Bush Will Meet 3 Latin Chiefs in Drug Summit

The presidents of South America’s three principal cocaine-producing countries on Tuesday invited President Bush to a summit within 90 days to forge joint strategies in the “frontal assault” on drug trafficking, and Bush quickly accepted the proposal.

Bush expressed his willingness to take part shortly after word of the proposal by Presidents Alan Garcia of Peru, Jaime Paz Zamora of Bolivia and Virgilio Barco Vargas of Colombia reached the White House, spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

“We accept. The President will go,” Fitzwater declared. “I think everybody had felt a summit like this would be necessary.”

Nevertheless, the specific invitation to a summit conference caught the White House by surprise, even though Bush had mentioned such a meeting during his presidential campaign last year and again in a nationally televised speech Sept. 5 in which he outlined his anti-drug program.

Fitzwater said no discussions have been held on the specifics of such a summit, including its agenda, date, location or participants.

Garcia, Paz Zamora and Barco did not suggest where the summit should be held, although their invitation to Bush suggested that they want it to occur in Latin America, not in the United States. That appeared to raise the potential for disagreement, given possible security problems in the drug-producing countries.

Jamaica, Barbados, and Caracas, Venezuela, have been mentioned as possible sites, Fitzwater said.

“They’re inviting us. We’ll be talking about the location,” he said.

A communique issued by the three Latin presidents said a technical meeting would be held in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on Nov. 20 to work out details of the joint proposal.

Surrounded by Troops

Meanwhile, in a desert resort surrounded by army troops and police units, Garcia, Paz Zamora and Barco spent nearly five hours Tuesday coordinating common measures against the scourge afflicting their nations.

The three presidents expressed their resolve to work together to combat cocaine trafficking, while acknowledging the differences in the problems of production, commercialization and consumption.

“We emphasize that there is a growing universal awareness of the gravity of the problem and of the co-responsibility of the states” to counter it, the three said after the meeting.

Peru and Bolivia, among the poorest countries in Latin America, together grow more than 80% of the coca leaves used in the production of cocaine. Colombia, home of the powerful drug cartels, is the center of final refining and marketing of cocaine to consumers in the United States and Europe. All three countries also have growing drug use problems of their own.

At the same time, Peru is coping with a violent left-wing insurgency that has left more than 15,000 dead since 1980. The dominant rebel group is Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist guerrilla movement that has built up a tactical alliance with peasant coca growers and in recent days has killed dozens of people.

Bolivia has no insurgency problem, but its coca growers are bound together in powerful unions that oppose eradication programs. Colombia has endured a wave of violence since mid-August, when traffickers killed a leading presidential candidate and the government responded with a declaration of all-out war against the government.

Underlining their security concerns, the presidents met in the small city of Ica, about 200 miles south of the Peruvian capital of Lima, in a virtual oasis surrounded by dozens of miles of bare desert sand. All approaches were guarded by security forces at roadblocks, and plainclothes officers patrolled the agricultural town of 150,000, reportedly rounding up hundreds of people without identity documents.

The two visiting heads of state arrived by plane at a military air base in nearby Pisco and flew by helicopter to the grounds of a resort hotel on the edge of Ica. Soldiers with binoculars stood atop the mountainous sand dunes that surround the hotel, monitoring all approaches.

The one-day summit preceded the third annual meeting today through Friday of the now-misnamed Group of Eight, an organization of presidents of Latin American democracies aimed at encouraging regional integration.

Panama, the eighth member, was suspended last year after strongman Gen. Manuel A. Noriega in effect deposed President Eric A. Delvalle. At this week’s session the presidents are expected to consider a motion to expel Panama outright after Noriega’s cancellation of election results last May.

“We could ill permit a country like Panama, which makes a joke of the democratic system, to remain among us,” Peruvian Foreign Minister Guillermo Larco Cox said Tuesday. “The Panamanian government is a usurper of the popular will.”

Newly Elected

Of the seven member countries, three have newly elected presidents: Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico, Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela and Carlos Saul Menem of Argentina. The other four, Garcia of Peru, Barco of Colombia, Julio Maria Sanguinetti of Uruguay and Jose Sarney of Brazil, all will be leaving office within a year after elections in those countries.

A brief communique read by Garcia after the talks Tuesday said the three leaders “take up the initiative of President George Bush. Therefore, we invite him to take part in a meeting in the next 90 days and also consider to be of great importance the possible participation of the countries of Europe in this meeting as well.”

In his anti-drug program announced Sept. 5, Bush pledged $261 million to the three Andean nations in this fiscal year to help them fight drug trafficking. Separately, the three nations had complained that the program overemphasizes repression of drug trafficking and offers too little economic help to allow the countries to devise viable alternatives for their people. Coca and cocaine bring billions of dollars a year into the three economies.

The three presidents neither criticized nor praised the Bush initiative. Their statement avoided substantive comment on the drug problem, and the presidents declined to answer questions.

Bush is scheduled to visit Costa Rica on Oct. 27-28, but officials have said for several weeks that if a drug summit is organized, it would not be held in conjunction with that meeting, because its host, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, has insisted that his summit focus entirely on the efforts to establish democracy in the region.

Asked whether a drug summit could take place within 90 days, Fitzwater said Bush had been talking about holding the meeting “by the end of the year,” so that a 90-day time frame was “within the realm of possibility.”

The spokesman said Bush and Barco had spoken about holding such a meeting when they met in Washington two weeks ago. “That probably fed the idea into the group” in Peru, he said.

Asked what such a meeting could accomplish, Fitzwater said, “You need a lot of coordination and information on international drug trafficking.”

Smith reported from Ica, Peru, and Gerstenzang from Washington.