THE ANTI-SMUGGLERS' BLUES

The U.S. military's effort to intercept and suppress supplies of drugs from
Latin America is more massive than it seems, and of uncertain effectiveness.

On April 20, when a Peruvian pilot in an A-37 fighter aircraft fired two
short bursts from the 7.62 caliber mini-gun mounted in his jet's nose, he
didn't know he was firing at an unarmed plane carrying Baptist
missionaries. Nor did he, or the CIA surveillance aircraft that had led him
to the civilian plane, know he was about to invite a giant spotlight onto a
little-noted but deadly battleground in America's "war on drugs."

The bullets sent the civilian aircraft plummeting to the Amazon River in
flames, killing missionary Veronica "Roni" Bowers and her 7-month-old
daughter, and severely wounding American pilot Kevin Donaldson. Bowers's
husband and son survived.

Though the tragedy apparently marked the first time that innocent civilians
were mistakenly targeted, the shoot-down pierced the veil of secrecy, or at
least of ignorance, that had shrouded what has become a routine part of
U.S.-led efforts to interdict the supply of cocaine and heroin flowing to
American shores. Since 1995, the Peruvian air force has shot or forced down
more than 30 drug trafficking aircraft as part of what the U.S. military
calls its "Joint Air Bridge Denial" program. The United States has
conducted a similar air-intercept program with the Colombian air force.

In the wake of the incident, the news coverage and widespread expressions
of surprise revealed that few Americans were fully aware of the desperate
cat-and-mouse game that U.S. military, law enforcement, and intelligence
forces play on a daily basis with drug traffickers all over Latin America.

Although government officials really don't like the phrase war on drugs,
U.S. efforts to attack drug production at its source and to interdict drug
shipments in transit do in many ways resemble a form of low-intensity
warfare. In fact, ever since the Pentagon was drafted into the drug war in
1989, U.S. counter-narcotics operations in what are called the "source
countries" and "transit zones" have increasingly been run as full-fledged,
multi-agency military campaigns.

Indeed, the military runs three full-time interagency task forces focused
solely on anti-drug operations. And although these task forces are an
alliance of federal, civilian, and military agencies--including the Coast
Guard, the Customs Service, the Border Patrol, and the Immigration and
Naturalization Service--they report to admirals and four-star generals. The
militarization of the anti-drug effort is apparent.

The risks inherent in these counter-drug operations only occasionally make
headlines. On May 20, 1997, an 18-year-old goatherd was mistakenly shot and
killed near his hometown of Redford, Texas, by an active-duty U.S. Marine
Corps drug surveillance team deployed by Joint Task Force Six, which is in
charge of anti-drug operations on the border with Mexico. Army National
Guard teams continue to conduct such surveillance missions, in an effort to
detect "drug mules" along the border. More recently, on July 23, 1999, a
U.S. Army RC-7 de Havilland reconnaissance plane crashed into an unmarked
Andean peak while on a counter-narcotics spying mission in Colombia,
killing all five U.S. service members aboard, as well as two Colombian air
force officers.

The blending of military, intelligence, and law enforcement forces in
source-country and interdiction operations has become a prominent
characteristic of the drug war, says Adm. James Loy, the four-star
commandant of the Coast Guard and the designated "interdiction coordinator"
in the U.S. counter-narcotics campaign. As the leader of the Coast Guard,
which is both a law enforcement agency and an armed service, Loy wears dual
hats.

An increasing amount of U.S. national treasure is devoted to drug
interdiction and source-country programs. While the budgets for both
efforts remain relatively small parts of overall federal drug control
spending, they have grown dramatically in recent years. Funding for
interdiction in the transit zones grew from $1.28 billion in 1995 to $2.15
billion in 2000. Funding for source-country programs increased more than
fivefold, from $295.8 million in 1995 to $1.65 billion in 2000. The Bush
Administration has requested $1.24 billion for this effort in fiscal 2002.

The explosive growth in source-country program funding reflects $1.3
billion requested by the Clinton Administration and approved by Congress
last year for "Plan Colombia," a large package of military and development
assistance designed to bolster the Colombian government as it fights an
alliance between drug traffickers and Marxist guerrillas on the one hand,
and traffickers and right-wing paramilitaries on the other. The Bush
Administration's 2002 request includes $882 million for its "Andean
Regional Initiative," a package of crop-eradication, law enforcement, and
other aid programs designed to sustain efforts in Colombia and prevent
spillover into Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

"The President of the United States has maintained that because of the
pain, deaths, and social disruptions they cause, illegal drugs are a threat
to our national security, and the military makes a huge and critical
contribution to countering that threat," said Adm. Loy in an interview. "I
would also argue that if the 52,000 deaths and $110 billion in economic
losses we suffer each year as a result of illegal drugs were being imposed
upon us by some foreign power or nation, the American people would rise up
and demand that their government do much more to fight that menace."

