Chapter 21

 

Global Reach: The

Economic, Political,

and Social Impact

 

"Corruption caused by drug trafficking is certainly one of the most widespread forms of corruption found in the world today." ‑ Victor T Le Vine, professor of political science, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

 

"The argument that coca and poppy cultivation is immoral has had little effect on the farmers of the Andean region, since grow­ing the crops has a long tradition for them, and they can't really see the ill effects. The situation is not much different from the tobacco farmers in the Carolinas of the U.S., who know what they cultivate can kill people, but that doesn't stop them from growing it."

Bruce Wyrick, professor of economics, University of San Francisco

 

San Andresitos is one of Bogota's most popular shopping centers, where, each day, throngs of people come to buy a large variety of goods at ridiculously low prices: authentic Nike sneakers for $35 a pair, Jose Cuervo tequila at $6 to $7 a bottle, fashionable Levis for $30 or less, prices that are much lower than prices for similar goods at other stores in Bogota. The true purpose of San Andresitos and the identity of the entrepreneurs who operate the market are no secret to Colom­bians: to serve as a money laundry for the billions of dollars the coun­try's hardworking drug cartels are making from the global drug trade. Traffickers buy U.S. and foreign goods like Nikes and Levis with Amer­ican dollars and then "smuggle" the goods into Colombia where they are sold at below‑market prices. According to estimates, Colombian drug

 

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traffickers are repatriating between $2 to $5 billion a year from drug exports, an amount equal to about 4 to 9 percent of the gross national product, or about $55 billion annually.' The fact the goods are sold openly is indicative of the power of the drug lords and the scale of cor­ruption in Colombia.

The cash flow from international drug trafficking is evident every­where in Bogota, most notably in the construction trade. Apartment complexes, shopping centers, luxury flats, and office buildings are still being built, even though many stand nearly empty, a striking example that, while the Colombian economy is expanding, narco dollars are dis­torting the economy and hurting its legitimate sector. Between 1991 and 1994, for example, the value of urban property in Colombia appreciated by 40 to 60 percent, while the average rate of inflation was 22 percent. "The local markets and manufacturers can't compete with contraband, so it creates numerous business failures and high unemployment," explained Alejandro Saenz de Santamaria, an economics professor at the Bogota‑based University of the Andes. "Besides, the drug traffickers pay no taxes on the contraband they smuggle into Colombia."

 

Economic Impact

 

Colombia is an example of the economic impact that the interna­tional drug trade has had on the economics of countries around the world. Indeed, it has been one of the major consequences of the War on Drugs. The Pablo Escobars, Khun Sas, and brothers Rodriguez Orejuela, the drug kingpins of international drug trade, dominate the news head­lines, but the drug trade employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who are dependent on the drug trafficking for their livelihood. After all, coca and poppy crops have to be planted, grown, harvested, and transported to the market; precursor chemicals supplied and delivered for the production process; laboratories built, staffed, and guarded; airports constructed and maintained; airplanes flown and serviced; workers paid; profits invested; local official bought off; and records kept. There is much indirect employment as well, since many people sell good, services, and labor to drug traffickers. "The drug; trade's impact on the Andean region is significant and crippling it could have serious economic, political and social consequences," explained Santamaria.

Mauricio Guzman, the mayor of Cali, estimated in 1996 that drug­ related business accounted for 25 percent of the Cali economy. After the

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Colombian government put the Cali cartel's leadership in jail, unem­ployment in Cali jumped to 13 percent. Economists estimate that the drug trade employs about 1 million people in the Andean region, with the Colombia cartels alone having collectively an estimated 100,000 workers on their payrolls. The Sun Ye On Triad, the biggest criminal group in Hong Kong, employs an estimated 25,000 people, while a 1997 Sao Paulo, Brazil, police study revealed that the city's drug traffickers employ more people than the country's auto industry, that is, 30,000 versus 40,000.

"Trying to eradicate the global problem of international drug trafficking quickly may create worse problems by throwing people out of work and destabilizing governments," warned Rensselaer Lee, coau­thor of The Andean Cocaine Economy.'

