A proposal by FARC rebels in Colombia to legalize the cultivation of coca, poppy and marijuana for medicinal and cultural reasons was only the latest salvo in an increasingly vocal debate on drug policy reform taking place throughout Latin America. FARC's proposal is unlikely to gain much traction in a nation whose government has vowed to wipe out the drug trade, with significant military backing from the United States. But increasingly, countries from Colombia to Mexico to Uruguay are questioning the U.S. model of uncompromising drug enforcement. [continues 1709 words]
Storm in an Andean Teacup A Battle Over Mastication TOURISTS who visit Bolivia's capital, La Paz, or Cusco, Peru's former Inca seat, are routinely given welcome cups of coca tea to mitigate soroche (altitude sickness). For centuries, people who live in the high Andes have chewed coca leaves, whose alkaloids act as a mild stimulant and help to ward off cold and hunger. The Spanish conquistadors declared coca a tool of the devil, until they saw how it improved the work rate of the Indians they sent down the mines. [continues 350 words]
MEXICO CITY -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for Latin America to fight drug corruption in a regional swing that ended Friday in Guatemala, days after that country's drug czar and national police chief were jailed on suspicion of leading a police ring that stole cocaine from drug traffickers. The arrests underscored Guatemala's vulnerability to traffickers, whose billions of dollars in profits and bribes are undermining a fragile country still recovering from years of military rule and civil war. [continues 581 words]
Could Decriminalization Be the Answer? The massacre in Ciudad Juarez at the end of January made it clear that Mexico is losing the war on drugs. Narcotics-related violence is on the rise in other Latin American cities as well. An increasing number of voices are demanding that drugs be decriminalized. The killers arrived in four or five SUVs. They quickly blocked off the road to Salvarcar, a working-class neighborhood of Ciudad Juarez, where 60 students were attending a birthday party. [continues 1995 words]
Aim: Defuse Supply of Arms to Drug Cartels MEXICO CITY - Police in Latin America will soon have access to a Spanish version of a U.S. gun-tracking system that could widen efforts to hunt down crime suspects and weapons traffickers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said Wednesday that it is about to begin testing a Spanish-language version of eTrace, the computer system that helps police trace who buys U.S. firearms. "This is to allow the infrastructure to make it easier for law enforcement throughout Latin America to track the firearms in their own language," said Scot Thomasson, an ATF spokesman. [continues 446 words]
A Wave of Decriminalisation Is Sweeping Through Latin America Bruno Avangera, a 40-year-old web designer from Tucuman in Argentina, pauses to relight a half-smoked joint of cannabis. Then he speaks approvingly of "progress and the right decision" by the country's seven supreme court judges, who decided last week that prosecuting people for the private consumption of small amounts of narcotics was unconstitutional. "Last year three of my friends were caught smoking a spliff in a park and were treated like traffickers," he said. "They went to court, which took six months. One went to jail alongside murderers. The others were sent to rehab, where they were treated for an addiction they didn't have, alongside serious heroin and crack users. It was pointless and destroyed their lives." [continues 1991 words]
In A Backlash Against The US 'War On Drugs', Latin America Turns To A More Liberal Policy Argentina and Mexico have taken significant steps towards decriminalising drugs amid a growing Latin American backlash against the US-sponsored "war on drugs". Argentina's supreme court has ruled it unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption, an eagerly awaited judgment that gave the government the green light to push for further liberalisation. It followed Mexico's decision to stop prosecuting people for possession of relatively small quantities of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs. Instead, they will be referred to clinics and treated as patients, not criminals. [continues 694 words]
BRASILIA -- The Supreme Court of Argentina opened a path this week to decriminalizing the private consumption of illicit drugs, becoming the latest Latin American country to reject punitive policies toward drug use. The unanimous decision by the Argentine court on Tuesday, which declared unconstitutional the arrest of five youths for possession of a few marijuana cigarettes in 2006, came just days after Mexico's Congress voted to end the practice of prosecuting people found to be carrying small amounts of illicit drugs, including marijuana. [continues 885 words]
