POLITICS-US: Annual ‘Certification’ Report Card Cites Major Advances

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 2 2001 (IPS) - The US government cited key advances, especially in Latin America, in the global fight against illicit drugs during 2000, although it noted that coca cultivation in Colombia grew some 11 percent during the year, and anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia and Haiti fell far short of US demands.

Nonetheless, the administration of President George W. Bush said it would not penalise Cambodia and Haiti because imposing far-reaching economic sanctions against those two countries could harm US national interests in their stability.

Afghanistan and Burma, which together produce 93 percent of the world’s opium gum, on the other hand, will remain on Washington’s list of countries which are officially “de-certified”.

That means the two countries, which have been de-certified for more than a decade, remain ineligible for all but humanitarian and anti-drug aid from the United States whose representative at the World Bank and other multilateral agencies is required to oppose proposed loans to them.

On the other hand, the new report found that the other major drug producing or transit countries, including all of Latin America, are co- operating fully with Washington’s drug war.

The report, which did not cover the latest US-backed eradication efforts in Colombia, singled out Bolivia and Peru for special praise, noting that the two top coca producers just a few years ago had reduced the amount of cultivated area for coca by 70 percent in five years.

It also hailed improvements in Nigeria and Paraguay which were moved from the same “national interest” list as Haiti and Cambodia one year ago to the fully co-operative list for 2000. Both countries had taken major action against prominent drug-traffickers and had shown other signs of a new commitment to fighting the drug trade.

The report also gave high marks to Mexico and Pakistan for reducing opium production and noted that the Taliban government in Afghanistan appears to have cut down on production there during the year 2000-2001, although it noted that so much opium gum had been produced in past years that sufficient stockpiles exist to meet any anticipated demand.

The latest certification report – a kind of “report card” on anti-drug efforts of foreign countries – comes at a time when the certification process itself is under unprecedented attack and the new administration seems undecided about whether to press for its continuation.

Initiated by the US Congress in 1986, the certification process is used to put pressure on countries to co-operate with the US drug war, by the threat of sanctions and public shaming.

The countries, particularly those in Latin America, have expressed outrage at the process since its inception. They have charged not only that it is unilateral, necessarily subjective, and supremely hypocritical, given that the United States itself is the world’s biggest source of demand by far for illicit drugs.

“It allows the US government to place the blame abroad without taking a serious look at the failure of efforts to reduce the demand for illicit drugs in the United States,” according to Gina Amatangelo, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Critics also point to Washington’s tendency to “de-certify” only those countries with which it has poor relations anyway at the same time that it passes other nations whose drug-fighting records may be just as bad, but whose strategic importance to the United States is so great that even publicly shaming could threaten other US interests.

Just a few weeks ago, Mexico’s new president, Vicente Fox, called the process a “sham that should be denounced and cancelled”.

Such criticisms are heard increasingly here as well, particularly because there is growing evidence that, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars in drug interdiction and the successes in eradication in the Andean countries of the kind cited in Thursday’s report, for example, there is virtually no evidence that consumers of drugs in the United States are having a more difficult time obtaining them.

On the contrary, the street price for cocaine and heroin has remained remarkably stable in the United States over the past 15 years – a fact stressed repeatedly in the recent Hollywood box-office hit, ‘Traffic,’ which depicts the futility of the drug war in the cravings of the daughter of a fictional US drug czar (Michael Douglas) who resigns his post on the day of his first press briefing.

As a result, a major fight is expected in Congress this year over whether to continue the process. Three proposals that would modify it have already been introduced, the most promising of which would suspend certification for two years while working to develop a more effective multilateral approach. The bill is sponsored by a bipartisan group of four Senate heavyweights: Democrats Chris Dodd and Ernest Hollings, and Republicans John McCain and Chuck Hagel.

The Bush administration so far has not taken a position. But Bush himself, on a visit to Fox’s ranch last month, suggested he was sympathetic to the Mexican president’s desire to see the process ended, while Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has indicated that he supports more efforts to reduce demand.

According to the White House, funding for drug prevention programmes increased only 33 percent between 1994 and 2001, while budgets for international control programmes increased by 175 percent and for interdiction programmes by 68 percent.

The battle, however, promises to be hard-fought. In testimony Thursday, Republican Rep. Ben Gilman, former chairman of the House International Relations Committee, argued that abandoning certification would be the equivalent of “unilateral disarmament”.

“Before 1986,” he said, we all heard good words and lofty promises from foreign governments about their promised co-operation with us. But all we got were words until drug certification came along. Only then did we see that these major producing and transit nations know that we were serious and were prepared to withhold our aid, if need be.”

Rand Beers, who has headed anti-drug efforts for several years at the State Department, also testified that while he was open to changes in the law, he felt any alternative must have an “enforcement mechanism” that would sanction non-co-operating countries.

Noting successes in reducing potential supplies from abroad, the report said the world, and especially the United States, faces new threats from synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamine and related drugs, such as MDMA, or ‘Ecstasy,’ which is more widely used by teenagers in the United States than cocaine.

‘Meth,’ according to the report, is one of the world’s fastest growing drugs and has replaced heroin as the main drug problem in Southeast Asia. Centres of production, according to the report, include Burma, China, North Korea, Mexico, and Poland.