Cash Crop, Curse : Latins Push Belated War on Cocaine

In certain valleys between the mountains grows a plant called coca, which the Indians value more than gold and silver. The mystery of this plant of plants is that those who chew its leaves never feel cold, hunger or thirst.

--Spanish doctor who visited the Andes in 1555

For four centuries, the Incas’ mysterious “plant of plants” has intrigued foreigners and alarmed them. Now, the cocaine refined from it is sticking in the craw of the very Andean nations that produce it.

Belatedly, perhaps futilely, the multibillion-dollar cocaine industry is under unprecedented assault in South America by the countries that seem to profit from it most.

U.S. officials are pleased, but the emerging anti-cocaine alliance between the producing nations and the world’s largest consumer of the drug is an uneasy one. Neither side entirely trusts the other’s commitment.

Governments throughout South America are attacking cocaine less because of badgering from Washington than because of their reluctant recognition that their own societies are being undermined by it. Money talks. The rich man’s high is the poor man’s corruption. Enforcement is better than ever today, but production and consumption of cocaine are also dramatically higher than ever.

In producer countries, the distorting political, social and economic impact of cocaine is straining have-not societies already challenged by hunger and the specter of violence.

Subversion of Democracy

Cocaine, more valuable than any precious metal, can threaten national security as certainly as spies or a bellicose neighbor, as the Latins have learned to their dismay. Cocaine subverts tender institutions. Ultimately, it imperils the survival of fragile young democratic systems in the worst-afflicted nations--Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

There is great irony in cocaine’s curse. In a time of profound economic crisis, the production and export of cocaine to the high-hungry North American market is Latin America’s most lucrative new industry.

“The only raw material that has increased in value is cocaine,” Peruvian President Alan Garcia told the United Nations recently. “The only successful transnational enterprise originated in our countries is narcotics trafficking. The most successful effort to achieve Andean integration has been made by the drug traffickers.”

There is sobering evidence of the drug’s destructive effects, not only in the Andean producer countries but also in other Latin American nations that are the smugglers’ bridge between farm and market.

In Colombia, multimillionaire cocaine barons grew annoyed with a courageous minister of justice. They had him murdered.

In Peru, coca is the most extensively planted agricultural crop. Coca paste is the leading national export and the largest single source of foreign exchange. Coca plantations are growing quickly, far outstripping a U.S.-financed eradication campaign.

In Bolivia, a cabal of smuggler-generals seized power in 1980 in what became known as “the cocaine coup.” En route to easy millions and subsequent arrest-free exile, they operated more planes than the Bolivian air force. Their heirs rule vast rural areas outside the control of the central government.

In the Bahamas, long one of cocaine’s Caribbean aircraft carriers, corruption has scaled a ladder toward the centers of official power--beyond the police department into “senior levels” of the government, in the judgment of a commission of inquiry.

Smugglers’ Aid

In the Dominican Republic, police and military officers are accused of aiding smugglers in transit.

In Mexico, a police chief heading the investigation of a U.S. drug agent’s murder was accused of accepting $270,000 to allow a trafficker’s jailbreak.

In Panama, someone kidnaped and murdered a former health official who accused the armed forces of involvement in drug smuggling.

A former government minister from Belize is serving seven years in a U.S. jail on cocaine charges, as are the chief minister and two other officials of the Turks and Caicos, a British Caribbean protectorate.

The Latin American experience is plain: Cocaine is all-corrupting. One veteran American smuggler told U.S. investigators that he had never encountered a Latin American official who could not be bought.

18 Months’ Pay

In the jungles of Peru, a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of coca paste is worth $1,800--18 months’ pay for a Peruvian policeman. A kilo of pure, uncut cocaine sells wholesale for around $35,000 in southern Florida.

That is equal to about 18 months’ pay for Miami policemen, two of whom were arrested recently for cocaine possession. That came two weeks after $150,000 vanished from a Miami police safe. “How Many Cops Have Gone Bad?” asked a Miami newspaper headline.

