A New Battlefront Forms for the U.S. in Central America

In the 1990s, the U.S. presence in Central America faded like the paint that demonstrators had sprayed on walls during the previous decade: “Yankee Go Home.”

The Cold War ended; the leftist guerrillas that Americans had helped fight signed peace agreements and turned themselves into political parties. The isthmus was no longer of much military interest.

Now the Yankees are back. In what critics call a militarization of the drug war, U.S. soldiers and sailors are again appearing across Central America:

* Costa Ricans are boarding U.S. Coast Guard cutters to patrol their own territorial waters.

* Guatemalans are catching rides on American helicopters to swoop down on cocaine caravans detected by U.S. intelligence.

* In El Salvador, the legislature voted Thursday to let U.S. pilots fly anti-drug spy planes out of the Comalapa air base.

* Even Nicaragua, whose armed forces were closely affiliated with the Marxist Sandinista regime that the United States opposed in the 1980s, is close to signing a military anti-narcotics cooperation agreement, according to U.S. Ambassador Oliver P. Garza.

So far, the results have been as modest as the investment--just $4.3 million in military anti-drug aid last year for all of Central America. By comparison, the new U.S. anti-drug package for Colombia, which also includes military funds along with appropriations for Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela, amounts to $1.3 billion.

But “the amount of money isn’t as important as the revival of the military mission,” cautioned William O. Walker III, chairman of the history department at Florida International University.

“Democracy isn’t on sound footing in these countries,” he added. “There may be unintended consequences of U.S. drug policy,” such as undermining the civilian governments that have only recently taken control of their armed forces.

In contrast, proponents--from national police chiefs and presidents to top U.S. military officers and anti-narcotics officials--insist that a joint effort is needed to solve a joint problem.

An estimated 59% of the cocaine bound for the United States--300 to 400 tons a year--is sent by land or sea through these tiny countries, which are ill equipped to stop the trade. In addition, law enforcement officials have in recent months found heroin tucked into the cocaine shipments.

U.S. officials want to intercept the illegal drugs before they get to Mexico, an easy route into the United States. Central American officials hope to halt the crack epidemic that has spread through countries along the route from Colombia to the United States.

As one U.S. Defense Department employee posted in Central America explained: “It’s the difference between having a dog walk across your yard to poop at the neighbor’s house and when the dog decides to poop in your yard. Then you want to stop it.”

The Pacific Seen as Key Trafficking Route

Anti-narcotics officials believe that drugs are increasingly being transported on speedboats across the Pacific, far offshore, where only sophisticated tracking devices can detect the vessels and helicopters based on ships are needed to intercept them.

The U.S. military is offering Central American countries the use of such equipment and trained people to operate it.

“There is a clearly defined division of labor,” said Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which is responsible for American military concerns in Latin America. “It is apparent that the U.S. role is one of support. The local authorities do the hard part: confronting, arresting and confiscating.”

Wilhelm made the remarks a few hours after kicking off “Maya-Jaguar,” a U.S.-Guatemalan anti-drug exercise that began in early June. The United States spent $1 million to lend Guatemala four helicopters, the Navy coastal patrol boat Chinook and 85 soldiers and sailors to operate them.

During a similar operation last year, Guatemalan police received information from the United States that allowed them to make the largest land seizure of cocaine in Central American history. They stopped three tractor-trailer rigs on the Pan American Highway, the isthmus’ main thoroughfare, carrying 2.5 tons of cocaine.

This year the results of the joint effort were less impressive. Unlike his predecessor, President Alfonso Portillo asked the Guatemalan Congress for permission to bring in the U.S. troops--and the ensuing publicity might have had a chilling effect on drug activity for the duration of the exercise.

The annual exercise is part of a regional program called “Central Skies,” the cornerstone of the joint anti-drug efforts.

The supporting cast of Central Skies is “Joint Task Force Bravo,” which shares the Enrique Soto Cano air base near Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, with the Honduran Military Academy. Established in 1983 to support the region’s right-wing governments and the counterrevolutionaries who fought Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the task force at one time was assigned 2,000 troops.

Since 1996, about 550 U.S. military personnel have been posted to Honduras, most on temporary duty. Lately, JTF Bravo has been best known for hosting the 29,000 U.S. troops who worked on rescue and reconstruction in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Central America in late 1998.

The pilots and air crews of JTF Bravo are the chauffeurs in the regional anti-drug exercises. For the first time this year, Salvadoran anti-narcotics police trained with U.S. helicopter pilots here at the Ilopango air base.