BUENOS AIRES - Latin America is headed towards the decriminalization of drug possession for personal consumption, according to experts and officials who took part in a regional conference in Buenos Aires. Those attending the 1st Latin American Conference on Drug Policy, which ended Friday, also said that legislative reforms are being designed to give smaller sentences "to small traffickers, and to create policies that minimize harm" by encouraging addicts who can't quit to come into the health system. They also warned that the war on drugs "did not achieve its goal," since Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, which together produce all the cocaine in the world, "could not manage in 10 years to reduce the area under cultivation," according to a communique released at the end of the meeting, sponsored by the Pan-American Health Organization. [continues 516 words]
Marijuana and cocaine for personal use should be decriminalised because the "war on drugs" has been a disaster, according to some of Latin America's most powerful politicians and writers. The current international policy on drugs encourages corruption and violence that is threatening democracy throughout the continent, according to the former president of Brazil, Fernando Enrique Cardoso, who is a co-president of the Latin American commission on drugs and democracy. As well as politicians, the commission includes the writers Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Paulo Coelho of Brazil. [continues 541 words]
MIAMI -- With drug violence and consumption rising across the hemisphere, a commission of three former Latin American presidents has blasted the U.S.-led drug war, calling it a failure and badly in need of public re-examination. Drug policy needs to move away from exclusive reliance on policing, to be treated as a broader public health issue with greater emphasis on reducing the harm drugs cause, according to the Latin-American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, led by three former presidents from Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. [continues 649 words]
BUENOS AIRES-- A group of former Latin American presidents on Wednesday described U.S. drug policies as a failure and called for debate on making marijuana legal while treating drug use more as a public health problem than as a crime. Former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria and former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo presided over the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, which also released a report in Buenos Aires about the need to find alternatives to eradication, interdiction and penalizing drug use. [continues 66 words]
Crackdowns in Mexico Have Prompted Drug Gangs to Look South for Supplies of Ephedrine, a Key Ingredient. BUENOS AIRES -- The three young entrepreneurs met their contacts outside a Wal-Mart here and drove off with them, apparently convinced that they would be celebrating a lucrative new deal. But authorities believe it was a set-up, linked to Mexican mobsters bent on reshaping the global drug trafficking map. The three men were handcuffed, forced to kneel in the mud and sprayed with bullets; their bodies were dumped in a ditch. [continues 1201 words]
SAN FRANCISCO - A little green leaf is causing big changes in Latin America. To the U.S. government, the coca leaf is the central ingredient in cocaine, a dangerous and profitable drug that needs to be eradicated at its source: the coca fields of South America. But to many Latin American indigenous people, the coca leaf is a medicine which they say should not only be allowed for traditional use, but rather promoted on the international market for its curative benefits. [continues 643 words]
Like many Americans at this time of year, President Bush is striking out for southern climes. Packing strategies for fostering trade, fighting drug-traffickers and fending off the regionwide shift to the political left, Bush flies out Thursday to start a swing through the friendlier parts of Latin America. He'll talk energy and free trade in Brazil and Uruguay. Those topics - -- as well as crime, punishment and border jumping -- will dominate the conversations in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. At every turn, Bush almost certainly will work to counter Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's leftist president. Chavez ranks among the world's more vocal and influential Bush-bashers, and his aura hovers over Bush's trip like a holiday-spoiling drizzle. [continues 1061 words]
In Latin America, Drug Production and Trafficking Threaten Fragile Ecosystems -- and the Scientists Trying to Pursue Research in the Region In the southern reaches of Mexico's Baja California peninsula, majestic cardon cacti stand sentry over the dusty red desert, which crumbles into the turquoise waters of the Gulf of California. But in this striking landscape, dark forces are at work. Within an hour of leaving the airport at the resort of Loreto, our truck is flagged down at a checkpoint set up by federal agents. They include inspectors from the environment ministry searching for abalone and other illegally harvested wildlife. Calling the shots are members of the AFI -- the Mexican equivalent of the FBI -- clad in flak jackets and armed with semiautomatic rifles. They are looking for narcotics. [continues 1563 words]