Dr. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, a former Colombian defense min­ister and now a columnist with El Espectador newspaper, points out that "coca and poppy crops are grown in the very poor regions of the Andes. In some areas, growing illegal drug crops is often the only economic type of activity taking place. When the drug traffickers show up with huge amounts of money‑money that the farmers haven't seen in their lives, it's impossible to stop the planting of illegal crops."'

The farmers in the Andes, moreover, have created powerful lobbies to protect their interests. In Bolivia the 70,000 coca‑growing farmers are organized into eight regional federations consisting of several hundred syndicates. These farmers are "highly organized and sometimes well armed, and they can exert tremendous pressure on the government," explained Rensselaer Lee. In Colombia, the farmers are influenced and often protected by the country's increasingly powerful guerrilla groups.

At times, the farmers have reacted aggressively and even violently against government antidrug policies. In 1991, for instance, Bolivian peasants from the Chapare region marched in protest against the involve­ment of the U.S.‑trained Bolivian army in the War on Drugs, because they believed, despite Bolivian government assurances, that the army would pursue the peasants who grew the coca and try to root out their coca plants. When the price of tin plummeted on the international mar­ket in the 1980s, the Bolivian economy collapsed, and growing coca became a means of survival for many of Bolivia's 300,000 peasants. In August 1996, soldiers clashed with Colombian farmers protesting their government's decision to eradicate their coca and opium crops. Colom­bia has tried to make the farmers switch to legal crops like maiz, yuca, and potatoes, but the farmers can make more money growing coca and

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poppy plants and selling them to drug traffickers. Coca, for example, can earn up to $10,000 an acre; maiz perhaps $200.

"The argument that coca and poppy cultivation is immoral has had little effect on the farmers of the Andean region, since growing the crops has been a long tradition for them, and they can't really see the ill effects," explained Bruce Wyrick, a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, who has done research on Latin American economic development. "The situation is not much different from the tobacco farmers in the Carolinas of the U.S., who know what they cultivate can kill people, but that doesn't stop them from growing it."

The U.S. and international agencies have not been successful in stopping the cultivation of drug crops in other parts of the world, par­ticularly in southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, still the world's principle source of the poppy crop. According to one U.S. Government Account­ing Office report, "The United States has been a major donor for UNCP drug control projects, providing about $2.5 million for fiscal year 1992 to 1994. However ... these projects have not significantly reduced opium production." Earlier, it was discussed how U.S. efforts to eradicate the marijuana crop led to a shift of production from Mexico to Colombia to Jamaica and then full circle to Mexico.

Illegal drug cultivation is directly tied to the world's economy, many experts believe. A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies pointed out that drug production takes place where there are few economic alternatives and where governments are unable to exer­cise sovereignty because of limited resources and political instability. "I believe that eradication may be the only way to get rid of the illegal drug business," explained Rensselaer Lee, who added, "The problem is trying to find a way to do that without causing a massive social and economic upheaval."

While coca and poppy' farmers struggle to eke out a living, the drug traffickers have accrued tremendous economic power. Cartel bosses in Colombia have built huge business empires by, buying radio stations, pharmacies, discotheques, horse ranches, dairy farms, construction companies, banks and financial institutions, and even two higher education institutions. Drug traffickers have spent some of their money on social welfare programs, a shrewd move that has garnered them support from the poor. It is said that the late Pablo Escobar built more public housing in Medellin than the government did, which helps to explain the outpouring of grief at his funeral in December 1993.

Cartel kingpins have become some of Colombia's biggest landown-

21. Global Reach

 

 

ers. In 1988 the Bogota‑based Institute of Liberal Studies reported that drug traffickers had bought nearly one million hectares of the country's best land. "A piece of land may be worth $1,000, but along comes a drug trafficker who wants to buy the land as an investment or because the river runs through it, making it good for cocaine processing," explained Julio Orlando Gomez, a press officer for the Colombian Institute for Agri­cultural Reform ( INCORA). "He offers the campesino $1,000. What do you think he is going to do?"''

