'In Latin America, Foes Aren't the Only Danger'

[Carl Remick]

[One of the better NY Times articles I have read in some time.  From today's 
edition.]

In Latin America, Foes Aren't the Only Danger

By Tim Weiner

When the fighter pilot's fire ripped through a plane carrying an American 
missionary family over Peru last week, the bullet holes opened up ironic 
points of light into American foreign policy in Latin America.

"Know your enemy and know yourself; in 100 battles you will never be in 
peril," Sun Tzu wrote in "The Art of War." In Latin America, though, it is 
its friends and allies that the United States does not seem to want to know 
too well. Today, particularly where the drug war rages, it finds itself, as 
it has so often in the past, in the awkward position of an arm's-length 
embrace.

The American drug warriors working hand-in-hand with the Peruvian Air Force 
pilot were there as part of a pact struck with Peru's disgraced and exiled 
former president, Alberto K. Fujimori. "It was a compact with Fujimori 
rather than with Peruvian society," said Robert E. White, a former United 
States ambassador in El Salvador and Paraguay. And Mr. White, who is now 
president of the Center for International Policy in Washington, said that 
such deals may be seen as something less than a bargain by the general 
populations south of the border: "We don't understand in this country how 
much Latin Americans look on drugs as our problem and not their problem."

The killing of a missionary and her baby in a plane that C.I.A.-employed 
spotters had first noticed on radar raised questions that go far beyond the 
drug war: What is America doing down there, and with whom? Who are its 
friends, and what happens when it befriends them?

Last year, the United States sent more than $1 billion in weapons, equipment 
and training to Latin American security forces, largely in the name of 
fighting drugs. It was more than all the economic and development assistance 
it provided to the region. A decade after the end of the cold war, 
Washington is working with every army in Latin America save Cuba's, and 
military officers, spies and their political cohorts are often its primary 
points of contact.

The Pentagon says democracy can grow out of this association: that working 
side-by-side will teach Latin American armies American values. "The 
sometimes overeager and trigger-happy officers of our partners in the drug 
wars" will learn discipline that way, as Michael Ledeen of the American 
Enterprise Institute wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

But the picture is larger than that. The Latin American military still 
serves and represents a ruling class far smaller and proportionately more 
powerful than the United States has seen since the days of the robber 
barons. The armies no longer run Latin America's governments directly, and 
they have rewritten their doctrines since the end of the cold war — no 
longer scorching the earth as they did in the days of dictatorships. But 
they have kept their mandate to preserve the power of elites who still wield 
immense influence even under the region's new civilian governments. And the 
United States values its own ties to those powerful people — businessmen, 
bankers, dynastic families and generals — as it pursues the varied aspects 
of its policy, particularly the drug war and free-trade pacts.

What the United States gets out of these alliances, in part, is a variety of 
stability, which is useful for oil companies seeking to pump Venezuela's 
crude, for clothing chains seeking cheap Central American labor and for 
Pentagon officers trying to enforce American drug policy. The argument for 
such stability is that it could allow prosperity to flourish, and prosperity 
could transform the region's politics. The problem, though, is when 
stability becomes stasis and it merely preserves the old economic and 
political order, in which prosperity has proved to be the most difficult 
thing to share.

Look back 40 years, to President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, 
the cold- war carrot that went with the stick of coups and 
counterinsurgency. The program helped build factories in El Salvador. They 
were run by the same people who ran the rural haciendas. They dealt with 
their workers as peons — same as ever — and the factories did little to lift 
the lives of the poor. This fed a cycle of rebellion and repression that 
burst out in the late 1970's and continued until 1992.

Twenty years ago, as that violence began, a New York Times reporter asked 
José Napoleón Duarte, the centrist leader of El Salvador's new ruling junta, 
why the guerrillas were in the hills. The answer was pithy: "Fifty years of 
lies, 50 years of injustice, 50 years of frustration. This is a history of 
people starving to death, living in misery. For 50 years the same people had 
all the power, all the money, all the jobs, all the education, all the 
opportunities." By and large, they still do.

The American left has had its own set of prisms, often idealizing guerrillas 
who were no more than bitter men with automatic weapons. Lori Berenson, the 
American activist imprisoned for life as a Marxist revolutionary in Peru by 
a hooded military judge in 1996, might possibly be a case in point: Miguel 
Rincon, a member of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, testified at her 
retrial last week that she had no idea with whom she had become mixed up.

But over the years, military and political leaders in places like Guatemala, 
El Salvador, Panama and Peru developed a clearer sense of the rules. They 
learned that it paid well to appear to be a partner of the United States and 
a part of American foreign policy. Even better if, like General Manuel 
Noriega, Panama's dictator in the 1980's, or Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru's 
spymaster in the 1990's, you were a close friend of the Central Intelligence 
Agency, providing inside information while nibbling the American embassy's 
canapes. And better still if you told the gringos what they wanted to hear, 
reinforcing their preconceptions, creating a closed loop of political 
analysis.

Such allies received "resources, prestige, legitimacy, and this appeal to 
the higher authority of the United States — higher than the fragmented and 
fractured politics of their own nations and existing institutions," said 
Marc Chernick, a professor of government and Latin American studies at 
Georgetown University. The payoff often included access to arms and gentle 
treatment when issues like corruption, torture and inequality arose.

Peru is a particularly pointed case. It strongly suggests that "we are 
working with untrustworthy rogue allies," said Coletta Youngers, a senior 
associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, which monitors 
human-rights issues in the region. "We are trying to impose a military and 
intelligence solution to a problem that in Latin America is fundamentally 
economic."

Mr. Fujimori, Peru's president from 1990 until he fled the country in 
November, had assumed a dictator's mantle. But as he brought inflation under 
control, attracted new foreign investment, crushed the Marxists and appeared 
to fight the cocaine trade, he won a measure of approval from Washington. 
Even after he appeared to steal a third election, the American ambassador in 
Lima, John Hamilton, attended his inauguration last July. His presence, a 
senior official of the Clinton administration told The Times, signaled "the 
reality" that Mr. Fujimori "is going to head the government of Peru at least 
for the foreseeable future, and we acknowledge that we have mutual, 
bilateral business to conduct."

Reality has shifted since then. Mr. Fujimori's government lasted less than 
four more months. It now appears clear that it was a mafia. Mr. Montesinos, 
the C.I.A.'s old interlocutor, fled into hiding after videotapes showed him 
as a corrupter of the highest rank. The commander of Peru's armed forces 
from 1992 to 2000, Gen. Nicolás Hermoza, now stands accused of working with 
drug smugglers and depositing $14.5 million in Swiss bank accounts. Other 
senior Peruvian officers stand accused of selling intelligence to drug 
traffickers to protect them from the shoot-first, ask-later air war — a key 
part of the bilateral business between Washington and Lima.

The C.I.A. contractors who man the spotter planes over the Andes were 
officially out of the chain of command that gave the order to fire on the 
plane carrying the American missionary, Roni Bowers, 35, and her seven- 
month-old daughter, Charity, who died. But the plane that fired was made and 
paid for in America. The pilot was American- trained. And even though some 
American officials argue that the pilot shouldn't have pulled the trigger 
without further checks on the airplane's identity, the intelligence that 
first put the missionaries in the crosshairs was American intelligence, 
gathered by American personnel, in furtherance of American foreign policy — 
which is an attempt to solve the problem of Americans' desire to smoke, 
snort and shoot cocaine.

Two more deaths will matter little to thousands of peasants growing coca 
leaves in the Andes because growing corn and beans does not pay them enough 
to survive. And in the end, they may matter little in a multibillion-dollar 
American policy, executed by American military and intelligence officers who 
rely on friends in Latin America for whom past American support has meant 
much — a little more immunity, a little more impunity and a lot more power.

[end]

Carl

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