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Washington's Global Drug Crusade
Nedd Willard
The US-led war on drugs appears to have only made the narcotics abuse problem worse while causing widespread destruction in a number of developing countries where it helps justify American political interference and military intervention. It is clear that the policy of violent repression has failed and has resulted in widening civil strife and ecological devastation.
As Things Stand
Despite billions of dollars spent on law enforcement, criminal prosecution and incarceration during the past 80 years, the United States has made little or no progress toward reducing drug use or solving its 'drug problem'." One of the most tangible, measurable effects of the "war on drugs" has been the creation of a "prison state" (A Wiser Course: Ending Drug Prohibition, Report of the Special Committee on Drugs and the Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, June 1994).
The War on Drugs
Too much has been written about drugs. Too many films have been made that dramatise the "war on drugs" and demonise drug users. Almost without exception, the overwhelming majority of books, articles, films and news stories on this subject have been slanted, fallacious or outright fabrications. This has become a war on human rights that has made a travesty of justice, imprisoned millions of individuals, robbed billions of dollars, and influenced foreign policy in almost every country of the world.
The purpose of this article is not to give once again the history of every drug, legal or illegal, used or abused, with suggestions about how things could be improved. Rather it will try to prove historically and factually that this attack on human freedom is based on falsehood and hysteria, and implemented with brutal disregard for basic human rights.
The Los Angeles police murdered a half-blind millionaire in 1992 in his own house. No illegal drugs were ever found there and the officer who shot him was cleared of manslaughter. Yet police jobs in the US related to the "war on drugs" swelled by 36 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, prison jobs by 86 per cent during President Reagan's years alone. President George Bush doubled the corps of federal prosecutors (Smoke and Mirrors, Micke Gray, Back Bay Books, Little Brown and Co, Boston, New York, Toronto, London; 1996).
There probably has never been an "epidemic" of drugs in any country, although large numbers of poor and desperate people have used drugs like opium and alcohol to blot out hunger, poverty and despair.
The present worldwide war on drugs is a direct descendant of prohibition, and the American experiment in the twentieth century to outlaw alcohol. And the worst features of that failed attempt persist today. They include brutal invasion of privacy and the imprisonment of innocent people. As in alcohol prohibition, those punished are usually poor, from ethnic minorities, and unfairly tried in court. Many have been simply entrapped by undercover agents.
Two dynamos drive this international machine of repression, a desire to intimidate by changing laws that protect individual rights of citizens while increasing the scope of repressive government agencies. The drug war has racist overtones that stigmatise minorities and punish them. The second driving force is the vast system of vested interest in money and political advancement that would be lost if the war were abandoned.
The health of the public has never been a major concern of drug prohibition. No matter how many scientific studies exist that minimise the danger of drugs, they will never convince those who benefit by the present system. The drug war blocks attempts to lessen the spread of AIDS and hepatitis through safer injection, and denies pain relief to terminal cancer patients, stark examples of the callousness of drug warriors.
The international treaties drawn up by UN bodies to pursue the drug war were based on little or no scientific studies; just strong assertions, unproved allegations and crude scare tactics. Still today, at none of the international meetings of the UN, the WHO, and other specialised bodies are the users of illegal drugs, or even dissenting sociologists and physicians, allowed to present their evidence or different points of view.
The drug war, more than any other single factor, has encouraged the glorification of violent and corrupt police and undercover agents. Drug prohibition invariably leads to multi-million dollar swindles involving those who benefit from it, and they are not only the drug mafias but also special police forces and unscrupulous politicians.
An unavowed purpose of this drug war is to allow the United States government, its major proponent, to intervene in any country it chooses in the world. The US can take sides in a civil war, for example, and arm the side of those closest to its own interests. In doing so, it can spray poison on their farmland by granting itself the moral right to do so. These practices help keep countries in Central and South America under indirect domination.
