NOTES FROM HERE AND THERE

IN PANAMA, SOUNDS LIKE MORE OF SAME

The United States is closing its bases in the Canal Zone but (big surprise)
has a tentative agreement with Panama to operate an international
drug-interdiction center at Howard Air Force Base with as many as 2,000
U.S. troops. Newsday's Geoffrey Mohan quotes Miguel Antonio Bernal, a
University of Panama constitutional law professor, as saying, ``They can
put any name they want on it. The monkey, even if it is dressed in silk, is
still a monkey. This will be a military base in disguise, and all of Panama
knows it.''

In Mohan's report, Everett Briggs, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama,
questions ``the crying need for a continued American presence there.'' And
drug policy expert Peter Smith, who is director of UC San Diego's Center
for Iberian and Latin American Studies, wonders which priority is pushing
which

- --do we want to be in Panama because of the drug war or is the drug war a
justification for having troops in Panama?

No Latin American country has announced that it will play a part in this
``international center,'' but canal users seem pleased that the United
States will stay.

Part of the U.S. center's proposed mission is to train paramilitary police
forces, but to do what? In Latin America, the drug war and plain-old
counterinsurgency often overlap -- and result in the killing of civilians.
U.S. Air Force Colonel David Hunt told Mohan, ``How these are melded in the
country involved is something that has to be determined by these countries
themselves.''

We just train them -- what they do isn't our responsibility.

©1998 San Francisco Chronicle