All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm looking at newamericamedia.org.
The article is Pentagon using drug wars as excuse to build bases in Latin America by John Lindsay Poland.
It's also in the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com.
John is research and advocacy director of the National Interfaith Organization Fellowship of Reconciliation.
He has served as director of the four task force on Latin America and the Caribbean since 1989.
He's the editor of Forrest Columbia update founded on Forrest Columbia peace presence team as the author of articles, reports, and books on U.S. military policy and history in Latin America, including military assistance and human rights, Columbia, U.S. accountability, and global implications.
Says here he works with the anti-war radio's old friend, Tom Berry here too.
Good old Tom.
How's he doing these days?
Hey, welcome to the show, John.
How are you?
Okay.
How are you doing?
Good to be here.
I'm doing great.
Very happy to have you here with us today.
Very important article.
And it's something that I admit that I neglect terribly, probably just because I don't speak Spanish and I don't know much about South America or Latin America at all.
And so I just, I don't know.
I hear the empire has been at war with these people under the good neighbor policy for a hundred years or something.
And it's the least covered topic on anti-war radio.
That doesn't make much sense.
So I'm very happy to have you here to help fill us in.
And of course there's no more commies.
So I guess the excuse has got to be cocaine distribution.
And based on that, they're building more military bases than they already had in South America.
Can you, I guess, start with the numbers?
How many bases do we already have?
How much of an expansion are we talking about here?
Well, the word bases itself is actually becomes pretty slippery on all sides of the debate because a lot of what the U.S. military is doing is building up facilities that might be formally owned by the nation itself in Latin America, but the U.S. will have access to it.
So there's various kind of gradations of U.S. military access in the region.
Some things are full-blown bases like what there is in Guantanamo in Cuba or the Palmarola base outside of Tegucigalpa in Honduras.
Others are more like listening stations, whether that's radars or airfields that are used for flights that will be doing surveillance all around the region.
Then you also have the Navy's fourth fleet, which was redeployed in 2008 and has increased the amount of U.S.
Navy operations and port visits all throughout the region.
Then you also have training, which often takes place in Latin America.
Most of it takes place in Latin America, and that can be at a Latin American facility as well as at a U.S. facility.
So there's a lot of different forms that it takes, but just to kind of give the scale of it, as you were asking, the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers does a lot of building military construction projects in Latin America in the last two years, just in dollar, counting by the dollars, the amount of construction has doubled since 2009.
So a lot of it is happening in Central America.
A lot of it is happening on the coasts under the guise of the counter-narcotics war or counter-narco-terrorism, as a lot of these accounts are called.
And particularly in Honduras and Panama, they're the hubs for a lot of U.S. military activity and construction in the region.
Now, as far as that guise goes, how thin a veneer is that?
How much of these resources are actually used in fighting drug cartels and how much of it is for other purposes?
Well, some of that remains to be seen.
A lot of what happens when you build a base like this is you build capacity that can be used for a variety of things.
I mean, basically you're building up the military institutions and those institutions have multiple missions.
Some of that might be to fight drugs or it might be rhetorically to fight drugs because that's what Washington wants.
I think in Latin America, both by militaries as well as by civilians, a lot of people perceive this as primarily a gringo problem.
And so the mission of fighting the cartels or fighting trafficking becomes something that a lot of people perceive as something that the United States should take care of.
Now, if the militaries are going to get goodies out of it, then they're more likely to go along and accept this as a mission that they should they should carry out.
It should also be said that the drug trafficking in Central America has become the I shouldn't say drug trafficking.
I should say that the organizations that are trafficking drugs have become serious organized crime institutions, you know, organizations that are not only trafficking drugs are also trafficking in people and extortion.
I mean, there's all kinds of other crimes that are associated with with the drug trade.
And of course, many people argue that if the drugs were legalized, that it would essentially take away a lot of the profit from that whole business.
So I think there is a desire on the part of a lot of people to deal with that in some fashion.
The problem is that the military approach is so ineffective.
And in many instances, as was just pointed out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy that released their report this past week, that in many instances, when you increase the firepower that the state brings to fighting organized crime or drug trafficking, the violence increases as well.
And that's certainly what's happened in Mexico.
So all of different places where President Calderón has called out the army and increased the militarization of the fight against organized crime, the homicide rate has also gone up.
And you know, it's kind of perverse, but, you know, you get these statements by Secretary Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Calderón saying, well, this is actually an indication that we're doing our job.
So as it becomes more violent, there's even sometimes subtly or unsubtly a an affirmation that that's a good thing.
So even if Hillary said, you know, we can't legalize drugs because she was asked about this and she said she can't because there's just too much money in it.
And now it would have been nice if she was referring to the banks need that money to not collapse or something.