Some governments in the UN are more rabid than others in pursuing the drug war, but so far none has openly challenged its validity or its unavowed purposes. Recently, however, there have been steps towards harm reduction and greater humanity in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain among others. They are softly bending the sharper edges of this war with the purpose of reducing harm to the individual drug abusers and to the community.
As Old As Humanity
There has probably never been a time when human beings have not sought a way to ease pain, experience happiness or forget loneliness, and alter their way of seeing the world by taking some form of drug. Drugs can be good or bad for you, but if they did not offer some form of pleasure or relief people would not take them. Drugs do not seek out people: people seek out drugs.
There is no scientific distinction between legal or illicit drugs, only in the way a society decides to consider them. Cannabis for example is illegal in France and alcohol in Saudi Arabia. Drugs can be natural or synthetic. Beer, wine, distilled alcohol, opium and cocaine are all full-fledged members of the drug family. Drug effects are complex and hard to measure. Lab experiments give some verifiable results of drug effects but few clues as to why humans use them. Not everyone who takes any drug becomes "addicted". Teenage drug use is mainly experimentation and stops there. Not everyone wants the same drug or effects. Not every heavy drug user continues the habit throughout life.
"Available data indicate that the vast majority of the American population that uses now-prohibited drugs does so with moderation" (A Wiser Course, pp. 44-45). The British Royal Commission on Opium in 1893 "found strong evidence in favour of moderation on the part of the consumer, and of his general immunity from any evident ill-effects caused by the habit".
The best way out of this brutal mess is to inform citizens honestly about drugs and suggest more humane options for those who have problems. The public needs to be reminded that personal use is not necessarily abuse and that the minority of people with a drug problem need help, not punishment. In a democracy, the informed public, not only those in power, decide how to deal with social problems. Humane law remains the firmest bul-wark of freedom.
Dutch policy rejects the idea that putting more people in prisons diminishes drug use. They point out that after the most massive wave of imprisonment in the US, that country has higher rates of drug problems than most other industrialised societies. The Dutch try to keep drug users within the bounds of conventional society rather than stigmatise or ostracise them, and make medical and social services available when and if they need them (Is Dutch Policy the Devil? Cohen and Reinarman, p.2).
Why Governments Enlist
A question well worth posing at the outset is why do so many third world countries, or rather their governments, enlist in the current drug war spearheaded by the US. This is strange because in many of them the so-called "illegal drugs" such as cannabis, opium and coca leaves have been in current use for centuries. In the case of Peru and Bolivia, coca and coca preparations have been used and associated with religious ceremonies for at least 4000 years. As for cannabis, called ganja or marijuana among its many other names, the traditional use in the Indian subcontinent has lasted just as long or longer and still continues, even though the governments of Nepal and India have officially subscribed to treaties advocating prohibition.
What is more, the use of coca and cannabis was not discovered to be a problem for the local populations where they were grown and used until the vast drug war machine swung into action after the Second World War. Countries like Colombia had never declared a coca problem yet put themselves in the frontline of a war to protect people they had never seen, most of whom lived in powerful industrialised countries, such as the United States and more recently Europe.
The US, aided by a pliant United Nations, was able to secure government signatures on international treaties that endorse the American programme of complete prohibition for any substance placed on the international blacklist. It still seems amazing that countries like Iran, with more than 3000 years of opium use heavily embedded in its culture of self-medication, would consent to do so. The same is glaringly obvious in the case of India, which was a late signatory to the treaties and where religious use of cannabis continues openly in spite of the official policy.
In an interview, Evo Morales, a Bolivian parliamentarian and leader of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) that took place in Geneva in May 200l, stated his firm opposition to the drug war and coca plant eradication by saying that, "The coca leaf is closely linked to 4000 years of Bolivian history. People chew the leaves for medicinal, nutritional and ritual benefits." Yet because of international treaties the government of Bolivia is determined to stamp out the production and use of the coca plant.
Even more surprising, the basic assumptions of major international treaties, such as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, that almost every government has signed, are precisely the same as those that initiated and justified American alcohol prohibition. These assumptions are worth closer examination since they underlie all the programmes based on police and military enforcement that accompany them.