Sweat pouring from their faces and black uniforms clinging to their backs in the tropical sun, they jumped from the helicopters and surrounded the choppers, guns pointing outward. At a thumbs-up from the U.S. crew chief, they reboarded and repeated the exercise, taking full advantage of the two-day practice session.

Six Central American countries agreed to participate in the 2000 edition of Central Skies, despite objections from legislators, many of them former guerrillas whom the United States was helping oppose a decade ago.

Officials in Nicaragua, the only nation on the isthmus left out of the exercise, refused to comment on why their country didn’t participate.

A source close to the government in Managua says Nicaragua’s armed forces have resisted U.S. overtures because of continuing resentment of American support for the counterrevolutionaries in the 1980s. But that rancor is abating, he says, citing the recent appointment of a military attache to the Nicaraguan Embassy in Washington, the first time in a decade that the post has been filled.

Further, public pressure is on the side of cooperation. A CID-Gallup survey conducted in March found that 78% of Nicaraguans questioned favor joint anti-drug patrols with the United States.

Agreement With Nicaragua in Sight

Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, said in late June that “we are very close to reaching [a maritime cooperation] agreement with Nicaragua.” That would make Nicaragua the fourth Central American nation to agree to some form of cooperation on the sea.

Both Belize and Panama have signed “ship-rider” agreements that allow U.S. vessels to patrol their waters as long as members of their police are on board. In November, the most extensive anti-narcotics maritime agreement between the U.S. and a Central American nation took effect in Costa Rica.

The agreement permits both air and sea patrols and, in some circumstances, even detentions of boats and passengers until Costa Rican authorities can arrive on the scene to make arrests. U.S. Coast Guard ships are also allowed to make port calls in Costa Rica to resupply and give their crews free time.

In the first joint exercise under the agreement, 134 boats were boarded in Costa Rican waters. No drugs were found, but U.S. helicopters did sight a 20-mile oil slick coming from a Mexican fishing boat that was dumping bilge, resulting in Costa Rica’s first successful prosecution of a marine pollution case.

The agreement was rejected twice by the Costa Rican legislature before it was modified enough to be passed on the third try, despite opposition from the leftist Democratic Force Party.

“The United States is putting too much emphasis on the military aspect,” said lawmaker Jose Merino del Rio. “We don’t think that this is the most effective way to fight drugs.”

Anti-narcotics authorities, however, insist that they need help.

“Costa Rica does not have the capacity to struggle with the Hydra of drug trafficking that grows two new heads every time we cut off one,” said Allan Solano, director of Costa Rica’s anti-narcotics police. “U.S. technology is indispensable to even up the struggle.”

U.S. officials hope to make the Costa Rica agreement a model for the rest of the region. Wilhelm says he discussed that idea with Portillo and members of the Guatemalan legislature during his two-day visit there.

But for now, the marine agreements have taken a back seat to Washington’s first priority in Central America: a place to land and service anti-narcotics surveillance planes.

The Salvadoran Legislative Assembly’s passage of an agreement for a permanent U.S. presence at the Comalapa air base, which shares a runway with the country’s international airport in San Salvador, makes this country the third leg of a strategy to replace the anti-drug air coverage that was lost when the U.S. military bases in Panama closed last year.

U.S. spy planes are already flying out of Ecuador and the Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curacao to detect drug production and smuggling. But planes flying from those airports can’t adequately cover the Pacific.

A hangar in El Salvador will close that gap, U.S. drug enforcement authorities say. The ability to fly from all three locations, Wilhelm said, “is crucial to our overall success.”

Eight people will be based permanently in El Salvador, and that number will increase to 50 or 60 when the air crews come in, says U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson. She has offered to take Salvadoran legislators to see U.S. operations in Ecuador and the Caribbean to reassure them that the proposed landing area is not a disguised military base.

“There are concerns, and we are going to discuss them,” she said.

Nevertheless, the guerrillas-turned-politicians of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, strongly has opposed the agreement, which was negotiated by the country’s foreign minister.

“We cannot pawn our sovereignty with the excuse of fighting drug trafficking,” lawmaker Manuel Melgar said. The FMLN, didn’t have enough votes to block the agreement, has vowed to take the case to the country’s Supreme Court.

“We are going to do all that is necessary to prevent this affront to the Salvadoran fatherland, this intervention,” legislator Shafick Handal said in an impassioned speech during the debate.

Other Salvadorans worry that a U.S. presence at Comalapa would reinforce the Salvadoran air force’s own nascent anti-drug role, which began when the international airport’s civilian authorities installed new radar equipment in December 1998.

Air traffic controllers noticed an alarming number of planes flying without flight plans and landing at locations other than the country’s two airports. Airport authorities notified the police.

