By Tina Rosenberg. Ms. Rosenberg, a visiting fellow with the Overseas Development Council in Washington, is author of (Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America), published by William Morrow.

The U.S. Department of State tells two very different official stories about the situation of human rights in Peru. On July 30, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger signed a determination that the Peruvian security forces were "not engaged in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights," that the human rights situation was improving, and that the military answered to civilian control.

A rebuttal, however, could be found without leaving the building. The State Department's own Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1990 said of Peru, "Security forces personnel were responsible for widespread and egregious human rights violations.... There were widespread credible reports of summary executions, arbitrary detentions, and torture and rape by the military, as well as less frequent reports of such abuses by the police." At a congressional hearing in March 1991, Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Bernard Aronson described Peruvian security forces' abuses as "long-standing and systematic."

The contradiction highlights the State Department's ambivalence over its chosen strategy in the fight against cocaine. Increasingly favoring a militarization of the drug war in Latin America, State officials find it necessary to softpedal another important but often contradictory goal: promoting human rights. But human rights abuses are an inevitable companion to militarization. Furthermore, U.S. experience in recent years in Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia suggests that winning the drug war requires the support of Peruvian, Colombian and Bolivian societies. Only a strategy based on respect for human rights can create such support.

Down in the valley

Eagleburger downplayed the abuses of Peruvian security forces because it is Bush Administration policy that to fight coca leaf, the Peruvians must first wrest control of the Upper Huallaga Valley, where 60 percent of the world's coca leaf is grown, from two guerrilla groups that dominate the valley: the Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso, and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Sendero, in particular, had turned into a union for Peruvian peasant coca growers, negotiating higher prices for coca leaf with the Colombian traffickers who buy it, and charging the Colombians a "tax" to use local airstrips. Administration officials believe that effective crop substitution and interdiction first require winning back the Upper Huallaga from Sendero. Hence, they have proposed training the military to fight coca leaf and paste, and sending Peru $34.9 million in military aid and 50 or more military advisers. In late September Congress approved the aid, albeit with conditions attached to its use.

The recruitment of local militias into the drug war is U.S. policy all over South America. U.S. counter-narcotics military assistance to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia totaled less than $5 million in FY 1988; in FY 1990 it had risen to $140 million. But it is a strategy that Andean governments have resisted. Alan Garcia, president of Peru until 1990, refused to allow U.S. military aid. Current Bolivian and Peruvian leaders Jaime Paz Zamora and Alberto Fujimori resisted such aid until the United States made it clear that economic aid depended on their acceptance of military aid. President Cesar Gaviria in Colombia has said that he would gladly give up all U.S. aid in exchange for trade concessions. Early in 1991, the Bush Administration coaxed the Argentine Air Force into fighting drugs in that country, despite hard-won Argentine statutes prohibiting the armed forced from an internal role--laws written to avoid repeating the human rights violations of the Dirty War.

Militarization is bad news for human rights. The first reason is that the money often does not go to fight drugs, but into what for most Latin militaries is a much bigger priority: fighting guerrillas. Colombian Army Chief of Staff General Luis Eduardo Roca and Army General Jose Nelson Mejia told U.S. congressional investigators that $38.5 million of the $40.3 million in U.S. counter-narcotics military aid in FY 1990 was to be used not to fight cocaine but to combat guerrillas in Operation Tricolor in northeastern Colombia, an area not known for its narcotics production. "How would this advance the two countries' anti-narcotics goals?" investigators asked. The generals' response: if processing facilities were located during the operation, they would be destroyed. The Bogota-based Inter-American Legal Services Association reports that in 1990, the Colombian villages of Yondo, Remedios, Llana Caliente, and Becerril were bombed during anti-guerrilla operations by UH-1H and Hercules helicopters and A-37 planes, injuring several civilians and destroying the homes of thousands. While the Colombian armed forces already had these aircraft, they were also the models supplied by the United States in 1989 as emergency counter-narcotics equipment.