The first assumption is that the availability and supply of a drug creates the demand. The second assumption is that if the supply of such a drug were eliminated (by police action) or greatly diminished, the demand for such a drug would significantly diminish or disappear.
Now, neither of these assumptions has ever been proved in practice. Rather the contrary. There are some good reasons for this. First of all, an examination of a traditional drug-producing country often undermines the idea that supply creates demand. Local and traditional cultivation of opium poppy, coca bushes, and cannabis plants has rarely been proved harmful to the farmers who cultivate them or to their traditional local societies.
It has been repeatedly demonstrated that availability alone does not in itself stimulate consumption and dangerous forms of dependency. These result from a complex series of factors in which availability may play a part but most prominent among them are poverty and personal alienation from the larger society.
A Net with Large Holes
When we examine the second assumption, namely, that it would be possible to eliminate or significantly diminish the supply of drugs people want and are willing to pay for, we find it unproved in practice. Moreover, the demand for such drugs, if they are eagerly sought after in wealthy developed countries, constantly fuels new engines of production and distribution. The most recent report in 2002 of the UN office based in Vienna for the control of drugs and prevention of crime highlights the constant rise in production of opium and other illegal drugs. And when one region is obliged to stop production others are eager to step in because such production is highly profitable.
Just as in the case of alcohol prohibition in the US, throughout the years of its enforcement, illegal breweries and distilleries sprang up in all the major cities as well as in poor and remote rural areas. Soon, alcohol distribution was carefully and competently arranged on a vast scale. What is more, illegal imports of alcohol from other countries such as Canada soared as well, making millionaires of gangsters and a number of well-placed politicians.
Today this pattern has reappeared and again it has proved impossible to eliminate the production or distribution of illegal substances at the source, whether they are cocaine, opium or cannabis. This is so in spite of the enlistment of regular and irregular armies for enforcement. Moreover, the resources and manpower of the drug war far exceed those allotted to alcohol prohibition. Almost every American embassy in the world today has special drug war agents among its personnel. Most recently the US Army, Navy, and Coast Guard have been enlisted to stop the import of illegal drugs. Needless to say, the US Customs Department has also been strengthened and given new powers of search and seizure. All this is in vain because of the fact that more cocaine and heroin keep pouring into that country and drug prices have often gone down.
Moreover, according to the most optimistic estimates no prohibition and destruction of illegal substances—by burning down liquor stills or uprooting cannabis plants or spraying herbicides on coca bushes—has ever succeeded in pre-venting more than 15 per cent of the amount produced from reach-ing its consumers. Commissioner Harry Anslinger, the main architect of world prohibition, publicly disclosed that estimate and it has been recently confirmed. Thus 85 per cent or so of what is grown and processed goes through the net of customs and the military to find its way into the streets of New York, Rome or Paris. Yet today's drug warriors still plead, using the same phrases as their predecessors in alcohol prohibition, "More time. Just give us more time! And more money."
After the resounding failure of American alcohol prohibition, it is astounding that these assumptions still hold sway in United Nations' deliberations. There is little to suggest that the present worldwide drug war will produce any better results, quite the contrary. But the war will continue to enrich a large number of people, principally drug smugglers and highly respected government officials.
Who Gains by Enlisting?
There are powerful and compelling reasons why many third world governments join up in the drug war. First of all, large quantities of US aid will be distributed if they sign up, with almost no serious accounting of how it is used or into whose personal bank account it will finally be placed. And it is important not to ignore or underestimate the simple factor of personal greed as a motive for joining up as mercenaries in this war waged mainly by the United States.
