The US Drug War Perspective

There was a view in the Bush administration that addicts were casualties of the Drug War and there wasn’t much you could do. Once someone was addicted, you couldn’t really save them, so don’t waste your time

focusing on them. ( . . . ) The budget has always been around 60-70 per cent for domestic law enforcement, interdiction and international, and that was driven by the belief that stopping drugs would stop people from using them. ( . . . ) There was a decade long push, probably starting in

’88 to around ’97 or ’98, where that ideology or thinking really drove the drug strategy, so that the focus on an Andean strategy, which includes Bolivia of course, was big. (Carnevale interview, 2013)

The above quote from former-ONDCP official, John Carnevale, identifies the

‘ideology’ of the Drug War Paradigm as a key factor in the introduction of the Andean Initiative in the late-1980s. This ‘ideology’ and its underlying

assumptions still hold influence, as evidenced by the interview accounts of US actors. In discussing the crack-cocaine scare of the 1980s, for example, US

interlocutors called on US cultural understandings of drugs and securitised notions of the issue. Forming an important component of their accounts, these instilled a sense of urgency and moral right to the US counterdrug role in Bolivia.

The following description from Ambassador Charles Richard Bowers emphasised the necessity of US action against the Bolivian drug trade. The powerful

assertion that cocaine produced in the Andes was ‘killing our kids’ reinforces the idea that the drug trade represented a threat to US national security. It also echoes the moral dichotomy of the Drug War Paradigm, where drugs are viewed as an ‘evil’ that must be defeated.

I mean, the reason we were down there to begin with was because of the massive flow of cocaine into the United States which was killing our kids.

Still is. That’s a whole other argument about Drug War… not Drug War…

but the basic thing is, that product made its way into the United States, so the goal was to stop that product coming in. (Bowers interview, 2013)² In this example, though, Bowers pulled back from using the contested term

‘Drug War’. This reflects the effects of contemporary criticism of US

counterdrug policy on the accounts of US actors.³ Interlocutors such as Bowers implicitly responded to these critiques in the construction of their historical accounts.

Following in this vein, Ambassador David Greenlee explained the logic of US counterdrug efforts in Bolivia. Greenlee externalised responsibility for the

‘devastating’ effects of crack-cocaine in urban-America. Intervention in Latin America to address the problem was rationalised against the background of perceived domestic crisis.

I think what really intensified the focus on Bolivia and the coca producing countries was the advent of crack-cocaine. Before, cocaine had been a sort of high-end drug… the doctors and lawyers… and it was quite refined, and it was a problem, (but) it wasn’t devastating the inner-cities. Crack-cocaine really changed the game. (Greenlee interview, 2013)

2 Bowers (interview, 2013) finished the interview by stating, ‘the root of the problem – if you want one final quote – there would be no problem if American kids stopped using the product’.

While this contradicts the externalisation of the problem, puritanical elements of the Drug War Paradigm are evident: abstinence from drug use (deviant behaviour) would solve the problem.

3 This is discussed further in Chapter 3.

It is interesting to note here the delimitation between high-end cocaine-use among ‘doctors and lawyers’ and crack-cocaine in the inner-cities. The effects of the former are largely dismissed, while the latter is viewed as a

‘game-changer’. During this period, these types of perceptions were reflected in wide disparities in prison sentences for each form of cocaine.⁴ Those caught in

possession of the ‘ghetto drug’ were subject to draconian mandatory sentences.

As such, some commentators argue that the ‘war on drugs’ caused more harm to predominantly African-American, inner-city communities than crack-cocaine itself (e.g. see Reinerman & Levine, 1997c). This was viewed to reflect the country’s 'racialised' history of drug control, its intermittent cycle of drug scares, and the division between mainstream US society and marginalised sectors. Although Greenlee does not engage directly with these issues (and it would be unfair to extrapolate from his account), this passage demonstrates the subtle influence of the conceptual framework of the Drug War Paradigm on the interpretations of US actors.

In terms of defining the parameters of the response, the Drug War model prescribes enforcement-led policies. Adopting the vocabulary of war, the

‘enemy’ of the drug trade should be met with the US security apparatus and defeated. Such ideas informed the formulation of the Andean Initiative and the process of defining a new post-Cold War security agenda in Latin America.

Ambassador David Miller, who headed the drug unit of the NSC (National Security Council) under Bush, suggests that US government agencies, emboldened by post-Cold War euphoria, adopted this thinking.

We were ploughing new ground, and I think it is important to bear in mind that there are some issues that they’ve already thought out and the NSC has wrestled with for many years. The idea of a co-ordinated Drug War in South America was something that had not been done. And so you had a lot of serious, separate commentary from people. (But) I think everybody was very enthusiastic, and they had a President who cared a lot about it which makes a difference. And it was new and exciting. I mean at that point people weren’t wandering around saying, ‘I wonder if this is going to work’. They were sort of wandering around saying, ‘well this is really

4 This assumed harsher sentencing and counter-supply efforts abroad were more effective in addressing the problem than alleviating social deprivation in inner-city areas.

different; we’re going to try and see if we can solve the problem at its origins’. (Miller interview, 2013)

Searching for new missions in this new era, government agencies adopted notions of human security. This chimed with American Exceptionalism:

addressing the ‘threat’ of drugs – and by extension drug corruption – would create the conditions for human rights, democracy and development. But there were also more prosaic explanations for sudden bureaucratic interest in the drugs issue. Former-Deputy Administrator of the DEA Terry Burke (interview, 2013), described the post-Cold War scramble for a share of the newly expanded counterdrug budget: ‘these other agencies… that were searching for funding and wanted to expand… they decided, “gee, let’s get into the drug business”. ( . . . ) It got so out of hand!’ Accordingly, the onset of the ‘war on drugs’ in Bolivia and US preferences for policy are partly explained by the institutional drive of these government agencies.

This institutional-bureaucratic narrative was also identified by Bolivian actors, but applied differently. Taking a more critical view, conceptualising drugs as a security issue, and the policy responses that this elicits, had been used to institutionalise the ‘war on drugs’. The discourse of security and the

militarisation of counterdrug policy have fed the Drug War bureaucracy, often to the detriment of the South. Former-President Jaime Paz Zamora argued along similar lines.

The problem was it turning into a war, or it becoming ‘Colombianised’ or

‘Mexicanised’. ( . . . ) The American agencies… in this respect, the European agencies are different… they need the problem to continue to survive. They aren’t interested in resolving the problem. They’d be left without work… it’s an interesting problem. It complicates their daily work, as they have to keep on generating situations that will make the news… a violent act, etc... so they appear like heroes who are in the front line, fighting for the mental health of the people, etc. Here, on many occasion, (the problem) was exaggerated, so they could survive. And this occurred with all agencies, including the UN. It’s something that has to be done because everyone needs to survive. So there are always more problems, always more things, more bureaucracy. That was our

experience. (Paz Zamora interview, 2014)

In this way, the interests of counterdrug agencies were bound to continual insecurity and the survival of the drug trade. There is a gap between the stated aims of US counterdrug policy and the interests of those who execute it. As discussed in the following chapter, US securitised notions of Bolivia’s coca-cocaine economy were resisted by the Paz Zamora government. While US

interlocutors adopted the assumptions of securitisation and looked to extend the Drug War in Bolivia, local actors rejected this conceptualisation and considered it detrimental to local priorities. Here, Paz Zamora argues that the US agenda was linked to bureaucratic politics. Along this and many other dimensions of the

‘war on drugs’, elite US and Bolivian actors interpretations stood in contrast to each other.