Clinton pushes military aid; human-rights abusers lap it up.

At midnight on December 31, 1999, the United States is due to evacuate Panama, removing thousands of troops and ceding control of the Panama Canal to its rightful owners after nearly a century of occupation. But the Clinton Administration is planning to keep the U.S. military in Panama anyway. The stated reason: to fight the drug war.

This past October, U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry informed Latin-American defense ministers at a meeting in Argentina that the United States is negotiating with Panama's President Ernesto Perez Balladeres to establish a multinational counter-drug center on Howard Air Base in Panama City. Thousands of U.S. troops will remain on the base to provide training and logistical support.

Heading these negotiations is John Negroponte, who served as U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the height of the contra war. Later in his career, while U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Negroponte pushed for heavy military involvement in the so-called drug war.

Now Negroponte is getting his wish. He and General Barry McCaffrey, the four-star general and Gulf War veteran whom Clinton named director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1996, are committed to drawing the United States ever closer to the brutal militaries in the region. And Clinton is all for it.

Before his appointment as Clinton's drug czar, McCaffrey headed the Panama-based U.S. Southern Command, which for years has been at the forefront of military involvement in drug policy. It was McCaffrey who last summer proposed keeping 5,000 U.S. troops in Panama after 1999, a proposal made just as the Southern Command was launching "Operation Laser Strike," which sent hundreds of U.S. troops into the field to help police and military forces in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru undertake a major counter-narcotics and crop-eradication operation. Before that, U.S. forces under McCaffrey's command provided the Colombian and Peruvian armies with sophisticated radar and surveillance equipment to track the flow and production of drugs in an operation known as "Green Clover."

Despite Republican charges to the contrary, Clinton has hardly been a dove in the drug war. In 1988, Ronald Reagan devoted $4.8 billion to anti-drug efforts. Clinton's latest budget calls for $15.1 billion, with two-thirds earmarked for repressive interdiction and law-enforcement efforts--the same skewed ratio set by Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Lately, Clinton's policy has gone from bad to worse. Beyond the proposed anti-narcotics base in Panama, Clinton is pressing for a series of measures that will augment the U.S. military's role throughout the hemisphere.

In fiscal year 1997, for example, the Administration requested $213 million for the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement account. These funds, which represent a $98 million increase from the previous year's allotment, will be used primarily to arm and train the military and police forces of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico. With barely a whisper from the media, Washington passed money to these forces by slashing $53 million from overseas-development programs specifically earmarked for children.

This fall, Clinton announced at the United Nations that the United States was sending an additional $112 million in military equipment--including helicopters, surveillance aircraft, patrol boats, troop gear, ammunition, training, and assistance--to the Colombian national police and the Colombian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, and Mexican militaries--forces that the Administration asserts "continue to deserve and need our support" in the battle against drugs. Eleven members of Congress promptly sent a letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher complaining that Clinton did not notify the proper Congressional committees before announcing this major transfer of weaponry.

Under the guise of the drug war, the Clinton Administration is bolstering repressive security forces responsible for human-rights abuses throughout much of Latin America. "We're looking at a tripling of U.S. military aid to the Andean region--a dramatic increase," says Colletta Youngers of the Washington Office on Latin America. "Beefing up extremely repressive forces in these countries will do nothing to cut off the flow of drugs, but it will lead to more human-rights abuses."

Youngers points out that drugs surfaced as a pretext just as the Cold War came to a close. "Since 1989, the drug issue has become the prime means for military-to-military relations" between the United States and the hemisphere's other armed forces, she says.

Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, did manage to attach an amendment to the Foreign Operations bill that forbids U.S. assistance to military units that are known human-rights abusers. But "the amendment applies only to aid given under the International Narcotics Funding,' says Robin Kirk of Human Rights Watch, who has documented the flow of aid to Colombian security forces. "It's a step in the right direction, but not broad enough."

In Bolivia, the United States has pressured the government to allow the army to participate in anti-narcotics programs despite reports of widespread abuses in the Chapare region, where most Bolivian coca is grown. Washington has also successfully pressed the Mexican military to involve itself in counter-narcotics, providing infusions of anti-drug training and equipment.

Even prior to this change, Mexico was using U.S. counter-narcotics weapons for repressive purposes. Tucked into a footnote of a recent General Accounting Office report on counter-narcotics is the following stunning admission: "During the 1994 uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas, several U.S.-provided helicopters were used to transport Mexican military personnel to the conflict."

"Most Mexicans will tell you that the involvement of the military in this aspect of civilian life is very troublesome," says Eric Olsen of the Washington Office on Latin America. "This is happening in the states where the military is involved in counterinsurgency, such as Chiapas."

Besides fueling repression, the renewed drug war comes at an enormous cost to U.S. taxpayers while doing little to stop the flow of drugs. There is no serious evidence that securing the Pentagon's foothold in Panama and Latin America will reduce drug consumption in America. Since 1981, the United States has poured more than $23 billion into the fight against drug trafficking.

Despite enormous expenditures to stop drugs at the source, virtually the same amount of cocaine and heroin continues to flow into the United States. Last year, Barry McCaffrey himself acknowledged as much, conceding that "the street price and availability of cocaine in the United States have not been demonstrably affected by the ... counter-drug effort in Latin America."

In 1994, a Rand study commissioned by the U.S. Army and Office of National Drug Control Policy said that to achieve a 1 percent reduction in U.S. cocaine consumption, the United States could spend either $34 million on drug-treatment programs, or $783 million (more than twenty times more) on attempting to eradicate the supply of drugs at the source.

Why, then, has Clinton gone the expensive route? Not surprisingly, the primary motivation has been political: Clinton has found it far easier to win elections as a tough guy than by explaining the complexities of the issue. And for the Pentagon, the drug war yields a more tangible benefit, offering the military something to do now that the Cold War is over.

In an excellent expose for the Los Angeles Times, reporters Mark Fineman and Craig Pyes outlined how much of the Pentagon's high-tech military equipment, designed for the Cold War, is now being deployed to track the flow of drugs. U.S. taxpayers are spending $1,500 per hour to operate the Navy's ROTHR system, a multimillion-dollar radar operation invented to help battleships locate Soviet aircraft cruising at high altitudes. Drug-war boosters point to 219 air interdictions in the Caribbean in the past three years, but meanwhile drug traffickers have shifted to using passenger planes that land, undetected, in Mexico and transfer the goods by truck.

On another front, U.S. Customs is planning to spend $30 million on a series of "Backscatter" X-ray systems that can purportedly detect drug shipments by bombarding trucks with radioactive particles. But the scanner, built to identify Soviet missiles in trucks, is patently incapable of locating the packages of heroin and cocaine routinely hauled over the border.

The fusion of drug and military policies finds its domestic application on the windswept plains of Fort Bliss, Texas; the remote mountain passes of Nogales, Arizona; the California desert; and the Rio Grande--all places where U.S. Special Forces scan the horizons using infrared radar systems and special map coordinates provided by the Army. Last year, according to an investigative report by Jim McGee of The Washington Post, more than 8,000 U.S. military personnel took part in 754 counter-drug missions on U.S. soil.

In Utah, soldiers assist the Drug Enforcement Agency with tapping telephones. In Key West, Florida, the government has erected a $13.5 million command center where military officers and federal drug agents work side by side.

The Pentagon's brazen insertion into domestic law enforcement violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military involvement in searches and seizures. But, as one former official told The Washington Post, "it's been institutionalized."

Now that he's safely reelected, will President Clinton shift to a more enlightened policy? Don't count on it. At the start of his first term, Clinton acknowledged that the drug war waged by Presidents Reagan and Bush had failed. But the moment he heard criticism from the right, he adopted the very same strategies.

To reorient drug policy at this point, the President would have to push hard against a Republican Congress that is salivating over the Clinton scandals. He would also have to risk challenging, rather than accepting, the right's terms of debate on drug policy--terms that have emerged in large part because they make it so easy for elected officials of dubious moral stature to couch policy in the righteous language of a moral crusade.

Eyal Press, a New York writer, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive.