The Politics of Cocaine

How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America

William L. Marcy

• Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781569765616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on declassified documents and extensive firsthand research, The Politics of Cocaine takes a hard look at the role the United States played in creating the drug industry that thrives in Central and South America. Author William L. Marcy contends that by conflating anti-Communist and counternarcotics policies, the United States helped establish and strengthen the drug trade as the area's economic base. Increased militarization, destabilization of governments, uncontrollable drug trafficking, more violence, and higher death tolls resulted.

Marcy explores how the counternarcotics policies of the 1970s collapsed during the 1980s when economic calamity, Andean guerrilla insurgencies, and Reagan's anti-Communist struggle with Nicaragua and Cuba became conflated as part of the War on Drugs. The book then explores how the U.S. invasion of Panama and narcotics related violence throughout Andean region during the 1990s led to the militarization of the War on Drugs as a way to confront narcotics production,  narco-traffickers, and narco-guerrillas alike. Marcy brings to the reader up to the end of the George W. Bush administration and explains why to this date the United States remains unable to control the flow of cocaine into the United States and why the War on Drugs appears to be spiraling out of control.

The Politics of Cocaine fills in historical gaps and provides a new and controversial analysis of a complex and seemingly unsolvable problem.

1

The Growth of the Narcotics Industry in the Northern Andes 1971–1980

On July 17, 1980, paramilitary men dressed in army fatigues and wearing black masks and armbands with Nazi swastikas took over Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. The paramilitaries were joined by mutinying Bolivian soldiers. Tanks and armored personnel carriers with troops in combat dress patrolled the city’s streets. The sound of shooting was heard in various areas of the capital.¹ The paramilitary men—also called Los Novios de la Muerte—and the mutinying soldiers called for the replacement of acting President Lidia Gueiler Tejada and the dissolution of the election that had selected Hernán Siles Zuazo’s socialist coalition to lead Bolivia. The military declared that they were launching this coup “for the dignity of Bolivia, to reject the results of the general elections and to declare the Congress and its actions unconstitutional.”²

On July 18, Gueiler Tejada, who had been cooperating with the DEA on narcotics control, stepped down from power. A right-wing military junta led by General Luis García Meza, acting as president, and Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, acting as minister of the interior, replaced her. The junta disbanded the Bolivian Congress and declared Bolivia a military zone. The revolt appeared to be a right-wing Latin American military coup against a leftist government when the junta announced over the radio that “the armed forces … will not allow Communists to assault the country.”³

However, a more insidious reason for the coup began to circulate alongside the junta’s claims. Allegations arose that the military junta was involved in the narcotics trade. The U.S. government withdrew State Department and DEA personnel from Bolivia since they now had no basis “to expect the kind of cooperation” from the military junta that would make it “worthwhile to continue the drug enforcement program.”⁴ For the U.S. government, it appeared as though millions of dollars and almost a decade of narcotics control efforts with the Bolivian government were lost.

The Origins of the Narcotics Crisis and Nixon’s War on Drugs, 1969–1974

In 1969, when Richard Nixon became president, narcotics usage had already reached crisis levels in the United States. According to a State Department study on narcotics control, in the late 1960s and early 1970s “the turmoil in U.S. society, increased addiction, and the war in South East Asia” that “provided easy access to drugs for U.S. servicemen” all became “a part of the same problem.”⁵ “From an internal security standpoint,” the student unrest and political turmoil created by the Vietnam War were a result of “the heavy overlapping between the propagation of the drug culture” in the United States and the “new left radicals who were committed to violent overthrow” of U.S. “institutions.”⁶ Nixon felt that he had a “national responsibility” to stop the nation from being “destroyed” by drugs.⁷ In his administration’s view, narcotics threatened the very fabric of U.S. society.

The U.S. military was one of the institutions most threatened by narcotics abuse. Heroin addiction had reached unprecedented levels among U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, jeopardizing U.S. national security by undermining military readiness and discipline.⁸ In early 1966, military authorities began to investigate the levels of illegal drug use in their ranks. Based on this study, Frank Bartimo, assistant general counsel to the Department of Defense, estimated that between 1967 and 1970, the use of marijuana, heroin, and hard narcotics in the armed forces had doubled each year.⁹ In 1971 Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., Nixon’s deputy assistant for domestic affairs, warned him that 15 to 20 percent of U.S. soldiers used heroin.¹⁰ High-ranking generals and members of the administration believed that Chinese communist and Soviet-North Vietnamese operators had flooded South Vietnam with heroin, facilitating the escalation of use by U.S. soldiers.¹¹

Along with the high rates of drug abuse among U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam, drug use among the civilian population also skyrocketed.¹² In a special message to Congress on the “Control of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs” in 1969, President Nixon stated that narcotics usage was “estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands,” and “several million college students had experimented with marihuana [sic], hashish, LSD, amphetamines and barbiturates.”¹³

Between 1960 and 1967, juvenile arrests involving drugs had risen almost 800 percent.¹⁴ In 1970 New York City had more than forty thousand heroin addicts, and the city’s chief medical examiner estimated that a record 1,050 people had died that year alone from narcotics-related causes.¹⁵ The Nixon administration maintained that the problem was “not limited to any region of the country” or “segment of society.”¹⁶ The implications were enormous. Narcotics touched all facets of life within the United States as the scourge of drugs threatened government and family institutions. Drug abuse had become the country’s “public enemy number one.”¹⁷

To address the narcotics epidemic, the Nixon administration proposed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act in 1969. Put into force on May 1, 1971, it replaced more than fifty pieces of drug legislation and established a single system of control for both narcotic and psychotropic drugs for the first time in U.S. history.¹⁸ Notably, the act attempted to address the issue of supply and demand within the United States. It created federal and state legislation to strengthen law enforcement procedures and initiated education and rehabilitation programs. Furthermore, it increased law enforcement training and cooperation between the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) and the Customs Bureau and created two new enforcement agencies: the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI).