But instead, she says, you know, we can't let people who are the drug businessmen make this much money.
They've got to be put in jail somehow and not allowed to get away with making this much money for living, distributing drugs.
Basically is what she's saying.
It's just an intolerable thing for that to happen.
And yet she apparently cannot understand the simple economics at play.
You clamp down, as you say, you militarize the war against the drug distributors.
Well, the incentives, the billions of dollars worth of profits are still there.
All the incentives to deal drugs are still there.
So all that means is they've got to arm up in response to the military and back and forth it goes until now, you know, you cite Mexico.
It seems to be tearing itself apart over this.
And it's pretty obvious which is the chicken and which is the egg, you know?
Well, I mean, I think the other thing that gets lost in this debate is that there's a whole range of options between 100 percent legalization of all narcotics, including heroin and cocaine and meth and the totally military prohibitionist approach that we have now, that the United States has now.
There's a lot of options in between.
And for me, what is more important is where are the resources going?
Because you can have a decriminalization policy, you can have a number of things in between those two extremes that that put the resources in a different way.
Because if you invest in treatment for people who have the most serious addiction problems, that cuts down on a lot of the use.
It cuts down on a lot of the the people who are who are addicted and using and also become dealers because of their their addiction problem.
And that then also takes out a middleman for a lot of the for the casual users.
All right, well, we're going to have to hold it right there.
But it's a very interesting article and a very interesting interview so far.
It's John Lindsay Poland.
The website is newamericamedia.org and the article, it's in the viewpoints at antiwar.com today.
Pentagon using drug wars as excuse to build bases in Latin America.
And we'll be back with more right after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
Talking with John Lindsay, Poland has a new piece at newamericamedia.org, Pentagon using drug wars as excuse to build bases in Latin America.
And I just wanted to quickly mention two New York Times articles because, you know, polite company can talk about New York Times articles.
It's not beyond the pale if it's in the New York Times.
And one of them was a long history of the DEA about a year ago or so about how it used to be that cocaine was sold by Jimmy Buffett types in open shirts.
Margaritaville dudes with private planes would bring the cocaine back and forth and make some money.
And it was all right.
And then they clamped down and the more they clamped down over decades and decades.
And it's the DEA telling the story to the New York Times after decades and decades of clamping down and clamping down.
Now, the worst, most ruthless, innocent civilian beheading maniacs are the only ones willing to engage in the cocaine distribution trade around there.
And then one more was how Juarez in Mexico, on the other side of the border from El Paso, had a pretty bad drug problem and a pretty bad criminal cartel that ran basically all the distribution in town.
And then they killed the bad guy or maybe they arrested him.
I think they killed the mob boss leader.
And then the whole town broke out into warfare over between all of his captains over who was going to be the new czar of the illegal drug market in Juarez.
And it's the agents, again, telling the story, dumbfounded by the simple economics of the situation.
The more illegal it is, the more valuable it is, the more the worst people become the only ones willing to engage in it.
And this is a path we've just gone down.
And I really think they don't understand.
I don't think it's like, you know, makes for a good excuse.
So keep it going like that.
I think they really don't get it.
And now, as as John Lindsay Pullen is explaining in his article at New American Media, newamericamedia.org today, this is, you know, really becoming the excuse for the expansion of the Pentagon's forces of different kinds, training and bases and and all kinds of different so-called cooperation throughout the entire hemisphere.
Still, the war on drugs where where there's not al-Qaeda, there must be something to fight down there.
And what do you think about my theory that that our government just doesn't understand the economics of the drug trade whatsoever?
Well, I think that's probably true that, you know, I think there's also people get into a certain mindset, you know, especially if you're in law enforcement, you're not you're not the one that is making the laws and the people who are making the laws sort of have this they're in a rigid mind frame about what are the options before them, because they're afraid.
It's just it's just like in a way what's going on with in Afghanistan.
They're afraid that if they don't so-called look tough, that there is no other option.
You know, it's like that old thought, like if if if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
And so they're not there's a total lack of imagination in the policy making sphere about how to deal with social, economic, political and security problems and to understand the complexity of them and why it is that a lot of young people are channeled into illegal activity, very risky activity, I should say, you know, whether we're talking about something like in the Middle East or in Afghanistan or something in Juarez, I mean, most of these kids are going to who become sicarios who become gunmen for the cartels end up being killed themselves.
And it's because they don't see any future.
And the state, whether that's the Mexican state or U.S. policy, is not investing in their future.
They are building soccer stadiums as a response to killing.
I'm actually going to Juarez on Thursday.
And, you know, what the federal police last night raided the human rights center, El Paso del Norte Human Rights Center in Juarez without a warrant, took took files as a way of intimidating an organization that is is saying that the state is partly responsible for a lot of the violations.