On the streets of Los Angeles, the wholesale price of cocaine is reported to be somewhere between $35,000 and $55,000 a kilo. Estimates of the street value of the drug, after it has been “cut” by the addition of other material, vary even more widely--from $110,000 to $625,000 a kilo.

In any event, South America’s millionaire cocaine traffickers have vastly more money to spend protecting their industry than the pursuing governments can afford to suppress it. The well-equipped settlements that the traffickers offhandedly carve from the Amazon jungle for their laboratories would be models of development if governments had sponsored them.

Boom Market

Money is no object. Uptown American sniffers stand in line to pay cocaine’s price. With an estimated 5,000 Americans trying cocaine for the first time each day, the U.S. market this year is estimated at about 100 tons--four times what it was in 1980--and some reports suggest that U.S. imports may be closer to 175 tons. Western Europe, where a 12-pound West German cocaine bust in 1977 seemed at the time like the ultimate seizure, is expected to consume around 20 tons this year.

In Southern California, the world’s largest retail market for cocaine, police at Los Angeles International Airport last year confiscated $12 million in cash from suspected homeward-bound cocaine couriers, agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said. Less than half made even the slightest legal effort to recover their money.

Here in South America, murder, extortion, kidnaping, intimidation and wholesale bribery are handmaidens of cocaine. After 45 people were arrested in one jungle laboratory with 13.8 tons of cocaine last year, a Colombian judge released them--for lack of evidence.

“Greed, not ideology” is the guiding light of the cocaine world, State Department official Clyde Taylor told the Senate last May, but some people think they see a Communist plot. American cocaine users, thundered Sen. Paula Hawkins (R-Fla.), “must realize they are tools in a geopolitical movement designed to perpetuate totalitarianism and spread Marxist insurgency throughout Latin America.”

That position is extreme, but some Colombian guerrillas swim comfortably with the cocaine sharks. In Peru, Maoist guerrillas woo farmers resentful of U.S.-sponsored coca eradication.

Citing circumstantial evidence, the Reagan Administration charges that officials of the Cuban and Nicaraguan governments have cooperated with drug traffickers. Both governments deny the allegations.

“Cuba doesn’t want narcotics traffickers in its waters, just some narcotics traffickers,” Jon R. Thomas, the State Department’s anti-narcotics chief, said in an interview.

Painful Burden

Even when American financial assistance matches American pressure and rhetorical encouragement--seldom, in the Latin American view--the anti-cocaine drive is a painful burden for poor countries. It diverts scarce resources from more pressing national problems.

In Peru and Bolivia--the primary producers of coca and two of South America’s poorest countries--new governments grapple with prolonged recession and unpayable foreign debts in the context of epidemic national misery. New presidents in both countries promise greater vigor than their lackluster predecessors, but drugs is not what is most on their minds.

Here, in Colombia, a more mature democracy, where a rich-as-Midas cartel refines most coca and organizes its export as cocaine, official energies are whipsawed by conflicting priorities. The government declared a “state of economic and social emergency” in the aftermath of the deadly eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano Nov. 13.

Judges Among Victims

That followed a violent, controversial and still politically explosive shoot-out with guerrillas who seized the downtown Palace of Justice here. A dozen Colombian judges who were weighing U.S. extradition requests for major cocaine traffickers were among the victims of the shoot-out.

Controlling cocaine is important to the Colombian government, but defeating the guerrillas--about 9,000 fighters in 23 “fronts” all over the country--is the most pressing task facing the government.

Despite the other crises, it is no longer fashionable among Latin Americans to dismiss the cocaine industry as “the gringos’ problem.” The need to control traffickers who flourish in dollars-bought empires outside government authority is now doctrine in virtually every South American nation.

An Uneven Struggle

The struggle is predictably uneven. The Colombian army is resolute against drugs. The Peruvian army sees no drug evil. When the Peruvian air force has cooperated with anti-drug police, it has normally charged by the hour for the use of its aircraft.

Peruvian authorities seize all property of suspected traffickers. Colombian police are allowed only to seize conveyances. In hapless Bolivia, drug enforcement--like everything else--is constrained by the institutionalized instability and everyday chaos that have humbled all modern Bolivian governments.

The “plant of plants” has survived innumerable assaults over the centuries. It may win this one, too. Clearly, the struggle against it is uphill. What is special this time, though, is that for the Latin Americans, the bottom line is not so much cocaine as self-preservation.

A historical scourge threatens our country--the drug traffic, whose temptation to quick riches corrodes consciences and destroys institutions. Our country and others cannot be identified internationally as exporters of poison.

--Peruvian President Alan Garcia in his inaugural address last July

When Latin American governments vow to crack down on cocaine, they invariably talk about destroying “the Mafia.” What they mean is the violent, home-grown, often-provincial crime families who manipulate narcotics kingdoms with feudal insouciance.

Although the drug lords seem to operate with impunity at home, traveling abroad is a burden for them and for any Colombian. Particularly if he is young, it is a safe bet that a Colombian will have a hassle with immigration and customs--from Los Angeles to London.

Such is the price of hailing from a country that is a renowned “exporter of poison.” U.S. drug experts estimate that 80% of the world’s cocaine traffic is controlled by Colombians.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of Colombians do not know cocaine from sugar. Many of them, like many Bolivians and Peruvians--and all of their governments--are fed up with being tarred by the drug traffickers’ brush.

The most dramatic turnabout has come in Colombia, where the cocaine assassination last year of crusading Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara abruptly ended what President Belisario Betancur would later call “our moral vacation.” Outraged by the murder and by the traffickers’ pernicious impact at all levels of Colombian society, Betancur declared a state of siege and “a war without quarter” against the cocaine mafia.

Since the start of 1984, Colombia has seized more than 20 tons of cocaine, smashed about 700 laboratories, arrested nearly 7,000 people and forged burgeoning regional anti-cocaine cooperation with neighboring countries.

Supported by the armed forces, Colombia’s U.S.-backed anti-drug police are the best of their breed in South America. To avoid the Colombian heat, major traffickers have relocated processing laboratories in the jungles of Peru, Brazil and Ecuador and in southern Florida.

Upwardly mobile cocaine czars who once mingled with Colombian high society have been driven underground or out of the country. In an extraordinary maneuver bespeaking both their arrogance and their alarm at the government counter-assault, major traffickers offered to abandon the business and to repatriate up to $5 billion to Colombia in exchange for an amnesty. Betancur refused.

“Rodrigo Lara died fighting drugs,” Betancur said at a memorial service for him this year. “With his death, the mafias sowed the seeds of their own destruction. . . . We share his conviction that theirs are crimes against mankind that cannot be defended.”

In Bolivia, where cocaine traffickers once ran the government and about 100,000 peasant families grow coca for the paste that is the country’s largest export, government rhetoric against cocaine so far surpasses government action.

Nothing New

It has been ever thus.

Angered by Bolivian inaction, the United States threatened earlier this year to suspend economic aid. Now, there is a new and more forceful president, but Bolivia remains one of the most politically unstable countries on earth. It is a particular bane to American congressmen, few of whom realize, as Bolivians do, that any afternoon in which the government’s authority is not openly defied within a few blocks of the presidential palace is a good day.

“We will do everything possible to fight this terrible scourge,” promised President Victor Paz Estenssoro at his inauguration in August. However, Paz--that rarity of Bolivian rarities, an elected civilian president--has had other, higher priorities.

He has decreed a state of siege and arrested 150 labor leaders who led a general strike against his Draconian attempts to control the world’s worst inflation.