Here are some recent and flagrant examples of such financial largesse as proclaimed by President Bush and reported by Jim Lobe, April 10, 2001 in the Inter Press Service:
Bush wants an additional 800 million dollars for bilateral economics and security assistance for Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela and Panama. The State Department's current budget is some 460 million dollars. The most startling increases are to go to South America as part of the war against drugs. Bush wants to provide 731 million dollars in new funding for the Andean Counter Drug Initiative, a continuation of Plan Colombia to which Washington has already committed some 1.6 billion dollars. Under the ACI budget Colombia will receive another 252.5 million dollars for interdiction and eradication.
The new sums of money will be spread over a large part of South America.
Peru who gets $48 million currently will receive $158 million next year. Bolivia will receive 101 million dollars, divided between the military and development. Ecuador will receive an additional 30 million dollars. Peru will go from $48 million to $156 million. Brazil is to get $15 million, Venezuela $10 million, and Panama 11 million dollars.
Moreover, the imperial ambitions of a series of US governments are to use the drug war as a pretext to spread their political and economic influence far beyond the Americas. Jim Lobe, in the report cited above, says, "Washington proposes to double military training assistance for Angola, Erithrea, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Yemen. Nor is this all, military financing will be increased for Nigeria, South Africa, Philippines, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The Caribbean region will get $4.8 million, and El Salvador, long-suffering El Salvador, will receive $3.5 million."
Little or nothing is said either about who will be the people responsible for spending so much money or how it will be accounted for. Therefore, such "aid" money is still as tempting to politicians in the aforementioned countries as it has proved to be elsewhere.
Another motive encouraging the governing elites in third world countries, where there are indecently huge gaps between rich and poor, to enlist in the drug war is that they will be given the chance to wipe out militant opposition. This is especially important when the opposition overtly claims itself to be Marxist or socialist. Bolivia and Colombia, later examined in more detail, present clear examples of such motives.
Money for arms, for modern equipment, for training military and paramilitary in advanced techniques frequently seems irresistible to shaky governments who are unable to control opposition by peaceful means alone.
What The US Gains
As the Narcotics Affairs Section Officer at the US Embassy in Colombia said to a journalist in July 2001, "We have a chance of killing two birds with one stone, inflicting the heaviest blow ever to cocaine trafficking and ending the longest-running Marxist insurgency in the world."
Although the US military had repeatedly said, "The Department of Defense will not step over the line that divides counter-narcotics from counter-insurgency", Mario Salazar, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Drug Enforcement Policy, claimed in his statement to a US congressional committee that they do so in practice, frequently and deliberately.
For example, when a plane spraying herbicides in Colombia and piloted by an American mercenary was attacked, an armed combat helicopter came to its rescue. Aboard that combat helicopter were a number of US military personnel on active service. The same is true today of the crews who man armed patrol boats that cruise the backwaters of Colombian rivers. Even more unashamedly open is the use of complex surveillance systems, owned, operated and manned by the US Navy, that continue to turn over their information to the Colombian army whose prime mission remains the destruction of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerrillas.
It was information furnished by US military intelligence personnel that led to the accidental shooting down of an innocent civilian plane in Peru. It was suspected of transporting cocaine. None was found and no apologies were offered, but the senior President Bush closed down this sort of mission later, at least overtly.
Dirty Work for Profit: The Case of Colombia
Winfred Tate of New York University declared in his article of June 2000, on "Colombia's Role in the International Drug Industry", "Since the early 1980s drug traffickers, together with landowners and local military commanders have formed paramilitary organizations to clean their territory of guerrillas and alleged guerrilla sympathizers and to protect land, cattle and cocaine laboratories and strategic shipping routes."
This was in spite of the fact that the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had labelled the paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño a major drug trafficker. He remains the leader of the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an umbrella group of paramilitaries that the US State Department itself claimed was responsible for more than 70 per cent of Colombia's human rights abuses.
Therefore leaders of such countries, allied to powerful economic interests, are in a win–win situation. They get money and arms to fight drug production while they are able to use both to wipe out any domestic opposition and quietly protect their own profitable activities in the illegal drug trade.