The War on Drugs, Trade Policy and Latin America's "Turn to the Left." In 1991, the United States cooked up the Andean Trade Preference Act with the nations of Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador - -- the source of nearly all the cocaine produced in the world. Later renamed the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, the ostensible purpose of the agreement was to combat "the scourge of drug trafficking" by providing economic incentives for the development of alternatives to coca cultivation. The key carrot: tariff and duty-free access to U.S. markets. [continues 673 words]
Last month, the mutilated bodies of two policemen were found in the streets of Acapulco. To make a grim story even more gruesome, the cops' severed heads were discovered some distance away in the Pacific resort city once fabled for its glamorous Hollywood visitors but now better known for toxic beaches and a vicious turf war between rival drug cartels. A sign accompanying the remains read: "So that you learn to respect." This macabre news rode the airwaves and splashed across newspaper front pages here for a couple of days. Then it vanished into a media morgue already chockablock with unsolved cases of murder and mayhem. [continues 1689 words]
Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, is heading a concerted, but little-publicised, diplomatic effort by Washington to thwart the ambitions of Hugo Chavez, the firebrand Venezuelan President, to create and lead an anti-American axis in Latin America. Faced by a resurgence of Left-wing populism in the Hispanic world, the Bush administration has decided to try "to do business" even with its harshest critics, if it can block the regional power play by Mr Chavez, backed by his friend Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator. [continues 188 words]
Hopes for Anti-Drug Leader End With Arrest Guatemala's top anti-drug cop laughed out loud last fall when U.S. drug agents came to arrest him at a hotel near Dulles Airport on cocaine smuggling charges. "He thought it was a joke," recalled one of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, who used a phony invitation to a training exercise to lure Adan Castillo to the United States last November. "Well, for about 15 seconds. Then the reality hit." [continues 1421 words]
MOROCHATA, Bolivia - In perhaps the quirkiest, most colorful of the many presidential campaigns gathering momentum in Latin America, Evo Morales, the Aymara Indian leader turned congressman, arrived in this mountain hamlet on a recent day, got out of his car a mile up the road and strode in like a conquering hero. The town's fathers honored him Bolivian-style, placing a heavy wreath of potatoes, roses and green beans around his neck. Crowds of peasants amassed behind him, while a ceremonial escort of indigenous leaders led him across cobblestone streets to a field filled with thousands. There, Mr. Morales gave the kind of leftist speech that increasingly strikes a chord with Latin America's disenchanted voters, railing against privatization, liberalized trade and other economic prescriptions backed by the United States. [continues 1038 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia - Three years ago the Bush administration began prodding countries to shield Americans from the fledgling International Criminal Court in The Hague, which was intended to be the first permanent tribunal for prosecuting crimes like genocide. The United States has since cut aid to some two dozen nations that refused to sign immunity agreements that American officials say are intended to protect American soldiers and policy makers from politically motivated prosecutions. To the Bush administration, the aid cuts are the price paid for refusing to offer support in an area where it views the United States, with its military might stretched across the globe, as being uniquely vulnerable. [continues 1444 words]
New And Dangerous Trends In The Andean Drug Business LOOKED at in one way, these are good times for America's drug warriors, at least with regard to cocaine. Traditionally, some 70% of the white powder has come from Colombia. The $3 billion in aid that the United States has spent there since 2000 under Plan Colombia has produced what American officials present as some spectacular numbers especially since Alvaro Uribe became president two years later and allowed large-scale aerial eradication of drug crops. [continues 1496 words]
It happened sometime between that sunny September day in 2001 when George W. Bush offered his friendship to Mexico's President Vicente Fox and last month when the State Department blessed Venezuela's fishy recall vote count: Latin America faded from the White House radar screen. Most Americans probably haven't noticed. But Beijing has and it is inching into the void. U.S.-Latin America policy is now defined by a costly drug war of doubtful effectiveness, persistent and damaging International Monetary Fund meddling, harassment of Latin militaries at the behest of left-wing NGOs, an intelligence network that counts coca plants for a living and a naive attitude toward bullies like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. This has left Latins scratching their heads about Dubya. Of course, these are not Bush values. But they are the priorities of his State Department and other agencies and by default have become the U.S. agenda in the region. [continues 865 words]
NARCO NEWS TO SUSPEND PUBLISHING INDEFINITELY ON OCTOBER 18 In memoriam: Carlos Sanchez Lopez (1954-2003) Narco News regrets to inform our readers that your trilingual online newspaper will suspend publishing new reports on October 18, three-and-a-half years after we began reporting on the drug war and democracy from Latin America. The suspension will be indefinite, it may be permanent, but the suspension will last at least until the New Year. We thank our readers and supporters who have helped to keep Narco News publishing non-stop since April 18, 2000. [continues 1162 words]
Players in Latin America with minor-league contracts will be tested for drugs by major league baseball starting next year. "There was enough out there in terms of issues people had raised to us that the prudent thing to do from our perspective was to spend the money and find out if we have a problem," Rob Manfred, executive vice-president for labour relations in the commissioner's office, said yesterday. The commissioner's office has been testing minor leaguers in the United States since 2001, but decided to expand its program following a series of articles in The Washington Post, which first reported baseball's decision yesterday. [continues 219 words]
San Roque, Colombia --- Colombia and Mexico have become the dominant suppliers of heroin to the United States, supplanting Asia, in a trend that experts and authorities fear could offset U.S.-backed successes in a campaign against drugs that has focused mostly on cocaine. From Maine to California, law enforcement authorities report small-scale epidemics and a rising rate of overdoses from a dangerously potent and cheap form of heroin. While total heroin use in the United States has not risen significantly, the drug is appealing to new middle-class users because it can be smoked or snorted, rather than injected. [continues 113 words]
Economic Woes, Political Unrest Raise Anxieties BOGOTA - A convergence of political and economic upheavals in recent weeks has plunged South America into turmoil, threatening to undermine two decades of progress toward democracy and market liberalization. Financial meltdowns in Brazil and Uruguay have prompted huge bailouts by the International Monetary Fund. Antiprivatization protests have erupted in Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru. The political and social schisms in Venezuela have widened, and rumors abound of another coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez. Colombian rebels launched a mortar attack this month at the inauguration of President Alvaro Uribe, killing at least 19, and the government declared a state of emergency. To the south, Argentina slid further into economic ruin. [continues 1302 words]
The world's growing illegal-drug trade is claiming innocent new victims: tens of thousands of dolphins. The playful sea mammals are being slaughtered by Latin American gangs using the fishing industry as cover for smuggling cocaine into the United States and other countries. Federal agents say crime syndicates in Colombia and Mexico have bought tuna fleets and canneries in South and Central America. The boats are used to transport cocaine and the fishing companies provide a means of laundering the profits. "The drug cartels don't care how they catch the tuna, so they don't fish in a dolphin-friendly way," Ben White of the Washington-based Animal Welfare Institute told London's Sunday Telegraph. [end]
TENS of thousands of dolphins are being slaughtered by Latin American gangs using the fishing industry as cover for smuggling cocaine into the United States and on to other countries, including Britain. US anti-narcotics officers acknowledge that crime syndicates in Colombia and Mexico have bought up tuna fleets and canneries in South and Central America. The boats are used to transport the cocaine - known as "white tuna" - and the fishing companies provide a means of laundering the profits. Ben White, the international co-ordinator of the Washington-based Animal Welfare Institute, said that the gangs used fishing methods most countries had banned because of the disastrous effect they have on dolphins and porpoises. [continues 496 words]
