CARTEL WATCH
Inside Trump’s Disastrous ‘Secret’ Drug War Plans for Central America
At closed-door meetings in Miami, Trump and his generals plotted a muscular military response to violence in Central America. Been there. Done that. It’s a disaster.
07.01.17 12:01 AM ET
Nothing
really puts you in your place quite like getting shot at in another
country. All gringo arrogance vaporized in an instant. Choking from
teargas. Lungs aflame. Reeling blind through unknown streets just
ahead of the death squads. Abandoned by your fellow correspondents,
who were all shrewd enough to have put on their gas masks and taken
cover before the soldiers launched shock grenades and opened fire on
the crowd.
Yes,
whenever a quick and brutal dose of humility is called for I can
always flash back to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa in the
summer of 2009, during the U.S.-backed military coup against
elected president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya.
A swift recall of live
rounds slamming
into unarmed demonstrators—of my own self at the mercy of those
sadistic soldados—and
all false pride just fades away.
The
crowds had come in their thousands and their tens of thousands to
protest the army’s kidnapping of old Mel, who was as famous for his
cheesy sombrero-and-mustache look as he was for his tepidly liberal
politics. In any case, soldiers arrived at his house one pleasant
morning in late June, frogmarched him in his PJs to the massive
American airbase just outside Teguc, and—wham,
whack, whoosh—Mel
was gone from the country within hours. The military then forged a
letter of resignation, installed a sham replacement as head of state,
and the coup was complete.
Or
so they thought. But then came the massive marches. Made up of
indigenous Garifuna and Linca and Meskit peoples. Campesinos,
feminists, and constitution-lovers of all stripes. These motley
flocks of patriots rose up in small villages and major cities across
the nation to sing and and chant, to beat drums and dance, and to
demand their country back.
Like
many of its neighbors in Central America, the “U.S.S. Honduras”
is run by a small and incestuous clan of oligarchs. These right-wing
cliques also control the military, and are closely allied with the
American corporations (like Dole and Chiquita) that gifted us with
the handy phrase “Banana Republic” in the first place. Well,
those Honduran overlords had had enough of Mel Zelaya daring to raise
the minimum wage, lobbying for lunch programs at public schools, and
suggesting democratic
plebiscites on
constitutional reforms. So he had to go.
And
all the folks marching in the street? Of course they had to go, too.
Back to the barrios from whence they came! Back to the banana
and palm-oil
plantations!
To affect the end of the protest fiesta, the authorities broke out
the state-of-the-art weaponry—including sonic
disruptor cannons—that
Uncle Sam had given them for waging the “War on Drugs.” They then
commenced to blast
away at peaceful
protesters, or anybody else who got in their way, including a
foolish-proud, white-boy reporter who thought he could hack it
without a gas mask.
Scores
were killed or wounded during what Hondurans still call El
Golpe de Estado (the
phrase means “coup d’état”; those who backed it are
called golpistas).
To further intimidate the opposition, and break the will of the
nonviolent Resistencia movement,
human rights centers sheltering victims were deliberately targeted by
government troops. Well, we all learned the hard way back in those
days. But at least we did learn just how dangerous democracy-hating,
Third-World warmongers can be.
The
same can’t be said of the Trump administration. As of now, it’s
set to double down on the same hard-line, authoritarian strategies
that enabled the Honduran president-snatching in the first place—and
resulted in the country’s descent into a gang-ridden, apocalyptic
nightmare from which it has yet to awaken.
The
“Northern Triangle” Tangle
The
corner of the Central American isthmus consisting of Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Honduras is referred to by military strategists and
policy geeks as the “Northern Triangle.” Over the last 10 years
or so it’s become one of the deadliest regions on earth. Young
people are particularly impacted. The homicide rate among youths is a
staggering 90 per 100,000, in part due to rampant gang violence.
Based on murders per capita, the Triangle is far more dangerous than
Mexico, no matter what Mr.
Trump says on Twitter.
The
Triangle is an important stopover on the smuggling routes that
connect the cocaine breadbaskets of South America with their cartel
distributors in Mexico. As such it suffers under
powerful maras (gangs)
with names like Barrio
18 and
the Salvatruchas—both
of which originated in the U.S. prison system, incidentally, and
arrived in Honduras thanks to mass deportations.
