Foreign Policy In Focus

The war on drugs is America’s forgotten war. For over 40 years, it has continued largely unnoticed outside the region and, for the last decade, has been almost completely overshadowed by the war on terror and the related conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the illicit drugs trade and the militarised government responses are the greatest threats to state and human security in the Americas; many analysts and policymakers now conclude that the war on drugs has largely failed.

Open Briefing has today published a policy briefing outlining a 'sustainable security' alternative to the war on drugs. 

Rehabilitating the war on drugs: Central America and the legalisation debate assesses the implications of Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina's surprise announcement that he wants to open a regional debate on the legalisation of drugs. The authors, Chris Abbott and Joel Vargas, conclude that decriminalising some drugs and legalising others should form the foundation of a sustainable security strategy to tackle the violent crime associated with the illicit drugs trade in the Americas. The report outlines the following integrated programmes that would constitute an effective strategy:

• Decriminalising some drugs and legalising others in a staged process.

• Separating the law enforcement and military elements of tackling drug-related organised crime.

• Addressing citizen security challenges, including lack of personal safety.

• Addressing police corruption through career-long training, supervision and assessment.

• Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration programmes for former cartel members.

• Radically increasing funding for drug education and treatment programmes in North America.

By focusing on ineffective supply reduction strategies, the war on drugs is destroying the countries of Latin America in order to protect those of North America. The Sixth Summit of the Americas on 14-15 April needs to allow for a proper debate on the potential legalisation of drugs, and Central American leaders must be prepared to develop policy strategies that also ensure the health and security of their own citizens rather than only benefiting others. The sustainable security strategy outlined in Rehabilitating the war on drugs could form the basis of such an alternative to the war on drugs. 

Chris Abbott is the founder and Executive Director of Open Briefing.

Since former U.S. President Richard Nixon launched the U.S. “war on drugs” 40 years ago, the U.S. government has with rare exceptions dictated drug control efforts across Latin America. It has used threats of aid cut-backs, trade suspensions and international shaming to cajole governments to do its bidding in the so-called drug war. Some countries, like Colombia, became willing accomplices.  But drug war strategies in Latin America were clearly stamped “Made in America.” U.S.-backed efforts have ranged from eliminating the only source of income for small coca farmers to putting militaries into a law enforcement role (often in countries only recently emerging from decades of military rule) to exporting harsh drug laws with mandatory minimum sentences that have filled prisons across the region with low-level, non-violent offenders.

Latin American governments are finally saying, “Enough is enough.” This Saturday, March 24, 2012 Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina is hosting a meeting of Central American presidents to discuss alternative approaches to the drug war. Pérez Molina has emerged as the region’s leading advocate for drug policy reform and has achieved what many thought was unthinkable even a few months ago: He has placed legalization at the center of the policy debate. His motivations for doing so remain murky and some would certainly question whether he is a trustworthy ally for drug policy reformers. (WOLA documents allegations of serious human rights abuses in its report, Hidden Powers.) But the stark reality is that Pérez Molina – building on the previous work done by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy and the Global Drug Policy Commission, as well as declarations by Colombia’s President Santos -- has taken on this fight with gusto and in the process has changed the terms of the debate. Latin America is now driving the drug policy discussion across the hemisphere.

Central American presidents go into Saturday’s meeting divided on the legalization issue. Guatemala has received the most support for debating the issue from Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla (not surprising given her academic work on citizen security issues). The presidents of Honduras and El Salvador have been less accommodating. But all of the presidents have agreed on the need for debate. And significantly, all have recognized that present drug control policies have failed to stem drug production, trafficking or consumption and are ill-equipped to deal with the increasing levels of drugs flowing through the isthmus. A consensus has emerged in Central America – and increasingly across Latin America – on the need for a new paradigm for dealing with the drug issue; ideally a paradigm based on public health and human rights principles.

For its part, the U.S. government has reluctantly agreed to a debate. On his recent trip to Central America, Vice President Joe Biden said that the United States would engage in the discussion -- how could they say no to that? But at the same time, he reiterated that Washington does not accept drug legalization as an alternative. As noted in a WOLA statement, “The dissatisfaction with the current approach has become so pronounced that the United States can no longer turn its back on the call for a thorough debate.” In a March 21 State Department Twitter Q&A on the upcoming Summit of the Americas, Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson responded to a question posed by WOLA stating, “We welcome discussion of new approaches to ensure comprehensive solutions to the problem.”

The outcome of Saturday’s debate is far from clear; but the ball is now in Latin America’s court.  Ideally, the meeting will culminate with a commitment from the Central American presidents to continue a rigorous and thorough discussion of drug policy alternatives that they will then take to the Summit of the Americas, to be held in Cartagena, Colombia on April 14 and 15. President Santos of Colombia has already said that the drug issue will be put on the summit’s agenda.  There, Latin American leaders should develop a concrete framework to advance the drug policy debate in way that generates an comprehensive and exhaustive discussion that includes drug policy experts, civil society representatives, community leaders and all stakeholders. Four decades after Nixon’s fateful speech, the failed prohibitionist drug policies exported by Washington are finally receiving the scrutiny that they deserve.

