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NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS

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Beyond the Drug War: The Pentagon's Other Operations in Latin America
By John Lindsay-Poland narrative justifying the U.S. military's activities in Latin America has been the war on drugs and the fight against "narcoterrorists," especially in Colombia. That narrative's credibility has always been fragile, at best, if measured by the results in cocaine use, retail price, amount of land planted in coca, or other objective metrics. Now that credibility is losing ground even among political elites, as well as among the U.S. electorate, according to polling data.' In June, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a panel of 19 former heads of state and dignitaries, released a report that is highly critical of the United States' "drug control imperialism" and its attempts to impose a prohibitionist and militarized approach to drug control on other nations.^ The military, however, does not rely exclusively on the "drug war" paradigm to justify its dealings in the hemisphere. According to Defense Department data on its contracts with private companies, the U.S. military has in the last decade undertaken several activities in the region that are unrelated, at least directly, to fighting drug traffickers or insurgents. These include low-profile tests of military equipment in Honduras, Panama, and Suriname; humanitarian assistance that the military itself acknowledges has intelligence-gathering purposes; and training to suppress social protest. Some Pentagon operations in the region, while framed as "exchanges" with the region's militaries or as humanitarian assistance, serve to train U.S. troops in combined operations or in engineering projects that the U.S. military is prohibited from doing within the United States, such as those that might compete with U.S. businesses. Other operations include deploy-

OR THE LAST TWO DECADES, THE DOMINANT

John Lindsay-Poland is research and advocacy director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the author of Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama CDuke University Press, 2003).

ments of ships and other forces in counternarcotics operations. It is no surprise that the drug war continues to serve as the principal public rationale for U.S. military assistance and activity in Latin America and the Caribbean. After all, it has worked as an effective pitch to Congress that has more than tripled the Pentagon's contract spending in the region during the last decade. In 2000-2001, yearly military contract funds averaged $121 million; by 2010 it had reached $438 million, according to federal data.' Some of this increase (36%) is attributable, as we would expect, to two costly programs: Plan Colombia, the multibilliondoliar counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency aid program implemented in 2000, and the Merida Initiative, a similar program for Mexico that began in 2008. Contracts in Colombia went from $24 million in 2000 to an annual average of $90 million for 2006-2010. With the implementation of the Merida Initiative, contract spending in Mexico also grew, jumping from $5.5 miUion in 2009 to $57.8 million in 2010. Most of the increase in Mexico was spent on just three contracts: with the giant military contractor Northrop Grumman for an unspecified service, with San Diego-based Cubic Corporation (for training equipment), and with Blackwater's training company, based in North Carolina. In fact, only five companies received more than half of all drug war dollars for all of Latin America from 2005 to 2009, many for non-competitive contracts.'* Pentagon drug war support to the Mexican armed forces (which includes costs not contracted to private companies, such as aircraft purchases) totaled $86.5 million in 2010.' A large segment of increased Pentagon spending, from an average of $16.3 million

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to do with the drug war: the detention center in Guantnamo, Cuba, and the U.S. military's deployment in response to the earthquake in Haiti. Defense contracts in Cuba shot up from an annual average of $34 million m 2000-2001 (before Camp Delta was built) to $115 million a year since 2005. After the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. military carried out a major mobilization, and in nine months spent $50.9 million on contracts in Haitimore than 10 times what it spent in the previous decade combined. Such humanitarian missions, together with low-profile weapons testing, intelligence gathering, and police training programs, have become staples of the Pentagon's activities in Latin America.

HESE OPERATIONS AND ACTIVITIES

A U.S. Navy photo depicts veterinarian Helle Hydeskov examining a puppy at a temporary clinic in Tumaco, Colombia. Humanitarian missions have become a staple of the military's publicity ustifylnj its presence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

in 2000-2001 to $62.1 million in 2010, is occurring in Central America, where the United States is building a series of coastal military bases that are to be turned over to the region's armed forces (including Costa Rica and Panama, which have no formal militaries). Although the United States is constructing military bases or operations centers in every

