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1994-05-02
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<text>
<title>
Latin American Militaries and the War on Drugs
</title>
<article>
<hdr>
Foreign Service Journal, November 1991
Unholy Alliance: Latin American militaries and the war on drugs
</hdr>
<body>
<p>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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>Down in the valley
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p>Destructive engagement
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> This is evident in Eagleburger's human rights determination
and in other official pronouncements regarding military aid.
Indeed, at a joint h