Seven laboratories have been raided by drug police since Paz took office, but no big traffickers have been captured. With the distraction of a man asked to tend his garden while his house burns, Paz promises U.S. officials that when he launches an anti-drug program, it will be as drastic as the measures he is using to control inflation.

In Peru, where the world’s best coca grows on the eastern slopes of the Andes, new President Garcia sees destruction of cocaine smuggling as an essential ingredient in overall national moralization.

Maximo Augustin Mantilla, Garcia’s portly, gun-loving former personal secretary, has become Peru’s cocaine dragon-slayer as deputy minister of the interior.

“We have the moral and ideological conviction to wipe out the drug trade,” Mantilla said. “It is an international crime. More, it erodes values at all levels among all kinds of people.”

Raids and Purge

In its early months, the Garcia government has mounted major raids and purged a police force riddled by cocaine scandal.

The Peruvian police officers who survived the purge recently destroyed six major conversion laboratories on the Peruvian side of the Peru-Colombia frontier that were among the largest and most modern ever seen by American agents who accompanied the raiders. Operation Condor, as the assault was called, also netted more than a ton of export-ready cocaine and three helicopters.

Profiting from the tribulations of their Andean neighbors, other South American governments are also taking a stiffer stance against cocaine.

Venezuela recently made a 600-kilogram seizure, and so did Ecuador.

“We are bombarded with cocaine from all sides,” said Lt. Col. Gustavo Gallegos, chief of Ecuador’s international police.

Brazil, a major producer not of cocaine but of the chemicals needed to refine it, is an inviting target for the traffickers. Brazilian authorities are alert to the lure that Brazil’s vast, thinly populated west represents for traffickers seeking safe haven for conversion labs and fields for cultivation of a down-scale, lowland variety of coca called epadu .

Brazil Safer

Smashing a cocaine ring in Sao Paulo with about 40 arrests earlier this year, police said the smugglers had decided that Brazil was a safer base than Colombia.

“If we had waited another year before reacting, Brazil could have quickly become another Colombia or Bolivia,” said Paulo Gustavo de Magalhes Pinto, chief of federal drug police in Sao Paulo.

Increased South American vigilance, combined with increasing American expertise, has paid off in Miami, long the major U.S. port of entry. Cocaine seizures there totaled more than 25 tons in the 1985 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to DEA special agent William H. Yout. That is nearly twice the amount seized in the entire United States in fiscal 1984.

“Five or six years ago, it was only the United States that was interested in combating the drug problem. Recently, there has been a dramatic change of attitude among the producing countries,” the State Department’s Thomas said. “That is progress. Once you have a political commitment, anything is possible.”

Coca leaf is a marvel. It has no peer.

--Peruvian psychologist Baldomero Caceres, who chews a black variety called coca pizarra, cheaper and more pungent than the green varieties favored by Andean Indians.

Man’s knowledge of coca, a tough and hardy bush, goes back thousands of years. Pre-Inca artifacts document its use 2,000 years before Christ, according to Raul Jeri, a Peruvian researcher. In 1499, a puzzled Amerigo Vespucci could make no sense of “Indians chewing their cud like cows.”

Today, in Peru alone, 4 million highland Indians routinely, and legally, chew coca leaves as a poor man’s defense against altitude, cold, fatigue and hunger. It is as much a part of Andean culture as the mountains themselves.

Modern processing of the leaf, though, has aggravated social problems in producer countries. There are, to be sure, thousands of rich young Latin Americans who cannot get by without cocaine, although the percentage of such users is much smaller than in the United States. More pertinent to Latin American governments is the fact that there are now hundreds of thousands of poor who regularly consume cocaine in its most inimical form.

In the first stage of processing, coca leaves are soaked in kerosene and acid to extract the alkaloid. The resulting paste-- pasta basica, as it is called--is converted through a much more sophisticated chemical process into cocaine.

