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December 21, 2005

U.S. policy and the outcome in Bolivia

This morning, I had the opportunity to participate in a great, well-attended press conference at the National Press Club about Bolivia’s elections, along with speakers from the Andean Information Network, the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Washington Office on Latin America. I learned a lot from my fellow speakers and I was grateful for the opportunity to participate.

Since this last week before Christmas is less busy than usual, I had a chance to prepare my four-minute remarks in advance. Here they are:

My name is Adam Isacson, I’m the director of programs at the Center for International Policy in Washington. For the last eight years I’ve run a small program that monitors all U.S. military assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean – arms transfers, training programs, deployments, bases, anti-drug operations, and similar things.

We’ve always had an eye on Bolivia. Since 1997, Bolivia has been the number-three recipient of U.S. military assistance in Latin America, with $393 million over 9 years. This puts it behind Colombia and Peru, but since Bolivia has less than 9 million people, only Colombia gets more military aid per person. Beyond Latin America, Bolivia is still one of the main destinations of U.S. military aid. By my best estimate of military and police aid worldwide this year, Bolivia is tenth in the world, right behind Poland and ahead of Mexico.

Between 2001 and 2004, the United States trained 5,689 Bolivian military and police, including about 300 at the former U.S. Army School of the Americas. Among Latin American countries, only Colombia had more trainees during this period. In 2004, Bolivia was fourth in the world in military trainees, behind Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia.

Our aid goes to specialized military and police units that interdict drugs, like the army’s 9^th division and the Rural Mobile Police Patrol Units in the police force. It funds an army-police joint task force that forcibly eradicates coca plants and breaks up protests in coca-growing zones. In 2001 and 2002 it even funded a paramilitary “Expeditionary Task Force” whose sole mission was to break up protests; this unit was accused of several human-rights violations. U.S.-funded forces have faced numerous allegations of abusive behavior toward the population in the zones they operate, and this behavior has almost never been punished. A result has been greatly increased popular anger at the Bolivian government and at the U.S. government.

Now, even though Bolivia doesn’t host any groups on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the U.S. government is making counter-terrorism more of a focus of its aid. The State Department’s 2006 aid request to Congress cites, as a main objective of its aid, “To ensure that Bolivia does not become an active transit point for international terrorism.” U.S. aid is helping to develop counter-terror units in Bolivia’s army, and earlier this year helped Bolivia’s police inaugurate an elite 700-man “counter-narco-terror” unit called the Special Operations Force or FOE. All of this, even though the only evidence of a “terrorist threat” that U.S. officials can cite is the booby traps that some coca-growers leave in their fields to harm eradication troops (remember that many of these people are former tin miners, and know how to use dynamite), and the social movements’ frequent protests and road blockages, nearly all of which have taken place without violence.

Now Bolivia also gets a lot of economic aid, about $100 million per year. However, keep in mind that much of this is humanitarian aid scattered across the poorest country in South America. In the parts of Bolivia that see the most U.S. military assistance – the coca-growing zones of the Yungas and the Chapare, which is Evo Morales’ home region – the economic aid ends up falling way behind the military aid.

Nearly all of Bolivia’s military and police aid is for drug eradication and interdiction – well over $370 million since 1997. But alternative development aid for places like Yungas and Chapare has added up to only $204 million. That’s close to a 2 to 1 ratio in favor of military aid in some of Bolivia’s poorest, most neglected regions. And the Bush administration’s 2006 request to Congress foresees a nearly 10 percent cut in alternative development spending.

Now let’s think about this. The U.S. government has chosen to favor the stick over the carrot in a part of Bolivia where people were already very poor and very angry at their government. The U.S. government let forced eradication outpace development in areas where much of the population is former unionized miners who lost their livelihoods when Bolivia opened up to the global economy. This very harsh mix of tactics did cause coca-growing in Bolivia to decline, for a while. (Not anymore though.) But it also radicalized a coca-growers’ movement whose leaders knew how to organize because of their past union experience.

If it weren’t for the U.S. government’s overly militarized approach to Bolivia, it would never, ever have made sense for someone to use a movement of coca growers as a path to political power. U.S. drug policy helped turn Evo Morales from a local advocate of coca-growing to a national political figure. And then, as the Bush administration refused to change course and failed to help Bolivia address its economic crisis, the United States helped propel Evo Morales to the presidency. Evo Morales is the natural and predictable product of twenty years of a militarized, failed U.S. drug policy in the Andes. The United States helped create Evo Morales. And now the United States has to work with him.

Posted by isacson at December 21, 2005 3:00 PM

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