These
street gangs are tangentially linked to the cartels operating out of
Mexico, as well as places like Colombia. The maras are
often hired to hack out small airstrips in the jungle for
drug-smuggling planes, or to run overland narcotics shipments across
international borders. And they find plenty of time to torture local
residents. The gangs rule entire neighborhoods, specializing in rape,
forced recruitment tactics, abduction for ransom, drug dealing.
Blackmail is rampant, and they often collaborate with local
authorities in shaking down their victims.
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All
that mayhem finally caught the attention of the Trump regime. But, as
usual when it comes to narcotics interdiction efforts under Trump,
the proffered solution seems to be more show
than substance—all
at the expense of American taxpayers.
A
shadowy summit last month in Miami brought together Vice President
Mike Pence, high-powered cabinet members like Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson,
the leaders of all three Triangle nations, and officials from at
least nine other countries. The plan they espoused? Spend untold
millions more dollars on a strategy that, according to experts, is
guaranteed to fail. So what’s not to like about that?
Co-hosted
by Mexico, the two-day session was grandly touted as “The
Conference for Prosperity and Security.”
The first phase focused on wealth creation; it went down at Florida
International University on June 15, and was immediately met
by protests on
campus.
“We’re
in this together,” Pence told Central American leaders at the end
of the day. He then went on to emphasize that sense of fellowship by
adding, “President Trump has already taken decisive action to
protect the American people from the harshest consequences of illegal
immigration...” In other words: We’re
here for you, neighbors—just stay the hell on your side of The
Wall.
The
second stage was geared toward the “Security” side of the
equation, and took place the next day behind closed doors at the
SOUTHCOM military base. Because press access was restricted, it’s
hard to know all the specifics that were discussed. But there are
clues that point to a coming crackdown.
Despite
the cloak-and-dagger staging of the conference, some of the Trump
administration’s harsh plans for escalating the
Drug War have already been hinted at in speeches, budget proposals,
and conference
calls with
the press. And critics contend this “old-is-new” approach is
unlikely to result in either “Prosperity” or “Security” in
the region.
An editorial on
the conference by the watchdog group InsightCrime referred to the
Trump doctrine for the Northern Triangle as “heavy-handed” and
“going backwards.” It also pointed out that all three leaders
from the Triangle countries in attendance had been accused of
corruption or involvement with drug traffickers or both—in fact the
vice president of El Salvador showed up in Miami already under
indictment back home.
The
InsightCrime op-ed concluded by lambasting Trump’s vision “that
the main threats to U.S. national security come from impoverished
migrants, the majority of whom have no ties to the organized crime
groups, gangs, or drug traffickers that safely
operate under state protection in
Central America.” (Italics added.)
The statement issued
by Doctors Without Borders about the goals set forth in Miami is even
more damning. Likening conditions in the Triangle to those found in
“some of the world’s deadliest war zones,” the group estimates
the number of immigrants bee-lining it out of their native countries
to be about 500,000 a year.
As
for the solutions proposed by Trump’s proxies, Doctors Without
Borders accused conference planners of “turning a blind eye” to
the emergency and went on to say, “Addressing the crisis in Central
America cannot only be about future prosperity and security; it must
also be about saving and protecting lives today.”
Militarization
Nation
There
are two schools of thought on how you help countries climb out of
multifaceted maelstroms like the one currently walloping the Northern
Triangle. The first, as favored by the Obama administration, is an
aid-based approach, usually involving democracy-building incentives,
humanitarian programs, and the strengthening of law enforcement and
judicial actors.
Obama’s legacy
in the region is
far from pristine, but to his credit he intuited that the coup in
Honduras was a mistake not to be repeated. (He also understood the
importance of development to affect positive change even if, as with
Afghanistan, he thought the military had to play a major role.)
The
second method is just to send on down millions of dollars for
“security assistance”—oversight be damned—and hope for the
best. Care to guess which strategy Team Trump prefers?
POTUS’
congressional budget proposal called for a $54 billion increase in
military spending, with an undisclosed amount of that earmarked for
ramping up the counter narcotics campaign and barricading borders
against migrants. Meanwhile the State Department and the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID) would see their budgets slashed
by about 39
percentfrom
last year’s levels under the Trump budget.
Economic
aid and assistance to Central America is projected to fall from $520
million down to about $300 million, according to a study by
the Washington Office on Latin America. All that “charity”
chopping will directly endangersocial
and educational programs in the Northern Triangle—further reducing
quality of life overall, and making immigration (legal or otherwise)
all the more tempting, observers say.
The
focus of the Trump agenda is not about solving the root problems like
poverty and government corruption that drive gang violence and
narcotics trafficking, says Jake Johnston, a research associate at
the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
in Washington, D.C.
Johnston
refers to the Trumpite approach as “outsourcing security to
countries with checkered pasts [on] human rights.” Far from winning
the Drug War, or curbing the flood of migrants, he tells The Daily
Beast, “empowering these sectors is only going to exacerbate those
problems.”
But
strong-arming our way to victory remains a popular fantasy,
especially among Trump’s all-gringo cabinet. Johnston says Homeland
Security boss Kelly—also a retired general and the former director
of SOUTHCOM—seems determined to apply the belligerent approach in
Central America, and is responsible for the “reprioritization”
away from programs like USAID, which directly targeted problems like
economic inequality in the region.
“It’s
unprecedented that the conference took place behind the gates of a
military barracks,” says Johnston. “The security apparatus and
the Pentagon’s specific plans [for the Triangle] are incredibly
opaque,” although the overall implications are clear enough.
“The
writing’s on the wall that this is a shift away from soft power to
hard power,” says Johnston, who’s been conducting research into
Latin American economic issues for the last decade.
During
a Senate hearing in late May, police officers from multiple
jurisdictions in the U.S. lectured
lawmakers about
just how ineffective, even dangerous, the Trump administration’s
brand of steroidal, community-alienating policing can be when it
comes to fighting entrenched gangs like the Salvatruchas.
Nevertheless,
says Johnston, “in the future, U.S. diplomacy in the region will
likely be wearing a uniform instead of a suit.”
Cops,
Soldiers, and Cartels on the Same Team
Over
the last two decades of the Drug War, the Pentagon’s penchant for
propping up repressive generalissimos in places like Mexico,
Colombia, and Central America has
caused widespread suffering among the populations of those nations,
including a plague of extrajudicial
killings.
To
get a precise read on current conditions in heavily occupied regions
of the Triangle zone, I reach out to the national coordinator for
the Honduran
Solidarity Network (HSN),
Karen Spring, who is based in Tegucigalpa.
“Honduran
society is already very militarized,” said Spring, in a phone
interview on the eve of the Miami conference. “Since the 2009 coup
they’ve created a whole series of new police and military units
like the Tigres,
who are vetted and trained by the U.S. government.”
Following
the 2009 coup the U.S. has sent some $200 million in security
aid to Honduras, despite
a petition signed
by dozens of American congressmen asking for a boycott over human
rights concerns. And yet in spite of all that martial funding the
country remains mired in one long, slow-burn Armageddon, with one of
the highest
homicide rates on the planet.
At
the same time, says CEPR’s Johnston, the post-coup years have also
seen “a real spike in poverty and economic inequality” despite
the millions flowing south from Washington.
According
to Spring, of the Solidarity Network, the militarization craze has
also sparked a rise
in human rights abuses,
including right-wing death
squadstasked
with eliminating political dissidents. The fact that “the military
is not trained to be providing civilian security” is part of the
problem Spring says. But the troubles go far deeper than that.
“The
police and military are known to be linked to, or infiltrated by, the
drug cartels,” says Spring, who first went to Honduras eight years
ago as a human rights worker sent down in the wake of the Zelaya
takedown.
(Full
disclosure: I knew Karen Spring back in those woeful, post-coup days
in Honduras, and have seen this brave young woman stand her ground
against civil abuses by armed actors more than once.)