Between 1993 and 1996 alone, the Colombian drug lords increased their landholdings by another million hectares, giving them a total between

 

228                                                                HARD TARGET

 

two and four million acres and a presence in 400 municipalities, accord­ing to INCORA. The institute reported that the aggregation of land was having a profound effect on the cost of land and the level of agricultural production and was contributing to the country's frequent violence.''

The Colombian government has moved to expropriate the land­holdings and other properties of dead and convicted drug traffickers. In December 1996 the Colombian congress approved a law that it hoped would lead to land reform and the redistribution of wealth, strengthen the government's ability to fight organized crime, and to help rehabili­tate Colombian society. The law eventually passed, but only after death threats and bribes, five months of heated debate, and the U.S. threat of unspecified sanctions. The process was a vivid example of how drug traffickers have used their money and power to penetrate and corrupt the established order and grow at the expense of legitimate state author­ity.

Many observers believe that agrarian reform is the only way to diffuse the power and influence of the Colombian guerrilla movement and its influence on the coca and poppy growers. "In my two and a half years here, I have not seen the Colombian government move to develop a strategy to deal with the guerrillas," U.S. ambassador Myles Frechette told this author in 1997. "They need one because a guerrilla movement in Latin America has never been defeated by military force alone."

 

Corruption

 

Drug‑trafficking‑related corruption is a worldwide phenomenon that has involved the highest political levels, including heads of state, mil­itary leaders, judges, and police chiefs in every country touched by drug trade. Corruption leas particularly affected Bolivia, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Colombia, which all have thriving , narcotics industries.

In the early 1980s, the Bolivian military under General Luis Garcia Meza joined with the country's drug traffickers to organize what has been described as the country's first official "narcocracy." Journalist Simon Strong described what subsequently happened: "Colonel Luis Arce Gomez, the head of military intelligence and relative of Roberto Suarez, then Bolivia's biggest coca-paste trafficker and supplier of Pablo Escobar, was appointed minister of the interior.  Not only did he and General Garcia Meza organize the army's systematic extortion of protection money from major drug traffickers - recalcitrants were murdered

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‑ but they also used paramilitary squads to stamp out the smallest deal­ers in Santa Cruz, the commercial heart of the cocaine trade. The squads were set up with the assistance of Nazi Klaus Barbie."

Colombia was called a "narco democracy" after strong evidence suggested that the Cali cartel financed Ernesto Samper's successful 1994 political campaign with millions of dollars. Mexican‑U.S. relations were seriously strained after the United States learned about the wide­spread corruption that has riddled Mexico's top drug‑fighting unit. In the 1990s, many top Italian officials, including Giulio Andreotti, seven times a prime minister, went on trial on charges of conspiring with the Mafia. Meanwhile, 50 municipal councils in four regions of Sicily have had to be dissolved on the grounds that they had been infiltrated by the Mafia. Corruption is widespread among law‑enforcement officials in Myanmar, the world's largest producer of opium, and international nar­cotics agents have warned that Pakistan could become another Colom­bia because the meager resources of the Pakistani state are no match for the power and wealth of the country's drug traffickers.

Not only are countries that grow and process narcotics becoming corrupt, many other countries are also getting caught in the net of inter­national drug trafficking as money‑laundering centers and transit points in smuggling routes leading to the United States and Europe. For exam­ple, in several cases drug shipments to Russia and Eastern Europe have used Peru, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries in order to take advantage of the lax customs regulations and weak law enforcement in the region.

Attempts to stamp out the drug traffic often exacerbate the prob­lem and make hard‑fought gains in the War on Drugs short‑lived. This is because cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are easy to produce, refine, transport, and sell, and the profits are enormous, which means that an ambitious criminal or criminal organization will always be willing to try to get the illegal product to the market.

The cultivation of opium is no longer confined to Mexico, the Golden Triangle, and the Golden Crescent. It is now also grown in Colombia and Guatemala, Poland and the Ukraine, and the central high­land republics of the former Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan). Today, coca is cultivated in Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela as well as Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. Law enforcement now busts cocaine‑processing laboratories in Italy, Spain, and Portugal as well as Latin America. New areas of marijuana cultivation include Brazil, Siberia in the former Soviet Union, and Togo, Rwanda, and Nigeria in Africa.