Central American country, the bulk of attention is focused on Honduras and Panama. The primary rationale for the bases is to combat drug trafficking, but the infrastructure could be used for other military missions in the future as well. Meanwhile, two other sources for the growth of Pentagon spending are missions in the Caribbean with little

do not require fixed overseas bases, and they are budgeted and funded directly by the Pentagon, as opposed to foreign aid programs that operate through the State Department. They are thus more difficult to track, since the Pentagon's budget is enormous, hard to navigate, and opaque. Pentagon foreign assistance, for example, is not programmed by country, and Defense officials have acknowledged that its monitoring of contracts is "inconsistent" and "error prone."* Moreover, the Pentagon's activities are also more difficult to challenge, since the Defense budget is overseen by congressional committees that are particularly committed to military expansionism, allowing less margin for advocacy than committees on foreign aid channeled through the State Department. For these reasons, human rights, peace, and leftist activists have focused primarily on U.S. military

NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS

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assistance in the foreign aid budget overseen by the State Department, and on U.S. military bases, the most visible form of U.S. militarization in the region. These foci correspond to assistance, presence, and training, three categories that Pentagon officers use to plan U.S. military relations with Latin America. The School of the Americas Watch and the movement it sustains has focused on some military training, forcing the school to rename itself in 2001 and leading some Latin American countries to withdraw from sending students. In terms of reducing military assistance in the foreign operations budget, there has been some limited success. In the 2012 budget that President Obama submitted in February, for example, military aid proposed for Colombia and Mexico was reduced. As for closing or limiting fixed U.S. military bases, public pressure has helped close bases in Ecuador, Panama, and Puerto Rico, while the plan to upgrade the Palanquero air base in Colombia for U.S. use has been scuttled. In the meantime, U.S. military activities that fall outside the domain of the drug war are little discussed. Yet despite the obscurity of Pentagon spending, it is possible to track Defense Department contracts with private companies for activities abroad. For example, more than $30 million in Pentagon contracts has gone to equipment testing in tropical zones, known as "tropic testing," carried out since 2002 by the private companies Kvaerner Process Services, based in Houston, and Las Vegas-based Trax International. These low-profile tests have taken place principally in Panama, where Pentagon-financed projects include the use of drones manufactured by Stark Aerospace, a division of Israel Defense Industries, as well as an upgrade to firing ranges. A 10

U.S. Army agency called the Tropic Test Center once tested conventional munitions, chemical weapons, depleted-uranium munitions, and many other kinds of matriel in Panama for decades. But public disclosure of these tests during the 1990s, when the United States and Panama were negotiating a continued U.S. military presence, tripped up the discussions, and the test center was closed in 1999. But as the Pentagon's contracts reveal, the testing resumed in Panama, as well as in Honduras, Suriname, and Hawaii. The tests focus on military equipment ranging from airborne sensors and electronics to chemical and biological protective systems to the XM8 rifie. The United States also conducted tests on the XM-7 Spider land mine in Panama or another tropic site.'' On its website, Trax International promoted the use of firing ranges for tropic tests with U.S. troops in Panama, as well as the other sites, until exposure in the Panamanian media in January 2011 prompted the company to conceal the test locations.** With a headquarters in Panama, the revamped Tropic Regions Test Center (TRTC) has had access to five test sites and maintains agreements with two universities allowing it to "retain key tropic test capabilities." An agreement with the Technological University of Panama, for example, focuses on testing materials for the effects of tropical exposure in areas on the Caribbean end of the canal. One of the sites used is the Cerro Tigre firing range, run by the Panamanian National Police. This is one of several canal-area ranges used by TRTC's predecessor agency and other U.S. military units during the 20th century that were contaminated with tens of thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance when they were returned to Panama as part of the canal treaties. A 2004 presentation

by TRTC touted "access to SOCOM [Special Operations Command] soldiers" in Panama, suggesting that U.S. uniformed soldiers continued to participate in weapons or other testing there." In Honduras, the United States' tropic tests are conducted on the Honduran Army's Fifth Battalion base in eastern Mocorn, 25 miles north of the Nicaraguan border. In 2008 former TRTC director Lance Vander Zyl described the area as "ideal" for testing sensitive communication systems and sensors.'" The Fifth Battalion's commander. Colonel Francisco Glvez Granados, told me in June he doesn't know what the test team does, and that his troops just provide security. After the June 2009 coup in Honduras, the test site went dormant and remained unused through most of 2010. During that time the TRTC looked to the tropical climate of Suriname as a replacement. The TRTC had already in 2008 first partnered with BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company and a subsidiary of Alcoa, to test Stryker armored combat vehicles on the company's extensive land holdings that form part of a bauxite-mining complex. But the lack of access roads led the military to identify a new site in 2010 in central Suriname, south of Paramirabo, the capital city." In addition to military testing, disaster-relief and humanitarian efforts help account for non-drug war spending by the Pentagon in the hemisphere. After the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. military carried out a major mobilization, and m nine months spent on contracts in Haiti more than 10 times what it spent in the previous decade combined. The U.S. military frequently promotes the humanitarian aims that its missions servedisaster relief, digging wells, providing medical services in poor rural areas of the

