Pubdate: Sun, 17 Dec 2000
Source: Plain Dealer, The (OH)
Copyright: 2000 The Plain Dealer
Contact:  1801 Superior Ave., Cleveland, OH 44114
Website: http://www.cleveland.com/news/
Forum: http://forums.cleveland.com/index.html
Author: Matthew J. Rosenberg

AFTER 30 YEARS WINNING DRUG WAR STILL ELUDES U.S.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Is the U.S. government winning its
30-year-old war on drugs?

Consider the recently ended Operation Libertador, which showcased
cooperation between dozens of countries and yielded the capture of an
alleged major drug kingpin as well as the seizure of tons of
marijuana and cocaine amid a flurry of public relations releases.

It was "a major takedown," said Michael Vigil, head of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency's Caribbean operation.

Now consider these sobering words from former Jamaican police Col.
Trevor McMillan, who's watched the drug war breed such corruption in
his country that every Cabinet minister was forced into a public
denial this fall that they are in any way involved.

"What the drug war has done is to drive the price of drugs up, so the
more the price of drugs goes up, the more money there is to corrupt
people," says McMillan, who was fired in 1996 after he started a
cleanup of the police force. "Until we remove the profit out of
trafficking, nothing will change."

This war may slog on for another half century or more, according to
the veterans who have fought it in the trenches - like Vigil, who has
spent 27 years in the DEA, including a couple of years in Colombia at
the height of the fight to bring down the Cali cartel.

He tells a reporter in his 20s: "We will be able to win this scourge
- - [but] it may not be in your lifetime or mine."

Still, he touts the regional cooperation strategy that he helped
develop. It is a fight largely financed and led by the United States
through multinational operations like Libertador, which involved 36
Latin American and Caribbean countries and territories.

Police reported arresting 2,876 people and seizing 20 tons of
cocaine, 29 tons of marijuana and 82,170 ecstasy tablets during the
Oct. 27-Nov. 19 operation. They said they also dismantled 94 drug
factories and seized 100 tons of chemicals for drug-making.

Among those arrested was Martires Paulino Castro, whose apprehension
in the Dominican Republic ended a two-year investigation in four
countries. Agents say Paulino's 10-year-old network stretched from
Dutch St. Maarten to New York and was capable of moving 4,400 pounds
of Colombian cocaine a month to the United States.

Paulino was arrested by American and Dominican authorities and will
be tried in his native Dominican Republic on drug trafficking charges.

Drug kingpins like Paulino can be caught, and drug trafficking
disrupted, only "by these [Caribbean] countries working with one
another," Vigil said.

Skeptics abound Still, there is growing skepticism in the region
about the drug war, which rankles local nationalists by seeming to
cede some sovereignty to U.S. authorities while not appearing to
seriously dent the drug trade.

Three decades after the war began, smuggling is at an all-time high,
along with a rising tide of violent crime and corruption. Many
critics say that's because of the war's heavy emphasis on
interdiction and eradication rather than on efforts to reduce drug
use.

Those on the war's front lines contend the situation would be
immeasurably worse if nothing was done.

"We now have guns, ammunition, gang warfare that we didn't have
before," says Rear Adm. Richard Kelshall, one of Trinidad's top drug
fighters.

"See, if we were to stop at all, then this [violence] would just
escalate ... " he says. "We don't know what the top limit would be.
So we have to be out there, we have to be vigilant, we have to stop
the drugs coming in, even if we're not actually stopping the full
load."

In 1999, more than two-thirds of the estimated 506 tons of cocaine
produced in South America was shipped through the Caribbean - the
first time Caribbean smuggling outstripped the amount of drugs
crossing the porous Mexican border, the United Nations'
Barbados-based drug monitoring program says.

Of that, 62,709 pounds of cocaine were seized in the Caribbean, about
6 percent of the estimated amount passing through the area, the U.N.
office says.

Critics - both in the United States and Caribbean - argue that
criminal organizations flourish because of the drug war, not in spite
of it. The war's focus on enforcement only jacks up prices, which in
turn foster vast smuggling networks that are well-financed, armed and
organized.

"Corruption around drugs has increased significantly," McMillan, the
fired Jamaican police official, said just weeks after the specter of
corruption became a stark public topic in his country.

Rumors that government ministers were caught on tape discussing
cocaine smuggling have swirled around Jamaica since Prime Minister
P.J. Patterson in October ordered an investigation into allegations
that his telephone was illegally bugged along with those of Cabinet
ministers and drug gang leaders with political ties.

Within days of Patterson's disclosure, the police commissioner said
high-ranking police officers were being investigated for aiding
Colombian smugglers.

The solution, McMillan and others say, is decriminalizing or
legalizing drugs, then using the money now spent on the drug war to
pay for education and addiction recovery programs that would reduce
demand for drugs.

Balanced approach Vigil does not disagree. "We have to look at a
balanced approached between enforcement and demand reduction," he
says.

But drug policy is mostly dictated by the United States, where
politicians favor tough anti-drug laws and initiatives.

Solid figures on U.S. anti-narcotics efforts are nearly impossible to
nail down. But the Center for International Policy, a
Washington-based think tank, estimates that in 1999 the United States
provided almost $500 million in aid to countries involved in this
year's Operation Libertador. Of that, only $5 million-$6 million was
earmarked to help reduce demand.
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe