Pubdate: Sun, 10 Feb 2013 Source: Dallas Morning News (TX) Copyright: 2013 The Dallas Morning News, Inc. Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/ Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117 MILITARY FRONT, CENTER IN FIGHT U.S. Troops, Pilots Routinely Deployed to Chase, Capture Traffickers The crew members aboard the USS Underwood could see through their night goggles what was happening on the fleeing boat: Someone was dumping bales. When the Navy guided-missile frigate later dropped anchor in Panamanian waters on that sunny August morning, Ensign Clarissa Carpio, a 23-year-old from San Francisco, climbed into the inflatable dinghy with four unarmed sailors and two Coast Guard officers like herself, carrying light submachine guns. It was her first deployment, but Carpio was ready for combat. Fighting drug traffickers was precisely what she'd trained for. In the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War, the U.S. has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade. U.S. Army troops, Air Force pilots and Navy ships outfitted with Coast Guard counternarcotics teams are routinely deployed to chase, track and capture drug smugglers. The sophistication and violence of the traffickers is so great that the U.S. military is training not only law enforcement agents in Latin American nations, but their militaries as well, building a network of expensive hardware, radar, airplanes, ships, runways and refueling stations to stem the tide of illegal drugs from South America to the U.S. According to State Department and Pentagon officials, stopping drug-trafficking organizations has become a matter of national security because they spread corruption, undermine fledgling democracies and can potentially finance terrorists. U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, pointing to dramatic declines in violence and cocaine production in Colombia, says the strategy works. "The results are historic and have tremendous implications, not just for the United States and the Western Hemisphere, but for the world," he said at a conference on drug policy last year. The Associated Press examined U.S. arms export authorizations, defense contracts, military aid and exercises in the region, tracking a drug war strategy that began in Colombia, moved to Mexico and is now finding fresh focus in Central America, where brutal cartels mark an enemy motivated not by ideology but by cash. U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel, DN.Y., who led the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere for the past four years, says the U.S.supported crackdown on Mexican cartels only left them "stronger and more violent." He intends to reintroduce a proposal for a Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission to evaluate anti-narcotics efforts. "Billions upon billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been spent over the years to combat the drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean," he said. "In spite of our efforts, the positive results are few and far between." Many in the military and other law enforcement agencies - the DEA, ICE, FBI - applaud the U.S. strategy, but critics say militarizing the drug war in a region fraught with tender democracies and long-corrupt institutions can stir political instability while barely touching what the U.N. estimates is a $320 billion global illicit drug market. One persistent problem is that in many of the partner nations, police are so institutionally weak or corrupt that governments have turned to their militaries to fight drug traffickers, often with violent results. Militaries are trained for combat, while police are trained to enforce laws. "It is unfortunate that militaries have to be involved in what are essentially law enforcement engagements," said Frank Mora, the outgoing deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs. But he argues that many governments have little choice. Mora said the effort is not tantamount to militarizing the war on drugs. He said the Defense Department's role is limited, by law, to monitoring and detection. Law enforcement agents from the U.S. Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection or other agencies are in charge of some of the busts, he said. But the U.S. is deploying its own military. Not only is the Fourth Fleet in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Atlantic, but the Marines were sent to Guatemala last year and National Guardsmen are in Honduras. Aboard the Underwood, the crew of 260 was clear on the mission. Standing on the bridge, Carpio's team spotted its first bale of cocaine. And then, after 2 1/2 weeks plying the Caribbean in search of drug traffickers, they spotted another, and then many more. "In all, we found 49 bales," Carpio said in an interview aboard the ship. Wrapped in black and white tarps, they were so heavy she could barely pull one out of the water. Later, officials said they'd collected $27 million worth of cocaine. The current U.S. strategy began in Colombia in 2000, with an eight-year effort that cost more than $7 billion to stop the flow from the world's top cocaine producer. During Plan Colombia, the national police force, working closely with dozens of DEA agents, successfully locked up top drug traffickers as an estimated 44,000 people were killed in organized-crime related deaths. Now the U.S. trains thousands of Latin American troops and employs its multibillion-dollar radar equipment to gather intelligence to intercept traffickers and arrest cartel members But then came "the balloon effect." As a result of Plan Colombia's pressure, traffickers were forced to find new cocagrowing lands in Peru and Bolivia, and trafficking routes shifted as well from Florida to the U.S.-Mexico border. Thus a $1.6 billion, four-year Merida Initiative was launched in 2008. Once more, drug kingpins were caught or killed, and as cartels fought to control trafficking routes, increasingly gruesome killings topped 70,000 in six years. Mexican cartel bosses, feeling the squeeze, turned to Central America as the first stop for South American cocaine, attracted by weaker governments and corrupt authorities. "Now, all of a sudden, the tide has turned," said Brick Scoggins, who manages the Defense Department's counternarcotics programs in most of Latin America and the Caribbean. "I'd say northern tier countries of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize have become a key focus area." The latest iteration is the $165 million Central America Regional Security Initiative, which includes Operation Martillo (Hammer), a year-old U.S.led mission. Focused on the seas off Central America's beachlined coasts, key shipping routes for 90 percent of the estimated 850 metric tons of cocaine headed to the U.S., the operation has no end date. As part of Operation Martillo, 200 U.S. Marines began patrolling Guatemala's western coast in August, their helicopters soaring above villages at night as they headed out to sea to find "narco-submarines" and shiploads of drugs. The troops also brought millions of dollars' worth of computers and intelligence-gathering technology to analyze communications between suspected drug dealers. Yet the strategy has often backfired when foreign partners proved too inexperienced to fight drug traffickers or so corrupt they switched sides. In Mexico, for example, the U.S. focused on improving the professionalism of the federal police. But its success was openly questioned after federal police at Mexico City's Benito Juarez International Airport opened fire at one another, killing three. In August critics were even more concerned when two CIA officers riding in a U.S. Embassy SUV were ambushed by Mexican federal police allegedly working for an organized crime group. Police riddled the armored SUV with 152 bullets, wounding both officers. The new strategy in Honduras has had its own fits and starts. Further, neither the State Department nor the Pentagon could explain a 2011 $1.3 billion authorization for exports of military electronics to Honduras, though that would amount to almost half of all arms exports for the entire Western Hemisphere and seven times the Honduran Defense Department's total budget. In May, on the other side of the country, Honduran national police rappelled from U.S. helicopters to bust drug traffickers near the remote, tropical Honduran village of Ahuas, killing four allegedly innocent civilians and scattering locals who were loading some 450 kilograms (close to 1,000 pounds) of cocaine into a boat. As the new year begins, Congress is still withholding an estimated $30 million in aid to Honduras, about a third of all the U.S. aid planned for this year. But there are no plans to rethink the strategy. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom