US anti-drug policies will form an important test for Obama: analysts
Agence France-Presse | 11/30/2008 9:49 AM
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WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama's pledge to change relations with Latin America will be tested in one key area -- the future fight against illegal drugs, political leaders and analysts say.
From Ecuador's decision to close a military base in Manta that the United States used for anti-drug activities, to Bolivia's recent expulsion of US Drug Enforcement Administration agents, Latin America's leftist leaders have put their defiance on display.
Democrats have not hidden their discomfort over the tone coming from a region that has dramatically swung to the left in recent years, with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez at the helm of the vocal movement.
"We have to talk to them," Democrat Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said of the Latin American countries.
"We cannot say to those countries, 'if you're friends with Hugo Chavez, you are our enemy.' That's a stupid policy. Countries can have good relations with Hugo Chavez and have at the same time good relations with the US," the New York lawmaker told AFP.
Engel said he met with President Evo Morales during the Bolivian leader's recent visit to Washington.
"We had a very long talk. I told him that I hope we can resume cooperation with him. I don't think it is very helpful he expelled our ambassador and that he is in the process of expelling the people from the DEA," Engel said.
"I encouraged him to do everything possible to get back in track with us in finding the eradication of drugs."
Morales insisted that he was clear in his conversations in Washington, above all in defending the cultivation of coca in his Andean country, where it has many traditional uses.
"Don't humiliate me," he protested at the Organization of American States, referring to the US certification program in which the US each year evaluates whether drug-producing and drug transit countries are taking sufficient steps to fight those activities.
"He's adamant about closing Manta," Engel said of President Rafael Correa and the Ecuadoran base that has hosted US anti-drug operations as one of the strategic points in its fight against the illegal trade and public health scourge.
"He does not want foreign troops in his soil. I think he is wrong but I respect it, it is his country."
Troops are to be withdrawn by November 2009 following Correa's announcement in July.
"We will have eventually to look for another substitute for Manta. Perhaps in some other country," Engel said.
Obama indicated during his presidential campaign that he has doubts about the effectiveness of Plan Colombia, after seven years and more than six billion dollars spent to fight drug production there.
The vice president-elect, Senator Joe Biden, in 2007 commissioned an evaluation of Plan Colombia, whose results came to light just after Obama's election.
The report recommends cutting back Plan Colombia and "transferring" some of its components to President Alvaro Uribe's government, such as crop substitution.
As Washington waits for the next secretary of state to be named, the pressure and the proposals for a drastic change of direction abound.
"I still think that the (next) administration can do things in a different way, for example, ending fumigation, which is not at all constructive," said Joy Olson, director of the progressive Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which wants to see Plan Colombia ended altogether.
Twenty high-profile figures from the United States and Latin America, including former presidents, are proposing a broad re-evaluation of current US drug policy, including comparing it with the policies in place in other countries.
"The US government should undertake a comprehensive, cross-country evaluation of the effectiveness of counternarcotics policies. The study should examine in depth the experiences of other countries and regions, including Europe, Canada, and Asia," the group said in its report sponsored by the Brookings Institution.
"In this country, a very important market for consumption, this discussion is not being worked in a very open way," said former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, one of the participants in the Partnership for the Americas Commission.