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To meet the surging demand for synthetic drugs, secret laboratories have sprung up to manufacture amphetamine in Poland, "ice" in Taiwan and South Korea, and methaqualone or mandrax in India and South Africa U.S. drug official Brian Stickney warned in November 1996 that the growing popularity of Exstasy and other synthetic drugs constitute a permanent problem.

In 1996 the DEA reported that the Mexican cartels had taken over the U.S. methamphetamine trade, expanding their reach into the coun­try by setting up operations in several major U.S. cities, notably Den­ver, Houston, Phoenix, Seattle, and St. Louis. According to U.S. and Mexican officials, the Mexican cartels produce the drug in labs based in Mexico but prefer making it in the United States because of harsh penal­ties if they are caught transporting it across the border. Methamphet­amine today rivals cocaine as the drug of choice in the larger cities of Nebraska and North and South Dakota, the U.S. heartland, where it is made in small "mom and pop" labs in motels and abandoned farm­houses. According to one police chief, "Anybody with a chemistry book and the ability to experiment can make meth."

Experts expect this trend in drug production to continue indefi­nitely. As one report explained, "The increasing drug supplies and oppor­tunities to service and develop new markets can be sustained only if there is a market for narcotics. The bulk of the evidence on global trafficking suggests that drug producers and traffickers have little to worry about."

Earlier, it was noted that increasing drug consumption and abuse was helping to fuel the globalization of international drug trafficking. Here are some more examples to illustrate the trend. In 1996 the Colom­bian press began reporting about a new type of cocaine that was so pure that it was killing addicts. Crack has spread to Europe front the inner cities of the United States, while opiates from the Golden Triangle have led to a resurgence of drug addiction in China, where, in Yunnan province, a major conduit for Golden Triangle heroin, 50 percent of the population of some villages have become addicted to heroin. The Tri­ads have made Vancouver, Canada (pop. 450,000), the major destination point of heroin entering the U.S. and Canadian markets and the city with the highest overdose rate in North America. The Italian port of Naples (pop. 3 million) is reported to have 20,000 heroin addicts - one in every 150 inhabitants, compared to one in 500 for the United States. The strict Muslim Countries of Iran and Pakistan have 1 million and 1.7 million drug users, respectively, while Thailand, according to scholar

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Alison Jamieson, "has between 100,000 and 300,00 adults who ingest pure heroin in doses which would be fatal for the Western consumer."

Since 1982 and the beginning of the modern crusade against inter­national drug trafficking, every country in the Caribbean region and Latin America has become involved in some way in the drug trade. In the early 1990s, when authorities began to put pressure on transporta­tion routes through Mexico and Central America, the drug traffickers shifted their routes to go through Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, and the other small countries of the eastern Caribbean. By 1996 the United Nations Drug Control Program's Caribbean regional office was esti­mating that Barbados was accounting for 180 tons or 10 to 20 percent of Europe's supply of cocaine.

A 1996 report by eight European experts called drug trafficking "the single biggest threat to the economic and social development of the coun­tries of the region" and concluded, "With their weak economies, high unemployment, meager resources and inadequate law enforcement, the islands of the eastern Caribbean provide easy targets for the international drug traffickers." It may be too late, however, to stop the assault. Var­ious U.S. officials have said that drug‑trafficking‑induced corruption is widespread throughout the Caribbean, where poorly paid public ser­vants find it difficult to resist payoffs and it is also difficult for honest officials to ferret out corruption.

The Caribbean reflects a worldwide pattern. The people who allow traffickers to conduct business without problems or fear of arrest are everywhere in the drug distribution chain. They could be a top govern­ment official like the prime minister of Barbados or the presidents of Panama and Colombia or customs officers on the U.S.‑Mexican border or the Burma‑Thailand border or a police officer in Palermo, Sicily, or Managua, Nicaragua. Invariably, the drug traffickers find a way to get their help through bribes or intimidation. Manuel Noriega reportedly made millions for helping drug traffickers launder their money, while in Bolivia, drug traffickers reportedly paid police officers between $20,000 and $25,000 for a "seventy‑two hour window of opportunity" for mov­ing major drug shipments by air, land, and sea.

