Analysis: Uruguay joins US “war on drugs” despite its long and checkered history

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The government of Luis Lacalle Pou is seeking the cooperation of the United States to address the growing drug trafficking issue. To this end, Interior Minister Jorge Larrañaga has renewed cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The DEA is an enforcement arm -but not the only one- of the US “war on drugs” strategy.

Larrañaga considers that “unless we wage this war decisively, with all the costs it may entail, we will have many tragedies in our national life.”

The “war on drugs,” started by President Richard Nixon in 1971, unfolded in parallel with the Vietnam War (1955-1975). Currently, it coexists with the “war on terrorism,” begun by President George Bush on September 11th, 2001, after the Twin Towers attack. Likewise, the United States has been conducting a “trade war” with China, since 2018.

All these strategic scope actions are based on a doctrinal, spiritual, conceptual and ethical framework that gives them foundation and meaning, as explained by the representative of the US government for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, in the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US Congress: “This attack on Chavismo is for us simply a war of survival […] because otherwise we will be allowing and giving space for it to destroy us. Imagine […] that we let the Chavistas govern unhindered, without waging war on them, allowing them to develop their social projects disregarding our companies and partners… that we continue to allow them to have all kinds of strange relations with the entire world that is opposed to the United States, feeding their people with concepts and ideas that are against our values.”

“This would lead to the debacle and doom of democracy in the Western Hemisphere. That is the primary reason why this type of regime is a threat to our country’s national security […] In essence, this is the fight we are waging against these types of regimes that would jeopardize our own fate, world peace. Can you imagine what it means to build 3 million homes without the involvement of private enterprise? What would be the fate of our model unless we intervene in health or education projects, in the training of the military and in the acquisition of elements for its defense?”

Ex-President Barack Obama, in the opposite position to Republican Elliott, believes that the United States “sometimes twists the arm of countries when they don’t do what we want […] I think if we didn’t have the realistic view that there are bad people around us who are trying to harm us […], if we didn’t have this sense of realism we wouldn’t achieve our goals […] We have the strongest military in the world and sometimes we have to arm-twist countries if they don’t want to do what we want through economic, diplomatic and sometimes military means.”

Sanctions/punishment

In its “war on drugs” strategy, the United States has unilaterally created an international regulation, outside the UN, under which it sanctions and punishes certain governments and companies that fail to comply:

1) Noriega: from ally to enemy

On December 20th, 1989, US troops invaded Panama, captured Manuel Antonio Noriega, its de facto president and extradited him to the United States. Noriega was indicted and sentenced for drug trafficking. He had worked for the CIA on contract, denouncing rebel guerrillas in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Prior to the invasion, Noriega had expressed his intention to close the School of the Americas, which the US maintained in Panama to train Latin American military personnel, many of whom had played leading roles in coups d’état in their respective countries. He had also announced plans not only to recover Panamanian sovereignty over the canal, but also to increase its technical and commercial control.

On the other hand, the US imposed the “blockade” on Cuba, in October 1960, afterthe expropriation of US companies. Condemned by the absolute majority of UN members, in dozens of general assemblies, the “blockade” has not only been maintained, but it has been tightened with new sanctions, for reasons related to the “war on drugs”. Venezuela and Nicaragua have suffered sanctions for the same reason.

In February 2021, Madrid’s El País newspaper reported on the United Nations special rapporteur Alena Douhan’s mission to Venezuela, who in a press conference stated that the US sanctions against the Venezuelan government for some years have exacerbated the country’s hardships and calamities: “UN rapporteur Alena Douhan has called on the governments of the United States and the European Union to lift the sanctions against Venezuela, because they have exacerbated a humanitarian crisis.”

On the other hand, by resorting to this legal extraterritoriality, the United States has imposed multi-million dollar sanctions on European companies and banks doing business with the sanctioned countries.

2) The “enemy within”

John Daniel Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, stated, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon administration after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and blacks. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then strongly criminalizing both, we could separate those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, dismantle their meetings, and antagonize them night after night on the news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.”

A study by the International Committee of the Red Cross notes that by December 31st, 2014, 6% of black men between the ages of 30 and 39 were in prison, against 2% of Hispanics and 1% of whites, in that same age bracket.

A study by Professor Tolani Britton of the University of Berkeley, California points out that between 1980 and 1985, young black men aged 18 to 24 entered college slightly faster than their white peers. However, this trend clearly began to reverse for black youths after the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed.

In early 2017, there were approximately 189,000 inmates in federal prisons, of whom 34.5% were African American, 34.8% Hispanic, 27.1% Caucasian, and 3.6% of other ethnicities. There were 93.2% men and 6.8% women. On the other hand, 47% of not guilty verdicts due to miscarriages of justice involved black convicts.

3) Censorship

To bolster its “war on drugs” strategy, the US government has prevented the publication of scientific research on the consequences of substance abuse: in 1995 the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) announced the publication of the results of the largest global study on substance abuse. However, a decision of the World Health Assembly banned the study’s release.

The US representative threatened that “if WHO drug-related activities fail to reinforce proven drug control methods, funding for relevant programs should be withdrawn.” This led to the decision to discontinue the publication.

