U.S. DRUG WAR BREEDING DISCONTENT

The next U.S. president may have to be more creative to obtain greater
Latin American cooperation in the war on drugs: One can sense a growing and
increasingly open regional discontent with current U.S. anti-drug policies.
Even Argentina, one of the closest U.S. allies in South America, is keeping
a prudent distance from the $1.3 billion U.S. military package to fight
drugs in Colombia, and is beginning to criticize publicly what it sees as a
narrow-minded U.S. focus on drug interdiction and eradication in countries
such as Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

At his office last week, Foreign Minister Adalberto Rodriguez Giavarini
summed up the growing regional frustration by recalling what he saw during
a recent visit to neighboring Bolivia.

The Argentine foreign minister was planning to congratulate Bolivian
President Hugo Banzer for his successful U.S.-sponsored coca eradication
program, which has eliminated more than 90 percent of the country's illegal
coca crops. Instead, he found Banzer in a devastating political and
economic crisis, ironically caused by the very success of his antidrug
plan. A revolt by 35,000 angry coca growers had paralyzed Bolivia, and
widespread street protests had caused at least 10 deaths and $200 million
in economic loss. According to Bolivian government estimates, Bolivia has
lost $700 million in illegal drug income over the past two years. There is
a near unanimous consensus in Latin America that U.S.-financed programs to
help coca growers switch to other crops are not providing enough funds to
help growers make up for their lost income. To make things worse, Europe
and the United States are making it increasingly difficult for Latin
American countries to export their legal crops.

In addition to greater efforts to curb drug consumption, the United States
and Europe should also do more to curb their own exports of chemicals used
to produce cocaine, he said. These chemicals are being dumped into Amazon
jungle rivers, creating an ecological damage without precedent in the
region. At a Sept. 1 summit of South American presidents in Brazil, some
countries such as Venezuela and Brazil also expressed growing uneasiness
with U.S. military aid to Colombia, which includes 500 U.S. military
trainers. My own conclusion: Unless the next U.S. president comes up with
new antidrug plans with greater responsibilities for drug-consuming
countries, there will be a growing confrontation over the drug war. And
even the closest U.S. allies will be on the other side of the fence.