Nixon hoped that the new legislation would provide “in a single statute” a comprehensive, “revised and modern plan” leading the federal government into a “full scale attack on the problem of drug abuse” in the United States.¹⁹ However, the administration knew that for this domestic narcotics policy to be a success it had to confront the narcotics supply from foreign sources. As a result, the domestic War on Drugs spilled over into the international arena.

The Nixon administration demanded a strong international narcotics control policy and directed its efforts toward decreasing and interdicting the supply of narcotics reaching the United States. To cut supply, signatories to the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs were for the first time required to fulfill their international obligation to limit the illicit cultivation, production, and trafficking of narcotics, including opium, marijuana, and cocaine.²⁰ Nixon used both military and economic aid to force those nations to reduce the manufacture and trafficking of narcotics within their borders. However, the demand for narcotics in the United States continued. When the War on Drugs stopped the flow of narcotics from nations such as Turkey and Mexico, the industry moved its operations to South and Central America. In the northern Andean nations of Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and the Central American republic of Panama, the narcotics industry quickly became a nascent force.

The Rise of the Narcotics Industry in the Northern Andes

The Nixon administration’s efforts at international narcotics control during the late 1960s were focused on stemming the flow of heroin from Turkey, France, and Mexico into the United States.²¹ A lack of resources limited U.S. attention to the budding South American narcotics industry, so that narcotics smugglers tied to the French Connection and South America’s contrabandistas were able to develop sophisticated production and trafficking networks more or less unobserved. When, in the 1970s, international demand for cocaine supplanted demand for heroin, the South American narcotics industry quickly adapted. In Peru and Bolivia, coca growing had been an important part of indigenous culture since time immemorial. Traffickers now used that coca to make cocaine. They transported the cocaine to their northern Andean neighbors and then shipped it to the United States. Colombia soon became a major transit point for refining and distributing coca as well as heroin and marijuana. Smuggling in Panama, which that government almost tacitly condoned, further contributed to the development of narcotics networks. The Andean narcotics industry had grown deeply entrenched years before the United States recognized its existence.

As early as 1957, several French Corsican families settled in South America and quickly formed a loose alliance with the existing contrabandista system that had smuggled loads of “liquor, tobacco, TV sets, and other high value items” for decades throughout Latin America.²² From their control centers in South America—Colombia, Panama, and Paraguay—the Corsicans “organized large-scale courier operations” and began to “send large bulk shipments” from Europe “into the United States” via “South America.”²³ The border region between Ecuador and Colombia provided some of the heroin, although poppy cultivation in the northern Andes was considered a limited industry.²⁴ Thus, “unknown to U.S. enforcement officials … heroin had been regularly shipped” from Europe “through South America to the United States” as early as 1967.²⁵

Before 1972, BNDD headquarters in Mexico City directed all U.S. narcotics operations in South America.²⁶ The BNDD did not set up a regional headquarters in Buenos Aires to cover South America until 1972. In 1973, when the BNDD was restructured as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a mere sixteen DEA agents covered all of Latin America and Panama. Of that sixteen, five were in Buenos Aires, which had become a major drug transshipment point, and the other eleven were in Paraguay, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Panama, Ecuador, and Chile.²⁷ The problem caused by the lack of BNDD/DEA officers on the ground was further “complicated by the enormous physical magnitude of geography.” The “topography of the growing areas, the thousands of miles of un-patrolled coastline, and the thousands of remote clandestine airstrips” provided daunting “obstacles to enforcement efforts.”²⁸

Corsican smugglers relied on three primary routes for bringing heroin from France into South America. The first consisted of sea shipments from Marseilles to various ports in Chile, with occasional deliveries in Panama along the way.²⁹ The second involved the movement of heroin by ship or aircraft from Marseilles to Buenos Aires; from there dealers delivered it to intermediate points in Paraguay or Chile. The third route was similar to the second, but in this case, the heroin was smuggled to Montevideo from Paraguay.³⁰ From bases within South America, the heroin networks smuggled their product into the United States via seamen-couriers, commercial airlines, and freight, or through intermediary countries such as Colombia, Panama, and Mexico.³¹

The DEA’s Operation Springboard managed a series of arrests in the early 1970s with the objective of breaking up the French–South American heroin networks. Yet those arrests were only temporarily effective.³² After Mexican police arrested the Corsican Auguste Ricord and killed another Corsican, Lucien Sarti, in 1972, South Americans who served as low-level operators, couriers, and intermediaries began to rise through the heroin rings and organized their own networks independent of Corsican influence.³³ By 1973 the DEA reported that “criminal elements” were “regrouping and restructuring,” and had been “only temporarily affected by enforcement developments.”³⁴ When international law enforcement operations finally caught up with the Corsicans, new organizations were in place and ready to expand their operations.

As early as 1964, the BNDD noted that in both Bolivia and Peru, considerable amounts of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Introduction U.S. Drug Policy in the Northern Andes and Latin America
• 1 The Growth of the Narcotics Industry in the Northern Andes 1971–1980
• 2 The Economic Role of Narcotics in Latin America, 1980–1987
• 3 U.S. Narcotics Control Policies in the Northern Andes, 1980–1987
• 4 Reagan, the Drug War, and the Narco-Terrorist Nexus
• 5 Northern Andean Guerrillas, Drug Trafficking, and Cold War Politics
• 6 The Militarization of the Dru War: Bush, Panama, and the Andean Strategy
• 7 The Failure of the Andean Strategy
• 8 Clinton: From the Andean Strategy to Plan Colombia
• Conclusion U.S. Drug Policy Comes Full Circle
• Notes
• Index