“Even
high-level military officials are known to be involved in drug
trafficking,” she says, and yet, “impunity rates have not gone
down. If you are not punishing people who are corrupt—especially
people in positions of power—what deters them from committing
crimes?”
Indeed,
that corruption permeates Honduran politics at the highest levels,
according to a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (PDF),
which describes the country as being run by “intertwined, or
‘integrated,’ ... kleptocratic networks.” Even the son of
the former
presidentwas
recently accused in
a New York courtroom of working with organized crime.
Death
and (War) Taxes
“The
way that gangs down here are portrayed in the international press and
by the government is that they’re these autonomous actors that take
over communities and prisons,” says Spring, when our conversation
turns to the dreaded maras.
“That’s
an elaborate narrative,” she adds, and a false one.
“I
work in urban communities every day—and nobody here believes gangs
are acting on their own.” Instead, they “work alongside and are
enabled by a corrupt police force.”
In
Spring’s eyes, the social-aid-first ethos espoused by President
Obama—who also took his fair share of flack for sending
down questionable
military aid to
Honduras—has done little or nothing to curb connivance between
authorities and organized crime. Trump’s hardball tactics, on the
other hand, are “much worse for everybody.”
“I
don’t think any aid from the U.S. to Honduras has made any changes
for the majority of the population,” she says, and as evidence
cites the fact that “60 percent of the country is still in
poverty.”
The soft-power
initiatives seem
to have proven useful in some
cases, but
Spring also accuses them of “promoting very specific interests”
that don’t “have an impact on security or why people live in
fear.”
Johnston,
of CEPR, also wonders if the soft programs are adequate. “State and
USAID have rolled out a number of community-driven
crime prevention programs and
held them up as illustrative of their success but the reality is we
have little knowledge about their actual effectiveness.”
The
playbook on social development might need fine-tuning or expansion,
but it’s far better than indiscriminately empowering crooked goon
squads. As human rights worker Spring puts it, “hard power just
doesn’t do anything to address the problems that are perpetuating”
Honduras’ downward spiral.
To
illustrate the failure of the stick-before-carrot strategy, she goes
on to describe a neighborhood where she works in Tegucigalpa:
“The
18 Street gang controls the community,” Spring says, and all local
business owners must provide a regular quota for the privilege of
living under thug tyranny, or risk being shot.
“It’s
literally called a war tax,” she says. “An impuesto de guerra,”
and from taxi and bus drivers to “the women selling tortillas,”
everyone has to pay it.
A
special unit of military police set up a permanent base on the same
barrio’s soccer field, back in 2013, which has put the kibosh on
local futbol games as well—one of the few innocent pastimes
formerly available to local kids.
Although
the borough is now an occupied zone, “everybody is still paying the
war tax,” Spring continues. “Extortion is still going on. There’s
still a high level of control in the neighborhood by the gang.”
In
fact, the barrio taxi stand “is right in front of the
military-police base—but the drivers are still paying” tribute to
the gangs. And that’s not a coincidence.
The
blackmailing goes on in front of the barracks where the officers
“eat, sleep, and live,” and not by accident, but because “the
police are involved in organized crime.” Everyone in the area knows
“they’re working with the gangs, extorting people for profit.”
Far
from being independent entities, she says, the gangs are often tools
of the authorities, who “use them for their own purposes.”
Most
citizens know they can’t “call the Honduran police for help”
when they’re targeted themselves since “they assume [officers]
are involved” with the maras.
“You
can’t just walk into a community with a complex social structure
and take it over,” Spring says. “Militarization is not solving
the problem—it’s making it worse.”
Drug
War Redux
As
a general rule, when arming oppressive regimes, lack of
accountability is the root of all evil. When we send military aid to
tropical tyrants we shouldn’t be shocked when they
commit atrocities with
those expensive and deadly toys.
Take
the March 2016 murder of Berta
Cáceres,
a well-known Honduran activist and winner of the prestigious Goldman
environmental prize. During the counter-coup movement, Cáceres
gained fame for her habit of striding out to meet with army
commanders in the streets of Tegucigalpa, in an effort to stem the
assaults on protesters. So it wasn’t a great surprise when her
killers were found to
have ties to the Honduran military.
