Blaming the Victim

Susan Hamilton Saavedra

Susan Hamilton Saavedra is the super-visor of the International Studies Resource Center, University of Notre Dame Library, South Bend, Ind. 46556-5629.

There is a growing sentiment that not enough is being done to stop coca production in the Andean region as the United States struggles with a burgeoning drug crime and abuse problem. The drug war en-thusiasts have tapped into this senti-ment and used it to propel the U.S. military into a war on drugs in South America.

Imposing this perspective on the Andean peoples, the Americans from the States fail to see the dire economic reasons behind the production of the coca plant. U.S. banks are pressuring countries to settle their debts, while the prices for their legal exports are plummeting on the world market. Meanwhile, poverty is rampant, and the value of the indigenous coca leaf is surpassing gold.

Without coca, the economies of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia would surely be greviously affected or possi-bly experience collapse. What the Andean countries need in order to survive is fair prices for their legal exports, development alternatives and less pressure from U.S. banks. Pior to the Cartagena Summit in February, the United States offered little or no relief in either of these areas.

Coca cartels, military insurgencies, repression and poverty are factors of life now in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. U.S. foreign policy, with its urgency to engage in an international drug war, is aggravating these problems by holding the producing countries responsible for the problem and not focusing primarily on the demand side of the drug trade equation — consumption at home.

Peru

The enormous demand for cocaine has created perverse economic and political problems in Peru. The profits generated by the illegal planting of coca are greater than the revenue from Peru's main exportable goods such as copper, fishmeal and silver. The amount of land presently used for the produc-tion of coca leaves (almost 200,000 hectares) is greater than the area used for Peru's main agricultural crops, and occupies almost as much land as the rice plantations that feed the entire Peruvian population.

In 1988, the government of Peru spent over $150 million dollars com-batting the drug problem in the valley and eradicating more than 5,000 hec-tares of coca plantations. The United States also spent over $8 million in support of coca eradication programs in the region. However, the peasants who are faced with bare land after the coca is uprooted either engage in ter-rorist activities or are condemned to live in misery.

The Sendero Luminoso, or "Shin-ing Path," is a Marxist-Maoist revolu-tionary group that is gaining ground in the valleys. Shunned by the world's Marxist-Leninists, the Sendero uses selective annihilation as means of gain-ing control. This is a euphemism for the execution of local politicians, reluctant peasants and foreign aid workers. One of the insurgency's chief slogans is "Destroy in order to construct." Sen-dero began its violent effort to take power with an attack on a rural voting station in the 1980 elections that brought a civilian president to office after 12 years of military rule. By January 1989, 17,500 people had been killed by means of "selective annihila-tion," leaving one-quarter of Peru's towns without municipal leadership.

In the early 1980s, army repression of civilians helped Sendero gain support in various parts of the country, but most notably in the Upper Huallaga Valley, where the world's most fertile ground for growing the coca plant is found and where the Peruvian co-caine drug-trafficking center is located. This area is now a major stronghold for the Maoist rebels. Though the Shining Path imposes an ascetic personal code on members that forbids the use of drugs, the rebels are establishing them-selves as the defenders of thousands of coca growing peasants who have been exploited by drug traffickers and cor-rupt local police. Sendero guarantees that the farmers are paid by the traf-fickers while simultaneously allowing the dealers freedom and protection to operate. In exchange for cooperating with drug interests and protecting the cocaine production network, Sendero charges a "protection tax," which fi-nances the revolution and provides the rebels with their main source of income.

The police in the Upper Huallaga are intimidated not only by the Sen-dero but also the army. The army hampers police efforts because it fears that disturbing the coca farmers drives them into the ranks of the guerrillas. However, lured by the prospect of as much as $40 million in U.S. military hardware for an anti-drug campaign, the army now contends that its war with the guerrillas is tantamount to fighting cocaine.

In addition to the insurgency, Peru's fragile democracy is already threat-ened by economic collapse. Peru is burdened by a $17 billion foreign debt. Its gross national product shrank more than 10 percent in 1988, and 11 percent in 1989. Inflation reached almost 2,000 percent in 1988 and increased to 3,000 percent in 1989.

Coca is the most lucrative crop, and no other agricultural product can com-pete with it. According to the Interior Ministry of Peru, the drug trade em-ploys 1.1 million Peruvians, directly or indirectly, and pumps about $800 mil-lion annually into the nation's econ-omy.
Peru's economic problems are heightened because the United States and other developed countries are re-ducing the amount of tropical products they purchase, aggravating the eco-nomic situation and enhancing the at-tractiveness of coca production. Unless this decline can be halted, Peru could become the first nation to reverse the democratic tide that has swept Latin America in the 1980s.

Bolivia

The poorest country in the Andes, Bolivia is trying to bounce back from economic collapse. Four years after the Bolivian government implemented austerity measures to halt hyper-infla-tion, the Bolivian economy remains fragile. Unemployment in 1989 was more than 60 percent. The average Bolivian makes less than $600 a year.

The cost of living in Bolivia is one of the highest in South America with the prices of poultry and dairy products comparable to those in the United States and Europe. Although the infla-tion rate, which was 26,000 percent not long ago, hovers at 12-15 percent, eco-nomic growth remains low, and foreign investment is almost nonexistent. Coca is the only booming crop.

Bolivia has grown coca for centu-ries but did not start processing co-caine until 1987. Once a leading pro-ducer of tin, Bolivia now produces close to 50 percent of the paste used to make cocaine consumed in the United States.

In the 1970s, Bolivians sold the paste to Colombian traffickers who flew it to their own country to process into cocaine. Colombian traffickers seeking lower production costs found cheap and readily available labor in Bolivia. They sent capital and technicians to help Bolivian trafficking networks set up cocaine laboratories. The Bolivians sold the refined cocaine to the Colombians, who in turn marketed it in the United States which obtains 30 percent of its supply from the Bolivians.

Since 1987, Bolivia has established expensive, sophisticated cocaine labo-ratories. Recently, some of Bolivia's 30 trafficking organizations began break-ing away from the Colombians, devel-oping their own export routes through Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, and opening markets in Europe.

Drug traffickers are becoming stronger and more powerful because of the amount of money involved. Accord-ing to police reports, there are cocaine laboratories in the Beni, a vast region of swamps and jungles, that are worth between $100,000 and $1 million. Bolivia's co-caine traffick-ing brings in an estimated $300 million to $600 million each year and pro-vides a liveli-hood for about 300,000 Bolivi-ans.

The Cha-pare region is the main coca-producing re-gion in Bolivia. The govern- ment estimates that 1,250 tons of paste are made annually in the Chapare, then transported and refined into 400 tons of cocaine. There are some 1,000 factories in the 6,000 square miles of the Chapare region that grow coca.

The Bolivian and U.S. governments have focused their efforts in the Chapare on substituting coca planting and on interdicting the illicit flow of drugs. Military aerial photographs show that there are close to 100,000 acres of coca cultivation in the area. A United Na-tions official estimated that 30-40 per-cent of the Bolivian economy is coca related. Annual drug earnings are about half of the country's legitimate exports.

In the past, the United States has provided money for eradication of the coca plants but had shied away from direct financing of crop substitution and relocation programs because it might seem to be bribing peasants not to plant coca. The United States pro-vides other development aid to Bolivia ($593 million in the fiscal year of 1988) but conditions it on progress in the eradication program. By the end of 1989, Bolivia eradicated only 3,200 of an estimated 123,000 acres of coca.

The election of Bolivian President Jaime Paz-Zamora on Aug. 6, 1989, was the third such consecutive election without military intervention. The 1982-85 government of Paz-Zamora's predecessor, Hermdn Siles Zuazo, ended in a chaotic economic situation that threatened to incite the military to intervene again.

In his inaugural address, Presi-dent Paz-Zamora said he would "fight against the threat of drug trafficking" while preserving "the sovereignty, development and well-being of our people." He added that he would seek more financial aid from the United States and other cocaine consuming countries to help the peasants switch to crops other than coca. In his election campaign, Paz-Zamora asserted that the United States put too much empha-sis on the policing and interdiction of drug producing and trafficking and not enough on rural development and the opening of markets for legal agricul-tural products. Shortly after his inau-guration, Paz-Zamora refrained from mentioning his policy involving the presence of several dozen Drug En-forcement Administration agents who help the Bolivian police in drug raids, nor did he mention whether assistance by the U.S. military forces would be accepted in the destruction of the drug laboratories.

Colombia

The escalation of violence in Co-lombia is eroding the popular support of President Virgilio Barco. From mid-August to December 1989 (sometimes referred to as the "season of terror"), the cocaine cartel members killed 187 civilians, set off 265 bombs and de-stroyed more than $500 million worth of property. To counteract the violence during that same period, the govern-ment made 497 arrests, nine suspects were extradited to the United States, and $250 million in property, weapons and drugs were confiscated. After five months of combatting the traffickers, the Colombian police captured planes, hundreds of properties, fleets of cars, and in December, gunned down José Rodriguez Gacha, the most violent of
the leaders of the Medellin cocaine organization.

The Colombian national police is the country's chief anti-drug agency. A special unit within the agency, the "Elite Corps," has the task of capturing drug bosses. An-other police group, involved with an operation called "Red Moon," seeks out and destroys jungle laboratories. The labs are believed to produce more than 550 pounds of cocaine a week, bringing in about $800,000 from U.S. purchases. According to U.S. officials, despite the efforts of the police and special units, there has not been a reduction in the flow of cocaine to the United States. An estimated 85 per-cent of the cocaine consumed in the United States is still coming from Colombia.

While the government is locked in mortal struggle with drug bosses, it realizes that the cocaine business is vital to the Colombian economy. The income from cocaine in 1989 was three times the $1.2 billion expected from the sale of Colombian coffee. By some esti-mates, as manY as 300,000 of Colombia's 32 million people may be directly or indirectly employed in the cocaine business, and as many as 1 2 million may benefit from the proceeds. The Colombian government and some economists say that a sudden halt to the drug trade (which yielded $4 billion in 1989) would throw the country into a deep recession that might run four or five years. "If the narcotics trafficking stopped suddenly," said Fernando Tenjo Galarz.a of the Department of National Planning, "it would be like having a coffee crisis and oil crisis at the same time."