Human rights are always at risk in anti-guerrilla operations, of course, but the danger of violations exists any time a military is assigned to wage war on an internal enemy, including drug producers. Bolivia has no significant guerrilla insurgency, but members of the anti-drug police, or UMOPAR, have been accused of torture and rapes in counter-narcotics operations in the Chapare and Beni coca-growing regions. As the Bolivian military--traditionally more abusive and corrupt than the police--becomes involved, abuses are likely to rise. The military has long been hostile to rural peasant federations, considering them subversive.

All three of the major drug-producing countries are nominal democracies, but in all three the military is strong and soldiers pay little heed to civilians. The Bolivian military has an unhealthy taste for coups, and Bolivia's new civilian government has been struggling to keep its tenuous hold on power. In its war against Sendero, the Peruvian government has placed more and more of Peru under armed forces command--today more than half Peru's citizens live under de facto dictatorship with no civilian authority. Militarizing the drug war, which makes local armies the U.S. partner in the region, further increases the power of the armed forces and weakens civilian control. "When you have a corrupt chief of police, you fire him," Bolivian politician Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada told the Wall Street Journal. "When you have a corrupt chief of the army, he fires you."

Destructive engagement

State Department officials say that U.S. involvement allows the United States more sway over local military practices--a sort of military constructive engagement. "It's better to be on the inside where we have influence," one State Department drug official told me. "If we just stay on the outside, criticizing, we become irrelevant." This is a frequent rationale for U.S. military aid, but it can bring perverse results. Instead of altering the behavior of the aid recipient, the relationship often has the reverse effect: U.S. dependence on the recipients to carry out policy goals may lead the United States to tolerate, overlook, or even justify abuses, for fear of creating opposition to the policy in Congress, U.S. public opinion, or in host countries. The mouse, after all, also trains his scientist: when he rings the bell, the good doctor brings him cheese.

This is evident in Eagleburger's human rights determination and in other official pronouncements regarding military aid. Indeed, at a joint hearing before three House Foreign Affairs subcommittees on September 12, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Schifter argued that Peru's violations do not form a consistent pattern, because many people are arrested and released without being tortured. A joint report by the departments of State and Defense transmitted to Congress in February 1991 stated, "We cannot gloss over past [government] abuses in some countries.... But, we should not succumb to the notion that organizations like the Sendero Luminoso of Peru or the FARC in Colombia are champions of human rights."

This deeply cynical statement does indeed gloss over present abuses in the two countries with the worst human rights records in the hemisphere. Sendero is indeed a terrorist group that has murdered thousands of civilians, especially those such as priests and peasant organizers who seek to improve the lot of the poor. The Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), to a lesser extent, has murdered and extorted. But this does not give the Peruvian and Colombian governments permission to fall into barbarity as well. Three thousand leftist politicians or organizers were killed or disappeared in Colombia from May 1989 to June 1990--more than General Augusto Pinochet killed or "disappeared" in 17 years in Chile. For the last four years, the United Nations has ranked Peru's security forces number one or two in the world at disappearing their own people.

"Accomplished bureaucrats"

Militarization has several roots. A new study of the Andean drug war by the Washington Office on Latin America points to frustration at the failure of anti-narcotics policies, the political benefits of being "tough" on drugs, the feeling that military means are needed to fight well-armed drug traffickers, and Pentagon officials' growing unease--despite long-standing opposition to a military role--that the end of the Cold War is leaving them with little to do. Admiral William Crowe, then recently retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on ABC News' Nightline in 1990: "Certainly I think we'll put more emphasis on the drug war. And if there are resources tied to it, why you'll see the services compete for those, and probably vigorously. We take some pride in being accomplished bureaucrats, as well as military men. And I think it's legitimate for military men to try and perpetuate their institution...."

The Southern Command has been particularly enthusiastic about the war on cocaine, seeing it is an extension of the Cold War; often officials refer to the enemy as "narco-guerrillas." The intertwining of counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency is U.S. policy in Peru and Colombia, according to the official statements of the departments of State and Defense, and Southcom.

