1988, West German police arrested a leader of Peru's ruling party, APRA, while attempting to cash a large check signed by one of Peru's most notorious traffickers. (43) Around the same time, the head of President Alan Garcia's press office was arrested with two satchels of cocaine; he used his influence to destroy the police file but was later unmasked. (44) Suspicions of APRA's deep involvement in the drug trade fed reports that the Garcia government purposedly ignored widespread coca trafficking in the Cusco area in the southern part of the country. (45) [...] Peru The US push for narcotics enforcement in Peru, as in Mexico, has evolved into a counterinsurgency campaign. The main targets in this case are the fanatical Maoist guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso. In the early 1980s, the United States began training and equipping an anti-drug police unit based in Tingo Maria, a center of the coca growing region northeast of Lima. The police began conducting joint operations with the air force and counterinsurgency-trained civil guard. (107) A series of devastating guerrilla raids, including police station bombings, forced a cancellation of police field operations. The 'New York Times' reported in August 1984 that with drug programs shut down ''the strike force is now almost fully occupied in the counterinsurgency campaign. This new role has raised questions among United States officials in Peru and in Washington about the spending of United States Government funds that are earmarked for narcotics control, not for counterinsurgency.'' (108) Although Sendero guerrillas do garner tens of millions of dollars each year from taxing the coca trade, US officials admit there is little evidence of a close alliance between the smugglers and the guerrillas. (109) Peru's security forces use the drug issue as an excuse to go after the greater danger. In July 1984 President Fernando Belaunde Terry declared a ''holy war'' against what he called the ''narcotics-terrorism threat,'' extending a state of national emergency for 30 days to give the armed forces a chance to use ''new methods'' against the guerrillas. (110) The army, however, did not see narcos and guerrillas as allies. It shut down anti-drug police operations and enlisted traffickers in the war against Sendero. ''We have to have popular support to fight terrorism,'' one officer said. ''We have to have a friend in the population. You can't do that by eradicating coca.'' (111) The army has returned to the Upper Huallaga Valley -- and so has the counterinsurgency campaign. US personnel are even joining the fight against Sendero. In early 1990, Shining Path guerrillas attacked the main anti-drug base at Santa Lucia in the Upper Huallaga Valley. US helicopters pilots took to the air in Huey gunships for a two-hour battle to beat them off. To plan and carry out its operations in the region, the DEA has teamed up with the Pentagon's Center for Low Intensity Conflict, a classic counterinsurgency outfit. (112) In early 1990, the Bush administration announced plans to deliver $ 35 million in military aid, under the anti-drug program, to combat Sendero directly. The money would finance a large military training base in the heart of the Upper Huallaga Valley, staffed by Special Forces counterinsurgency trainers; six army battalions; and refurbishing of 20 A-37 jets. Melvyn Levitsky, the State Department's top narcotics officer, explained, ''We have to up the capability to hit the Sendero, to provide a cover -- a security cover for the operations by the police and the military against the drug traffickers.'' (113) That rationale falls apart under examination. Sending aid to the Peruvian military in the name of fighting drugs is almost a contradiction in terms. Levitsky himself admitted that widespread reports of military corruption ''have ranged from taking payoffs from the traffickers so that they could go after the Sendero, that is to let the [drug] flights in, to other kinds of collusion.'' (114) Top military officers have made no secret about halting drug eradication efforts in order to win peasant support against the guerrillas -- just as they did in 1984-1985. General Alberto Arciniega, the army's field commander in the Upper Huallaga Valley until 1990, said, ''The magnitude of the problems we face is far greater than narcotics. My order is: nobody must touch the 'campesino' coca grower. This doesn't mean I support drug trafficking.'' He might as well, though. ''We hit laboratories,'' said one senior US embassy official, ''but there are no arrests, no seizures. It's just harassment. We're not making major progress here.'' As a result, coca fields have expanded and drug shipments are picking up.'' (115) Worse yet, the Peruvian military only fuels the insurgency by brutalizing the peasantry. The State Department's own annual report on human rights around the globe blamed government security forces for more than 500 forced disappearanced in 