Peru Quits U.S. Drive to Smash Cocaine Labs

Escalating its protest of the U.S. invasion of Panama, Peru delivered a blow to the Bush Administration’s anti-drug strategy Friday by pulling out of programs to find and destroy cocaine laboratories in the Andes.

An Administration official said that President Alan Garcia’s government broke off the $10-million-a-year U.S.-Peruvian program one day after it called for cancellation of a planned Andean summit conference on drugs.

“The Peruvian government requested that we suspend joint anti-narcotics operations, so we are suspending them,” the official said. “We plan to resume them as soon as the government requests it.”

The official said all U.S. assistance to anti-drug programs in Peru is covered by the suspension, although humanitarian aid programs totaling $14 million a year will continue.

Garcia announced Thursday that he would not attend the upcoming U.S.-Colombia-Bolivia-Peru drug summit and had recalled his ambassador from Washington in response to the U.S. invasion of Panama.

U.S. officials insisted that the summit, scheduled for Feb. 15 in Cartagena, Colombia, will go on without Garcia. Peru and Bolivia are the leading producers of coca, the raw material for cocaine. Colombia is the leading refiner of the drug.

The U.S.-Peruvian program was aimed at rooting out the crude jungle laboratories that turn raw coca leaves into coca paste. Another program intended to use herbicides to destroy coca plants in Peru has failed to get off the ground.

Although Bolivia and Colombia have condemned the U.S. intervention in Panama, undertaken in part to bring ousted dictator Manuel A. Noriega to justice on narcotics charges, Administration officials said they have not pulled out of anti-drug programs.

Officials also said that Peru’s suspension of the drug programs will have little immediate effect because no joint operations had been planned until after New Year’s. However, Garcia’s action will inflict major damage on the Administration’s Andean strategy if the Peruvian president does not relent by early next month.

The officials said that Drug Enforcement Administration agents now in Peru would remain in the country for the time being but would not conduct anti-drug programs in the coca-producing Upper Huallaga Valley or elsewhere in the country.

In a related development Friday, the Organization of American States, on a vote of 20 to 1, deplored the U.S. invasion. Washington delivered the lone vote against the resolution. El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Antigua, Costa Rica and Guatemala abstained.

The OAS vote came just before dawn Friday at the end of a marathon session that began Wednesday. The organization approved a resolution “to deeply regret the military intervention in Panama” and call for withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Earlier, the OAS rejected a more strongly worded resolution presented by Nicaragua and Panama to condemn the action.

The second resolution was approved after an often-acrimonious debate in which many longstanding U.S. allies heaped criticism on the military intervention. It was the sharpest denunciation of Washington by the OAS in more than a decade.

“We are outraged,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher declared.

Boucher said the OAS “missed an historic opportunity to get beyond its traditional narrow concern with non-intervention.”

Boucher complained that the OAS failed to single out Noriega as the “root cause” of unrest in Panama. He said the OAS refused to listen to the “rightful representative of the new Panamanian government.”