Drafting The Military

The U.S. military's involvement in counter-narcotics operations is not new.
U.S. Army Special Forces troops, for instance--the Green Berets--have long
trained local military forces in Central and South America in
counter-narcotics operations. Recently, U.S. Special Forces completed
training a new Colombian army counter-narcotics brigade that is armed with
American helicopters. Defense Department contract pilots have long served
as crop dusters in efforts to eradicate coca and poppies in the region.

But it was the 1989 Defense Authorization Act that assigned the U.S.
military the lead role in detecting and monitoring drug traffic in foreign
countries and in transit zones. At that time, the Pentagon formed the joint
task forces and began to fuse its command-and-control operations with
intelligence responsibilities for interdiction. Fully 70 percent of drug
seizures result from intelligence tips, many of which are collected by U.S.
spy satellites, surveillance aircraft, and other "national intelligence
means." The information is then fed into a special counter-narcotics
intelligence cell operated out of the Defense Department's Joint
Interagency Task Force East headquarters, which is housed in a nondescript,
windowless building on Key West Naval Air Station in Florida.

Last year, 40 percent of U.S. drug seizures on the high seas were conducted
by small Coast Guard detachments operating aboard U.S. Navy warships, a
tactic designed in part to skirt the federal Posse Comitatus Act forbidding
U.S. military personnel from directly serving as law enforcement agents or
making arrests. (Similarly, National Guard troops are also used at home to
support domestic counter-drug operations, because, in their nonfederal role
as "local militia" under the command of state governors, they are not bound
by strict adherence to Posse Comitatus.)

To grasp how pervasive the U.S. military presence is in Central and South
America, consider this: Pentagon-owned planes accounted for 48 percent of
the total aircraft hours flown by U.S. maritime patrols in the
source-countries and transit zones, and U.S. Navy vessels accounted for 38
percent of the total U.S. ship-days involved in the interdiction campaign
at sea. The Pentagon has also built an elaborate network of radars to
detect drug smugglers in the Caribbean, in Central and Latin America, and
in the eastern Pacific, including over-the-horizon radars with 2,500-mile
ranges based in Puerto Rico, Virginia, and Texas; remote radar stations in
host countries along the Andean Ridge; and Aerostat radar balloons tethered
in the Caribbean and along the southern U.S. border.

When Howard Air Force Base in Panama was turned over to the Panamanians in
1999, the Pentagon began building what it calls "forward operating
locations" for U.S. surveillance aircraft in El Salvador, Ecuador, and on
the islands of Aruba and Curarao. Once they are fully operational, sometime
in the next year and half, those forward bases will facilitate even more
round-the-clock air surveillance of the Andean region.

What this nation brings to the drug fight that no other country can is a
wide-ranging command-and-control and intelligence system that can
coordinate efforts by many agencies and countries. The U.S. interagency
coordination was dramatically displayed on May 3, when U.S. Coast Guard
personnel boarded the Belize-registered ship Svesda Maru in international
waters off the California coast, capturing more than 13 tons of cocaine.
U.S. officials confirm that they were first alerted to the shipment by
high-level intelligence sources, whose information was passed to Joint
Interagency Task Force West in Alameda, Calif. Operators then dispatched a
Customs Service P-3 surveillance aircraft, which eventually found the ship
and handed it off to a long-range Coast Guard C-130 aircraft for continued
tracking. The Svesda Maru was intercepted by a U.S. Navy guided-missile
frigate, and boarded by a Coast Guard detachment deployed aboard. Closer to
shore, the Svesda Maru and its crew were handed off to a Coast Guard
cutter. American officials were able to board the ship in international
waters because the United States had signed an agreement with Belize
authorizing such action, one of 22 such bilateral agreements the United
States has negotiated with countries in Central and South America and in
the Caribbean.

"Even when these drug seizures are credited to other agencies like the
Coast Guard, you often find that a good portion of the effort was put out
by the U.S. military, whether through direct assistance, intelligence, or
command-and-control support," said Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, a member of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in an interview. Given the
critical nature of Pentagon support, DeWine argues that it would be a
"serious mistake" for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to follow through
with his public suggestions that the Pentagon may want to lessen its
commitment to the counter-drug campaign. That decision awaits an internal
Pentagon review. "The U.S. military is intricately involved in virtually
everything to do with our counter-drug efforts, and to pull them back from
that mission would cripple our interdiction efforts," DeWine said.

