The New York Times

Sunday, March 1, 1998

IN DRUG WAR, AMERICAN BARKS BUT FEAR OF BITE FADES

By TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON The driver was late, the aide had the directions all wrong, and as Colombia's Ambassador rode up Capitol Hill the other day to defend his country's drug-fighting record before one more skeptical audience, his only armor was two copies of a thin, boring-looking Government report. For the emissary of a country whose drug-enforcement efforts had failed the United States' certification test two years in a row, the Ambassador, Juan Carlos Esguerra, was looking remarkably unperturbed.

"When we didn't know what it would mean to be decertified, we were terribly worried that it would have catastrophic effects," Mr. Esguerra said, recalling the all-out lobbying campaigns that Colombia waged in past years in vain attempts to avoid the Clinton Administration's censure. "Once you know the impact, you know you can handle it."

The 12-year-old Federal law requires that, by the end of every February, the White House publicly evaluate the drug-control efforts of countries that produce or ship the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines that are consumed in the United States. And each year by the beginning of March, critics attack the process known as drug certification, mostly because of the anger and irritation it produces in American relations abroad.

Superficial Irritation

Lately, though, the irritation has appeared to be mostly skin deep. For countries like Mexico - which was fully certified again on Thursday despite a confidential assessment by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration that was stingingly pessimistic - it has become clear, officials say privately, that considerations like trade will outweigh dissatisfactions over the drug issue. Similarly, the practice of recent years has shown nations like Pakistan and Lebanon that even if they are denied certification, their strategic importance to the United States is such that they can expect the White House to waive the penalties in the national interest.

Under the 1986 statute, the penalties include a mandatory halt to some American foreign aid, a requirement that the United States vote against their applications for multilateral development bank loans, and the possibility of trade and economic sanctions. But when the law was written, both the cold-war power of the United States and the promise of such sanctions had a fresher smell.

Last year, as the Administration and Congress wrestled with the question of whether to decertify Colombia for the second year in a row, the Government of President Ernesto Samper dispatched its police chief and half a dozen cabinet members to lobby in Washington. The issue was Mr. Samper himself, and the $6.1 million that American officials say he took as a campaign contribution from cocaine traffickers. But his Government nonetheless took out full-page advertisements in American newspapers to describe the sacrifices that Colombia's people had made, the blood that its soldiers and police had spilled. Brightly colored booklets detailing the country's anti-drug achievements inundated Congress.

Taking a New Tack

This winter, the strategy changed. "No publicity. No advertising. Absolutely none," Mr. Esguerra said. "The certification issue has become less important." (Last week, in a gesture that American officials did not take seriously, Mr. Samper offered to resign a few months early if it would improve Colombia's relationship with the United States.)

At a Senate subcommittee hearing about certification Thursday, Senator Joseph Biden, the Maryland Democrat, spoke up for the process. It remains, he said, "an effort to prod other governments into action - actions they would not otherwise take."

But in the past, American officials have been able to count on at least some flurries of police activity abroad as the judgment day nears: drug traffickers arrested, drug crops eradicated, drug shipments seized. Recent years have seen less and less of that kind of push.

More significant than the end of Colombia's lobbying are the issues on which it flatly ignored American appeals - and threats of further decertification. In November, the Samper Government allowed the legislature it controls to reinstate its extradition treaty with the United States with the proviso that it would not apply retroactively - and thus to the powerful Cali Cartel bosses who are serving relatively short prison sentences in Colombia but are wanted by American courts.

The frustration of American law-enforcement officials with Mexico has been harder for some in Washington to interpret: Last year, the Government of President Ernesto Zedillo has overhauled its anti-drug force, arrested some military and civilian officials on corruption charges and taken small but potentially important steps toward extraditing Mexican drug criminals to the United States. But at what is typically the busiest time of the law-enforcement year, American agents were reporting to their headquarters that the "new" Mexican police units were making no discernable effort to arrest the most important traffickers.

In Pakistan, the Government has steadfastly ignored American pleas for the release of a Pakistani employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration who is serving a five-year sentence at hard labor for helping American law-enforcement agents with an undercover operation that led to the jailing of two Pakistani air force officers on, charges of heroin trafficking. The drug-enforcement aide, Ayyaz Baluch, was found guilty of "seducing" the officers to commit a crime. Pakistan , s Ambassador to the United States, Riaz Khokhar, dismissed what he said had been open threats of decertification over the matter. "We have lived with certain sanctions in the past," he said in an interview. "Frankly, it won't bother us."

Some American officials blame the toothlessness of decertification on the limits of the law. Colombian officials, for their part, noted that they have been authorized to receive more anti-drug aid since being decertified. In Washington, support is rising for a multilateral approach to setting drug-enforcement standards. But even if American legislators have an alternative, they may still have a problem. "If you favor repeal of the certification statute, then you look like you're weak on drugs," said Lee H, Hamilton, the Indiana Democrat who is the ranking, minority member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "And that's still an uncomfortable position for politician to be in."