The Miami Herald

Saturday, 11 Mar 2000

U.S. DRUG WAR FINDING ALLIES IN FORMERLY HOSTILE REGION

By Glenn Garvin

(MANAGUA) -- When officials here announced last week that they hope to

sign a treaty within the next few months giving U.S. military ships

the right to pursue suspected narcotics traffickers into Nicaraguan

coastal waters, the surprise was the reaction: Instead of the usual

cries of American intervention, there was dead quiet.

"Things have changed," said Oliver Garza, U.S. ambassador to

Nicaragua, who made a maritime treaty on narcotics enforcement a top

priority when he arrived here last September. "People have recognized

that an international counternarcotics effort is not only not bad,

it's actually good politics."

In a startling turnaround, cooperation with the U.S. military against

drug trafficking, which just a few years ago was political poison in

Central America, has become politically profitable.

The change is visible all around Central America:

Costa Rica, which prides itself on rejecting just about anything with

even the remotest military connection, approved what U.S. diplomats

consider a model treaty that permits not only hot pursuit of suspected

drug smugglers into territorial waters but counternarcotics flights

through Costa Rican airspace. "Our national sovereignty is being

violated daily by drug dealers, and all we have to combat it are the

equivalent of paddleboats," said Vanessa Castro, a congresswoman from

the normally anti-military Liberation party.

Honduras -- where relations with the United States have been so

prickly in recent years that President Carlos Flores went on

television to denounce American aid efforts after Hurricane Mitch --

is within weeks of signing a similar maritime agreement with Washington.

El Salvador's national police chief, Mauricio Sandoval, announced last

week that the country was beginning air and sea patrols aimed at

catching cocaine-laden ships that slip northward up the country's

Pacific coast. But Sandoval bluntly said his forces were only a

stopgap measure and that what El Salvador really needs is a treaty

that will permit U.S. vessels to work Salvadoran waters.

Guatemala, working with U.S. law enforcement agencies, last year

seized 2.6 metric tons of cocaine being trucked up the Pan American

Highway in shipping containers, the largest single bust on land in

Central American history.

El Salvador and Honduras have indicated interest in permitting one of

their airfields to be used for U.S. military aircraft monitoring

suspected drug flights from Latin America -- something that Panama

refused to do last year when it closed down Howard Air Force Base as

part of the Panama Canal turnover.

Until recently, close cooperation with U.S. counternarcotics efforts

was nearly impossible in Central America. The faintest whiff of it

brought stormy protests that governments were abandoning their

sovereignty -- and, moreover, doing so to combat something that was a

problem for gringos and not Central Americans.

The change is particularly noticeable in Nicaragua. After the

announcement of the proposed treaty on hot pursuit of drug smugglers

by U.S. military ships, the Nicaraguan army, which only a decade ago

was virtually at war with the United States, announced it was inviting

a delegation from the U.S. Southern Command to inspect the country.

Nationalist Limits

Last month, at a regional conference on combating narcotics

trafficking, the president of El Salvador's congress warned his

colleagues that nationalism had to be put aside if the Central

American countries hoped to fight drugs.

"To make a common front under a treaty is a matter of conscience,"

said Juan Carlos Deuch, "of accepting certain limitations on the

natural rights of every country on things like sovereignty, joint

patrols and extradition treaties." The other delegates applauded him.

The change couldn't come at a more welcome time for the United States.

With stepped-up enforcement efforts making the traditional Caribbean

smuggling routes more difficult, traffickers are increasingly turning

to Central America to move their product north.

About 60 percent of the cocaine leaving South America for the United

States travels through Central America, U.S. law enforcement

authorities say, because the governments leave their coastlines almost

unguarded, air coverage is spotty, and highway border crossings are

undermanned.

The Easiest Path

The result was inevitable. "Narcotraffickers take the path of least

resistance," said a DEA agent who has worked in Central America for

several years. "And here, there was almost no resistance."

But that's changing. One important factor is that the smuggling is no

longer perceived as strictly a "gringo problem," because some of the

drugs are staying behind. Cocaine use is up sharply throughout Central

America.

Another reason involves money: Central American armed forces, who once

jealously guarded their prerogatives when it came to a foreign

presence on their territory, have become enthusiastic boosters of

treaties with the United States. Their eyes nearly popped out over the

$1.6 billion U.S. military aid package proposed for Colombia.

"We think it's a good idea if the U.S. Army, the DEA, the FBI and some

others come to see what we're doing, the difficulties we have in some

places here," Nicaraguan Defense Minister Jose Antonio Alvarado said,

"so we can all get together and determine how they can help us

strengthen our strategic capacity for joint operations."

Old Quarrels Fading

More broadly, bruised feelings from the 1980s seem to be healing.

Central America's political left bitterly resented U.S. intervention

in the region during that era, and even the political right, which

backed American military assistance, bridled at the strings that were

attached.

Even though the old quarrels seem to be fading, diplomats on both

sides warn that the new spirit of cooperation could easily be

shattered if Washington pushes too far too fast. The U.S. ambassadors

in Honduras and Nicaragua were appalled last year to discover that the

State Department was about to put the two countries on its annual list

of "major drug producing and drug transit" countries.

Many U.S. diplomats say including Honduras and Nicaragua would have

been disastrously confrontational at a time when the two countries

were warming up to American overtures.

"It took a lot of lobbying by the [U.S.] ambassadors to get Nicaragua

and Honduras off that list," said an American diplomat who followed

the controversy closely. "They really had to argue, `We don't want

drugs to become the focal points of our relations here. These

countries are not Colombia.' Fortunately, it worked."