Pubdate: Sun, 09 Jul 2000
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053
Fax: (213) 237-4712
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Forum: http://www.latimes.com/home/discuss/
Author: Juanita Darling, Times Staff Writer

A NEW BATTLEFRONT FORMS FOR THE U.S. IN CENTRAL AMERICA

This Time, Troops Are Helping Fight Drugs, Not Rebels. The Militarized 
Effort May Hurt Democracy, Critics Say.

ILOPANGO, El Salvador--In the 1990s, the U.S. presence in Central America 
faded like the paint that demonstrators had sprayed on walls during the 
previous decade: "Yankee Go Home."

The Cold War ended; the leftist guerrillas that Americans had helped fight 
signed peace agreements and turned themselves into political parties. The 
isthmus was no longer of much military interest.

Now the Yankees are back. In what critics call a militarization of the drug 
war, U.S. soldiers and sailors are again appearing across Central America:

* Costa Ricans are boarding U.S. Coast Guard cutters to patrol their own 
territorial waters.

* Guatemalans are catching rides on American helicopters to swoop down on 
cocaine caravans detected by U.S. intelligence.

* In El Salvador, the legislature voted Thursday to let U.S. pilots fly 
anti-drug spy planes out of the Comalapa air base.

* Even Nicaragua, whose armed forces were closely affiliated with the 
Marxist Sandinista regime that the United States opposed in the 1980s, is 
close to signing a military anti-narcotics cooperation agreement, according 
to U.S. Ambassador Oliver P. Garza.

So far, the results have been as modest as the investment--just $4.3 
million in military anti-drug aid last year for all of Central America. By 
comparison, the new U.S. anti-drug package for Colombia, which also 
includes military funds along with appropriations for Ecuador, Bolivia, 
Peru and Venezuela, amounts to $1.3 billion.

But "the amount of money isn't as important as the revival of the military 
mission," cautioned William O. Walker III, chairman of the history 
department at Florida International University.

"Democracy isn't on sound footing in these countries," he added. "There may 
be unintended consequences of U.S. drug policy," such as undermining the 
civilian governments that have only recently taken control of their armed 
forces.

In contrast, proponents--from national police chiefs and presidents to top 
U.S. military officers and anti-narcotics officials--insist that a joint 
effort is needed to solve a joint problem.

An estimated 59% of the cocaine bound for the United States--300 to 400 
tons a year--is sent by land or sea through these tiny countries, which are 
ill equipped to stop the trade. In addition, law enforcement officials have 
in recent months found heroin tucked into the cocaine shipments.

U.S. officials want to intercept the illegal drugs before they get to 
Mexico, an easy route into the United States. Central American officials 
hope to halt the crack epidemic that has spread through countries along the 
route from Colombia to the United States.

As one U.S. Defense Department employee posted in Central America 
explained: "It's the difference between having a dog walk across your yard 
to poop at the neighbor's house and when the dog decides to poop in your 
yard. Then you want to stop it."

The Pacific Seen as Key Trafficking Route

Anti-narcotics officials believe that drugs are increasingly being 
transported on speedboats across the Pacific, far offshore, where only 
sophisticated tracking devices can detect the vessels and helicopters based 
on ships are needed to intercept them.

The U.S. military is offering Central American countries the use of such 
equipment and trained people to operate it.

"There is a clearly defined division of labor," said Gen. Charles E. 
Wilhelm, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which is responsible for 
American military concerns in Latin America. "It is apparent that the U.S. 
role is one of support. The local authorities do the hard part: 
confronting, arresting and confiscating."

Wilhelm made the remarks a few hours after kicking off "Maya-Jaguar," a 
U.S.-Guatemalan anti-drug exercise that began in early June. The United 
States spent $1 million to lend Guatemala four helicopters, the Navy 
coastal patrol boat Chinook and 85 soldiers and sailors to operate them.

During a similar operation last year, Guatemalan police received 
information from the United States that allowed them to make the largest 
land seizure of cocaine in Central American history. They stopped three 
tractor-trailer rigs on the Pan American Highway, the isthmus' main 
thoroughfare, carrying 2.5 tons of cocaine.

This year the results of the joint effort were less impressive. Unlike his 
predecessor, President Alfonso Portillo asked the Guatemalan Congress for 
permission to bring in the U.S. troops--and the ensuing publicity might 
have had a chilling effect on drug activity for the duration of the exercise.

The annual exercise is part of a regional program called "Central Skies," 
the cornerstone of the joint anti-drug efforts.

The supporting cast of Central Skies is "Joint Task Force Bravo," which 
shares the Enrique Soto Cano air base near Tegucigalpa, the Honduran 
capital, with the Honduran Military Academy. Established in 1983 to support 
the region's right-wing governments and the counterrevolutionaries who 
fought Nicaragua's Sandinista government, the task force at one time was 
assigned 2,000 troops.

Since 1996, about 550 U.S. military personnel have been posted to Honduras, 
most on temporary duty. Lately, JTF Bravo has been best known for hosting 
the 29,000 U.S. troops who worked on rescue and reconstruction in the 
aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Central America in late 1998.

