A SPLENDID LITTLE DRUG WAR

Tragedy, Farce, And Fake Brass Cojones South Of The Border

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw, by Mark Bowden,
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 295 pages, $25

Shooting the Moon: The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other,
Ever, by David Harris, Boston: Little, Brown, 394 pages, $26.95

Stay away from drugs, kids. They'll suck every filament of moral fiber from
your soul and set your brain afire with insane delusions. In the end you'll
be murdering, kidnapping, and torturing, and you'll be rationalizing it all
for the sake of the drugs. Don't believe me? Just look at what drugs have
done to the U.S. government.

George Bush I invaded Panama, burning down entire neighborhoods of the
capital and killing hundreds of people, to collar a single two-bit
narcotrafficker. The Clinton administration embarked on a nutty $1.5
billion intervention in Colombia's civil war -- not because the guerrillas
there are Stalinist butchers, but because they sell cocaine. And when the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) mistook a plane full of American
missionaries for drug runners and helped the Peruvian air force shoot it
down, George Bush II administration officials, sounding eerily like Soviet
apparatchiks explaining how that damn Korean airliner had only itself to
blame, snapped that the missionaries should have filed a better flight plan.

In some ways, this reefer madness is not exactly news. Drug policy has been
inducing dementia in U.S. social policies for nearly a century (though
Clinton's drug czar Barry McCaffrey plumbed new depths when he argued that
letting dying cancer patients smoke marijuana would just turn them into
addicts). But it was only recently, after the end of the Cold War, that we
began letting the vice squad run foreign policy. Faster and faster, the
national security state is evolving into the narcosecurity state, which
promises to be even more ruthless.

Two new books illuminate the growing ugliness of a War on Drugs that is
rapidly losing its metaphorical status. Alas, the main revelation of David
Harris' account of Washington's confrontation with Manuel Noriega's
Panamanian mafiacracy is that the '60s left's alleged anti-imperialism was
strictly situational. As long as no communists get killed, old New Lefties
can be the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for unleashing the U.S. military
against foreign narcotraffickers. (The fact that their own butts are no
longer in danger of getting shot off, I suspect, is also relevant.)

Harris was among the most famous members of the anti-war movement of the
Vietnam era, and he paid the price for it. At Stanford, fraternity boys
jumped him and shaved his head; after graduation, he went to prison for
refusing to register for the draft. (Admittedly there were compensations;
Harris became a Hippie Chick Magnet and even got to boink Joan Baez.) That
makes his loud applause for the fanatic cops and prosecutors who goaded the
Bush administration into invading Panama all the more appalling. Of the
half-dozen or so books published over the past decade detailing the
build-up to the invasion, Shooting the Moon is by far the most gung-ho.

To hear Harris tell it, Panama is a simple postmodern cop thriller: Noriega
the Pusher was protected by his buddies at the CIA and Pentagon, who
admired his fascism, until a handful of gumshoes in Miami brought him down
through simple hard police work.

The real story was considerably more complex.

In two decades of covering Latin America, I've yet to speak to a single
U.S. official who defended Noriega. They all thought he was a liar, a
brute, and a sleazeball. Sure, he provided good intelligence on his trading
partners in Havana, but he was also a double-dealer who was passing Fidel
Castro who-knew-how-many secrets of ours. Worse yet,by early 1986,
virtually everyone in the U.S. government who paid attention to Latin
America was seriously worried that his schoolyard-bully government was
going to trigger a leftist insurrection that would jeopardize the security
of the Panama Canal.

The problem was, what could you do about it? Panama was not exactly
brimming with democratic traditions. The most popular politician in the
country was Arnulfo Arias, an anti-Semite who openly sympathized with
Hitler during World War II and who, during one of his three abortive
presidencies, rewrote the Panamanian constitution to call for the
deportation of its entire black population. (His widow, Mireya Moscoso, was
elected president in 1999. "Dr. Arias has been misunderstood," she told me.
"It's just that these men came to Panama from the West Indies and then they
didn't send home money to their families. Dr. Arias wanted them to go home
so they would support their wives and children. It was a pro-family policy.")