That information coincided with reports that U.S. Embassy anti-drug and military officials had been receiving from intelligence sources. In response, with support from U.S. diplomats, airport officials, anti-narcotics police and the air force formed the “Cuscatlan Group.”

Police surveyed the country’s landing strips, many of them unregistered. The air force developed a plan to defend Salvadoran airspace from unidentified planes.

That plan proved its effectiveness in March, when two air force fighters left over from El Salvador’s civil war surrounded a suspicious-looking plane and escorted it out of Salvadoran airspace. Notified by their neighbors, two Guatemalan planes met the aircraft at the border and accompanied it until it crash-landed on a small airstrip.

Police found empty fuel tanks and 470 pounds of cocaine.

“We have become the roadblock of the Pacific,” airport manager Armando Estrada said proudly.

While El Salvador patrols its skies, Costa Rica is taking steps to better patrol its own waters by passing a law to make its coast guard more professional. It began by appointing U.S. Naval Academy graduate Claudio Pacheco as director.

Wariness About Military Resurgence

Those new roles worry Central Americans who are wary about the resurgence of military power. Proud of having abolished their army in 1948, Costa Ricans are suspicious of any form of armed forces, while other countries still remember years of military rule.

“It is difficult to understand why the United States, after working to help us develop a civilian police force, would want to have the military involved again,” said Salvadoran senior statesman Hector Dada. “Our democratic institutions are still weak, and the armed forces remain the strongest institution in the country.”

Even Central Americans who support the U.S. military anti-drug effort worry about American fickleness, wondering how deep the U.S. commitment really is.

At the same time that the maritime agreement was signed, the United States promised Costa Rica two helicopters and four Coast Guard cutters as they became available. So far, one ship has been delivered.

“I don’t think that we are going to get the others,” predicted former Defense Minister Juan Rafael Lizano Saenz. One reason is that, even if the United States is willing to donate new equipment, these countries cannot afford the maintenance.

In Costa Rica’s case, the government has already rescinded the request for helicopters because it couldn’t pay the $1 million a year it would take to keep them flying.

During the Central American civil wars, donations of U.S. equipment included funding for maintenance. The unwillingness to provide that money leads Central Americans such as Lizano who support the joint anti-narcotics effort to worry about the level and dependability of the U.S. commitment.

Further, they insist that the problem has become serious because the United States tolerated drug trafficking at a time when it could have been more easily brought under control. The most notorious example was the U.S. complicity with CIA informant and Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel A. Noriega until late 1989, when U.S. forces invaded his country to arrest him on drug charges.

Even more recently, in 1992, says Leonel Gomez, a Salvadoran investigator who has worked for both the U.S. Embassy and American congressmen, the U.S. government gave in to pressure to withhold evidence that would have sent a young oligarch here to prison for his part in a 3-ton shipment of cocaine that was seized in the port of Acajutla.

William Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, who isn’t related to the historian, remembers the incident differently.

“He was held at my insistence,” he said of the suspected drug trafficker. “The day after I left the country, they released him.”

Still, Walker says that he was shocked by the parade of prominent Salvadorans who came to his office to ask for the man’s release. “Many were people I had respected,” he said. “I must say, I had to reappraise my opinion of them.”

Gomez warns that Walker’s successors did not learn from that lesson and that, in the intervening eight years, the United States has continued “to look for allies among the most corrupt people in El Salvador.”

That undermines U.S. credibility, he said, because “it is difficult to believe that they will stop drug trafficking when their allies are involved.”

Still, faced with the seemingly unlimited funds of the drug traffickers and their own tight budgets, if Central Americans want to stop narcotics trafficking through their region, they appear to have few choices but to accept U.S. help, with its risks and shortcomings.

Pacheco estimates that, at any one time, only seven or eight of his coast guard’s 30 boats are working properly. “It’s not that we can’t fix them--it’s just not worth fixing them,” he said.

Similarly, pilots say it doesn’t make sense to upgrade the radar of El Salvador’s nine old A-37 aircraft. U.S. officials talk about supporting the Salvadoran pilots, but when asked for specifics, they mention night-vision goggles, not new airplanes.

Funding is the biggest difference between the current war against drugs and the war against communism that was waged here in the 1980s, according to U.S. and Central American officials familiar with both efforts.

“Back then, we were training people to use equipment they had just received,” another Defense Department employee said. “Now we are training them first, and the requests for equipment will come later.”

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Anti-Drug Aid to Central America

An estimated 59% of the cocaine bound for the U.S. passes over the land or through the territorial waters of the tiny countries of Central America. U.S. troops have begun appearing across Central America to help fight the drug war.

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* reflects closure of U.S. military bases

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Source: Center for International Policy