Despite news stories lauding the "largest maritime cocaine seizure ever," a
number of aspects of the Svesda Maru incident were ominous. The ship's crew
of Russians and Ukrainians seemed to confirm intelligence indicating that
the Colombian drug cartels have formed close alliances with other powerful
international criminal organizations, including the Italian and Russian
mafias. After the United States concentrated greater assets on disrupting
the Andean "air bridge" and the Caribbean maritime routes, the ship's
course through the eastern Pacific proved once again the agility of drug
traffickers in changing their strategies and tactics in response to U.S.
pressure.

In the eyes of some critics, the most troubling aspect of the seizure is
that, despite its record size, virtually no one expects it to significantly
affect the price or availability of cocaine on U.S. streets. In fact,
following a second record-setting year of net cocaine seizures, Adm. Loy
confirms that because of increased production in Colombia and a shift of
the cocaine flow to maritime routes, the actual rate of maritime seizures,
as a percentage of the amount of drugs in the pipeline, is declining. That
trend has raised serious doubts that maritime seizure rates will meet the
goals set by the Office of National Drug Control Policy--18.7 percent of
the projected drug pipeline in 2002, and 28.7 percent in 2007.

"I frankly don't believe that we are going to be able to reach those goals,
given our current seizure rate of roughly 10 percent," said Loy. "I remain
concerned that if the National Drug Control Strategy reflects the will of
the nation vis-a-vis the `war on drugs,' then we are falling short in the
interdiction arena. That's why I believe in my heart that any long-term
solution to this problem will eventually have to come on the
demand-reduction side."

Critics of U.S. drug policy say that the well-documented inability of
interdiction efforts to affect the availability and price of illegal drugs
on American streets for any sustained period of time points to the
essential futility of the costly programs. The huge disparity between the
relatively minuscule costs of producing and processing cocaine and heroin,
and the high prices the drugs can earn on American streets, has resulted,
to date, in a plentiful supply and traffickers willing to take the risks.

"The United States should immediately stop this international war on drugs,
for the simple reason that it has been a failure in the strictest sense of
the word--meaning it has failed to achieve its stated goals of decreasing
the availability and raising the costs of drugs on American streets," said
Jacobo Rodriguez, assistant director of the Project on Global Economic
Liberty for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

In the book After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the
21st Century, Cato authors and contributors argue that the cure is worse
than the affliction it is designed to counter. "For simple economic
reasons, we can do everything short of bombing producing countries out of
existence, and drug traffickers will still find a way to supply a $60
billion-a-year U.S. market," said Rodriguez in an interview. In the
meantime, he argues, the international counter-drug efforts are undermining
stated goals of U.S. foreign policy such as strengthening democracy and the
rule of law in Latin America. "In the name of fighting the war on drugs, we
have turned a blind eye to the abuses of autocrats such as [former Peruvian
President Alberto] Fujimori, and bolstered Latin American militaries who
have historically had little respect for human rights."

Plugging The Dike

Virtually everyone who has studied drug production and trafficking patterns
over the past two decades has recognized that for every interdiction
action, there is an equal and corresponding reaction. Among drug policy
experts, a whole lexicon has sprung up to describe the phenomenon. Experts
talk about "displacement" and "backflow," or use analogies such as a
balloon or the Pillsbury Doughboy to indicate that when pressured at one
point, the flow of drugs bulges out at another.

For instance, when the United States and Peru first instituted their
shoot-down policy in 1994-95, they cut off drug-cultivating farmers in the
isolated Huallaga Valley from their airborne customers. Peruvian coca leaf
prices dropped precipitously, from $80 per 100 pounds to just $7 in some
areas, forcing many farmers out of the coca business and directly affecting
availability and prices of cocaine in the United States. But the effect did
not last long. Soon enough, traffickers were moving coca paste out of the
Huallaga through the region's vast network of rivers, and prices returned
to normal.

With a massive deployment of U.S. ships and planes, Operation Steel Web
clamped down on air and sea shipments through the Caribbean for a time in
the 1990s. But traffickers quickly changed tactics and focused on moving
drugs overland through the porous Mexican border and ferrying them along
the eastern Pacific in fishing boats. More recently, they have been
returning in force to the Caribbean with "go-fast" cigarette boats that can
easily outrun Coast Guard cutters. Although from 1995-2000, coca
cultivation in Bolivia and Peru declined a dramatic 70 percent, and overall
coca production in the region declined 17 percent, U.S. officials concede
that an explosive 166 percent increase in coca cultivation in Colombia is
rapidly making up the deficit.