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world. The U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom), in charge of the Pentagon's operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, highlights the large number of patients treated. But the medical model is military; what the United States provides is neither long-term treatment nor the building of state agencies' medical capacity, much less the training of health promoters who help communities from within to address their health needs. Rather, these are sessions with patients that the military's medical staff, as caring as they may be, will likely never see again. While the funds for these deployments are appropriated for training purposes, they also "build partnerships down-range," that is, over the long term, SouthCom spokesman Steve Lucas told me. The military is upfront about ihe public relations purposes of its humanitarian deployments. "Providing veterinary services while in uniform yields the additional benefit of showing the military in a different light," a Marine Corp veterinarian said of a deployment from the USS I wo Jima, an amphibious assault ship, in Covenas, Colombia, in August." Yet that very same naval visit to Colombia illustrates how the military's activities can be framed as disaster relief but in fact prepare the host country for clamping down on unruly citizens. "U.S. Marines geared up with riot shields, shin guards and batons to show Colombian Marines the basics in non-lethal weapons and riot control," said a SouthCom press release. "These skills are essential when dealing with a populous [sic] that turns desperate after a natural disaster." SouthCom added: "Security and crowd control are chief concerns when providing humanitarian assistance. Colombian Marines also learned proper takedown techniques and enjoyed prac-

tical application v^dth both U.S. and "Along with helping the local Colombian Marines."" citizens, the [medical and civic assisThe military approach to disas- tance program] allows the Honduran ters reflects broadly held fear and military to assess the security in the bias. Drawing on the findings of area and research for any suspicious disaster scholars since the 1950s activity," Special Operations Comand on her own fieldwork in New mand South (SocSouth) said of medOrleans, San Francisco, Mexico ical programs in which U.S. troops City, and New York, author Rebecca participate in Honduras.'* Solnit challenges the perception that in a disaster ordinary people HE PROLIFERATION OF U.S. MILIneed to be controlled by the govtary missions leads inevitably ernment. She shows how the most to institutional prerogatives, effective responses to disasters are and the Southern Command and typically spontaneous and unofficial SocSouth are benefitting from macitizen efforts. Government officials, jor construction at their U.S.-based meanwhile, frequently imagine that facilities. SouthCom's new $402 the populace will panic and riot in million headquarters in Miami was savage behavior, especially if those completed in December. The Sevaffected by the disaster are people enth Special Forces Group, which of color. Solnit calls these violence- conducts SocSouth's military trainprone responses "elite panic."''' ing in Latin America, is online for a Such panic can be reinforced by new $240 million complex in Florworst-case planning. The Air Force's ida, scheduled to be completed in 615th Contingency Response Wing, July. The unit will also benefit from whose mission is to quickly provide new training ranges and a host of disaster relief and open air bases in other construction for special ophostile territory, is now designated erations at Eglin Air Force Base on for operations in Latin America and the Florida Panhandle costing more the Caribbean. Its air personnel ran than $100 million.'^ the airport in the first days after the At least some people in Florida Port-au-Prince quake. The unit's question these priorities. Peace commanders like to feel good about groups are organizing a protest at humanitarian work, but are also SouthCom headquarters in October "training for the hostile, the worst to commemorate 519 years of milicase scenario environment," regard- tarization. Opponents of this militaless of the mission. Colonel Daniel rization highlight the impositions on Miller told me last year. Latin American sovereignty and digMoreover, the Army Corps of nity represented by such a violenceEngineers explicitly recognizes the ready set of resources and policies. military uses of even civilian-oriented The growth of Pentagon spending projects. "Every soldier a sensor," not only goes hand in hand with the said Lester Dixon, program director impoverishment of the state's social for the Corps' division that operates commitment to addressing poverty in Central and South America. Corps and other sources of conflict; it also "Civilians/Soldiers can collect infor- leads inexorably to deeper secrecy mation and intelligence" and "pro- about the United States' activities vide entry point into country," Dixon abroad. Perhaps, if civil society can said in November. He noted that make such militarization more visCentral and South America are "key ible, efforts to transform it might see greater success. Q locations of recent interest.""

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