Prohibition or war on drugs

After World War I (1914-1918), the United States, faced with the excessive consumption of alcohol by the civilian population, set out to eradicate it, inspired by its fundamentalist Protestant morality. In 1920, it established the absolute prohibition of alcohol (“prohibitionism”). However, its daily implementation from January 1920 to December 1933 proved disastrous.

Smuggling, violent gangster organizations, police and political corruption, growing and often deadly counterfeit alcohol intoxications proliferated. All these moral, criminal and institutional transgressions created such public rejection that “prohibition” was abolished with high public support.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon appealed to the same moral precepts to decree the “war on drugs.” But it is still being implemented to this day.

“Prohibition” was a process of trial and error, which neither fulfilled its public health nor its public peace purposes. That is why it was suspended. With greater negative effects, the “war on drugs” -now on an international scale- maintains, multiplies and diversifies its actions, but not only does it not reduce drug trafficking, but it increases it.

In terms of reducing consumption, commercialization and the harmful effects of illegal drugs, not only has this not been achieved, but many indicators point to a substantial increase in drug trafficking.

They can’t because they don’t want to

After 50 years of the “war on drugs”, the situation in terms of production, trafficking, consumption, gangs and overdoses remains essentially unchanged.

Three government agencies (DEA, CIA and ATF) and the Pentagon (27 military bases and innumerable “semi-bases”, which have no formal agreement with legislative approval) are working to prevent the entry of drugs into US territory. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) maintains a dozen bases, mainly in the Caribbean.

However, the CIA describes the United States as the “world’s largest consumer of cocaine (shipped from Colombia through Mexico and the Caribbean), Colombian and Mexican heroin and marijuana; largest consumer of Mexican ecstasy and methamphetamine; lowest consumer of high-grade Southeast Asian heroin; illegal producer of cannabis, marijuana, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens and methamphetamine; hub of money laundering.”

The flow of illegal drugs into the United States violates its own regulations, with which the US applies sanctions to some countries and companies. The fact that they are not applied in their case is evidence that their origin and purposes are not related to drug trafficking.

It is also striking, to say the least, that the combined efforts of the DEA, CIA, RTF, Pentagon bases and NATO are largely unsuccessful in stopping people, ships or planes that smuggle illegal drugs into the United States.

Official acknowledgement of this inadequacy is reflected in an official document: “While the proportion of illegal drugs entering the country that are seized at the border is unknown, the amount of illegal drugs seized is unknown. It is this snapshot of seizure data that has served as a reference point for the current policy debates surrounding border security and drug flows into the country.”

In short, this situation suggests that the smuggling of illegal drugs is not only known, but also shaped by the US security apparatus, which was strengthened on a global scale after the attacks on the Twin Towers. In other words, it can be inferred that the flow of illegal drugs into the United States is an instrument of that strategy.

It has already been seen how, as far as the situation within the United States is concerned, this smuggling feeds the repressive policies of the black population and provides the law enforcement agencies with an important role in social life.

Narcofinance oils the system

Antonio Maria Costa, former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, states that “some inter-bank loans have recently been financed by money from drug trafficking and other illegal activities.” He estimates global revenues from the drug trade at around US$483 billion annually. “According to our research, most of this money has been absorbed into the legal economic system and has served as a fundamental lever against the crisis […] interbank credits have been financed by the proceeds of drug sales and other illegal activities,” he says.

For its part, the United Nations estimates that money laundering, taking into account all the methods used to carry it out, generates between US$800 billion and US$2 trillion per year.

The vast sums of money involved in drug trafficking have become indispensable to the global capitalist system. Many financial institutions, which have collapsed due to their own excesses, have survived thanks to these funds. Drug trafficking has become an essential component of the capitalist system.

The crisis of legal opiates

In the United States, deaths due to overdoses from legal opiates have increased sevenfold in a decade, a veritable health catastrophe involving middle and upper class whites, as well as the drug industry and physicians, one of the most respected professions in today’s society.

A study by the Commission Globale de Politique en Matière de Drogues points out that the current opiate crisis “has its origins in the efforts made to address the legitimate problem of pain. However, these efforts have been rapidly exploited by pharmaceutical companies, which have seen in it an opportunity to expand their market.”

“Lax regulation of pharmaceutical marketing and direct sales to physicians by medical sales representatives have exacerbated the damage associated with drugs. In both the Canadian universal health care system and the US market system, numerous practices that encourage more drugs to be prescribed are legal. Some examples: use of databases by sales representatives to target certain physicians in order to push them to prescribe more; bonuses for commercial ads that contribute to increasing prescriptions; bonuses to physicians for speaking engagements; inaccurate risk presentation; and (in the United States) emphasis on patient satisfaction measures.”

In the United States, the drug addiction circle is closed by linking the upper and lower classes, WASPs and African-Americans, Hispanics, and so on. The majority of prisoners are black. Most of those who die from drug overdoses are white.

The United States, like so many imperial powers throughout history, has sought to impose its way of doing business and its way of thinking. And in this endeavor, as with other powers with similar intentions, not only have they not succeeded, but they have lost their internal balance and peace.

Cicero said “history, teacher of life”, and for Cervantes it was “the mother of truth.”

Claudio Iturra is a history professor.