WAR ON DRUGS BECOMES WAR ON POOR

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Cochabamba, Bolivia -- Josue celebrated his first birthday last month, on
the Fourth of July. We were going to have a party for him. Instead the
bright-eyed boy with a thick mop of black hair spent his birthday in a
Bolivian jail cell with his mother, our friend Adela.

While Americans celebrated the birth of justice and freedom, here Adela and
Josue sat in an overcrowded jail cell, innocent victims of a "guilty until
proven innocent" law that is a staple of the U.S. "War on Drugs". Our
family has known Adela for eight years. A tiny woman who stands barely five
feet tall, she worked as a cook in the religious retreat house where we
once lived. We came to admire her most as a mother, who was raising four
warm and caring daughters, and then Josue. She has now been in jail for six
weeks. Her daughters are able to visit her for just two hours a day. Her
case is emblematic of the cruel turn the U.S. anti-drug effort has taken
here in Bolivia.

Adela and Josue's nightmare journey into jail began June 23, with a
birthday party for Adela's mother. Adela and her children went to her
mother's house to make a special meal and a cake. At 4:00 in the afternoon
there was a knock at the door. A cousin, whom she had met only twice
before, arrived in a taxi, saying he'd come to pick up two large plastic
bags in a storage room. The cousin entered, retrieved the bags and left,
all in the space of less than five minutes.

Two hours later there was another knock at the door, this time officers
from the FELC, Bolivia's feared anti-narcotics police. Adela's cousin, she
was told, had been arrested with two large bags of marijuana and had given
the police a false name. They insisted that Adela come to the jail to
identify him. With Josue in her arms, she went with the police to identify
the cousin. But instead of allowing them to leave, the police locked both
mother and child into 6 x 12 foot concrete cell, which they share with a
dozen other women and their children and infants.

No one in the case has alleged that Adela knew what was in the bags or had
anything to do with their presence in the house. According to the
prosecutor's own filings with the court, the evidence against her consists
of only this: The same cousin who lied to police about his name also
claimed that Adela, not he, carried the bags from the house to the taxi. In
the eyes of U.S.-financed prosecutors, that is evidence enough to put her
in jail -- for years.

"I've always accepted that I am poor, that I wear old clothes," said Adela.
"I never chose to do anything illegal to change that. Never in my life did
I think I would be here."

Like all those accused of a drug-related crime here, Adela is being
prosecuted under Bolivia's notorious Law 1008, a Draconian statute under
which all those accused are presumed guilty and held in jail until trial.
According to Bolivian human rights groups, that wait usually takes years.
More than 1,000 of the nearly 1,400 prisoners jailed in Cochabamba have
never been sentenced, never had the chance to defend themselves at trial.

The situation is so desperate that last April a hunger strike protest swept
though all five local jails. Four women inmates sewed their mouths shut
with heavy needles and thread. Ten others crucified themselves to a jail
balcony.

"The law gives the police the power to decide who is guilty and who goes to
jail," says Gloria Rose Marie de AchE9, a Bolivian attorney who
specializes in criminal law. "That is supposed to be decided by judges, but
not here.

U.S. involvement in the drug war and with the "guilty until proven
innocent" law runs deep. How much of a hand U.S. officials had in writing
the law is subject to debate.

"It is a law that was written first in English," claims Hugo Mantera Lara,
an attorney with the Permanent Assembly on Human Rights. In 1988 the Reagan
administration froze 50 percent of U.S. aid until the Bolivian Congress
approved the law. While U.S. Embassy officials deny that they dictated the
specifics of the anti-drug law, U.S. officials have also long praised it.

"What is Draconian?," argued then U.S. Ambassador Richard Bauer in a 1994
Bolivian press interview. "I have read the law, I know it well and it is a
very good law."

Regardless of the American role in the origins of Law 1008, today the U.S.
government is clearly the chief financier of its implementation. The
special prosecutor for the drug law, Graciela Thompson Aguillar, the woman
who decided to prosecute Adela, receives a special salary bonus of $1,400 a
month (a huge sum in Bolivia) directly from the Narcotics Affairs Section
of the U.S. Embassy. A local newspaper refers to her by her nickname, "made
in U.S.A."

The special drug police, the same ones who tricked Adela into the jail,
also receive their salaries from the U.S. Embassy. "The U.S. dictates how
the war on drugs is fought in Bolivia," says Kathryn Ledebur,
co-coordinator of the Andean Information Network, a human rights group that
monitors the impact of anti-narcotics programs here.

In exchange for this U.S. cash, drug prosecutors and police need something
to show their financiers, and what they use are arrest statistics. Twice
each year the special drug police forces release a report trumpeting
increases in arrests.

These arrest rates are then echoed by U.S. officials in their reports to
Congress. "Arrests are up by 42 percent," brags the report on Bolivia
released by the State Department last February. But who is getting
arrested, the innocent or the guilty?

Too many of the cases are just like Adela's: the innocent and the poor
tossed in jail to make good arrest numbers, along with the smallest of
operators with the tiniest amounts of drugs in their possession. While
arrests jumped by half, drug seizures stayed the same, more evidence that
what the drug net is catching is somebody other than drug kingpins.

Documentation by human rights groups explains the real story behind the
numbers: passengers on a bus arrested and jailed because someone else's bag
with narcotics was found under their seats; taxi drivers jailed for years
because they picked up a fare on the street who turned out to be carrying
narcotics. Says attorney, de Ache, "What they want is the largest number of
arrests. They don't care who's innocent and who's not."

It is also clear immediately, when you enter the jail where Adela and Josue
are held, that the people who get trapped in the anti-drug net are
Bolivia's poor. Those with resources are usually able to buy their way out,
either with well-financed defenses or, according to many, with payments to
police under the table.

The very few people of means who do get arrested are treated like royalty.
In the Cochabamba jails, cash will buy you a private cell with carpeting,
cable television, a cell phone and police willing -- for a price -- to
bring everything from alcohol to women. The poor sleep on cold patios,
unless they can come up with $300 (a half year's salary here) to buy a
bed-sized cell.

Today the U.S. Embassy here says that it supports legal reforms under
consideration by the Bolivian Congress, changes aimed at reducing some of
the injustices under the current law. "But what is going to happen to the
hundreds of people already in jail under the anti-drug law?" asks Ledebur.
"That remains completely unclear." And while reforms are debated, the U.S.
funds for the police and prosecutors keep on flowing.

Meanwhile, at the jail, the winter nights left Josue with a lung infection
and Adela had to send her still-nursing baby to a hospital in the hands of
her teenage daughters. As a parent, I try to imagine what those few days
must have been like: having one of my children fall ill, and finding myself
locked away, unable even to speak to the doctor.

When we visit, Adela's daughters are also there, sometimes in good spirits,
sometimes in tears with their mother. We all know that if Adela is forced
to stand trial, her wait in jail could last years.

"I am suffering here inside, but so are my daughters and I can't do
anything," Adela tells me. "I only hope that someone, somewhere can do
something to help, a miracle from God, something."