Colombia: A newspaper columnist who printed allegations that leading presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe had drug connections said he had fled Colombia due to threats. Fernando Garavito, who writes for the Bogota weekly El Espectador, said he was now in the United States, but did not specify his whereabouts. Dozens of other Colombian news reporters and columnists have gone into exile, as political and drug-related violence escalates in the South American country's 38-year civil war. Haiti: Shouting "Down with Aristide," nearly 1,000 supporters of Haiti's embattled opposition rallied at the ruins of their headquarters in Port-au-Prince on Friday to proclaim their right to political freedom. [continues 295 words]
WASHINGTON -- President Bush visits Latin America this week to focus on controlling immigration, combating drugs and expanding trade, issues that have been redefined since Sept. 11. The brisk four-day, three-country tour, which begins today, aims to reassert U.S. leadership in a hemisphere that is eager to get back on the president's radar. The largely symbolic excursion will reunite Bush with Mexican President Vicente Fox and showcase the fledgling democracies of Peru and El Salvador. It could serve Bush well politically at home, where he has made a point of courting Hispanic voters. [continues 102 words]
WASHINGTON -- President Bush will highlight two lesser-known targets of the war on terrorism when he travels to Latin America this weekend: poverty and drug lords. Starting Thursday in Monterrey, Mexico, Mr. Bush will tout his plan to boost U.S. foreign aid, partly as a way to dissuade nations from harboring terrorists. At the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development, he will call for what amounts to a competition among developing nations for U.S. aid; winners will be picked based on their ability to adopt economic reforms and to end corruption. [continues 436 words]
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - With the United States focused on the war against terrorism, long-simmering problems in Latin America have boiled over. Those woes could force President Bush to pay the sort of attention to America's closest neighbors that he promised during the presidential election campaign. . Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine, has erupted into open warfare against Marxist rebels who are deeply involved in the drug trade. Government troops have started retaking by force a swath of the country that was ceded to the rebels in a December 1998 bid for peace. [continues 812 words]
Miami - Latin America and the Caribbean seemed to drop off the U.S. radar screen after Sept. 11, but the region's problems could easily entangle the United States in the coming decade. Marxist guerrillas and cocaine cowboys in Colombia, an aging but crafty dictator in Cuba, an anti-American populist in Venezuela, economic and political paralysis in Haiti and the recent Argentina collapse are clear warning signs that America's own back yard shouldn't be ignored, experts say. ''The biggest challenge in Latin America over the next decade is the aftermath of Argentina,'' said Bruce Bagley, a Latin specialist at the University of Miami. ''We're likely to see more rejection of market reforms, a growing questioning of democracy and the emergence of more populist leaders. The U.S. talks a good rhetorical game on free trade, but in reality we're protectionist on textiles and agricultural goods. We're going to have to alter that, even if it means job losses at home.'' [continues 754 words]
U.S. Altering Regional Focus Since Sept. 11 FORT BENNING, Ga. -- Defense officials say they are concerned that groups in Latin America with ties to the Middle East might be entering the cocaine trade to fund terrorist activities. "It's an area we're watching very closely," Army Brig. Gen. Galen Jackman, director of operations for the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in Latin America, said Wednesday. Although none of the Latin American groups is believed connected to the al-Qaida terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden, Jackman said groups associated with Hezbollah, Hamas and the Egyptian group al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya have a presence in South America and are known to be involved in illegal activities. Some Iranian and Iraqi terrorist cells also are believed to be operating in the region, according to Jackman. [continues 261 words]
WHEN the fighter pilot's fire ripped through a plane carrying an American missionary family over Peru last week, the bullet holes opened up ironic points of light into American foreign policy in Latin America. "Know your enemy and know yourself; in 100 battles you will never be in peril," Sun Tzu wrote in "The Art of War." In Latin America, though, it is its friends and allies that the United States does not seem to want to know too well. Today, particularly where the drug war rages, it finds itself, as it has so often in the past, in the awkward position of an arm's-length embrace. [continues 1458 words]
