South America

Dealing with Drugs and Revolution

BACK FROM THE DEAD -- WITH U.S. HELP

One day, a major study will have to be written on the perverse pleasure
U.S. administrations take in fostering Latin American demagoguery. It could
cite as an example Evo Morales -- the leftist, Jurassic, U.S.-bashing coca
grower who almost won the Bolivian presidency. He is the meticulous
creation of the American government.

In 1998, the United States "urged" Bolivia to put into practice the
"Dignity Plan" in the Chapare region. The Bolivian military uprooted
thousands of acres of coca plantations. By last year, coca leaf was reduced
from close to 100,000 acres to 7,000 acres (another 24,000 acres are
legally grown in other parts of the country). Tens of thousands of families
lost their livelihood overnight, unable to sell for a profit the pineapples
and bananas with which they attempted to replace coca bushes worth $400
million. The result was revolt -- violent clashes with the police, some
people killed, others injured.

The Bolivian government sent a U.S. government-paid and trained
expeditionary force of veteran soldiers. As could be expected, this force
now stands accused of atrocious human rights violations. Is it any wonder
that Morales, the son of Andean shepherds, almost made it to the presidency
by defending the right to grow coca leaves and denouncing Yankee bullies?

What can the United States show in return? The supply of cocaine into the
American market has not diminished -- official reports show street prices
are the same.

The consequences of this policy go beyond a coca-growing demagogue in
Bolivian politics and the U.S. government's failure to curb the cocaine supply.

The cause of free markets in Latin America is now in question, in part
because the United States kept promising, and did not deliver on time and
without heavy conditions, access to U.S. markets for Andean products.

The U.S. government's actions, particularly domestic agricultural subsidies
that total $50 billion -- or 21 percent of the farming industry's income --
so seriously contradict promises of free trade that many in Bolivia are now
lashing out against the very idea of free trade. While we are at it, they
reason, why not start questioning the whole reform process of the 1990s
that converted state companies into privatized monopolies?

This kind of rhetoric, bundling together the gratuitous havoc caused by
anti-drug policies and the inability of U.S.-backed policies to reduce
poverty, is what has turned Morales into a formidable political force.
Blind to it all,
Washington is simply denouncing the radicals its policies have created --
and pumping more money into the bottomless pit.

The situation is not much different in Colombia and Peru. Plan Colombia was
hailed at the end of the decade as a panacea against drug traffickers and
Marxist guerrillas, a combination that was devastating a country with many
natural resources and the most entrepreneurial business class in South America.

Under the $1.3 billion program, U.S. advisers trained Colombian troops and
provided money for Black Hawk helicopters and other equipment.

Thousands of acres of coca leaves were sprayed from the air between 1999
and 2001. Between one-quarter and one-third of a total of 400,000 acres of
coca plantations were eradicated. The result? Coca plantations moved to
Peru; the supply did not diminish. After a while, coca bushes started
springing back up in Colombia. Now they are growing in Bolivia again; 95
percent of bushes being eradicated now were recently planted.

So Congress and the Bush administration concluded that the failure of Plan
Colombia was all a problem of degree -- and a new $900 million package was
approved to carry on the same policy.

The only reason there is no Evo Morales yet in Colombia is that terrorist
organizations have so shocked the population that voters opted for a man
who embodies the tough message of resolution against that onslaught --
Alvaro Uribe.

The case of Peru is just as telling. Deciding that the hard-line policies
of Alberto Fujimori and his dark prince, Vladimiro Montesinos, were the
right way to combat terrorism and drugs, Washington accepted that the rule
of law, freedom of the press and other minutiae could be sidestepped. More
than $110 million from U.S. taxpayers poured in. For a while, incentives
given to peasants for crop substitution reduced coca growing by 60 percent.

But those plantations, of course, ended up in Colombia. A few years later,
with Peru deep in recession, its dictatorship's grip slackening and U.S.
forces helping drive plantations from Colombia, coca returned in style.
Now, Washington has tripled the amount of money devoted to coca eradication
in Peru.

Peasants there are ripping out coffee plants, cacao trees and other crops,
and replacing them with coca, which is three times as profitable. With the
Marxist Shining Path making a comeback, drug lords now pay the terrorists
for protection, and with that same money the terrorists buy their food from
peasants.

As in Bolivia, anti-U.S. sentiment is growing in Peru -- and those of us
who want good relations between the United States and Latin America, as
well as policies that expand freedom, are having a very tough time. There
is, of course, no guarantee that if U.S. policy changed, these
reinvigorated Latin American leftists who have seemingly come back from the
dead would return to their graves. But current U.S. policies are clearly
encouraging a most unpleasant phenomenon of political necrophilia.