There is some truth to the narco-guerrilla connection. Certain fronts of the FARC guerrillas in Colombia did protect jungle cocaine labs. The Shining Path does raise money by taxing drug traffic and does protect coca-leaf growers. But that does not make these groups drug traffickers as such. (Indeed, Sendero's efforts on behalf of Peruvian coca growers put it at odds with the traffickers who buy the leaf.) In Colombia, the narc-FARC marriage is one of convenience. The two groups do not agree on an ideology or goals for society.

The phrase overlooks a far more pervasive and significant connection: the narco-military. The link is due to more than corruption. In Colombia, many traffickers have become wealthy landowners and joined forces with paramilitary groups and active duty officers to rid zones of pesky peasant and labor organizers. Many of Colombia's massacres of rural activists can be traced to this narco-military connection, with traffickers supplying the financing and the army the manpower. These shadowy paramilitary organizations operate with impunity. In April 1991, Colonel Alfonso Arrellano Reyes of the Colombian anti-drug police confirmed that paramilitary groups protect drug trafficking operations. But as for breaking them up, the police didn't seem to be trying very hard. "In practice, we've never been able to find them," Arralleno said. "We have never had an armed conflict with one of these groups."

Perhaps the most compelling reason not to militarize the drug war is that programs to reduce coca and cocaine do not require it. The Colombian police, for example, make 80 to 90 percent of all drug seizures and raids on airstrips in that country, yet received only 16 percent of the $65 million emergency aid package the United States sent to Colombia in August 1989, with the rest going to the military. The Bush Administration is incorrect in stating that military aid is necessary to allow anti-coca crop substitution programs to go forth in the Upper Huallaga Valley. Crop substitution has been going on for years, carried out by the Peruvian government and by the United Nations Development Program, which had 200 employees in the Upper Huallaga Valley for three years; only one staffer was killed by Sendero. "Sendero will ask villagers if a particular program is good and helpful, and if villagers say yes, they leave it alone," said Ivan de Rementeria, who headed the UNDP's efforts in the Upper Huallaga. Many observers believe that it is not Sendero that will block crop substitution but the ease of planting coca in the vast stretches of the Huallaga that now lie fallow.

Stick to carrot

A strategy that emphasizes human rights and non-military solutions would be better for both the drug fight and Peru's battle against Sendero. The administration has already recognized this. Since January 1989, it has carried out no forced coca eradication programs in the Upper Huallaga, recognizing that such repressive actions were driving local peasants into the arms of Sendero and reducing what little credibility the Peruvian government retained in the valley. The new U.S.-Peru drug agreement, aside from its pernicious provision of military aid and the pitiful sum of $250,00 allotted to improving Peru's justice system, reflects a potentially effective switch in strategy from the stick to the carrot.

In Colombia, a repression-based strategy proved temporarily effective but unsustainable. In 1989, President Virgilio Barco began a tough crackdown on cocaine after traffickers killed presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan. But the traffickers responded with terrorism, and soon a backlash began: Colombians believed that if the government was not equipped to fight the traffickers, it should not have provoked their wrath. President Gaviria reversed the Barco policy, deciding that the best way to fight the Colombian problem of drug terrorism was to abandon the fight against drug trafficking, considered a U.S. problem. Gaviria's policy is tremendously popular in Colombia; meanwhile the DEA reports that 1990 cocaine production in South America--almost all of it in Colombia--was up 28 percent over the year before.

Almost every Colombian and Peruvian citizen I met, whether rural or urban, poor or rich, left or right, corrupt or clean, shared one view about drugs; it is the gringos' war. The United States has yet to convince Latin societies that they are seriously hurt by drugs or should assume part of the burden of fighting drugs. One important reason is that many people see the cure as worse than the disease. Military occupation, U.S. interference in local sovereignty, forcible loss of a source of national or personal income with nothing to replace it--these are the strategies that cut into crucial local support. A strategy that emphasizes local dignity, economically rational crop substitution programs, and development would encourage more Andean citizens to say no to drugs--and yield the added benefits of strengthening local economies and government institutions. Respect for human rights, far from being an obstacle to a successful war on drugs, is one of its cornerstones.