Prominent Latin American religious leaders have joined more than 100 civic, political and intellectual figures from the region to call on President Bush to suspend Plan Colombia, the U.S.-funded anti-drug initiative, and place more emphasis on peace initiatives. In a Monday letter to Bush, the leaders said Plan Colombia, which increases U.S. support for the that country's military to curb the drug trade, is militarizing the long-standing conflict in the South American nation. The leaders, who include retired Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the former bishop in Chiapas, Mexico, and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, archbishop emeritus of Sao Paulo, Brazil, said they believe Plan Colombia's "predominantly military emphasis" will only intensify the internal conflict and undermine the peace process. [end]
A group of seven Latin American leaders has told President George W Bush that the United States needs to change its tactics in the war on drugs or risk destabilising much of the Americas. In an embarrassing challenge to Mr Bush on the eve of the 34-nation Summit of the Americas in Quebec, his Latin American counterparts are diplomatically telling him the US-driven war is largely a failure. The presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Panama will put to Bush a new anti-drugs strategy comprising more carrot and less stick. [continues 56 words]
Today Colombian President Andres Pastrana is lobbying Washington for $1.6 billion to fight drugs. AGUAYTIA, PERU -- Standing knee high in a field of young green palm plants, Dionisio Flores Ortiz recalls how not long ago he and the farmers with plots around his would have been up to their waists in coca - the raw material for cocaine. "Now we're going to be trafficking something else," he says, breaking into a smile as he pulls on a palm that will eventually be harvested for hearts of palm. "The farmers here just want to support their families and get a little ahead. As long as there's a market for these new products, this change can be permanent." [continues 874 words]
Drug-Fighters Claim That A Combination Of Repression And Social Engineering Can Eliminate Coca Cultivation, And So Cocaine. It Has Not Happened Yet PALMAPAMPA, Peru - MAXIMO ROJAS'S farm lies up a steep and muddy track on a hillside high above the Apurimac river, in eastern Peru. At this time of year, the river is a swirling brown torrent as it cuts through a broad tropical valley on its way to the Amazon. The track passes through a field of glossy young coffee bushes before ending at an open-sided thatched hut. There Mr Rojas and his family have spread soyabeans to dry on the ground. As well as coffee and soya, Mr Rojas has planted cacao, citrus, pineapples and maize on his eight hectares (20 acres) of land. In all this, he has been helped by agronomists from the United Nations Drug Control Programme. It is, he says proudly, a model farm that others can copy. [continues 2852 words]
Panama Is Second Stop Of Her Trip To Latin America PANAMA CITY - Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright arrived here Saturday in a bid to patch up feelings that were hurt when neither she nor President Clinton attended the recent ceremony in which control of the Panama Canal was turned over to Panamanians. Albright went on a brief tour of the Miraflores Locks section of the canal and recalled how, in the 1970s, she and other members of the Carter administration were proud of the decision to turn the waterway over to Panama. [continues 438 words]
Excess That Isn't Sold Abroad Is Cheap At Home Two months ago, Raul, a 30-year-old father of two, checked out of a public hospital for severe drug addicts that takes in 100 new patients a month. But two weeks later, he checked back in after injecting cocaine into his spindly arms again. And so he has returned to Thdgeting in his room, his cheeks sunken and his eyes red. ``I don't want to make excuses,'' said Raul, a dry cleaner who asked that only his first name be used. He shares a room with two other addicts at Argentina's National Center for Social Re-Education, a treatment center whose patient population has grown 15 percent during the 1990s. ``But when you get out of here, back in your neighborhood, the (cocaine) is everywhere, man. And it's cheap.'' [continues 963 words]
Latin America, Long an Exporter, Fights Growing Addiction BUENOS AIRES--Raul, a 30-year-old father of two, tried to make it through the exit. Two months ago, he checked out of a public hospital for severe drug addicts that takes in 100 new patients a month. But two weeks later, he checked back in after injecting cocaine into his spindly arms again. And so he has returned to fidgeting in his room, his cheeks sunken and his eyes red. "I don't want to make excuses," said Raul, a dry cleaner who asked that only his first name be used. He shares a room with two other addicts at Argentina's National Center for Societal Re-Education, a treatment center whose patient population has grown 15 percent during the 1990s. "But when you get out of here, back in your neighborhood, the [cocaine] is everywhere, man. And it's cheap." [continues 1207 words]
