 [24] Drugs, politics (1:375/48)  TALK.POLITICS.DRUGS 
 Msg  : #2029 [143]                                                             
 From : Sergio Rivera                       1:2613/335      Tue 02 Aug 94 17:14 
 To   : All                                                                     
 Subj : Welcome to the jungle                                                   

From: SRAYALA@SUVM.SYR.EDU (Sergio Rivera)
Organization: Syracuse University

               Copyright 1989 Institute for Public Affairs
                             In These Times
                          November 15-21, 1989

SECTION: Viewpoint; Volume 14; Number 3; Page 16
HEADLINE: Drug-war rhetoric conceals cartels' capital ties
BYLINE: By James Petras; James Petras teaches sociology at the State
University of New York, Binghamton.

   It has recently become fashionable for Latin American presidents to
declare their willingness to join the US in the ''war on drugs.'' Surface
differences revolve around the most effective methods. While the Reagan
and Bush administrations have emphasized military aid, drug eradication
and law enforcement, Latin presidents want economic aid to cushion the
effects of conversion from coca growing to alternative farming. But there
are also underlying tensions on the principal locus of the problem. US
policy-makers place greater emphasis on restricting drug supply, while
Latins emphasize the need to curtail demand. Neither party, however, has
seriously examined structural relations between drug profits and key
institutions and supporters of their respective political
administrations.

   Massive money laundering by major US banks in Florida, New York and
California has been documented in the media and congressional hearings.
The financial sector has become a major influence in both major US
political parties, Congress and the presidential campaign -- and
subsequently in the executive branch. The obvious and most direct method
of attacking the drug trade -- through tighter regulation of the banking
system -- has been avoided in order not to cut into banking
''confidentiality'' and profits. Instead, highly publicized, ineffectual
campaigns have been launched against retail networks in poor
neighborhoods.

   If structural links between banks and political institutions undermine
any sustained effort to end or curtail the drug trade in the US, similar
circumstances operate in Latin America. In Colombia, social scientists
conservatively estimate that at least one-third of their members of
Congress are elected with funds from the drug cartels. Several presidents
(the most obvious Julio Turbay) had close financial ties with drug
networks. Most of the generals, the landed oligarchy and top business-
people and bankers were involved in joint ventures or interlocking
directorates with the drug barons. In Bolivia, the Hugo Banzer and
subsequent military regimes were the closest examples we have of narco-
states -- regimes based primarily on long-term, large-scale ties with
drug capitalists.

Civilian drug pushers

   With the advent of elected civilian leaders in Bolivia and Peru, and
with the emergence of liberal President Virgilio Barco in Colombia, media
attention has shifted away from regime ties to the drug trade. The
vigorous public condemnations of the drug trade by liberal and social-
democratic spokespersons in these regimes has further encouraged the
notions that there is a shared hemispheric purpose in wiping out the coca
cartels if the resources could be mobilized and that elected regimes are
likely to pursue the goal of stopping the drug plague.

   There is very little reason to expect this. One of the most aggressive
promoters of the drug trade in the 19th century was democratic England:
through the Opium Wars, it succeeded in forcing drugs into the lives of
millions of Chinese as part of its Free Trade policy against the will of
China's authoritarian dynastic rulers. Likewise, in the US, local, state
and national political and law-enforcement officials have been on the
drug take for many years. Not to mention the indirect ties through the
recent banking-political nexus mentioned above.

   The underlying relations among profits, trade and power -- between
political and drug figures -- are not profoundly altered by changes in
political regime, whether it be a shift from military dictators to
elected civilians or from conservative to social-democratic regimes.

   A case in point is Peru under President Alan Garcia. A leading member
of the Socialist International, he is an ardent public advocate and
supporter of Washington's anti-drug campaign. In his public speeches,
Garcia has made a point of exhibiting his wholehearted agreement and
cooperation with US Drug Enforcement Administration efforts in Peru. He
has accepted a substantial contingent of US drug advisers and even the
use of health-hazard defoliants (Spike), particularly as his reform
programs have collapsed and he has turned toward the US for economic aid.

The hidden producers

   But there is another side to Garcia's drug policy that has not
received any attention from the media or Washington. His administration
has encouraged or given the blind eye to the expansion of coca
cultivation and the dramatic increase of coca production in areas that he
finds politically and economically useful. While Garcia enthusiastically
receives $ 100 million in drug enforcement funds for an ''interdiction
security'' program in northern Peru (the Upper Huallaga Valley), a United
Nations team studying satellite maps has identified the existence of
40,000 hectares of coca in the south, in the Quillabamba-Cusco area. This
is four times the production estimated by the government agency in charge
of the state coca monopoly and half again as much as the area in the
much-publicized Upper Huallaga Valley. More satellites photos are
expected to reveal further recent coca expansion in the Cusco region. The
former head of the state coca monopoly and a close friend of President
Garcia claimed that the state purchased the bulk of the coca grown in the
Cusco region. Yet independent observers calculate that the 4,000 metric
tons purchased by the state is the production of only 4,000 to 6,000
hectares -- roughly one-eighth of the land under coca cultivation. The
Garcia government has long ignored police reports of large-scale
trafficking and production in the Cusco area, lending credence to the
charges of independent observers that top-level state personnel and
Garcia's APRA party leadership are deeply immersed in the drug business.

   By vigorously supporting the drug enforcement campaign in the Upper
Huallaga Valley in the north, Garcia receives merit points and aid from
the US while quietly building a political base and securing financial
resources from the drug trade in the southern Quillabamba-Cusco area.
Beyond the political and personal gains that the new southern coca
expansion provides to the Garcia administration, it also creates the
basis for Peru to gain a dominant position in the legal coca market.

  Alan Garcia's double discourse, his advocacy of a ''progressive'' drug
war in the Upper Huallaga Valley -- combining eradication and economic
incentives for alternative farming -- with the tacit encouragement of
coca expansion in the south, symbolizes the hypocrisy and cant of all the
major players, North and South, neoconservative and social democratic,
who place the market and profits above public morality and human needs.
Until the drug trade's underlying structural support systems located in
the legal institutions of society are tackled, the trade will continue to
flourish. We will continue to be subject to highly visible drug
''campaigns,'' ''wars''and other rhetorical excesses that distract us
from uncovering the links between drug capitalism and its legal
counterpart. The double discourse of Peru's president is emblematic of
our times.

GRAPHIC: Photo, Peruvian President Alan Garcia: turning a blind eye to
coca production in some parts of Peru?

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