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the twenty-second in the series.

It’s no secret that West Africa has become a major transport hub for Latin American cocaine in recent years as American authorities choke off trafficking routes in the Caribbean. Most frequently, attention is focused on the weak states in the region, particularly Guinea-Bissau, where law gets sold out to the highest bidder, and order is nowhere to be found. Yet it’s become increasingly clear that traffickers are enjoying a healthy presence in the region’s stronger states as well, a fact that friends and contacts hammered home to me on a recent trip to Senegal. But new cables released by WikiLeaks this week add new depth to just how problematic the situation has become. In a series of embassy dispatches from Accra, American officials report that drug traffickers have so thoroughly corrupted the state in Ghana that the country’s president himself suspects his inner circle of advisors to be in on the act. A cable from late 2007 sets the scene: 

Ghana is increasingly becoming a significant transshipment point for cocaine from South America and heroin from Southwest Asia. The majority of the narcotics flow is to Europe, although seizures have occurred on flights to the U.S. The GOG [government of Ghana] does not have a handle on the issue and lacks an overarching strategy to deal with the problem.

Worse still,

The GOG seems to focus more on small time dealers and couriers and it does not typically carry out long term investigations that result in the arrest of major drug traffickers. For example, GOG contacts in both the police Service and the President’s office have said they know the identities of the major barons, but they have not said why they have not chosen to arrest them. A Police Service contact told us the GOG does not have the political will to go after the barons. This official and other others close to the President have also told us that they cannot trust anyone when it comes to narcotics. Corruption is endemic in Ghana and pervades all aspects of society. Although difficult to measure, corruption almost certainly impacts the law enforcement organizations charged with counternarcotics efforts.

As part of an internationally coordinated effort to stem the flow of drugs through Ghana to points West, Great Britain established the Westbridge interdiction program. A cable from 2008 notes that while the program had experienced a measure of success, it also revealed the extent to which drug traffickers had penetrated Ghana’s security forces to help lubricate the flow of drugs through the country. One British anti-narcotics agent   

observed NACOB [Ghana’s narcotics control board] agents at the airport (particularly Ghana Police Service officers on loan to NACOB) directing passengers away from flights receiving extra interdiction scrutiny. On one occasion, he returned unexpectedly to the airport at 4 a.m. to screen a flight. An arrested trafficker told the UK official that the trafficker had been told that Westbridge was not operating that night. A test by Westbridge officials of the cell phone SIM card of a trafficker found the phone numbers of senior NACOB officials.

For the embassy’s Charges d’Affaires, Sue Brown, this was old news. “The Project Westbridge team's concerns over the integrity of NACOB personnel at the airport are neither new nor surprising,” she comments at the end of the cable.  But what follows in a report from a year later must have raised her eyebrows a bit more. Ghana’s president, John Atta Mills, seemingly intent on taking charge of the fight against drug trafficking in the country,

had expressed interest in acquiring itemizers for the Presidential suite at the airport in order to screen his entourage for drugs before boarding any departing flight. According to O'Hagan, Mills wants these officials to be checked in the privacy of his suite to avoid any surprises if they are caught carrying drugs. The itemizers, similar to those provided several years ago by the U.S. Embassy through INL funding, would be sensitive, portable screening devices that can detect the drug content in minuscule drops of human sweat after recent external contact or for up to three weeks after ingestion.

Mills also asked that screeners be assigned to airport government VIP lounges to search first- and business-class travelers leaving the country. According to the cable,

NACOB believes that the VVIP lounge at the airport has been a source of drugs leaving the country. Passengers leaving the lounge are driven directly to the plane and are not searched before departure. NACOB placed two officers in the lounge to screen departing passengers, and the number of passengers using the VVIP lounge has decreased. 

The only trouble seems to be that the itemizers in question are in continual need of very expensive maintenance and protection against sabotage. Nevertheless, the cable concludes that help could come from the airlines themselves which

might be willing to pay for the itemizers to be repaired, and specifically mentioned KLM and Delta…the cost of maintenance on the itemizers is less than the cost of diverting flights on which passengers suffer drug overdoses. Within the last few months…KLM has diverted to Spain two flights from Accra to Amsterdam because passengers started vomiting drugs. In both cases, the passenger died.

Once again, the timing of the cables release by WikiLeaks couldn’t be better. Just over a week ago, Ghana’s minister of the interior released a detailed statement celebrating the country’s recent success in fighting the drug trade, noting that “drug trafficking is efficiently and effectively being controlled” by authorities in Accra. And to the country’s credit, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has ceased its practice of officially labeling Ghana the “Cocaine Coast,” which must surely be a good sign.