Martin Hodgson, author of an article in the Guardian of February 27, 2001, noted, "Unemployment and poverty are plagues of the region. The paramilitaries launched a campaign of massacres and assassinations to drive out the FARC guerrillas who had dominated the region for decades. Their success helps explain the lack of guerrilla resistance to the fumigation campaign in Putamayo." A local ombudsman said, "We shouldn't just be eradicating coca, we should be eradicating poverty."
Nor is misuse of funds and corruption confined to third world leaders and elites. The hands of many American drug warriors are dirty as well. As a former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit, Dennis Dayle said, "In my 30-year history in the DEA and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."
Moreover, former US military officers of all ranks supply know-how, training and equipment ranging from razor wire to soft drinks and fence posts, to the ongoing drug war in Colombia. Pilots of helicopters spraying herbicides, formerly in the official US Army or Air Force, are hired as private consultants, by firms run by former generals and high officers. All of them are purely mercenaries, whose clearest motive is hence personal profit, with all that it implies.
New Hi-Tech Strategy
Since the assumptions of alcohol prohibition have been so widely accepted, it stands to reason that the strategy and means to enforce them will be the same. They are, but on a far larger scale than could have been imagined in 1919 when US prohibition of alcohol was declared and later enshrined in an amendment to the US Constitution itself. They now include, as in the examples just cited, the use of armed force, air surveillance, army and navy trained troops, and the latest techniques of disinformation and assassination.
The most modern technology and those who know how to operate it have already been brought into active service in Colombia. With the latest equipment for space-spying, as well as the ability to listen in on all radio communications, the armed forces of Colombia and the US claim that they know where the enemy is at all times, where its bases are located as well as its labs, its growing fields and its river routes.
While conventional army brigades concentrate on securing the towns, special river units trained by the US Navy patrol the rivers to shut down water routes. This scenario evokes sad reminiscences of the war in Vietnam and scenes from the film Apocalypse Now. And the moral seems to be: let civilians beware if they find themselves accidentally in the line of fire of these special units.
But the US excuse that its presence helps developing countries deal with their problems, is wearing very thin. Ann Carrigan, writing in the Irish Times, February 10, 2001, in an article entitled, "The Plan Colombia is a Foolish Drug War", says simply that, "The plan, based almost entirely on military strategies, could lead to America's next proxy war in Latin America." Mark Bowden, reporting from Colombia for Prospect Magazine in the UK, 2001, reports that, "Dyncorp in charge of spraying operations employs retired US military men on a $170 million contract. Those under contract work alongside US Special Forces soldiers from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who have been rotating through in higher numbers."
The new counter-drug battalions have been trained and outfitted and are covertly guided by the US Army Special Forces themselves. How many they are is unknown and a guarded secret. There are at least an estimated 500 soldiers and pilots, as well as special Signals Intelligence and electronic eavesdropping programmes. Even more sinister are the special "black ops" men who hunt down and kill those targeted, notes Bowden in his special report on Colombia.
No One Wants a Bad Name
Another point worth stressing is that no one, not even the corrupt members of a third world country government, can easily tolerate their stigmatisation broadcast in world media dominated by American networks. They risk being portrayed as leaders of countries where pathetic and ignorant peasants produce dangerous drugs and vicious and murderous "drug lords" distribute them to innocent people in other countries far away.
It has become an open secret that the DEA, the CIA and the Pentagon currently suggest themes for such films and oversee their production. The usual excuse offered is that they are merely checking for technical accuracy.
Another attractive feature, already noted, is that such governments have only to join up officially and publicly. This does not prevent them from continuing their own discreet and profitable connection with the drug distribution network. There is proof that high officials in Latin American countries, like Mexico, Peru and Colombia, have done so. A prominent Peruvian official even recorded his own secret video films that show him corrupting political leaders with money gained by the drug trade. These films have been released on international TV channels. Moreover, leaders of poor countries publicly join the drug war and don the colourful costumes of anti-drug crusaders. These are not negligible benefits.