The pilots and air crews of JTF Bravo are the chauffeurs in the regional 
anti-drug exercises. For the first time this year, Salvadoran 
anti-narcotics police trained with U.S. helicopter pilots here at the 
Ilopango air base.

Sweat pouring from their faces and black uniforms clinging to their backs 
in the tropical sun, they jumped from the helicopters and surrounded the 
choppers, guns pointing outward. At a thumbs-up from the U.S. crew chief, 
they reboarded and repeated the exercise, taking full advantage of the 
two-day practice session.

Six Central American countries agreed to participate in the 2000 edition of 
Central Skies, despite objections from legislators, many of them former 
guerrillas whom the United States was helping oppose a decade ago.

Officials in Nicaragua, the only nation on the isthmus left out of the 
exercise, refused to comment on why their country didn't participate.

A source close to the government in Managua says Nicaragua's armed forces 
have resisted U.S. overtures because of continuing resentment of American 
support for the counterrevolutionaries in the 1980s. But that rancor is 
abating, he says, citing the recent appointment of a military attache to 
the Nicaraguan Embassy in Washington, the first time in a decade that the 
post has been filled.

Further, public pressure is on the side of cooperation. A CID-Gallup survey 
conducted in March found that 78% of Nicaraguans questioned favor joint 
anti-drug patrols with the United States.

Agreement With Nicaragua in Sight

Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, said in late June that "we are 
very close to reaching [a maritime cooperation] agreement with Nicaragua." 
That would make Nicaragua the fourth Central American nation to agree to 
some form of cooperation on the sea.

Both Belize and Panama have signed "ship-rider" agreements that allow U.S. 
vessels to patrol their waters as long as members of their police are on 
board. In November, the most extensive anti-narcotics maritime agreement 
between the U.S. and a Central American nation took effect in Costa Rica.

The agreement permits both air and sea patrols and, in some circumstances, 
even detentions of boats and passengers until Costa Rican authorities can 
arrive on the scene to make arrests. U.S. Coast Guard ships are also 
allowed to make port calls in Costa Rica to resupply and give their crews 
free time.

In the first joint exercise under the agreement, 134 boats were boarded in 
Costa Rican waters. No drugs were found, but U.S. helicopters did sight a 
20-mile oil slick coming from a Mexican fishing boat that was dumping 
bilge, resulting in Costa Rica's first successful prosecution of a marine 
pollution case.

The agreement was rejected twice by the Costa Rican legislature before it 
was modified enough to be passed on the third try, despite opposition from 
the leftist Democratic Force Party.

"The United States is putting too much emphasis on the military aspect," 
said lawmaker Jose Merino del Rio. "We don't think that this is the most 
effective way to fight drugs."

Anti-narcotics authorities, however, insist that they need help.

"Costa Rica does not have the capacity to struggle with the Hydra of drug 
trafficking that grows two new heads every time we cut off one," said Allan 
Solano, director of Costa Rica's anti-narcotics police. "U.S. technology is 
indispensable to even up the struggle."

U.S. officials hope to make the Costa Rica agreement a model for the rest 
of the region. Wilhelm says he discussed that idea with Portillo and 
members of the Guatemalan legislature during his two-day visit there.

But for now, the marine agreements have taken a back seat to Washington's 
first priority in Central America: a place to land and service 
anti-narcotics surveillance planes.

The Salvadoran Legislative Assembly's passage of an agreement for a 
permanent U.S. presence at the Comalapa air base, which shares a runway 
with the country's international airport in San Salvador, makes this 
country the third leg of a strategy to replace the anti-drug air coverage 
that was lost when the U.S. military bases in Panama closed last year.

U.S. spy planes are already flying out of Ecuador and the Caribbean islands 
of Aruba and Curacao to detect drug production and smuggling. But planes 
flying from those airports can't adequately cover the Pacific.

A hangar in El Salvador will close that gap, U.S. drug enforcement 
authorities say. The ability to fly from all three locations, Wilhelm said, 
"is crucial to our overall success."

Eight people will be based permanently in El Salvador, and that number will 
increase to 50 or 60 when the air crews come in, says U.S. Ambassador Anne 
W. Patterson. She has offered to take Salvadoran legislators to see U.S. 
operations in Ecuador and the Caribbean to reassure them that the proposed 
landing area is not a disguised military base.

"There are concerns, and we are going to discuss them," she said.

Nevertheless, the guerrillas-turned-politicians of the Farabundo Marti 
National Liberation Front, or FMLN, strongly has opposed the agreement, 
which was negotiated by the country's foreign minister.

"We cannot pawn our sovereignty with the excuse of fighting drug 
trafficking," lawmaker Manuel Melgar said. The FMLN, didn't have enough 
votes to block the agreement, has vowed to take the case to the country's 
Supreme Court.

"We are going to do all that is necessary to prevent this affront to the 
Salvadoran fatherland, this intervention," legislator Shafick Handal said 
in an impassioned speech during the debate.

Other Salvadorans worry that a U.S. presence at Comalapa would reinforce 
the Salvadoran air force's own nascent anti-drug role, which began when the 
international airport's civilian authorities installed new radar equipment 
in December 1998.