Even the successful "kingpin" strategy that led to the destruction of the
monolithic and murderous Colombian Medellin and Cali cartels in the 1990s
had unforeseen, though perhaps unavoidable, consequences. With their
demise, the cocaine cartels in Colombia splintered into smaller,
less-threatening--but harder to track--organizations. Out of relative
weakness, this loose network of trafficking organizations has aligned
itself with Colombia's Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries,
mutating into a new and potentially even more virulent strain of
criminality that continues to destabilize Colombia. In an equally
troublesome result, the cash-strapped and harried Colombian cartels in the
1990s were forced to pay off Mexican cartels with cocaine rather than cash
transshipment fees as had been customary in the past--vastly increasing the
resources and power of Mexican criminal cartels.

"The most frustrating aspect of our source-country and interdiction efforts
has been the U.S. government's inability to correctly anticipate the next
move in this chess game and how it will impact U.S. interests," said Steve
Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York
City, who has written extensively on the issue. "We helped create the fix
Colombia is in now with our successes in Bolivia and Peru, and with the
kingpin strategy. If Plan Colombia is successful, it will likely hand the
drug business to Mexican cartels operating in a country that is even more
vulnerable to their corrupting influence. And while the United States
arguably could live with a failing state in Colombia, we cannot coexist
with a failed Mexican state on our southern border."

U.S. officials counter that they have learned from some of the successes
and failures of the past decade. Dramatic reductions in coca cultivation in
Peru and Bolivia in recent years, they say, have shown that the
stick-and-carrot approach of coercive eradication through crop spraying,
coupled with alternative economic development and crop substitution, can
successfully shift Andean farmers away from coca and poppy cultivation. The
critical ingredient, they argue, is sufficient will on the part of national
leaders, who must genuinely want to help their country shed the reputation
of "drug pariah," as Bolivia did with its "Dignity Plan."

"In Bolivia's case, [then President Hugo] Banzer said he was tired of
Bolivians' being stigmatized and strip-searched every time they traveled
abroad, so he instituted Plan Dignity," a senior State Department official
said. "His message to farmers was, `We will help you transition to other
crops, but we will also use the hammer of coercive coca eradication,' and
it worked. Crop eradication will still have to continue in Bolivia and
Peru, however, because this is a garden that will require continuous weeding."

Whether the source is war-torn Afghanistan, Burma's lawless Golden
Triangle, or the Marxist-guerrilla-controlled Putumayo province of
Colombia, drug cultivation and production operations gravitate to
sanctuaries where national governments lack effective control.
"Strategically, there are a finite and declining number of those places
left, which is why Plan Colombia focuses on helping the Colombian
government exert sovereign control over its entire country," said Robert
Brown, acting deputy director for supply reduction in the Office of
National Drug Control Policy. "If we don't make this effort, and the
Colombian government is ultimately forced to make some accommodation
agreeable to the drug traffickers and guerrillas, then you will see them
increasingly flood illegal drugs, not only into the United States but also
into other markets such as Europe, looking to create new demand."

Ultimately, U.S. officials who have wrestled with the counter-narcotics
campaign reject the war-on-drugs analogy precisely because it
oversimplifies a complex problem that has significant public health, law
enforcement, national security, and foreign policy dimensions.

"We all understand the fundamental fact that the supply of illegal drugs
grossly exceeds demand--always has, always will," said retired U.S. Army
Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who served as President Clinton's drug czar. That
fact, however, doesn't lessen the value of annually interdicting some 200
tons of cocaine that otherwise would go, he said, for the "initiation of
new addicts."

"We also understand that illegal drugs impose devastating damage on the
nations where they are produced, through adolescent addiction, violence,
corruption, and economic disruption," McCaffrey says. "Why shouldn't
nations such as the United States and Colombia struggle against such a
massive, evil enterprise? Why should we put 40,000 U.S. troops and billions
of dollars into the Balkans to counter ethnic conflict, yet hesitate to
stand by a close neighbor and beleaguered democracy like Colombia, with 40
million people and close social, economic, and political ties to the United
States? I always tell people, I hope you like the Colombians, because if we
walk away from this fight, you're going to see a whole lot of them showing
up on U.S. shores."