In 1989, with the Cold War ending, the attention of the U.S. national security establishment increasingly turned towards the drug war, as demonstrated by the early rhetoric and initiatives of the George H.W. Bush administration. Bush, as Vice President, had overseen the South Florida Drug Task Force and had often called for greater participation of the military and CIA in drug interdiction (Scott and Marshall 1991, p.2). He was supported in this stance by Richard Cheney, his Secretary of Defence, who emphasised the threat against the state. He branded drugs “a direct threat to the sovereignty and security of our country”, and aimed to challenge this by ordering commanders to develop plans to provide operational support to counter-narcotics missions in Latin America, and vowed a “more aggressive and robust” U.S. presence in the Andean region (Scott and Marshall 1991, p.2). To facilitate these activities, National Security Directive 18 was issued in August 1989, declaring that:
“One of the principal foreign policy objectives of this Administration is to reduce, and if possible eliminate, the flow of illegal narcotic substances to the United States. The impact of illegal narcotics use on our society has been and continues to be devastating. (White House 1989, p.1, emphasis added) Under NSD 18, the Bush Administration placed the war on drugs on the centre stage of its foreign policy priorities. Like Reagan’s past directive, it sought to effectively mobilise the U.S. military and intelligence community in the service of drug interdiction, directing that:
“The Secretary of Defence, in conjunction with the Secretary of State, shall revise DOD policy directives and procedures to expand DOD support of U.S. counter- narcotics efforts and to permit DOD personnel to conduct training for host government personnel and operational support activities anywhere in the Andean region. DOD personnel will not accompany host government forces on actual field operations” and that the “Director of Central Intelligence, coordinating with the
counter-narcotics intelligence community, shall similarly develop detailed
intelligence programs.” (White House 1989, p.3, emphasis added) Administration policy quickly came to have a direct strategic impact. The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama in Operation Just Cause was primarily about securing America’s interests in the region. However, the fact that the Panamanian dictator, General Manuel Noriega, had been complicit in cocaine trafficking for years with the Colombian Medellin cartel (despite at the same time being allowed to indulge in it due to his support for Contra operations in Nicaragua) was offered as one of several reasons for his ouster (Feiling 2009, p.202).
More covert counter-narcotics support by the military was provided in the Andean region as per the direction of NSD 18, specifically in Colombia, the most problematic country at the time and the world’s largest cocaine producer. U.S. Green Berets were deployed to Colombia as trainers for native counter-narcotics forces. Though officially they did not accompany forces on field operations, as per the stipulations of NSD 18, practical necessity meant that U.S. forces would sometimes accompany the Colombians on raids in order to ensure that training was proving effective and to monitor levels of corruption (Smith 2006, p.164).
At the same time Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin drug cartel, was in open warfare with other drug barons and the Colombian state, and his capture became a priority. With U.S. military training and strict security vetting, a native Colombian unit known as Bloque de Búsqueda (Search Bloc) was created to track Escobar down, and was substantially aided by U.S. military intelligence. A special American unit known as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), was deployed to utilise their intelligence gathering and surveillance expertise. Their airborne monitoring and cell-phone triangulation technology allowed for the capturing and gradual erosion of the Medellin hierarchy before locating Escobar himself, who was killed by Colombian forces in 1993 (Smith 2006, p.165-168).
In 1989 the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was created as part of the Executive Office of the U.S. President. Its remit was to establish policies, priorities and objectives to eradicate illicit drug use and trafficking, criminality, violence and health issues (White House 2014). Led by the Director of National Drug Control Policy, referred to as the ‘Drug Czar’ by politicians and the media, the office advised the president on drug policy and coordinated drug-control activities and related funding across the Federal government (White House 2014). The director oversaw both international and domestic anti-drug efforts, a role that was deemed important enough to be raised to cabinet-level a few years later.