There simply weren't any good options in Panama. So first the Reagan and
then the Bush I administration lurched along, looking for either a coherent
political movement or, failing that, a nicer military faction to support,
while simultaneously leaning on Noriega to behave himself. Nothing worked,
least of all the pressure on the general, who seemed to become ever more
flaky as the crisis developed. By the end, Noriega was making speeches
where he smashed furniture with machetes and pounded his chest, shrieking
that he was all that stood between the gringos and their dream of the
complete plunder and rapine of Latin America. One of the few really
instructive bits in Shooting the Moon is when Harris recounts a
conversation between Noriega and a couple of U.S. marshals who be-friended
him after his jailing in Miami. What were you thinking? asks one of the
marshals. Replies a sheepish Noriega: "I guess I fucked up."

He picked a bad time for it, going round the bend just as a handful of
fanatic Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and federal
prosecutors got wind of some cocaine flights coming through Panama. Say
what you will about the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the
rest of the U.S. government -- and certainly there is much to criticize in
the way they dealt with the Noriega problem -- at least their worldview
went beyond old episodes of Hawaii Five-O. They understood that when you're
dealing with a guy who has his own army and controls the Panama Canal, it's
a little more complicated than barking, "Book 'em, Danno."

The cops suffered under no such intellectual restraints. There was a war on
drugs, that's what they'd heard, and they were going to fight it. Their
attitude can be summed up fairly in the words that Harris admiringly quotes
from Kenny Kennedy, the No. 2 man in the DEA's Miami office: "The taxpayers
hired me to put fuckin' dope peddlers in jail, and that's what I do." Yup,
that's the kind of guy we want dictating U.S. foreign policy.

Or at least Harris does. He ridicules the Reagan officials who complained
that fighting communism in Central America might be more important than
eliminating a single cocaine smuggling route. (That's all Panama was, a
transshipment point that the Colombian cocaine cartels could and did map
around when it was eventually shut down.) He sympathizes with the federal
prosecutor who complains bitterly that Washington won't twist Spain's arm
for the extradition of a Colombian narcotrafficker because it might mean
the loss of all U.S. air bases in Spain. Basically, he agrees that no price
is too high to pay to fight drugs.

And in the end, that's the situation that developed. The single-minded
agenda of the cops pushed aside everything else, the dithering State
Department policy makers and the Pentagon's caution and any number of White
House officials who knew better but were crippled by allegations of
involvement in other scandals like Wedtech or Iran-contra and were afraid
to say no for fear they would be accused of quashing a dope case. At a cost
of hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives -- the majority of
them civilian bystanders -- the United States invaded Panama to arrest
Manuel Noriega.

As it turned out, Kenny Kennedy's claim that he didn't go for "no
sweetheart deals and that kinda shit" was, like so much drug-cop talk,
merely the clanking of phony brass balls. To convict Noriega, the strike
force had to make a flurry of deals with other accused narcotraffickers,
bargaining a collective 1,435 years in prison down to 81. And by the time
Noriega went on trial, official U.S. estimates of the cocaine flowing
through Panama were higher than ever. Some victory!

We may get another crack at it. Cuban-American organizations in Miami are
spending millions right now to lobby prosecutors to indict Fidel Castro for
murder for sending his MiGs to shoot down a couple of little unarmed exile
planes patrolling the waters off Cuba in 1996, looking for rafters. Thus
far the exiles have had no luck pressing their case. Sooner or later,
though, it will occur to them that the drug issue is more potent.

Compared to the invasion of Panama, Killing Pablo, the tale of how the U.S.
government used a death squad to hunt down and murder Colombian drug
traffickers, is probably just a footnote in the story of official
counternarcotics mayhem. But what a footnote!