However, the sums of money to fight the drug war, the uniforms, guns and planes contribute to large-scale political corruption, and contaminate both the giver and the receiver.
Unfortunately for the poor people in such countries, these large sums of money, so badly needed for social purposes like health or education, are diverted to the drug war and never accounted for. No one knows, nor can find out, just where all these millions and even billions go. But past experience shows that they often find their way into the pockets and foreign bank accounts of the high officials of such countries as Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Myanmar, Pakistan and others.
Less well known, and hotly contested by those who benefit, is the profit skimmed off by the American officials themselves who are the main actors of the international drug war. One of the prime advantages to such officials is that by definition the CIA, the DEA and all their covert operations, are not open to public scrutiny or review by democratically elected bodies.
It would be unwise to overlook career advancement for diplomats, such as the current US ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson. She is a drug war veteran and proud of it. She has worked in Peru and El Salvador, and is now in Colombia where she firmly supports the Pentagon official who, when interviewed in her office, bluntly described the plan as "a surgical application of violence". Neither of them acknowledged that surgery of any kind always means pain, suffering, and loss of blood.
A recent trend, amply demonstrated in the case of Colombia, is to have foreign military personnel wear thin disguises as private contractors. Most are former officers and veterans of the US Army, Navy and Special Forces. Such men are generously paid and maintain close and amicable relations with those officially in charge of drug war operations. They are employed to train troops, act as special anti-drug battalions, do aerial spraying, and high-level computerised spying using official US Army, US Navy and US Air Force material. This can be seen clearly in the Plan Colombia launched by President Clinton and continued by President Bush and it shows no signs of ending.
Other deep and far-reaching motives for bringing drug wars into third world countries are the exploitation of precious mineral resources, from oil to the large forests to be cut down and sold, precisely in areas where illegal drug plantations supposedly exist. Finally, there is a real lust of multinational corporations to exploit, in the true sense of the word, the large tracts of virgin land although that furthers the destabilisation of the world eco-system.
Key members of Amnesty International, interviewed by Constance Garcia-Barrio in the Philadelphia Inquirer of March 2001, claimed that the US has just such a hidden agenda in the war on drugs, namely, getting and keeping control of Colombia's resources, like gold, silver and copper.
The most amazing feat of paid propaganda has been to convince the governments of the world, publicly at least, that those drugs the US and UN designate as "illegal" present a grave threat to the existence of the US and potentially all the countries in the world. Three recent US presidents have gone so far as to publicly claim that these drugs even present a menace to civilisation itself.
Why Poor Farmers Do Not Enlist
After looking at the major reasons why so many governments enlist in the drug war, we have to explore why so many peasants and poor farmers from Afghanistan and Bolivia to the American South resist. Put simply, it is because they are the main targets and victims of the drug war. Their crops are destroyed, and not only the illegal ones. Their environment is poisoned and their food supply made precarious. As if this were not enough, American trained death squads, often costumed as paramilitary soldiers, working in close collaboration with the official military, kill innocent people and often burn down the villages they leave behind them.
The first response of the poor people is to flee, but in some cases, like Colombia, they enlist in an armed Marxist guerrilla group. Ironically, such groups may encourage the production of coca bushes and poppy fields to generate the resources needed by themselves and the peasants.
When drug war violence provokes internal or external exodus of poor people the negative impact is tremendous; thousands attempt to flee to neighbouring countries that may be as poor as their own. These refugees are often in desperate need. Every exodus of poor farmers, even within the borders of their own country, poses problems of health, food supplies, and the necessity of finding work for such people. There are probably more people displaced in Colombia and Bolivia by the drug war than there are cocaine-dependent users in the United States for whose benefit this war is supposedly being waged.
As Kathryn Wolford, president of the Lutheran World Relief, recently returned from one battle zone said, "[The] US isn't helping Colombia. Communities are caught in the crossfire and then denied the option of neutrality by the combatants. An estimated two million people are displaced internally. The unrest caused by the violence spills over the border and creates problems with Ecuador." Mistakenly, the Ecuador government has turned to the US requesting additional funds to deal with the problems that the US has helped to create.