Lethal Combination

The paste, though, can be a killer, and it has flooded major Andean cities, where it is wrapped in tobacco or marijuana and smoked. Either way, it’s a lethal combination, called basuco in Colombia, kete in Peru and pitillo in Bolivia, where each cigarette costs around 125,000 pesos--10 U.S. cents.

“The residue of toxic chemicals in the paste is much more dangerous than the cocaine it contains,” said Jeri, the Peruvian psychiatrist, who studies the effects of drugs. “In 1978, we saw the first 158 cases of abuse from smoking of the paste. Now, it is common in Peru among all ages and all economic levels.’

By Jeri’s reckoning, there are 180,000 paste smokers in Peru alone and many thousands more in Colombia.

U.S. officials, stressing growing domestic abuse as a key reason for Latin American authorities to rally against cocaine, have been heard to say that paste smoking “fries the brain.”

Abuse of coca is as old and as ingrained as the fruitless attempts by New World governments to control it, in the judgment of Colombian cocaine chronicler Jorge Child.

The early Spaniards quickly discovered that the Indians prized coca. The Spaniards, naturally, first taxed it, then tried to ban it. When that didn’t work, they began using it as a portion of the monthly salaries of Indian laborers, a practice that survived deep into this century.

In 1567, a council of bishops in Lima prohibited the use of coca, calling it “a useless, pernicious thing which leads to superstition. It is talisman of the devil.”

King Philip II of Spain decreed bold laws against coca in 1560, 1563 and 1569. But in 1573, the king bowed to reality, ordering production limits “to protect the Indians in the cultivation of coca so they do not become sick in those humid zones.”

By 1617, the chewing of coca leaves was so common among members of the Spanish clergy in the colonies that a synod in Bogota denounced it as “the most efficient instrument for communication with the devil.” Despite threats of excommunication, an itinerant Spanish inquisitor found such widespread use among Dominican and Augustinian monks in 1628 that he warned “if the Inquisition does not take a hand against this infernal superstition, we have lost.”

Since then, coca has won most of the skirmishes and all the wars. In 1947, Colombian President Mariano Ospina banned the cultivation, sale and consumption of coca and marijuana. Fifty days later, after what he ruefully called “a true tempest,” Ospina rescinded his own law.

Prohibition Outgrowth

Indeed, one of the key strengths of today’s cocaine industry is a smuggling tradition nurtured among South Americans by centuries of restrictive governments.

In the 18th Century, an enraged businessman in Cartagena, Colombia, complained that the amount of goods smuggled into that Caribbean port was double those on which tax was paid. Not much has changed. The entirely unrecorded export of coca paste from Bolivia and Peru exceeds that of any taxed export.

And as historian Child notes, paste and refined cocaine often move along long-established smugglers’ routes that once carried gold, emeralds, cigarettes, whiskey and spare parts. Sometimes the transporters are members of old smuggling families who have stepped up from burros and canoes to airplanes with long-range fuel tanks. In the Peruvian jungle, in fact, the nickname for traffickers’ courier planes is “burro.”

. . . Carlos Bustamante also told (DEA informant Adler) Seal that the car dealership Auto World, 6310 South Dixie Highway, Miami, Florida, is owned by Pablo Escobar. Bustamante stated that Escobar was then moving in excess of 500 kilos of cocaine through the dealership location every week . . . .

--From a government petition seeking the extradition to the United States of Jorge Ochoa, a Colombian cocaine warlord of second rank to Pablo Escobar, a 34-year-old billionaire who is the world’s No. 1 cocaine trafficker. Escobar’s extradition is also sought.

It is not only history that makes Latin American governments the underdog in today’s cocaine wars. The enemy they face is world-class.

Major traffickers are tough, smart, unimaginably rich by almost anyone’s standard, and ruthless. Intimidation, corruption and murder are everyday tools of their trade.