In brisk prose and compelling detail, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark
Bowden (who chronicled U.S. military misadventures in Somalia in Black Hawk
Down) documents the murderous impulse that lies at the heart of U.S.
counternarcotics programs in Latin America. Down there among the little
brown people, freed of the nettlesome constraints of meddling judges and
pesky American Civil Liberties Union attorneys and nosy reporters,
America's drug warriors could make their sanguinary dreams come true.

The story begins in 1989, when Washington sent a top-secret Army
intelligence unit known as Centra Spike to help the Colombian government
corral the leaders of the mighty Medellin cocaine cartel -- especially its
top man, a pudgy little psychopath named Pablo Escobar whose fondnesses
included teenage hookers and roasting enemies alive. Using small spy planes
to intercept communications -- particularly cell phone calls -- Centra
Spike was able to pinpoint the locations of cartel leaders and pass them
along to the Colombians.

That sounds like innocent enough police work, but it wasn't. The first time
Centra Spike produced a narcotrafficker's address, the Colombians didn't
try to arrest him. They sent a squadron of T-33 fighter-bombers to
annihilate him.

Washington neither complained nor backed away. Instead, it dived in deeper.
Eventually the FBI, CIA, DEA, the National Security Agency, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Army's Delta Force, the Navy, and the
Air Force would all be lending a hand. At one point, there were so many
American spy planes circling overhead in Colombia that the Air Force had to
assign an airborne warning-and-control center (AWACs) just to keep track of
them all.

The American aid to Colombian security forces continued even when the U.S.
operatives saw them torturing suspects. Even when U.S. soldiers concluded
that the Colombians were flinging captured men out of helicopters. And even
when the Colombians organized Escobar's rival narcotraffickers into a death
squad known as the People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar, or "Pepes" for short.

The Pepes murdered not just suspected drug barons but their lawyers, cab
drivers, real estate agents, apartment building managers, horse trainers,
and maids -- perhaps as many as 300 people in all. There was overwhelming
evidence that they were using intelligence supplied by Centra Spike and
other U.S. agencies to target their killings, but the Americans never
blinked. An American DEA agent, Javier Pena, was so chummy with the Pepes
that one of them presented him with a gold watch. Pena is now in charge of
the DEA office in Bogota.

It's a complicated tale that might have overwhelmed a lesser writer, but
Bowden skillfully weaves a narrative studded with anecdotes that are
hilarious, horrifying, and tragic, sometimes simultaneously. No magical
realist could have imagined Escobar's young daughter wandering the lobby of
a deserted Medellin hotel, singing her own lyrics to an old Colombian
Christmas hymn: "The Pepes want to kill my father, my family, and me."

Pablo Escobar was eventually killed,though not by the Pepes; he was
probably murdered by a Colombian cop as he lay on the ground, helpless from
a leg wound. His death and the destruction of the Medellin cartel barely
caused a blip in Colombia's cocaine trade, which passed into the hands of
the country's Marxist guerrillas, who now pose a threat to the security of
the entire region.

But then, the American drug warriors were never under any delusion that
they were going to stop cocaine from flowing into the United States. "The
Americans had signed on for this job believing that it was about something
bigger," writes Bowden. "It was about democracy, the rule of law, standing
up for justice and civilization."

That is, by trampling Colombia's constitution and subverting its already
shaky criminal justice system, by executing criminal suspects without
trials or convictions, by murdering cab drivers and housemaids, the
American government sought to civilize Colombia. As we used to say in
Vietnam, sometimes you've got to destroy the village in order to save it.

That's why nobody should have been surprised in May when a Peruvian jet,
guided in for the attack by a U.S. intelligence aircraft, mistook a plane
full of missionaries for drug smugglers and shot it down, taking the lives
of a young Michigan woman named Roni Bowers and her infant daughter. It's
only a small step from killing Pablo to killing Roni.

Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin, author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo:
The CIA and the Contras, recently completed five years as the Miami
Herald's Central American correspondent.