Moreover, things often look very different to local people who consider locally produced drugs such as coca paste, for example, as a reasonably innocuous but valuable commodity. Here is just such a case.
Where a Little Coca Is As Good As Gold
Juan Forero in The New York Times on the web, July 8, 2001 wrote, "The drug pharmacy in the hot stifling jungle town of Camelias looks ordinary but customers pay their bills with clear plastic bags of coca paste." The FARC runs things, controlling roads, punishing lawbreakers, and building bridges. People are often paid for their work in coca paste but that does "not mean the inhabitants themselves are cocaine addicts or gang members". The rebels keep the peace by forbidding drug consumption. Those who violate the ban end up on road-paving or bridge-building duty. The guerrillas forbid young single men, most susceptible to drug use, to be paid in coca paste.
"That's the way it works in the Cagnan river region," explains a villager. "We are a coca culture. Our money, sometimes during the year, is coca base but we use it as currency. No one here consumes the drug."
But on the other hand a good example of CIA show business was used to help another general in Asia. Before a huge fire on TV in 1972 the general was shown burning 26 tons of seized "opium". Not all of this was opium but just rubbish, yet the general was awarded a large sum on camera for surrendering his supposed "last supply" of opium.
Drug War—Anti-Honesty, Anti-Human Rights
General Phao in Thailand was able to use the CIA-created power for his own rackets in shipping heroin and the repression of dissidence. Sulzberger of the The New York Times called him a "superlative crook" and a Thai diplomat described him as "the worst man in the whole history of Thailand". He was allegedly responsible for mass arrests of students and intellectuals and repression of all dissidence.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released a report in February 2001 that detailed "Colombia's failure to meet a single human rights requirement of Plan Colombia". This was in spite of the promises by government to take care of the local population while ridding the land of bad elements. There are repeated reports of what resembles ethnic cleansing of black and indigenous people as well as savage massacres of anyone the paramilitary or military want to eliminate.
This is what it means to be in a battle zone of the drug war. The governors of six states affected by aerial spraying of herbicides are strongly opposed to it. Environmentalists note that these US-sponsored operations violate EPA and even Monsanto recommendations for the chemical's use. Six months after fumigation began, almost none of the alternative development, human rights or judicial aid had been delivered as was observed by Winfrate Tate of New York University in his article of June 2001 on "Colombia's Role in International Drug Industry".
If this seems too abstract a picture consider these observations of an English journalist in the Guardian. "Luckily for the students, the village school was closed the day the crop dusters, escorted by combat helicopters, doused the tin-roofed classrooms with herbicides." According to the schoolteacher, "They sprayed the coca but they also killed all our food crops." His children complained of rashes, headaches, and vomiting after the weed killer fell on the village. The reporter noted the half-dead fruit trees, withered maize plants and row upon row of skeletal coca plants, but senior Colombian officials said the operation was a resounding success because 29,000 hectares of coca were destroyed in Putamayo State, although they admitted that high winds might drift the weed killer off target.
Carlos Palacios, Peace Informers Network, accused the Colombia military of spraying rainforests indiscriminately. In La Hormiga, a small city in the Amazon territory, the spraying killed medicinal plants and food crops such as yucca. Glyophosphate seeps into the soil and water. Fish die in contaminated rivers.
In other regions, farmers have lost their cows and other farm animals and the country is barren of birds and butterflies now. This was reported as observed by Constance Garcia-Barrio in the Philadelphia Inquirer in March 2001. She went on to add, "And, as if this were not disastrous enough, work is going on right now in American laboratories to research newer chemicals and mutating fungus that will adhere better to vegetation."
Not surprisingly, government ministers keep their eyes well shut to the damage this crop-spraying may have caused. Colombia's environment minister, Juan Myer, maintains that such fumigation causes no real harm. The Ecuadorian Minister of the Environment Lourdes Luque agrees with him. Neither has visited the area in person (Anti-Fumigation Takes Toll, Kinto Lucas, July 8, 2001).