When they are attacked, the traffickers fight back. Their enemies die, like Colombian Justice Minister Lara, or the judge investigating his murder, or the warden of a Bogota prison who thwarted a trafficker’s jailbreak. Passers-by die, like the Colombian woman killed by a car bomb outside the U.S. Embassy here a year ago.

Colombian judges and prosecutors are garden-variety assassination targets. About two dozen policemen died fighting drugs in Colombia in the past year. As many police and U.S.-paid coca eradicators were murdered in Peru in the past year.

DEA Agent Murdered

Traffickers tortured and murdered DEA Agent Enrique S. Camarena in Mexico earlier this year. In one South American capital, the local DEA chief, pursued by smugglers who ransacked his apartment, no longer has a fixed address. He sleeps in “safe houses” scattered around the city.

Until gunmen on a motorcycle murdered Lara on April 30, 1984, big traffickers were all the rage in Colombia. They flaunted their money openly--and spread it around clandestinely--to win respectability and influence.

Dashing men about town, they bought banks, showcase ranches, soccer teams, radio stations, a newspaper. Escobar, now a fugitive thought to be hiding in Colombia, underwrote a low-cost housing scheme in a slum area of Medillin, his hometown.

Traffickers paved streets, built athletic fields, sponsored bullfights and bicycle races and gave to the Roman Catholic Church. One Colombian bishop accepted such a gift, although he warned that it would not save its donor’s soul.

Money From Smugglers

“I myself have received money from the drug smugglers, and I have distributed it among the poor, because if a man wants to give something to the church, I cannot oppose,” said Colombian Bishop Dario Castrillon, secretary general of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference.

Escobar opened a public safari park in central Colombia, complete with giraffes, camels, a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus and a bullet-chewed car said to have been used by the Capone mob in Chicago.

Escobar and another trafficker were elected alternate members of the Colombian Congress, giving them congressional immunity and the right to attend sessions in the absence of elected members. Escobar enjoyed his influence in Congress. He openly financed at least one congressman and one senator.

Airstrip for Cocaine

Fugitive Carlos Lehder, a devotee of Adolf Hitler, started a neo-fascist political movement, opened his own newspaper and built a big resort hotel in his hometown of Armenia. To facilitate cocaine transport, Lehder also bought Norman Cay, an island in the Bahamas. At the island’s airstrip, an X was painted at the head of the runway, closing the field to all but Lehder’s business flights.

Drug money has flowed regularly into Colombian political campaigns at all levels. The traffickers gave evenly to all sides, not caring who won as long as the winner was beholden to them. It is widely believed here that Colombia’s two major political parties each received around $1 million in drug money to help with their 1982 presidential campaigns.

“The narco-traffickers are creating in our countries true multinationals of crime which use their enormous economic capacity to grab control of the levers of power,” said Enrique Parejo, Colombia’s current justice minister.

The Colombian cocaine kings, like their counterparts in Peru and Bolivia, employ top-rate technicians: skilled engineers to build laboratories, careful chemists to run them. They hire daring American and Latin American pilots to link clandestine airstrips in untracked jungles where navigation is sometimes a nervy matter of counting the rivers.

Cash and Carry

Of cocaine’s cash-and-carry billions, only a small percentage ever returns to South America. By one careful estimate, the Peruvian cocaine industry yearly generates around $4 billion, of which only about $600 million is spent in Peru. That is not the panacea that some Latin Americans once imagined cocaine represented to their hard-pressed economies, but in the case of Peru, it is still more of a help than petroleum, the second-leading export earner.

Most of the cocaine billions are laundered abroad in places like Miami, Panama, the Cayman Islands, Western Europe--wherever there is a friendly banker who doesn’t care about the origins of the suitcases full of cash.

Among Colombian money launderers now jailed in the United States, one was a hotelier, rancher and soccer team owner; another was a champion amateur golfer, the grandson of a Colombian Supreme Court justice and the son of a retired army colonel; a third was a Ph.D candidate in engineering who free-lanced in overseas finance from his family’s travel agency.