A study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico esti­mates that Mexican drug cartels spend $500 million a year in bribes, an amount that goes a long way considering that a military commander in the Mexican army makes only $900 a month and a regular policeman $300. A customs official on the U.S.‑Mexican border can now command as much as $1 million for simply looking the other way when drug

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traffickers try to sneak a truckload of drugs across the border to the United States. In testifying before the U.S. Senate in 1997, DEA Direc­tor Thomas Constantine revealed that a Mexican general had offered a Tijuana judicial official $1.5 million if he would scale back his efforts against drug trafficking.

"Corruption caused by drug trafficking is certainly one of the most widespread forms of corruption found in the world today," explained Victor T. LeVine, professor of political science at Washington Univer­sity, St. Louis Missouri, and author of Political Corruption: The Ghana Case.

 

Violence

 

If drug traffickers can't get their way through the bribe, they resort to the bullet, or, as the practice has become known in Colombia, "Plomo o Plata (lead or money)." As discussed in Section Three, drug traffickers will kill anyone who gets in their way, whether it be law‑enforcement officials, members of the judiciary, the press, a good citizen, or even a clergyman. In 1974 an Italian priest in Naples was murdered in his church while preparing for mass by drug traffickers angry that he was telling his parishioners to shun their criminal organization.

In protecting their interests, syndicates have undermined democ­ratic states, attacking them at their core. Since the early 1980s, for exam­ple, drug traffickers have launched a violent assault on the press in numerous Latin American countries. The drug‑related violence has taken many forms: murders, bombings, kidnappings, and intimidation. In Colombia alone, 67 journalists have been murdered as of April 1997.

The judiciary‑another cornerstone of the democratic state‑has been under assault as well. In Colombia, 350 judicial personnel, includ­ing 50 judges, were murdered between 1980 and 1992, and a survey indi­cated that 25 percent of the Colombian judges had been threatened. Today in Colombia, suspected drug traffickers appear before "faceless" judges who have their identities concealed.

In some drug‑growing countries, most notably Colombia, there has been concern about a possible alliance between drug traffickers, the mil­itary, and landowners, who share a rabid anticommunism and hatred of leftists and are willing to work together to establish a reactionary social order. In 1989 the Washington Office of Latin America charged that a "marriage of convenience" had formed between the three groups in

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which "all , are bent on eliminating subversive elements," and that "this alliance manifests itself in death squads that have the power of mini­armies, and is the driving force behind Colombia's escalating political violence."

Amnesty International, a human‑rights group, has charged that Colombian armed forces and paramilitary units linked to the military have been responsible for the death of some 20,000 suspected leftists since 1986. Amnesty obtained three documents in 1996 that it said sup­ported its claim that the U.S. military equipment intended for Colom­bian antidrug operations have been used instead to combat insurgency, a development that has led to the deaths of thousands. The leaked doc­uments, said William F. Schultz, Amnesty International director, offered proof that U.S. tax dollars had indeed been used to supply the Colom­bian armed forces with military equipment that "equipped thugs in uni­form who murdered other people who were simply inconvenient to the Colombian military."

Ambassador Frechette said the United States has an "in‑use moni­toring program to keep a check on the military equipment given to the Colombian military," but he conceded that the program is not com­pletely secure. That would be unrealistic, although we remain satisfied that the aid we give is being used for anti narcotics efforts."

 

Guerrillas and Insurgents

 

The highly profitable drug‑trafficking business has helped leftist insurgents and guerrilla groups as well as right‑wing groups to increase their power and extend their influence at the expense of legitimate state power. Since the early 1970s, insurgents and guerrilla movements have expanded their role in the drug trade as it has spread its tentacles across the globe. This has been especially true in southeast Asia (Myanmar), the Middle East (Lebanon), western Asia (Turkey), and Latin America (Peru and Colombia).

In Colombia in the mid 1990s, self‑styled Marxist guerrillas helped fill the vacuum left by the dismantling of the Medellin cartel. They not only support coca and poppy farmers but also impose a 10 percent tax on traffickers who move drugs through their territory, often guard the drug laboratories for a fee, supervise coca and opium cultivation, and even run their own cocaine‑producing and distribution operations in remote parts of the country. Analysts say that the money and influence

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garnered from drug trafficking has helped guerrillas control as much as 40 to 50 percent of the country.

"In some areas of the country, the guerrillas are the law and author­ity," explained Juan B. Tokatlian, a Bogota‑based sociologist and pro­fessor at the National University of the Andes, who has written extensively on the drug trade.  Rensselaer Lee added, "Many strategists have writ­ten off large parts of Colombia as being ungovernable."

Beginning in the 1980s, the Peruvian guerrilla group Sendero Lumi­noso (Shining Path) began to expand its presence in the large coca‑grow­ing area of the upper Huallaga Valley, where it appears that, while not participating directly in the drug trade, the guerrilla group has extracted "taxes" from peasants who grow and process the coca crop for traffickers. "Aware of the benefits to be gained from cooperation, the coca and cocaine‑paste producers and Sendero Luminoso have formed a business relationship in which each side uses the other to achieve its respective goals," explained Gabriela Tarazona‑Sevillano.

Elsewhere in the world, the U.S. State Department reported that in 1996 Turkey's Kurdish Worker's Party (KWP) was receiving money to protect drug labs in eastern Turkey, the crossroads and production cen­ter for Afghan heroin oil its way to Europe and North America. The KWP uses the money, which estimates put at $500 million annually, to buy guns for its struggle to establish an autonomous state in the Kur­dish area of Turkey.

The KWP is one of the insurgent groups that most of the world community classifies as a terrorist group. Many experts believe that, with the end of the Cold War, the KWP and other groups involved with global terrorism have turned to the international drug trade to finance their activities. Since the early 1980s, the United States has talked of the existence of "narcoterrorism" and has tried to portray such countries as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Syria as outlaw states that have used the drug trade to finance and inspire terrorism in an effort to undermine U.S. Soci­ety. Until the breakup of the Soviet Union, many observers believed that the drug trafficker-terrorist link was overstated and that while the two shared some short-term goals, their long-term aims were in opposition.

            Donald Mabry, a scholar who has published extensively on Mexican politics and the drug trade, believes there is some evidence implicating Cuba and Nicaragua in the drug trade, but added, "It is difficult to see the validity and importance of the charges in light of the fact that the U.S. government has consistently sought to blame non U.S. persons for the drug trade.

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In an interview, Colombian president Ernesto Samper charged that "The U.S. has long practiced a double standard on the War on the Drugs. Through its certification program, the U.S. has passed judgment on countries like Colombia, but have done nothing to curb their own sup­ply, of marijuana," Samper explained. "In fact, the U.S. is the world's number one grower of the drug."

 

The U.S.'s International

    Drug War Strategy

 

Even though the drug trade continued to expand and thrive between 1982 and 1987, the United States has steadfastly stuck to a strategy that has tried to stop the flow of drugs before they reach the country. Uncle Sam has supplied weapons, advisers, aircraft, and intelligence under the terms of bilateral agreements with drug‑producing countries, but the aid has never seemed to be enough and the strategy has always been ques­tioned. In 1997, for example, Representative Bill McCollum (R‑Fla.) criti­cized President Bill Clinton for budget cuts in the War on Drugs and for a shift of emphasis from interdiction to trying to stop drug production

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at its source, a move that the congressman charged was allowing the eastern Caribbean to flourish as a cocaine‑distribution pipeline to the United States.

The United States has used its power and influence to persuade many other countries to sign bilateral and multilateral antidrug agree­ments. In 1997, for example, the United States and Colombia signed a maritime accord after two and a half years of negotiations, which allows the U.S. military personnel in Colombia territorial waters to interdict drug trafficking. The agreement came a short time before the United States was to decide whether to certify Colombia as a country that had done enough in the War on Drugs the previous year.

Often the pressure to sign antidrug agreements has led to friction. For instance, many countries have balked at U.S. efforts to get them to sign agreements that would allow U.S. aircraft to pursue suspicious air­craft into the country's airspace and force them to land, complaining that they would give up more than they would receive. "We will not stand accused of not cooperating with our partners, but neither will we allow our hard‑fought sovereignty to be sacrificed in the tug‑of‑war between the moral and social imperative to curtail demand and the need to reduce supply," explained Barbados Foreign Minister Billy Miller.

