DRUG WARS The Rule of the Game
Kawell, Jo Ann
"Our message to the drug cartels is this," George Bush told the nation last September when he unveiled his administration's drug control strategy. "The rules have changed." For "the first...
...In Peru and Bolivia, paste pits and landing sites are often located near towns or other populated areas...
...personnel out of Tingo Maria, the valley's largest town, halting drug control operations for more than five months until a heavily-fortified base near the town of Santa Lucia could be completed...
...addressing one without also addressing the others is unlikely to achieve reduced cocaine supply...
...Now, many national security strategists -among them prominent adherents of LIC doctrine-argue that communism should be viewed along with international drug trafficking and terrorism as interlinked threats...
...Low-Intensity Conflict The Sendero Luminoso guerrillas have organized farmers and hold political control of most of Peru's Huallaga Valley, the largest coca-growing zone in the world...
...But such highVOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) K I S 5D N 9profile actions are hardly typical of the Pentagon's involvement in the drug war in Latin America, especially in the cocaine-producing Andean region...
...This key tenet of past U.S...
...Reagan's Pentagon chiefs were reluctant to get involved, insisting that the drug war would draw manpower and resources away from what they perceived as greater national security threats...
...In fact, Bush's drug policy is largely a continuation of his predecessor's...
...While their unconventional analysis and prescription for fighting may keep it from looking like Vietnam, they may turn the region into the Bush administration's Central America...
...Until then, drug control was considered the job of law enforcement agencies...
...During the Reagan administration, the Pentagon's Center on Low-Intensity Conflict worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration to draw up plans for DEA's Operation Snowcap-the rubric under which the Agency has conducted anti-cocaine activities in 12 Latin American countries since 1987...
...Both sides seem to have agreed that a small, low-profile U.S...
...Up until now, Drug Enforcement Administration and civilian contract employees have been the only U.S...
...The drug war provides a new mission and real action-opportunities for testing soldiers and strategies in combat...
...In the Huallaga Valley, targeting "drug centers" has often meant occupying towns, and arresting dozens or even hundreds of people...
...personnel," the September drug strategy report states...
...Bolivia and Peru received a mere $400,000 each in military aid in 1988...
...We can and must accomplish [our] objectives with a minimum of direct involvement by U.S...
...the directive opened the way for largescale military involvement...
...soldiers had been sent to Panama...
...Colombia's highly publicized drug war is to be underwritten by $76.2 million in military assistance, up from $4 million two years ago...
...military would be sent abroad to fight the drug war...
...Despite Bush's claim to be first, the Reagan administration had already sent 160 U.S...
...soldiers to Bolivia in July 1986 for an anti-drug effort dubbed Operation Blast Furnace...
...Special Forces advisers have worked with Bolivia's drug police since 1986, and the Bush administration has quietly expanded the military's advisory role in the region...
...Moreover, total U.S...
...These officials talk much more openly than a year ago about the threat Sendero presents to the anti-drug program, and they admit that it can not be conducted in its present form unless the guerrillas are brought under control-a task they maintain should fall to Peru's military...
...The new secretary of defense, Richard Cheney, seems far more enthusiastic...
...The Bush administration has downplayed, though not abandoned, coca eradication, as ineffective and dangerous for eradication workers...
...According to figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service, these countries can anticipate $53.5 million and $46.9 million respectively for 1990...
...One important change has occurred during the Bush administration...
...This does not mean that LIC doctrine, in any version, has become a blueprint for the drug war...
...The reason for the Pentagon's new can-do attitude isn't hard to find: Recent changes in Eastern Europe make the Soviet threat far less convincing as a justification for high military budgets...
...The countries of the area must carry the principal burden themselves...
...strategy, says Donald Hamilton of the White House's Drug Control Policy Office, "can also be self-defeating, driving farmers into the ranks of the insurgents...
...Says one source familiar with the debate over strategy, some officials who consider LIC a useful theoretical framework are still leery of putting its precepts to the test in the Andean region...
...Economic instability and political insurgencies also present serious challenges to democratic institutions and stability in the area...
...There is hardly universal agreement within the welter of government agencies-among them the Pentagon, the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration-about what shape drug policy should take...
...As the "Soviet threat" fades, LIC proponents are preparing to wade into the complex conflict underway in the Andes...
...officials now recognize happened in the Huallaga...
...Although LIC theory can lead to its own excesses, its proponents argue that it is a way of avoiding the appearance of another Vietnam by precluding the use of large numbers of U.S...
...Jo Ann Kawell is a freelance journalist and author of "Coca: The Real Green Revolution" (NACLA Report on the Americas, March 1989...
...Reagan, not Bush, changed the "rules" in 1986, when he signed a secret directive establishing international drug trafficking as a national security threat...
...military team trained Peru's special counterinsurgency police unit, the Sinchis, as well as local anti-drug police forces...
...Drug control operations resemble counterinsurgency in many respects and they can also fuel actual insurgencies, as many U.S...
...combat troops...
...By the end of the year, the Pentagon had announced plans (currently on hold) to station aircraft carriers off the coast of Colombia, and more than 20,000 U.S...
...According to an Embassy cable, in mid-1989 a U.S...
...The United States has, however, quietly offered to provide military aid and advice to Peru's counterinsurgency forces...
...policy in Latin America seemed aimed at a single goal: Confronting "the communist threat...
...Are these actions-widely applauded in the United States and roundly denounced throughout Latin America-signs that the Bush administration really has changed the "rules" of the drug war...
...personnel to take a direct role in drug raids...
...Theoretically, drug control operations in zones like the Huallaga could disrupt the cocaine industry through frequent, commando-style attacks against targets like paste pits, where coca leaves are steeped in chemicals to form a cocaine precursor, and against the landing strips where small planes pick up the paste to transport it to large labs...
...However, it is impossible to design these actions as surgical strikes that leave most citizens unaffected...
...Last year, U.S...
...Bush dispatched a group of instructors to work with Peruvian police in mid-1989 and sent advisers to Colombia in the wake of the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galin in August...
...officials citing "security concerns," pulled DEA agents and other U.S...
...In the past, U.S...
...The Bush drug control strategy echoes this thinking: "Cocaine trafficking, moreover, is but one threat in the Andean region...
...While the situation in Peru was on the minds of officials who drafted the Bush strategy released in September, according to Washington sources some of them were also influenced by recent theories of low-intensity conflict-the amorphous post-Vietnam guide to battling "low-level" conflicts and insurgencies in the Third World, which emphasizes the value of small units, light equipment, guerrilla-style tactics and an indirect role for the United States...
...These officials, says the source, want to "keep control of the 'cowboys' [extreme LIC enthusiasts within their own ranks] so they don't run amok in the drug war...
...The three are interrelated...
...Bush and other administration officials went out of their way to portray the Panama invasion as a blow against a fiendish drug trafficker and yet another victory for democracy...
...presence is acceptable...
...This represents at least a partial victory for national security strategists who for a generation have argued that the United States should direct more attention to fighting "security threats" emanating from the Third World, among them communist insurgency and international drug trafficking...
...Last year, Bush signed a national security directive permitting military advisers to work in the drug-producing zones-a move that would put them on the drug war's front lines...
...At a press conference two weeks after the president's speech, Cheney called drug control a "high priority" mission and said, "I believe that our military forces have the capability to make a substantial contribution toward drug interdiction...
...military expenditures for the Andean region, though not specifically earmarked for the drug war, have dramatically increased...
...For "the first time," the U.S...
...Coca production and related activities are the mainstay of economic life in these regions, and they employ hundreds of thousands of area residents...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 6