In Peru, police closely watched the growth of the cocaine business. A July explosion in a Lima conversion laboratory literally blew the lid off their corruption. Lima’s still-unraveling police scandal is a textbook example of subornation by traffickers.

The elaborate laboratory, dubbed “Villa Coca” by the Peruvian press, was the property of a 43-year-old Peruvian named Reynaldo Rodriguez Lopez. For the extensive Rodriguez Lopez clan, many members of which he employed at high salaries, he was the patriarch. They called him “El Rey”--The King.

Not much was known about Rodriguez Lopez at first. He seemed to be a modest accountant and an adviser in a tourism firm run by two of his brothers. Then, it turned out, the DEA knew Rodriguez Lopez as a trafficker with links to a Mexican smuggler who, in turn, was believed to be tied to the murder of agent Camarena.

When government investigators began digging, they discovered that Rodriguez Lopez was listed as an adviser to the Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police, had a private phone there and was a good friend of ranking police generals charged with eradicating the drug traffic in Peru.

When investigators--not the police, who were by then under a cloud--raided the offices of the family travel firm, they found checkbooks, credit cards, dozens of passports and a courtesy international air ticket issued to the wife of the general commanding the supposed anti-drug police.

Smuggling Whiskey, Aliens

The travel agency did a land-office business. Among Rodriguez Lopez’s sidelines, authorities say, was smuggling whiskey into Peru and illegal aliens into the Los Angeles area from Tijuana.

Last month, honest Peruvian policemen found The King hiding out in a small seaside provincial city and arrested him. At first, Rodriguez was identified as Peru’s biggest cocaine trafficker, but now, as they wade through a wealth of seized documents, investigators suspect that he may have been simply a partner in an even bigger trafficking organization.

With the investigation continuing, Peru’s clean-broom president, Alan Garcia, has swept out more than 200 generals, colonels and majors in a reform of Peru’s three national police forces.

About 140 of them are gone from the cocaine-tainted plainclothes investigations police. However, “this does not mean that any of these officers were involved in crimes or illicit acts,” Abel Salinas, Garcia’s interior minister, said in announcing the recent dismissal of 10 generals and 13 colonels in one of the three forces.

In the world war against narcotics, we need the commitment of the consumer nations to attack the traffic with the same vigor we have shown. We can make all the sacrifices possible, but if there is enormous demand, production will never be completely eradicated.

--Belisario Betancur, Colombian President

Underlying the new-found Latin American belief that cocaine ought to be fought because it is an internal threat is a deeper-seated conviction that the United States is asking Latin America to do something that the Americans themselves will not do.

Recounting to the United Nations a series of anti-cocaine successes in his first weeks in office, Peru’s Garcia asked pointedly:

“If we can accomplish so much in 50 days, it would be fair to ask the U.S. government what it has done to protect the human rights of those addicts who collapse in Grand Central Station. It would be fair to ask when the U.S. government will fight, with law and Christianity, to eradicate and condemn the consumption of drugs in its own territory, the paramount market deforming the lives of our campesinos. “

Which Comes First?

Does supply grow because of growing demand in the world’s freest and most affluent market, as the Latin Americans insist? Or is demand stoked by the ever-greater availability of supply?

Either way, the fact is that while more cocaine is being seized by alarmed authorities around the world, more cocaine is also being produced than ever, and more is being consumed.

“We recognize that the demand stimulates the supply in a producer-to-user chain that must be broken,” the State Department’s Thomas told a recent inter-American meeting of newspaper editors.

Reduce Incentive

Colombian Justice Minister Parejo told the same meeting: “While the major consuming countries constitute a market of exceptional size and great lucrativeness, the efforts we make will be, if not fruitless, quite precarious in their results. It is indispensable that countries like the U.S. mobilize their enormous resources to stem the entrance of drugs and to reduce consumption. When that happens, it will considerably reduce the incentive to produce.”