The differing experience of each subsequent director is indicative of the evolution of U.S. counter-narcotics towards a more enforcement-based approach. The first director, William Bennett, came from academia and served as Education Secretary under Reagan (New York Times 1989). He was succeeded in 1991 by Bob Martinez, a former governor of Florida during Miami’s cartel wars, who had emphasised law enforcement and prison expansion (New York Times 1991). As the Clinton Administration entered office, Martinez was succeeded in 1993 by Lee Brown, a career police officer who had led departments in Atlanta, Houston and New York (Treaster 1993). Then, in 1996, General Barry McCaffrey (who had led U.S. Southern Command and so had experience in utilising military resources to combat Latin American drug trafficking) assumed the directorship until Clinton left office (Zoroya 1996). From academic, to politician, to law enforcement officer, to military commander; those who occupied the post of ONDCP director reflected the progressively securitised then militarised enforcement-oriented approach to U.S. counter-narcotics policy.
Such a process was well in train when, in 1990, as part of an additional $1.2 billion request to fight the drug war – on top of the $8.8 billion anti-drug budget that already existed – President Bush recommended a 50 percent increase in military spending. This raised the Pentagon’s counter-narcotics operations budget to $1.2 billion a year, up from $800 million, a third of which was to be used for U.S. programs to help the cocaine producers of Latin America, namely Colombia, Peru and Bolivia (Burke 1990)45. Along with greater active military involvement in counter-narcotics, this demonstrated a growing emphasis on attempting to curb narcotics trafficking by improving the security situations in the producer countries. Such a strategy was to come into its own towards the end of the Clinton Administration.
4.7 The Clinton Administration 1993-2000
Remaining on the course set by its predecessors, within the first year of the Clinton Administration, Presidential Decision Directive/NSC-14 was issued, focusing exclusively on Latin America and cocaine. It echoed rhetoric going back to Captain Hobson’s day by lamenting that, “the scourge of illegal narcotics is severely damaging the social fabric of our society” (White House 1993), and consequently the U.S. would:
45 Despite this increase, some politicians still felt not enough had been done to utilise military capability in drug
war operations. Democratic Senator Joe Biden was an outspoken proponent of U.S. efforts against drugs, and a September 1992 report by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chaired, argued that the Bush Administration had failed to grant sufficient money and power to the U.S. military to shift its mission to fighting illegal drugs (Baum 1993, p.74).
“Treat as a serious national security threat the operations of international criminal narcotics syndicates, requiring an extraordinary and coordinated response by civilian and military agencies engaged in national security.”
(White House 1993, emphasis added) Yet the Directive also marked a change in emphasis, shifting from efforts mainly targeting interdiction of drug traffic, towards a strategy that distributed effort across three programs (White House 1993):
Expanded assistance to partner countries for the strengthening of their native security institutions and the encouragement of broad economic growth and equity in an effort to erode the attraction of, or reliance on, the drug trade.
The destruction of narco-trafficking organisations through law-enforcement, erosion of funds by squeezing money laundering, and the control of precursor chemicals essential for drug manufacture.
The continuation of interdiction efforts by U.S. agencies, but a gradual shift of emphasis from transit zones towards source countries, complemented by U.S. support for regional nations’ own interdiction efforts, both civilian and military.
Though there had been previous instances of direct or covert assistance by U.S. military and intelligence assets (Operation Blast Furnace in Bolivia, or ISA operations in Colombia), such a strategic shift marked the beginnings of a move towards sustained counter-narcotics initiatives of the kind that have been selected as case studies. This strategy focused on eliminating, or at least mitigating, drug trafficking by taking the fight to source countries. There was also recognition that a vital component was the enhancement of the security institutions of those countries, alongside the traditional approaches of disrupting/eliminating traffickers and improving interdiction.
The 1997 National Drug Control Strategy, overseen by ONDCP director and former military officer Barry McCaffrey, sought to establish the foundations for such initiatives by calling for a flexible and long-term strategic vision of a ten-year commitment to combat illicit narcotics. The document sustained the recommendation for a broad strategy, including the admission that drug education, treatment and demand reduction were the ‘number one priority’, but putting equal weight on supply reduction by eliminating coca cultivation,
supporting source countries’ counter-narcotics efforts, and stepping up interdiction in transit zones (McCaffrey 1997).