1989, a world record that year. According to Juan Mendez, executive director of Americas Watch, army units sometimes react to ambushes and attacks ''by invading a community and killing dozens of young and old males, sometimes in view of relatives.'' In addition, right-wing death squads linked to the army ''have targeted journalists, lawyers and human right monitors,'' bombing the headquarters of no fewer than three rights organizations in Lima in one week. The most prominent of these death squads, the Rodrigo Franco Front, was reportedly financed by funds that police confiscated in narcotics raids. (116) Sending more military aid to Peru -- a project jeopardized by the breakdown of US talks with the government of Alberto Fujimori in September 1990 -- would put counterinsurgency ahead of all other political and economic priorities. In Peru's unstable situation, bolstering a military that held total power from 1968 to 1980 can only shift the balance of forces in favor of an institution whose loyalties to democracy, human rights and civilian rule are tenuous at best. Endnotes (1) The White House, 'National Drug Control Strategy,' September 1989, 61-2; Senate Government Operations Control Committee, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (hereafter SPSI), hearings, 'Federal Drug Interdiction: Role of the Department of Defense' (Washington: USGPO, 1989), 18. [...] (4) James Mills, 'Underground Empire,' (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986), 555. (5) 'San Jose Mercury,' January 17, 1985. (6) Jonathan Marshall, ''Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China,'' 'Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars,' VIII (July-September 1976), pp. 19-48; 'New York Times,' September 14, 1945. [...] (11) House Committee on Foreign Affairs [hereafter HCFA], staff report, 'US Narcotics Control Programs Overseas: An Assessment,' February 22, 1985, p. 17; 'High Times,' May 1984, p. 19; 'New York Times,' July 21, 1984; 'San Francisco Examiner,' August 26, 1984. [...] (33) 'Hoy' [La Paz], March 8, 1990. (34) Antonil, 'Mama Coca,' p. 96. (35) 'Wall Street Journal,' May 1, 1987; cf. HCFA, staff report, 'US Narcotics Control Programs Overseas: An Assesment,' 20. (36) Richard Craig, ''Illicit Drug Traffic,'' 'op. cit.' (37) 'SPSI, hearings, US Government Anti-narcotics Activities in the Andean Region of South America, 289; 'US News and World Report,' April 30, 1990; 'Miami Herald,' March 28, 1990. (38) 'Boston Globe,' January 24, 1982. (39) 'LAWR,' March 5, 1982. (40) 'Newsweek,' February 25, 1985; 'Oakland Tribute,' June 2, 1985; 'Los Angeles Times,' December 1, 1985. (41) Ann Wrobleski, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters, testimony, HCFA, hearing, 'Narcotics Review in South America' (Washington: USGPO, 1988), 100. (42) HCFA, staff report, 'US Narcotics Control Programs in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico: An Update,' 7-12. (43) 'LAWR,' November 3, 1988. (44) 'LAWR,' December 1, 1988. (45) James Petras, ''Drug-War Rhetoric Conceals Cartels' Capital Ties,'' 'In These Times,' November 15, 1989. [...] (107) 'LAWR,' August 17, 1984; 'New York Times,' September 13, 1984, 'LAWR,' June 22, 1984. (108) 'New York Times,' August 13, 1984. (109) Testimony of Gustavo Gorriti, SPSI, hearings, 'US Government Anti- narcotics Activities in the Andean Region of South America,' 226; 'Wall Street Journal,' August 10, 1984; testimony of Hon. Edwin G. Corr, former ambassador to Peru, in SPSI hearings, 'International Narcotics Trafficking,' p. 199; statement of Clyde Taylor, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for INM, Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, hearing, 'Drugs and Terrorism, 1984' (Washington: USGPO 1984), 25; cf. 46-49. Congressional investigators cited ''disturbing -- though unconfirmed -- reports that the military has actually collaborated with the drug traffickers to identify guerrilla strongholds.'' (HCFA, staff reports, 'US Narcotics Control Programs Overseas: An Assessment,' February 22, 1985, p. 20. On bloody clashes between Sendero and the narcos, see Agence France Presse, May 13, 1987. (110) 'San Francisco Examiner,' July 7, 1984; 'Norfolk Virginian-Pilot,' July 29, 1984. (111) 'Washington Post,' December 29, 1984; Rensselaer Lee II, ''Why the US Cannot Stop South American Cocaine.'' (112) 'New York Times,' April 12, 1990; SPSI, hearings, US Government Anti-narcotics Activities in the Andean Region of South America,' p. 50. (113) 'New York Times,' April 22, 1990; SPSI, hearings, US Government Anti-narcotics Activities in the Andean Region of South America,' p. 155. (114) 'Ibid.,' 170. (115) 'Ibid.,' 294; 'Los Angeles Times,' January 6, 1990; 'New York Times,' December 6, 1989. (116) 'Christian Science Monitor,' May 3, 1990; 'New York Times,' May 7, 1990; 'San Francisco Chronicle,' August 15, 1990. See also Amnesty International, Peru Briefing, ''Caught between two fires,'' November 1989.