LATIN AMERICA SEES U.S. DRUG POLICY AS HYPOCRISY

Regional Discontent is Growing and Increasingly Out In the Open

BUENOS AIRES -- 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 anti-drug
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 some
$700 million in illegal drug income over the past two years.

Is Aid Inadequate?

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.

``There is a big hypocrisy at the global level: They force us to substitute
[illegal] crops that are highly profitable, yet don't allow us to export
our legal crops,'' Rodriguez Giavarini told me. ``The solution is not to
allow drugs, but to allow greater free trade.''

The Argentine foreign minister complained about what he described as a
growing protectionist trend in the United States and Europe. U.S. subsidies
for domestic agricultural producers have grown from $8 billion to $28
billion a year in the late '90s. Europe's agricultural subsidies are much
worse, reaching $150 billion a year, he said.

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, he said.

The Armies

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.

In addition to fearing that the Colombian army will end up pushing drug
traffickers and leftist guerrillas across their borders, some countries
that have unresolved border conflicts with Colombia fear that the U.S.
military assistance will give too much power to Colombia's army.

But even in countries that take a softer line about the U.S. military aid,
such as Argentina, there is widespread skepticism that the U.S.-backed
military offensive will defeat the drug cartels and their guerrilla allies.

There are generalized fears that, if it realizes that its war effort is
going nowhere, the United States will intervene with more than military
trainers in Colombia, or seek a multinational coalition to help fight the
war there.

``Nobody wants to set a precedent of U.S. military intervention in South
America,'' says Juan G. Tokatlian, a professor at the University of San
Andres who taught for nearly two decades in Colombia. ``Throughout history,
the United States intervened several times in the Caribbean Basin, but
never in South America.''

My own conclusion: Unless the next U.S. president comes up with new
anti-drug 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.