There are tradeoffs. Colombia is very concerned about the traffickers buying millions of acres of prime farm and ranch lands. Jorge Enrique Var-gas, the deputy director of the Depart-ment of National Planning, portrays the cocaine money as an unwelcome factor, distorting the Colombian econ-omy and threatening agrarian reform programs that have been implemented over the last 25 years. Factors adversely affecting the reforms include (a) an increase of violence by dispossessed campesinos who, without land, have few possibilities for satisfying their basic needs and (b) the return to the tradition of land being concentrated in the hands of the few.

In the last five years, millions of dollars in "hot money" was used to purchase a little over 1 million hec-tares in the virgin and most fertile regions of the country. That amount of land is greater than the 919,000 hec-tares acquired over the past 25 years as part of Colombia's agrarian reform program. At the rate the land is being purchased, narco-traffickers will have purchased approximately 250,000 hec-tares in 1989, doubling the amount of land targeted for distribution among the campesinos by Incora, the agrarian reform organization.

Economics should be at root of Andean coca policy

Each of these Andean countries produces and processes coca leaves into cocaine. However, they operate as a conglomerate with each country play-ing its major role. Peru produces the bulk of the leaves which in turn are processed into coca paste by Bolivia. Colombia then refines this into cocaine. The mafia-controlled cartels distribute the latter internationally.

Millions of people, from the poor peasant farmer to the wealthy, power-ful drug lords, are involved in this highly profitable and illegal enterprise. To protect their interests, armed resis-tance and aggressive attacks with the use of automatic weapons, surface-to-air missiles, and various explosives have become commonplace. Not only have the drug profits provided money for these weapons and explosives but they have also been directly or indi-rectly instrumental in financing insur-gencies and guerrilla groups.

Drug experts say that because of the intensified war against traffickers in Colombia, Bolivian suppliers had temporarily lost their shipping contacts, causing the price of Bolivian paste to fall. They also expect that Colombia's drug cartels will soon be bidding up the price sharply as they seek to restore and resecure their links in Bolivia and Peru. Because of the trafficking crack-down, the Peruvian traffickers are look-ing to Europe as a faster growing market than the United States and are basing new supply routes on Brazilian, Argentinian and Chilean air or sea links across the Atlantic rather than on well-established routes through Colom-bia. At the same time, traffickers in Bolivia with close ties to the Medellin cocaine cartel are raising their prices to protect themselves from an expected assault on their strongholds, and both the Bolivian and Colombian traffickers have purchased surface-to-air missiles to combat U.S.-supplied helicopters.

The high profits from cocaine have made the Bolivian and Peruvian gov-ernments reluctant to move against it, and few farmers have been willing to switch to other crops. Some Bolivian farmers have taken United States andn Bolivian money, offered as an induce-ment for destroying coca plots and cultivating other crops, and moved to remote fields to plant more coca. In Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley, the farmers have virtually halted the culti-vation of any other crop.

The Latin American countries that either produce the raw materials or serve as cocaine processing points have a great distaste and fear of any possible imposition of the traditional U.S. use of force. They are eager to find alterna-tive economic solutions to the drug cultivation and trade in addition to the present means of repression and pre-vention.

The cultivation, processing and sale of cocaine became an appealing and profitable alternative *crop as the legal Andean export prices dropped on the world market. In 1988/89, Bolivia's legal exports earned $400 million, coca prof-its yielded approximately $500 million; Peru's legal exports earned $2.5 bil-lion, coca profits amounted to $1.2 bil-lion; Colombia's legal exports earned approximately $7.5 billion; coca brought in an additional $4 billion.

Just as the causes of the Andean drug trade are economic, the solutions must be economic. Legal Andean ex-port products must be traded at higher prices on the world market. Invest-ments in alternative development pro-grams must be made by the interna-tional community in addition to provid-ing economic aid. These efforts should not be considered gratuitous gifts or handouts, for they are in fact the only real potential solutions for combatting the drug trade.

References

Merrill Collett, "The Cocaine Connection: Drug Trafficking and Inter-American Relations," Foreign Policy Association Headline Series, No. 290, 1989.
Comisi6n Nacional Contra el Uso Ilicito de las Drogas, La cuesti6n de las drogas en américa latina: una visi6n global, Caracas, Venezuela, 1987.
Carlos 'vein Degregori, Sendero luminoso, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima, 1985. Carlos Ivdn Degregori, Sender() luminoso: lucha armada y utopia autoritaria, H parte, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima, 1985. Juan E. Méndez, A Certain Passivity: Fail-ing to Curb Human Rights Abuses in Peru, Americas Watch Committee, New York, 1987.
Report of the Secretary of Defense to the President and the Congress, Counternar-cotics Programs: Pt. IV, Defense Compo-nents, January 1990.