It is complex in the sense that the state is both complicit in drug trafficking and in some parts of the state is fighting drug trafficking.
Sometimes that means that they're fighting opponents of the part of the state that they're with that is allied with one cartel.
Well, I mean, hey, you can read about read Gary Webb about the DEA resenting the CIA in Los Angeles.
That's for sure.
You think there's still a lot of CIA involvement in the drug trade these days?
And at least South American drug trade will leave out Central Asia for now.
I don't know how active, you know, the CIA is so secretive, it's not something that I've been able to investigate.
I mean, do you hear a lot about that the way I mean, in the 80s, kind of everybody knew.
Right.
I mean, I think all the intelligence agencies, they there's a structural part of their task, which is that they need information.
And a lot of the people who have information are criminals.
Whether those criminals work for the state or whether they work for some private enterprise.
And so in order to get information, a lot of times you have to give something.
And that might be money or it might be other information.
It might be some kind of collaboration.
And, you know, that's kind of built into the whole intelligence process.
I think journalists actually sometimes face the same thing.
Sometimes individual journalists, part of it, of course, is they work for the intelligence services, of course, as they work for the corporate monolith.
But they also they if they want to get information from people in power, they also have to be on the good side of people in power.
And that's a that's a tricky process.
So I think, you know, some similar things work for the people in the CIA who I know that a lot of people think, oh, it's actually intentional, that they're that they're attempting, they're they want more drug trafficking.
And I think most of them don't really care.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's the essence of the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb.
And in his book is that they didn't think, great, we'll create a crack epidemic and destroy the black community in L.A.
They just couldn't care less about the black community in L.A.
And, you know, this is where this new peace movement that is rising up in Mexico, one of the slogans that they put out there is indifference kills.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's not just about denouncing something.
It's also about, like, caring about something and whether you're whether you're in a state agency or whether you're like us who are out and about trying to do our live our lives.
Well, you know, it's really too bad that we can't have a reasonable discussion about drugs or maybe we're just beginning to be able to have a reasonable discussion about these kinds of policies without sounding like, oh, well, you're just pro crack or something.
I mean, after all, crack was only because powder cocaine is artificially expensive because it's illegal and poor people can't afford it.
So you rock it up and poor people can afford it.
You know, it's pretty obvious.
That's where the meth epidemic comes from, too.
The artificial expense is very cheap to make.
So, I mean, we're finally getting to the point, I think, where maybe we can begin to talk about this without people just, you know, imagining the worst crack zombie and thinking that what you mean is that we ought to go ahead and welcome our society turning into that or something when it's it's such a false choice and such a kind of naive portrait the way the government has painted over all these years.
I hope we can finally make some progress, if not for the good of America or the United States, for the South American victims of our policy.
Yeah, I think the one other piece that I really want to highlight before we break, too, is the gun trade, which is, you know, very associated with the drug trade.
But the way in which the United States deals with guns, both in policy and culturally, means death for people south of the border, because you can go into a shop in Phoenix or any of these border communities and buy 20 AK-47s from the ATF and walk out with them.
Yeah, totally legal.
You can buy them from the cops, actually.
Yeah, I mean, there's any number of ways to obtain them.
They're easily available here and they're illegal to own in Mexico.
And it's what's killing people on the street in all these different Mexican cities.
Right.
And then we hear state and federal people, federal officials in our country saying, well, maybe we need more gun laws here instead of recognizing that, you know, never mind the ATF being behind the distribution of all these AK-47s and getting their own cops killed and that kind of thing, like in the CBS story.
But just, you know, the only reason that drug cartels need AKs in Mexico is because we're forcing them to use their military to fight the drug war.
And you know what?
I forget if you had a chance to mention this, but maybe you could mention real quick the massive protests in Mexico recently and whether that's actually going to do any good.
Well, I think it's already done some good in the sense that it's, for one thing, it is taking away the stigma of victims of this violence who were accused by President Calderón and many others of being part of the drug trade.
And yet many, many, many people who are being gunned down in Mexico have nothing to do with the gun trade, with the drug trade.
And so they're beginning to speak and their voices are beginning to be heard in a way that is super important to overcome the 98 percent impunity rate for crimes committed in Mexico.
I'm sorry, we are so over time and we've got to go.
But I really thank you for your time very much.
I hope we can talk again soon.
As you can tell, I'm very ignorant about South American politics, but I'm not ignorant about how important it all is.
So thanks again.
Really appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's John Lindsey Poland.
He's writing at New America Media dot org.
It's in the viewpoints today at Antiwar dot com.
Pentagon using drug wars as excuse to build bases in Latin America.