One
oft-proffered solution by hawks in Washington is to improve screening
and background checks on individual units south of the border. The
sad truth, however, is that even our best attempts to vet security
forces engaged in the Drug War in Mexico, Central, and South America
have proven fruitless.
A
prime example of this futility went down in the remote Ahuas region
of Honduras, during a botched
DEA raid on
an indigenous village in Moskitia that left four innocent people
dead, and several others wounded.
A
State Department chopper team, working with a vetted Honduran unit,
opened fire on a boatload of locals after mistaking them for drug
smugglers.
“The
Honduran door gunner didn’t fire until he received orders from the
DEA agent,” according to CEPR’s Johnston, who co-authored
an article on
the incident. (The DEA declined to respond to an interview request
for this story.)
As reported
by The Daily Beast last year,
another badly bungled Drug-War op took place in Mexico’s Coahuila
state, in 2011, when DEA officers shared intelligence with Mexican
officers—who then leaked that intel to the Zetas cartel, resulting
in a massacre that wiped out parts of an entire town.
“We
know from experience that the violent model that has been in place in
Mexico is to be intensified in the Central American countries as
well,” says Laura Carlsen, director of the
Americas Program,
in Mexico City. Some 160,000
people have
lost their lives since Mexico’s Narco Guerra began in 2006.
“Lack
of justice and collusion between [authorities] and organized crime,”
are hallmarks of the war
in Mexico,
Carlsen says. “In cases of assassinations of journalists and
attacks on human rights defenders, at least 50 percent of the
perpetrators are identified as government officials.” And yet
conviction rates hover in the single digits.
Mexico’s
Other Wall
A
preview of what’s to come in the Northern Triangle is already on
display along Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. That’s
where the Pentagon and [DHS Director] Kelly “have placed a real
emphasis on militarizing,” says Americas Program director Carlsen.
That
plan for shutting down the border—or the Frontera del Sur
initiative—was also on the docket at the recent conference in
Miami, where Vice President Pence bragged about how it’s already
stifled immigration from Triangle-land by 70 percent. Carlsen
describes the clampdown as another attempt to “make Mexico pay for
The Wall again—only this time on its own southern border.”
Thanks
to Frontera del Sur, Mexico now deports more Central American
migrants than does the U.S. And in fact our own Border Patrol reports
that illegal immigration from the isthmus has been halved since this
same time last year. And yet that reduction has come with a price.
The
crackdown on the Guatemalan border “has had a devastating impact on
migrants,” says Carlsen, who has worked in Mexico since the
mid-1980s.
The
refugees “are fleeing very serious violence in their country.”
Yet instead of offering succor, Mexico is now “attempting to box
them in,” in part to curry favor with President Trump and his
advisers ahead of upcoming NAFTA
negotiations.
Mexican
cartels are “delighted at these kinds of policies,” she goes on,
“because they criminalize migrants, and turn them into into prey.”
For
Carlsen, the Trump team’s script for the Drug-War reboot has “much
more to do with repressing people than trying to solve deeper social
problems that they’re facing.”
CEPR
economist Johnston believes the Trumped up approach to immigration
and the Drug War will actually worsen Central America’s ongoing
crisis. Nothing presented at the Miami conference will “address the
problems that are actually driving people to leave these countries,”
he says.
Karen
Spring agrees. But she also holds that it shouldn’t be left to the
Trump administration to implement ham-fisted fixes in the Triangle.
Viable solutions have already been put forth by those closest to the
violence, who know the risks and realities best of all—if only the
ruling junta would hear them out:
“There
has never been a space in Honduras to really listen to some of the
proposals that are put forward by local communities and
organizations,” explains Spring, who laments what she calls a
“failure of democracy” in the Northern Triangle.
Former
President Zelaya tried to listen, but his modest attempts to fight
economic inequality got him shanghaied by his own troops.
Trouble-making crusaders like Bertha Caceres have been assassinated
for daring to suggest land-ownership reforms that challenge
traditional elites and transnational corporations.
“It’s
the voices which have typically been excluded that are trying to
promote an alternative,” Spring says, “and for doing so they’re
being killed, criminalized, and silenced.”
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