U.S. DRUG WAR FINDING ALLIES IN FORMERLY HOSTILE REGION

(MANAGUA) -- When officials here announced last week that they hope to
sign a treaty within the next few months giving U.S. military ships
the right to pursue suspected narcotics traffickers into Nicaraguan
coastal waters, the surprise was the reaction: Instead of the usual
cries of American intervention, there was dead quiet.

"Things have changed," said Oliver Garza, U.S. ambassador to
Nicaragua, who made a maritime treaty on narcotics enforcement a top
priority when he arrived here last September. "People have recognized
that an international counternarcotics effort is not only not bad,
it's actually good politics."

In a startling turnaround, cooperation with the U.S. military against
drug trafficking, which just a few years ago was political poison in
Central America, has become politically profitable.

The change is visible all around Central America:

Costa Rica, which prides itself on rejecting just about anything with
even the remotest military connection, approved what U.S. diplomats
consider a model treaty that permits not only hot pursuit of suspected
drug smugglers into territorial waters but counternarcotics flights
through Costa Rican airspace. "Our national sovereignty is being
violated daily by drug dealers, and all we have to combat it are the
equivalent of paddleboats," said Vanessa Castro, a congresswoman from
the normally anti-military Liberation party.

Honduras -- where relations with the United States have been so
prickly in recent years that President Carlos Flores went on
television to denounce American aid efforts after Hurricane Mitch --
is within weeks of signing a similar maritime agreement with Washington.

El Salvador's national police chief, Mauricio Sandoval, announced last
week that the country was beginning air and sea patrols aimed at
catching cocaine-laden ships that slip northward up the country's
Pacific coast. But Sandoval bluntly said his forces were only a
stopgap measure and that what El Salvador really needs is a treaty
that will permit U.S. vessels to work Salvadoran waters.

Guatemala, working with U.S. law enforcement agencies, last year
seized 2.6 metric tons of cocaine being trucked up the Pan American
Highway in shipping containers, the largest single bust on land in
Central American history.

El Salvador and Honduras have indicated interest in permitting one of
their airfields to be used for U.S. military aircraft monitoring
suspected drug flights from Latin America -- something that Panama
refused to do last year when it closed down Howard Air Force Base as
part of the Panama Canal turnover.

Until recently, close cooperation with U.S. counternarcotics efforts
was nearly impossible in Central America. The faintest whiff of it
brought stormy protests that governments were abandoning their
sovereignty -- and, moreover, doing so to combat something that was a
problem for gringos and not Central Americans.

The change is particularly noticeable in Nicaragua. After the
announcement of the proposed treaty on hot pursuit of drug smugglers
by U.S. military ships, the Nicaraguan army, which only a decade ago
was virtually at war with the United States, announced it was inviting
a delegation from the U.S. Southern Command to inspect the country.

Nationalist Limits

Last month, at a regional conference on combating narcotics
trafficking, the president of El Salvador's congress warned his
colleagues that nationalism had to be put aside if the Central
American countries hoped to fight drugs.

"To make a common front under a treaty is a matter of conscience,"
said Juan Carlos Deuch, "of accepting certain limitations on the
natural rights of every country on things like sovereignty, joint
patrols and extradition treaties." The other delegates applauded him.

The change couldn't come at a more welcome time for the United States.
With stepped-up enforcement efforts making the traditional Caribbean
smuggling routes more difficult, traffickers are increasingly turning
to Central America to move their product north.

About 60 percent of the cocaine leaving South America for the United
States travels through Central America, U.S. law enforcement
authorities say, because the governments leave their coastlines almost
unguarded, air coverage is spotty, and highway border crossings are
undermanned.

The Easiest Path

The result was inevitable. "Narcotraffickers take the path of least
resistance," said a DEA agent who has worked in Central America for
several years. "And here, there was almost no resistance."

But that's changing. One important factor is that the smuggling is no
longer perceived as strictly a "gringo problem," because some of the
drugs are staying behind. Cocaine use is up sharply throughout Central
America.

Another reason involves money: Central American armed forces, who once
jealously guarded their prerogatives when it came to a foreign
presence on their territory, have become enthusiastic boosters of
treaties with the United States. Their eyes nearly popped out over the
$1.6 billion U.S. military aid package proposed for Colombia.

"We think it's a good idea if the U.S. Army, the DEA, the FBI and some
others come to see what we're doing, the difficulties we have in some
places here," Nicaraguan Defense Minister Jose Antonio Alvarado said,
"so we can all get together and determine how they can help us
strengthen our strategic capacity for joint operations."

Old Quarrels Fading

More broadly, bruised feelings from the 1980s seem to be healing.
Central America's political left bitterly resented U.S. intervention
in the region during that era, and even the political right, which
backed American military assistance, bridled at the strings that were
attached.

Even though the old quarrels seem to be fading, diplomats on both
sides warn that the new spirit of cooperation could easily be
shattered if Washington pushes too far too fast. The U.S. ambassadors
in Honduras and Nicaragua were appalled last year to discover that the
State Department was about to put the two countries on its annual list
of "major drug producing and drug transit" countries.

Many U.S. diplomats say including Honduras and Nicaragua would have
been disastrously confrontational at a time when the two countries
were warming up to American overtures.

"It took a lot of lobbying by the [U.S.] ambassadors to get Nicaragua
and Honduras off that list," said an American diplomat who followed
the controversy closely. "They really had to argue, `We don't want
drugs to become the focal points of our relations here. These
countries are not Colombia.' Fortunately, it worked."