Latin America: Washington, Nations In Region Must Shore Up Venezuela, Colombia And Peru. The Latin American turn away from military dictatorships and toward democracy has been celebrated in the United States since the process began in the early 1980s. More recently, American pressure combined with that from Latin democracies helped keep countries such as Guatemala (in 1993) and Paraguay (this year) on the straight and narrow when autocracy and instability threatened. But today, the United States and Latin America's democracies are curiously disengaged as the Andean countries are drifting toward instability, violence or dictatorship. Exhibit one is Venezuela. Former Lt. Col. Hugo Chavez, who was jailed for his coup attempt in 1992, won the presidency in December and control of the new constitutional assembly last Sunday. His distaste for Venezuelan style democracy is not hard to explain: Corruption was endemic, and the country's vast oil revenues circulated among its elites, with precious little trickling down into schools or hospitals for the masses. The problem is Chavez's cure, which seems to be to centralize power into his own hands, weaken rivals like state governors or political parties and insert his trusted military associates into every ministry. [continues 596 words]
Package Will Help Fund Anti-drug Efforts. Nation's Record Of Corruption And Human Rights Abuses Concerns Critics. WASHINGTON--Despite the roles of Colombia's military in human rights abuses and the corruption created by the nation's role as one of the world's leading producers of cocaine, the United States is stepping up its involvement with the Colombian armed forces because it fears that they are losing a war to Marxist rebels who derive much of their income from drug trafficking. [continues 727 words]
TARAPOA, Ecuador--Second of three articles For two weeks in May, U.S. special operations forces used this isolated jungle region near the Colombian border to stage their biggest deployment in Latin America in years -- an example of what the U.S. military is doing, and would like to do much more of, throughout Latin America. The idea was to train the Ecuadoran military to better fight two intertwined foes that frequently operate in the area: drug trafficking organizations and Marxist Colombian guerrillas. In the exercise, 143 elite U.S. troops and their 645 Ecuadoran counterparts used American-provided boats and Black Hawk helicopters in mock raids on targets such as a "narco-guerrilla camp" and a supposed cocaine laboratory. Overhead, A-37 combat jets raced after small airplanes to practice forcing down suspected drug flights. [continues 3416 words]
Despite the end of the cold war and the transitions toward more democratic societies in Latin America, the United States has launched a number of initiatives that strengthen the power of Latin American security forces, increase the resources available to them, and expand their role within society--precisely when struggling civilian elected governments are striving to keep them in check. Rather than encouraging Latin American militaries to limit their role to the defense of national borders, Washington has instead provided the training, resources, and doctrinal justification for militaries to move into the business of building roads and schools, offering veterinary and child inoculation services, and protecting the environment. Of greatest concern, however, is America's insistence that the region's armed forces -- including the United States military itself -- play a significant role in domestic counternarcotics operations, a law enforcement function reserved in most democracies for civilian police. [continues 2855 words]
[continued from part 1] The administration has attempted to offset transit zone funding cuts by encouraging greater cooperation from its Caribbean allies, but its efforts have met with strong resistance from leaders concerned about a further erosion of their national sovereignty Although Trinidad and Tobago quickly agreed to a "hot pursuit" treaty Barbados and Jamaica both strongly opposed attempts by Washington to forge bilateral antinarcotics agreements that would allow United States forces to pursue suspected drug traffickers within the territorial waters and airspace of another country and only signed treaties after intense United States pressure. Regional leaders accused the United States of using "unfounded allegations, innuendoes, and the threat of punitive measures aimed at the economic welfare of Caribbean states" in its efforts to force them to provide the carte blanche for hot pursuits. [continues 2872 words]
BUENOS AIRES - Concerned that Argentina's border with Paraguay and Brazil has become a haven for terrorists and mobsters, the FBI will join authorities in those nations in a crackdown intended as a model for regional cooperation in Latin America, FBI Director Louis Freeh said yesterday. The lawless border region exemplifies the dangers of globalized crime and the need for a coordinated response in the hemisphere, Freeh said in an interview during a five-day trip through South America, the first by an FBI director. [continues 414 words]
Inside Latin America