The European Parliament Wakes Up
In Putamayo, recent aerial spraying has already caused social and environmental havoc," wrote Ann Carrigan for the Irish Times and The New York Times in February 2001. Convinced of this, the European parliament voted 474 to 1 to reject Plan Colombia because of human rights, and army plus paramilitary complicity in such violations.
"Colombia's traditional economy is in crisis. Since Colombia opened its agricultural markets in the early 1990s, the coffee harvest has been reduced almost by half. Ten years ago agricultural imports to Colombia were 700,000 tons and today they are seven million. Also one million rural jobs have been lost in the last decade." It is hardly surprising that many small peasants have turned to coca production that allows them to earn some money. It is worth examining other examples of how governments and simple farmers react differently to the drug war.
In spite of all the brave talk from President Fox of Mexico, who swore to President Bush in front of the TV cameras, that he would put an end to corruption in his country, in January 2001 one of the major drug barons was allowed to escape from prison with the complicity of the guardians there, reported Yvette Laudy, from Florida.
After his ringing declaration with President Bush about the energy and conviction of the Mexican government to fight the drug war, President Fox expressed his gratitude that Mexico would be granted a "grace period, free from the constraints of the US certification system that threatens punishment to countries deemed to be falling down on the job of combating drug trafficking. This will give us time," he said (AFP, February 19, 2001).
Important exceptions can frequently be made for those third world governments pledging allegiance to the US drug war but carrying on gangster business at the same time. Afghanistan, Mexico and Peru provide dramatic illustrations of this.
Nor is that all. In the US itself a story was published at about the same time, on August 5, 2001, in the Oregonian, entitled, "Meth amphetamine. It's the New Illegal Drug of Choice", by Kyle Odegard. The article is all about a craze for using homemade amphetamines by illegal drug users in Oregon.
Police and narcotic squads such as that run by Detective Mike Schultz of the Blue Mountain Enforcement Narcotics Team are on full alert there. There will be arrests, searches of cars and trucks, without the formality of search warrants at traffic lights and all the dramatic activities of another drug war. What makes this case so interesting is that the illegal drug makers are stealing anhydrous ammonia from the fertiliser tanks on farms. Labs are simple and easy to make.
The author of the article observes that, "It's a new meth world and the makers and dealers of illegal substances are gaining the upper hand in the war against the drug. Also, meth is being made in labs in California and Mexico and driven up the main highways of the Northern United States."
Some people feel meth may replace cannabis, "marijuana" as the drug of choice, Ms Odegard claims. What she does not mention but should be stressed is the fact that cannabis is a mild hallucinogenic and amphetamine a very strong stimulant. It seems unlikely therefore that the latter, with its quite different effects, will ever replace the former, unless the choice of drug users changes from hallucinogens to stimulants.
And so the familiar scenario for another drug war begins to unfold as the Oregon legislature unanimously passes a bill to increase penalties for anhydrous ammonia thefts, adding the fertiliser to a list of precursor chemicals. Policemen and legislators express concern over the risk run by producers of the meth of getting seriously burned in the production process. But no mention is made of the fact that when the drug is made legally such accidents rarely, if ever, occur.
In spite of this government and police concern, the author of the article interviewed an "addict" recovering from treatment who said the drug is still easy to obtain and becoming cheaper all the time.
An educated guess might be that this meth alarm heralds a new attempt to revitalise the worldwide drug war. This alarm will prove to be as mendacious as the "crack epidemic" in the US in the 1980s. Moreover, the impossibility of controlling all the fertiliser tanks in Oregon, not to mention any place that farmers in the subcontinent of the US store their manure, means that this campaign promises to be a long-drawn-out affair which probably delights all the narcotic squads in the nation. The drug war begun by the US at home and abroad may prove to be longer in duration than the Hundred Years War between England and France in the Middle Ages.