Yet at the same time as foreign counter-narcotics policy increasingly focused on support for source countries, the process of domestic police militarisation that began with the 1981 Military Cooperation and Law Enforcement Act was supercharged by the 1997 National Defence Authorisation Security Act. The act created the Law Enforcement Support Program, an agency that organised transfer of excess or unwanted military equipment to civilian police forces to assist counter-narcotics in their jurisdictions (Balko 2006, p.8). This led to a huge rise in the availability of battlefield weaponry, equipment and vehicles at the disposal of not just large police forces, but even rural county sheriff’s departments. Between January 1997 and December 1999, the Law Enforcement Support Program handled 3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment from 11,000 police forces across all 50 states (Balko 2006, p.8). At the same time, it was found that 90 percent of cities with populations of 50,000 or more had at least one SWAT team which, given that such small towns and cities often lack the budgets to form such teams independently, suggested that Pentagon support was instrumental to many such teams’ existence (Balko 2006, p.9).
Another study which highlighted police militarisation was conducted by Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler (1997). They found that, by 1997, of the police departments participating in the study, during the initial setup and training of their Paramilitary Police Units (PPUs, i.e. SWAT teams) 46 percent had drawn expertise from police officers with past special operations experience in the military, and 43 percent had trained with active-duty military experts in special operations (Kraska and Kappeler 1997, p.11). This meant that almost half of surveyed police departments had been heavily influenced by past or present military training and culture during the formation of their PPUs.
Additionally, when asked about the training that their PPUs continued to receive after their formation, 30 percent of departments reported that officers with past special operations experience in the military were involved, and 46 percent admitted to training with active-duty special operations experts (Kraska and Kappeler 1997, p.11). Therefore, not only were militarily-experienced individuals involved in moulding the institutional culture of newly formed PPUs, but their influence endured well into the continuous training of unit personnel. Such arrangements and cultural cross-pollination could be traced back to the early efforts at civilian and military institutional cooperation, such as the South Florida Drug Task Force, where elements of the armed forces cross-trained and co-deployed with their law enforcement counterparts. With the more proactive attitudes towards counter-narcotics of the
Reagan and Bush Administrations, the number of search and/or arrest warrants involving drugs surged, and responsibility for executing such warrants increasingly fell to PPUs. The result was that by the second term of the Clinton Administration, a typical unit could be called out on between 200-700 drug raids annually (Kraska and Kappeler 1997, p.7).
The statistics relating to the resources police departments received from the Law Enforcement Support Program, as well as the influence wielded by military-minded trainers and members of PPUs, were indicative of the para-militarising of U.S. law enforcement efforts to combat the drug trade. If PPUs were more actively involved in drug enforcement than ever before, and had become far more militarised in resources, training and institutional culture, this constitutes a prime example of militarisation. Though the above examples concern domestic U.S. drug enforcement, the importation of military resources and cultural practices into civilian institutions established a precedent that would become observable in the kind of support eventually granted to, and encouraged within, the specialist police and military counter-narcotics units of Latin American countries.
Meanwhile, in Colombia, though the Medellin Cartel’s Pablo Escobar had been killed in 1993 and the leaders of the rival Cali Cartel had, by 1995, all been arrested, the security situation was still serious. Conflict perpetrated by smaller successor cartels, right-wing paramilitaries and Marxist FARC guerrillas all contributed to pushing the country towards being a failed state. Whether overly simplistic or not, it was widely felt that the drug trade perpetuated conflict and instability by providing funding for the warring parties, as well as being a lucrative trade to fight over in its own right, regardless of combatants’ broader objectives.
In one of his last foreign trips, Clinton visited Colombia in August 2000, bringing $1.3 billion of aid and sixty military helicopters, including $200 million to promote democracy, judicial reform, human rights and economic development (Hancock 2000). The allocation of funding for civil development was an important fig-leaf for U.S. politicians wary of becoming militarily involved in Colombia’s civil war. Yet if the drug trade was felt to be an integral part of that civil war, and the long-term policy had been to provide military support in combatting that trade, then it was difficult to envision how U.S. support in Colombia’s civil war and drug war46 could be so easily kept separate and compartmentalised. Whatever the complications that would ensue as policy aspiration met pragmatic reality, the
first truly sustained and comprehensive U.S. foreign counter-narcotics initiative in Latin America was underway: Plan Colombia.