But then again, as the Guardian’s coverage of Ghana’s unfolding WikiLeaks embarrassment highlights, taking a government’s word for things doesn’t always lead one to an accurate sense of reality. While British officials were complaining in private about Ghana’s out-of-control drug trafficking problems and their own inability to stop it, in public they were all smiles. The British Home Office, responsible for overseeing UK interdiction efforts in Ghana, publicly lauded its efforts as “‘a very good example’ of how to tackle the cocaine trade, while in a written statement, the Home Office said ‘these operations meet our drugs strategy commitment to intercept drugs and drugs couriers before they reach the UK.’”

A Supreme Court verdict in Peru this week once again shows how the U.S. government has engaged in unholy alliances -- often with those involved in the very drug trade it claims to be combating -- in order to further its short-term drug policy objectives and to the detriment of broader U.S. foreign policy goals.

After four years of deliberations, a tribunal of the Peruvian Supreme Court finally upheld the 2006 verdict sentencing Peru’s Vladimiro Montesinos to 20 years in prison and a steep monetary reparation for selling weapons to the Colombian Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia, or FARC. At the same time that Montesinos was running guns to the FARC, he was the right-hand man of then-Peruvian president turned dictator Alberto Fujimori, functioning as de facto security adviser and drug czar. He was also a key ally of the U.S. government in the so-called war on drugs. Even more ironic, Montesinos’ arrangements with the FARC coincided with the launching of Plan Colombia.

As in the case of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega (a paid CIA informant until the 1989 U.S. invasion), the U.S. government’s relationship with Vladimiro Montesinos shows the absurd lengths that U.S. policy makers have been willing to go in attempting to show progress in the “war on drugs.” While in power in Peru, Montesinos organized death squads, orchestrated the undermining of Peruvian democracy with the aim of keeping Fujimori in power indefinitely, and amassed a huge illegal fortune (by some estimates over $250 million) through corruption and blackmail. He was also the U.S. government’s prime interlocutor on drug policy issues.
 
Before emerging as Fujimori’s trusted aide, Montesinos was widely known as a lawyer for major drug traffickers. Now-declassified 1991 cables from the U.S. Embassy in Lima carried clear warnings; one stated, “There is substantial circumstantial evidence linking Montesinos to past narcotics activity…among the police and military figures recommended by Montesinos are men with possible ties to drug trafficking.” Yet even that did not persuade U.S. intelligence and drug-related agencies from seeking to forge an alliance with him. Montesinos quickly won the support of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which then, with Montesinos’ help, edged out the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as the lead anti-drug agency for the U.S. government in the country.

He was soon courted by State Department officials as well. He became known in U.S. government circles as “Mr. Fix It.” If you wanted to get something done, you went to Montesinos. But the strategy worked both ways. If Montesinos didn’t like what he thought Washington was up to, he would withhold drug-related intelligence and slow down or even cease drug control activities. One U.S. official told me privately that Washington was always quick to give in. It seems that Montesinos, an expert in blackmail, managed to get the upper hand over his U.S. backers.

Montesinos was also quietly running the drug business behind the scenes. During Fujimori’s ten years in power, Peru went from being a coca producer (coca being a primary product in the production of cocaine) to a player in the cocaine business. And if you wanted to do business in Peru, you had to pay off Montesinos. The consequences for not abiding by his rules were steep: “intelligence” would be provided to the DEA and Peruvian anti-drug policy that would result in the arrest of any potential rivals.

Even as evidence mounted of Montesinos’ involvement in the drug trade, the U.S. government provided important political backing to him and it appears that the CIA continued to provide him with a lucrative monthly stipend. That assistance continued until the bitter end. After fraudulent elections and a series of outrageous scandals, Fujimori finally accepted defeat and on Sept. 16, 2000 he announced that he would call new elections, deactivate the notorious national intelligence services (which also got U.S. drug control assistance, despite its involvement in horrific human rights abuses) and fire Montesinos. It was only four days later that then Secretary of State Madeline Albright issued a directive that the U.S. government was to have no further contact with Montesinos. A week later, he fled to Panama. In June 2001 he was arrested in Venezuela and extradited to Peru, where he has remained in prison facing more than 60 separate court cases. Sentences run consecutively in Peru, so this verdict ensures that -- barring some sort of political pardon -- he will spend 20 years behind bars.

In Peru, justice has been served in this particular case. But what about in Washington? No serious effort to evaluate U.S. drug policy in Peru in the 1990s (or in any other period) has taken place. One 1994 inter-agency working group concluded only that relations with Montesinos should be downgraded slightly (one U.S. official involved at the time told me that despite a majority in favor of more drastic action, the CIA managed to get the upper hand in the internal debate). Later calls for investigations into U.S. support for Montesinos and intelligence agencies in Peru have gone unheeded. Similarly, efforts to obtain declassified documents have been met with resistance.

While allowing the full truth to come out about the U.S. relationship with Montesinos may be embarrassing for the U.S. government, such transparency and an honest reflection is necessary to avoid continuing to repeat the same bad strategies in the future. It is time for Washington to do two things: open up the files on Montesinos and undertake a serious review of how the U.S. government ended up throwing its support behind a corrupt, gun-running, drug-trafficking thug.