Andean
Update:
Peru's
Fujimori
and
Coca
Eradication
Gone,
Colombia's
Peace
Talks
on
Hold
as
Country
Braces
for
Drug
War
11/24/00
Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori resigned this week, bringing to an end an authoritarian regime that made its reputation by repressing two strong insurgencies in the mid-1990s. Fujimori, however, proved more adept at defeating guerrillas than working within the constraints of a genuine democracy. The Peruvian strongman appeared invincible as recently as a few months ago, but his popularity began to erode in the wake of a hotly contested presidential election in the spring. Then, after his leading advisor and head of the national intelligence service, Vladimiro Montesinos, was linked to a bribery scandal and to a guns-for-drugs deal with the Colombian FARC, Fujimori's approval ratings went into freefall. Fujimori resigned long distance, notifying Peruvian authorities of his decision from Japan, where he had stopped after a global economic conference in Brunei. He remains in Japan. New elections are scheduled for April, and while the political picture is muddied, Fujimori's Second Vice Presdent Ricardo Marquez has been sworn in as a caretaker pending the elections. The congressional opposition, however, stands ready to replace Marquez with a centrist elder statesman, Victor Paniagua. Fujimori garnered assistance and accolades from the United States for his tough stance on drugs. Aided by US troops manning radar stations and transmitting intelligence to Peruvian authorities, Fujimori okayed the shooting down of suspected drug smuggling planes, which helped to erode the Peru-Colombia coca connection. He also engineered a tough coca eradication program that succeeded in cutting Peruvian coca production in half since 1995. But in a shining example of the law of unintended consequences, total Andean coca production remains roughly unchanged, with large scale production shifting from Peru and Bolivia to Colombia, where it is fueling a brutal civil war. But Fujimori outlasted his coca eradication program. Early this month, as Fujimori struggled to maintain his grip on power, farmers in Peru's coca growing heartland, the Upper Huallaga Valley, rose up in protest. Some 35,000 growers blocked highways in the region for a week, forcing the embattled government to give in. "We have been able to arrive at a consensus... in which the eradication is stopped," Health Minister Alejandro Aguinaga, who also heads Peru's anti-drug efforts, told local radio news. Aguinaga said that any future eradication of coca bushes would occur only with the agreement of farmers. Protests are on hold, according to farmers' groups, pending government proposals to assist with alternative crop development. In Colombia, to which much of the Peruvian and Bolivian coca production migrated, political violence continues to increase in anticipation of the US-sponsored Plan Colombia. Under that plan, US-trained and -equipped troops will attempt to invade strongholds of the leftist FARC guerrillas to wipe out coca production. The first anti-drug brigade is expected to roll into conflicted Putumayo province as early as next month. Right-wing paramilitaries effectively allied with the Colombian military have entered the province in large numbers in recent months, as have hundreds of FARC guerrilla reinforcements. Twenty-eight people died in fighting early last week, and the month-long FARC blockade of the province remains intact. Although the military airlifted some 300 tons of food into Puerto Asis, the provincial capital, earlier this month, local authorities are bitter and depressed. "The government has abandoned Putumayo," Mayor Manuel Alzate told the St. Petersburg Times. Neither does Alzate think Plan Colombia will make a difference. "The government would have to station its troops every 50 yards along the highways, and they lack the manpower to do that. And even if they did, the rebels could creep up and kill them." In a further sign of trouble to come, last week the FARC guerrillas announced they were withdrawing from slow-moving peace talks. The FARC statement pointed to Colombian government tolerance of the paramilitaries and accused the government of choosing the US-inspired war plan over negotiations. Meanwhile, in a an indication of problems for Plan Colombia in Washington, a leading Republican hawk, Rep. Benjamin Gilman of New York, has broken with the administration. In a letter last week to Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, Gilman called Plan Colombia "a major mistake" and criticized the Colombian military's human rights record. But the Gilman move is not a case of sudden enlightenment. Instead it is partly a partisan attack on the Clinton administration and partly an effort to shift US military assistance from the Colombian armed forces to Gilman's favored National Police. Still, Gilman's defection from the Plan Colombia consensus on the Hill means the plan will be an even tougher sell in Congress in the coming session. Administration officials are preparing to ask for an additional $400 to $600 million to prosecute the war during the next budget year. Undaunted by the virtual collapse of Plan Colombia before it even begins, McCaffrey, in his Colombian swan song, touched down in Bogota to cheerlead one last time before retiring. Although he predicted heavy fighting and an increase in Colombian cocaine production, McCaffrey said he could see no alternative to Plan Colombia. McCaffrey repeatedly told his audiences that US aid was not designed to influence the country's decades-long civil war, but instead aimed at suppressing the drug trade. But in a remark that cuts to the heart of US confusion over its goals in Colombia, McCaffrey repeated his claim that the FARC is "the principal organizing entity of cocaine production in the world."
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