In Drug War, America Barks but Fear of Bite Fades

WASHINGTON -- The driver was late, the aide had the directions all wrong,
and as Colombia's ambassador rode up Capitol Hill the other day to defend
his country's drug-fighting record before one more skeptical audience, his
only armor was two copies of a thin, boring-looking government report.

For the emissary of a country whose drug-enforcement efforts had failed the
United States' certification test two years in a row, the ambassador, Juan
Carlos Esguerra, was looking remarkably unperturbed.

"When we didn't know what it would mean to be decertified, we were terribly
worried that it would have catastrophic effects," Esguerra said, recalling
the all-out lobbying campaigns that Colombia waged in past years in vain
attempts to avoid the Clinton administration's censure. "Once you know the
impact, you know you can handle it."

The 12-year-old federal law requires that, by the end of every February,
the White House publicly evaluate the drug-control efforts of countries
that produce or ship the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines
that are consumed in the United States.

And each year by the beginning of March, critics attack the process known
as drug certification, mostly because of the anger and irritation it
produces in U.S. relations abroad.

Lately, though, the irritation has appeared to be mostly skin deep. For
countries like Mexico -- which was fully certified again Thursday despite a
confidential assessment by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that
was stingingly pessimistic -- it has become clear, officials say privately,
that considerations like trade will outweigh dissatisfactions over the drug
issue.

Similarly, the practice of recent years has shown nations like Pakistan and
Lebanon that even if they are denied certification, their strategic
importance to the United States is such that they can expect the White
House to waive the penalties in the national interest.

Under the 1986 statute, the penalties include a mandatory halt to some U.S.
foreign aid, a requirement that the United States vote against their
applications for multilateral development bank loans, and the possibility
of trade and economic sanctions. But when the law was written, both the
Cold War power of the United States and the promise of such sanctions had a
fresher smell.

Last year, as the administration and Congress wrestled with the question of
whether to decertify Colombia for the second year in a row, the government
of President Ernesto Samper dispatched its police chief and half a dozen
cabinet members to lobby in Washington. The issue was Samper himself, and
the $6.1 million that U.S. officials say he took as a campaign contribution
from cocaine traffickers. But his government nonetheless took out full-page
advertisements in American newspapers to describe the sacrifices that
Colombia's people had made, the blood that its soldiers and police had
spilled. Brightly colored booklets detailing the country's anti-drug
achievements inundated Congress.

This winter, the strategy changed. "No publicity. No advertising.
Absolutely none," Esguerra said. "The certification issue has become less
important." (Last week, in a gesture that U.S. officials did not take
seriously, Samper offered to resign a few months early if it would improve
Colombia's relationship with the United States.)

At a Senate subcommittee hearing about certification Thursday, Sen. Joseph
Biden, D-Md., spoke up for the process. It remains, he said, "an effort to
prod other governments into action -- actions they would not otherwise take."

But in the past, U.S. officials have been able to count on at least some
flurries of police activity abroad as the judgment day nears: drug
traffickers arrested, drug crops eradicated, drug shipments seized. Recent
years have seen less and less of that kind of push.

More significant than the end of Colombia's lobbying are the issues on
which it flatly ignored U.S. appeals -- and threats of further
decertification. In November, the Samper government allowed the legislature
it controls to reinstate its extradition treaty with the United States with
the proviso that it would not apply retroactively -- and thus to the
powerful Cali Cartel bosses who are serving relatively short prison
sentences in Colombia but are wanted by U.S. courts.

The frustration of U.S. law-enforcement officials with Mexico has been
harder for some in Washington to interpret: Last year, the government of
President Ernesto Zedillo has overhauled its anti-drug force, arrested some
military and civilian officials on corruption charges and taken small but
potentially important steps toward extraditing Mexican drug criminals to
the United States.

But at what is typically the busiest time of the law-enforcement year, U.S.
agents were reporting to their headquarters that the "new" Mexican police
units were making no discernable effort to arrest the most important
traffickers.

In Pakistan, the government has steadfastly ignored U.S. pleas for the
release of a Pakistani employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration who
is serving a five-year sentence at hard labor for helping U.S.
law-enforcement agents with an undercover operation that led to the jailing
of two Pakistani air force officers on charges of heroin trafficking.

The drug-enforcement aide, Ayyaz Baluch, was found guilty of "seducing" the
officers to commit a crime. Pakistan's ambassador to the United States,
Riaz Khokhar, dismissed what he said had been open threats of
decertification over the matter. "We have lived with certain sanctions in
the past," he said in an interview. "Frankly, it won't bother us."

Some U.S. officials blame the toothlessness of decertification on the
limits of the law. Colombian officials, for their part, noted that they
have been authorized to receive more anti-drug aid since being decertified.
In Washington, support is rising for a multilateral approach to setting
drug-enforcement standards.

But even if U.S. legislators have an alternative, they may still have a
problem. "If you favor repeal of the certification statute, then you look
like you're weak on drugs," said Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the ranking
minority member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "And that's still
an uncomfortable position for a politician to be in."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company