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. 
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom