A news story that broke late yesterday makes it clearer
than ever that the U.S. government plans to use the drug war as the pretext
to intervene in the Colombian civil war on a massive scale
ANTIWAR.COM
Thursday, 14 October 1999
Colombian sting
By Alan Bock
A news story that broke late yesterday makes it clearer than ever
that the U.S. government plans to use the drug war as the pretext to intervene
in the Colombian civil war on a massive scale. Exultant press conferences
were held in Washington and Bogota to announce the arrest in Colombia of
30 drug trafficking suspects, including two described as "kingpins," Alejandro
Bernal Madrigal and Fabio Ochoa, who had previously served a jail term
as an alleged leader of the old Medellin cartel.
The key to the story is what was touted as an unprecedented level of
cooperation between U.S. investigators and Colombian police. "Operation
Millennium" was a yearlong operation involving tapping into cellular phone
communications and Internet communications systems. So we have US DEA agents
teaching Colombian police how to be more efficient wiretappers. Your tax
dollars at work.
Transnational response
Attorney General Janet "Flamethrower" Reno was especially pleased
at the ability of the two governments to work together across national
boundaries. "It is as if we have removed the CEOs of several major corporations
who had joined together in a major conspiracy," she whooped. Note that
her idea of fighting crime is removing CEOs. "The threat of the illegal
drug trade is pervasive; it knows no boundaries," she said. "That is why
it is so critical that our response was equally transnational.
It can hardly have been coincidental that the indictments were unsealed
and the arrests made as the Clinton administration is about to unveil an
"emergency" request for $1 billion in drug-fighting-in-Colombia money -
the US now sends about $290 million a year to Colombia for such tasks.
The highly publicized bust is intended - as the BATF's initial raid
against the Branch Davidians was almost certainly intended to be before
it went so sour - as an aggressive operation that can be spun as a big
success, and as a prelude to a request for even bigger budgets to set up
even more spectacular but useless aggressive operations.
All show, no blow
Doubt that such spectacular busts are essentially window dressing
designed to justify larger budget requests rather than to do something
real about the flow of drugs? All the stories carried reminders that this
was the biggest, baddest bust since the capture of many leaders of the
Cali cartel (which took over after the Medellin cartel was supposedly busted
up) in 1995. Few mentioned that since that famous victory coca and poppy
cultivation in Colombia has expanded dramatically, as have drug production
and smuggling. Indeed, the main result of the attack on the Cali cartel
(combined with activities in Peru and Bolivia) seems to have been to decentralize
the cultivation and trafficking operations, making them that much more
effective and that much more difficult to track.
Another example of government dishonesty can be seen in the released
information about how much dread cocaine was seized in conjunction with
the arrests and the news conferences. Various stories set the figures anywhere
from 13 tons to 15 tons.
Never mind that the government claims that Alejandro Bernal Madrigal
had bragged of shipping 30 tons of cocaine a month to the United States,
which means at least 360 tons a year from his operation alone, which means
that 13 tons seized is simply part of the cost of doing business.
Tucked toward the bottom of one of the stories was news that 11 of this
13 or 15 tons was hidden in a Mexican fishing boat captured August 13 -
two months ago - by the US Coast Guard. Was that 11 tons really part of
this operation, or was it added in two months later to make the seizure
seem more impressive?
Justifying intervention
Nobody seriously believes that a few more sting operations like
this will do anything more than create temporary inconveniences in the
drug trade, moving a few kingpins up or down various pecking orders but
in general rewarding those who are most ruthless and adept at violence
and concealment. But they provide a handy pretext for more massive military
and police intervention into Colombia.
As Drug "Czar" Gen. Barry McCaffrey has made utterly clear, in previous
statements suggesting that the guerrillas and the narcotraffickers are
pretty much the same people these days, there will be no effort at all
to separate US "assistance" in the drug war from US intervention into Colombia's
ongoing civil war. Indeed, every effort will be made to blur the lines,
to fuzz over distinctions, to make the conflict as large-scale as possible.
|