In the Latin Americans’ view, the U.S. government, as usual, assigns to their have-not societies the dirtiest jobs. Suppressing the cocaine industry pits often unstable and always economically distressed democratic governments against their own people. That is not a price the United States has chosen to bear, the Latin Americans note.

Neither is the lesson of the Colombian marijuana industry lost on the complaining Latin Americans. A 1960s and ‘70s precursor of the cocaine boom, the marijuana business is now declining in Colombia’s Guajira peninsula under a U.S.-backed assault that includes aerial eradication. However, Americans once wedded to Colombian marijuana have not abandoned the weed; they have simply changed their source of supply. Today, the United States is the world’s largest producer of marijuana.

Constantly urged to do more against drugs by a stream of somber American visitors to ministries and presidential palaces, the Latin Americans find it revealing that the Reagan most closely publicly associated with the anti-drug campaign is not the President but Nancy, the First Lady.

Latins Are Targets

American enforcement today is targeted against traffickers, most of them foreigners, or at least Latins. Hometown consumers are seldom hassled by American police.

No one on either side of the hemisphere holds any brief for the murdering, corrupting millionaire traffickers. What, though, of the jungle farmer who plants coca because it has an instant market and pays eight or ten times more than any other crop?

“Those peasants, they’re criminals. I know they are poor campesinos, but they are breaking the law,” Thomas of the State Department said in an interview.

Such an attitude is viewed here as Anglo-Saxon righteousness, and the issue does not seem so black and white to leaders of Andean countries assailed more by hunger than by a surfeit of affluent cocaine-snorters.

“Perhaps it is wrong. Perhaps they are guilty, but the peasants must live, mustn’t they?” asked Ciro Gallegos, mayor of Tingo Maria, a Peruvian drug town.

In the Peruvian view, particularly, American anti-drug programs--budgeted at around $50 million worldwide this year--are long on promise and short on delivery.

“The DEA is like Latin American politicians. They both promise everything and deliver nothing,” said Abel Salinas, an engineer by trade, who is Garcia’s interior minister and Peru’s top policeman.

Even more unsettling to the Latin Americans is their perception of U.S. policy as heavy on the stick and light on the carrot. Peru and Bolivia both seek more economic aid to offset rural hardships that a sustained anti-coca drive would generate. Bolivia is also calling for an international economic fund to buy coca leaves from farmers, thereby establishing “a world system of control of the raw material without damaging the economy of the peasants,” in the words of Vice President Julio Garrett-Aillon.

Thomas, though, said, “A country can’t ‘develop’ out of drugs. Developmental assistance without enforcement doesn’t work. The only thing that works is enforcement. Only after a peasant is convinced that he will lose his crop does development become important.”

Garcia a Mixed Blessing

Peru’s 36-year-old Garcia, a dynamic example of a new breed of Latin American democrats, is a mixed blessing for U.S. anti-drug efforts.

He says all the right things, vowing to war on drugs “because they are a crime against humanity.” Then, in populist nationalism untrammeled by diplomatic nicety, Garcia casts the drug issue in an awkward context for U.S. policy-makers:

“It is an equally grave crime against humanity to raise interest rates, lower the prices of raw materials and squander economic resources on technologies of death while hundreds of millions of human beings live in misery or are driven to violence.”

Meaningful Questions

Even as the Latin Americans rally against cocaine in the name of their own self-interest, there are pregnant questions of long-range commitment, constancy and capacity on both sides.

At the moment, the white hats appear to have won some momentum. If the cocaine kings are not running scared, at least they are more discomfited than ever before. The United States is encouraged.

“We are making a lot of progress, even if we can’t cite any decrease in gross production,” Thomas said. “Attitudes are changing. Some things that would have been impossible even a few years ago, like extradition of Colombian traffickers, are now realities. We can’t eliminate production and use, but we can contain and limit it. It can be done.”

Maybe. The “plant of plants” has seen it all before.