Pubdate: Tue, 01 Jan 2002
Source: Reason Magazine (US)
Issue: January 2002
Copyright: 2002 The Reason Foundation
Contact:  http://www.reason.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/359
Author: Glenn Garvin

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.
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