In light of recent developments, the effectiveness of U.S. major sup­ply‑side policies in the War on Drugs can be questioned. Only a few countries actually accept U.S. aid to implement narcotics eradication programs, and, in the countries that do cooperate, little evidence exists that such programs are making a difference. As pointed out earlier, the economic incentives are just not present; poor farmers can make more money growing the illegal coca and poppy crops than they can from legal crops.  Besides, there are suspicions that the money the United States often provides in cash payment fro eradication is being used to finance the cost of planting new drug crops in other locations.  Furthermore, the use of herbicides and the methods of eradication employed have been criticized as being harmful to the environment.  Coca cultivation is blamed for the deforestation of at least 700,000 hectares of land in the Amazon region of the Andes (an are almost 40 percent larger than the state of Delaware), the pollution of waterways, the killing of wildlife, and the disappearance of several fish species.

    Bolivia signed an extradition agreement with the United States n early 1997 that will enable the United States for the first time to extradite Bolivian nationals wanted on U.S. drug-trafficking offenses.  Then in May 1997, the United States and Mexico signed and accord against drug

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trafficking, which included a new protocol for extradition, and six pres­idents of six Central American Countries and the Dominican Republic promised the U.S. that they would "modernize their extradition treaties and apply them vigorously.  The next month, the Colombian legislature passed a measure that moved the country close to passing a historic law that would make extradition retroactive. This meant that drug lords like Helmer "Pacho" Herrera and the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers now in Colombian jail could be extradited to the United States for trial.

Most countries, however, view extradition as an affront to their sov­ereignty and independence, even though most of them concede that drug traffickers would face a greater likelihood of conviction as well as tougher sentences in the United States.

Certification as an instrument of supply‑side antidrug policy has been controversial since it was first implemented as part of the Anti‑Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law requires that the U.S. government apply sanc­tions on countries unless the president reports to Congress that they are cooperating fully with U.S. antinarcotics efforts. Loss of certification status leads to a loss of foreign aid, requires the United States to vote against extending loans to decertified countries by multinational insti­tutions like the World Bank, and could lead to trade sanctions and suspension of commercial airline service to these countries. "Some nationalists in the affected countries object to the certification process," Mabry explained. "Some believe that the process means the U.S. is pass­ing a moral judgment on their nations."

At the Group of Rio's sixteenth annual ministerial meeting in Asun­cion, Paraguay, in May 1997, 14 countries made a declaration critical of the U.S.'s use of certification in dealing with member states in the War on Drugs.

There are many critics, both in the United States and in foreign countries, who believe that the United States has treated some countries by different standards and have often used other foreign policy consid­erations in determining certification status. Historically, there has been strong evidence to support the critics. In 1997, for example, the United States decertified Colombia and not Mexico, even though strong evi­dence suggested that the later was as corrupted by drug money as the former. In an editorial, the Miami Herald newspaper summed up the feelings of U.S. allies affected by the U.S. certification program: "Con­gress would do better to focus its legislative powers on the cumbersome certification law that ‑ rather than discouraging drug trafficking ‑ most effectively hamstrings U.S. policy by making it reek of hypocrisy."    


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The Future

 

The United States, however, has given no indication that it will abandon its current policy initiatives or stop looking outside its borders for answers to its drug problem. Most likely, Uncle Sam will continue to pressure producing countries to destroy drug crops at their source, wipe out drug laboratories wherever they exist, and help it interdict drugs before they enter the country, even while the price of narcotics, no doubt, stays low, the drug supply remains abundant, and the inter­national market expands.

In light of current U.S. antidrug policy, foreign countries involved in the War on Drugs will continue to view the superpower's antinar­cotics policy as unfair, complaining that Uncle Sam has not made an effort to solve its own drug problem and keeps blaming other countries with a lot fewer resources. They will also continue to point out that the United States is the world's largest consumer of illegal drugs, and if there wasn't such a high U.S. demand, drug crops would not be grown and marketed in other countries.