Air traffic controllers noticed an alarming number of planes flying without 
flight plans and landing at locations other than the country's two 
airports. Airport authorities notified the police.

That information coincided with reports that U.S. Embassy anti-drug and 
military officials had been receiving from intelligence sources. In 
response, with support from U.S. diplomats, airport officials, 
anti-narcotics police and the air force formed the "Cuscatlan Group."

Police surveyed the country's landing strips, many of them unregistered. 
The air force developed a plan to defend Salvadoran airspace from 
unidentified planes.

That plan proved its effectiveness in March, when two air force fighters 
left over from El Salvador's civil war surrounded a suspicious-looking 
plane and escorted it out of Salvadoran airspace. Notified by their 
neighbors, two Guatemalan planes met the aircraft at the border and 
accompanied it until it crash-landed on a small airstrip.

Police found empty fuel tanks and 470 pounds of cocaine.

"We have become the roadblock of the Pacific," airport manager Armando 
Estrada said proudly.

While El Salvador patrols its skies, Costa Rica is taking steps to better 
patrol its own waters by passing a law to make its coast guard more 
professional. It began by appointing U.S. Naval Academy graduate Claudio 
Pacheco as director.

Wariness About Military Resurgence

Those new roles worry Central Americans who are wary about the resurgence 
of military power. Proud of having abolished their army in 1948, Costa 
Ricans are suspicious of any form of armed forces, while other countries 
still remember years of military rule.

"It is difficult to understand why the United States, after working to help 
us develop a civilian police force, would want to have the military 
involved again," said Salvadoran senior statesman Hector Dada. "Our 
democratic institutions are still weak, and the armed forces remain the 
strongest institution in the country."

Even Central Americans who support the U.S. military anti-drug effort worry 
about American fickleness, wondering how deep the U.S. commitment really is.

At the same time that the maritime agreement was signed, the United States 
promised Costa Rica two helicopters and four Coast Guard cutters as they 
became available. So far, one ship has been delivered.

"I don't think that we are going to get the others," predicted former 
Defense Minister Juan Rafael Lizano Saenz. One reason is that, even if the 
United States is willing to donate new equipment, these countries cannot 
afford the maintenance.

In Costa Rica's case, the government has already rescinded the request for 
helicopters because it couldn't pay the $1 million a year it would take to 
keep them flying.

During the Central American civil wars, donations of U.S. equipment 
included funding for maintenance. The unwillingness to provide that money 
leads Central Americans such as Lizano who support the joint anti-narcotics 
effort to worry about the level and dependability of the U.S. commitment.

Further, they insist that the problem has become serious because the United 
States tolerated drug trafficking at a time when it could have been more 
easily brought under control. The most notorious example was the U.S. 
complicity with CIA informant and Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel A. 
Noriega until late 1989, when U.S. forces invaded his country to arrest him 
on drug charges.

Even more recently, in 1992, says Leonel Gomez, a Salvadoran investigator 
who has worked for both the U.S. Embassy and American congressmen, the U.S. 
government gave in to pressure to withhold evidence that would have sent a 
young oligarch here to prison for his part in a 3-ton shipment of cocaine 
that was seized in the port of Acajutla.

William Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, who isn't related 
to the historian, remembers the incident differently.

"He was held at my insistence," he said of the suspected drug trafficker. 
"The day after I left the country, they released him."

Still, Walker says that he was shocked by the parade of prominent 
Salvadorans who came to his office to ask for the man's release. "Many were 
people I had respected," he said. "I must say, I had to reappraise my 
opinion of them."

Gomez warns that Walker's successors did not learn from that lesson and 
that, in the intervening eight years, the United States has continued "to 
look for allies among the most corrupt people in El Salvador."

That undermines U.S. credibility, he said, because "it is difficult to 
believe that they will stop drug trafficking when their allies are involved."

Still, faced with the seemingly unlimited funds of the drug traffickers and 
their own tight budgets, if Central Americans want to stop narcotics 
trafficking through their region, they appear to have few choices but to 
accept U.S. help, with its risks and shortcomings.

Pacheco estimates that, at any one time, only seven or eight of his coast 
guard's 30 boats are working properly. "It's not that we can't fix 
them--it's just not worth fixing them," he said.

Similarly, pilots say it doesn't make sense to upgrade the radar of El 
Salvador's nine old A-37 aircraft. U.S. officials talk about supporting the 
Salvadoran pilots, but when asked for specifics, they mention night-vision 
goggles, not new airplanes.

Funding is the biggest difference between the current war against drugs and 
the war against communism that was waged here in the 1980s, according to 
U.S. and Central American officials familiar with both efforts.

"Back then, we were training people to use equipment they had just 
received," another Defense Department employee said. "Now we are training 
them first, and the requests for equipment will come later."

~~~

Anti-Drug Aid to Central America

An estimated 59% of the cocaine bound for the U.S. passes over the land or 
through the territorial waters of the tiny countries of Central America. 
U.S. troops have begun appearing across Central America to help fight the 
drug war.
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D