HOW TO LOSE THE COKE WAR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403220032-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 9, 2012
• Sequence Number: 32
• Publication Date: May 1, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403220032-9
^" THE ATLANTIC
0" PAGE May 1987
How To LOSE
THE COKE WAR
The U. S. -Bolivian campaign against the
"Coca Nostra" has been a failure,
says one of the men who led it
ceived in four treaties on narcotics outdoor cafes along the Avenida Balli-
signed by Bolivia and the United States vian, acting out their vision of them-
on August 11, 1983. In addition to selves as outlaws in their BMWs and
launching UMOPAR, the agreements cre- Mercedes. Outside town, in the Cha-
ated a Bolivian government entity pare, impatient dealers have occasional-
known as DIRECO, the Coca Reduction ly taken to weighing hundred-dollar
Directorate, and committed the govern- bills-so many pounds of dollars buys so
merit to a five-year program to reduce many pounds of drug-as they sit be-
coca production to only that level need- hind their lemonade-stand-stylc folding
ed by the domestic population of coca- tables.
leaf chewers. In 1985 Bolivia estimated Fr
om the moment that Merwin ar-
STATF?RtiER AIR FORCE Ma'or C that level to be 20,000 metric tons of dry rived in Cochabamba, there were por-
Edgar Merwin has seen America's coca leaf annually, a figure thought by tents of trouble. Merwin had told his
uwar o gs as few others have-from most experts to be exaggerated. The fig- State Department liaison that he would
the front lines of one of its losing battles. ure was recently revised to 10,000 tons. accept the job only if his family was
For two years Merwin combated Boliv- In any case, perhaps 240,000 tons of guaranteed a secure, defensible home.
ia's "Coca Nostra," the barons of the co- coca are grown-over twenty times as It had to be on a quiet street; there had
caine trade. The story of his struggle much as domestic consumption could to be a stone wall around the property at
helps to explain why the United States is warrant. This huge crop has the poten- least twenty feet from the house itself;
far from winning this much heralded tial to produce 240 tons of cocaine hy- and there had to be a route of escape,
conflict. drochloride. Bolivia supplies about 40 should the perimeter of the house ever
Ed Merwin went to Bolivia, at age for- percent of the worldwide market in the be breached.
ry-five, uniquely qualified to take on the drug. In the agreements Bolivia was ini- The State Department liaison had
underground empire of the drug traf- tially obligated to eliminate 4,000 hect- given his solemn promise: "We don't
fickers. He had recently retired from a ares of coca production-some experts take chances where the safety of our
twenty-one-year career in the military, estimate that as many as 200,000 hect- people is concerned," Merwin recalls
during which he had served as the direc- ares are under cultivation there-by De- the man's saying. But what Ed Merwin
for of the Latin American branch of the comber 31, 1985. saw on his first day in Cochabamba was a
Air Force's Special Operations school, Under the treaties about $7.5 million house with no protective wall at all. And
chief of the indications and warning was allocated by the United States for it was located on a dead-end street, a
branch of the U.S. Southern Command the agricultural and law-enforcement cul-de-sac. Shaken, he found another
in Panama, and a senior U.S. representa- support of the various programs. This house himself.
tivc to the Organization of American was followed in later fiscal years with ad- His unease deepened when he set to
States Mission in Central America. IE_ ditional funding in foreign-aid pack- work training the Leopards unit. The
had also served in combat in Southeast, ages-with, however, the stipulation 1983 agreements obligated the United
Asia and had been detached from the Air that portions of the assistance would be States to outfit the strike force with vir-
Force for two tours with the CIA. He suspended unless the Bolivian govern- tually all of its nonlethal equipment-
was highly regarded in Washington cir- ment took steps to eliminate cocaine vehicles, communications devices, and
Iles as an expert in special operations. trafficking, including meeting the target uniforms. (U.S. law prohibits the trans-
Shortly after he entered the civilian of the 4,000-hectare reduction. fer of weapons job market as an "international-security or ammunition to foreign
In this hopeful context of ambitious Police organizations.) The government
consultant," the aState nal Da ep cseMatnt's policy goals and generous funding to of Bolivia agreed to provide the rest-
reach them, Ed Merwin took his family weapons, food, housing, medical sup-
came to Merwin with an unusual offer. to Cochabamba, Bolivia, on March 1, port, and salaries for the troops.
They wanted him to join the depart- 1984. Sprawled across a valley 8,500 feet But Merwin quickly discovered that
meet's Narcotics Assistance Unit (NAU) above sea level, southeast of La Paz, the the wording of treaties is often a far cry
team in Bolivia, on a civilian contract, city was until recently referred to as the from the language of reality. "The
and become the chief adviser to the Bo- breadbasket of Bolivia. That was before troops would go months without receiv-
livian Narcotics Police. His task would coca became king and Cochabamba be- ing money for rations," he told me re-
be to create and train a first-of-its-kind came the gateway to the vast coca fields cently. "They had food, of course, but it
paramilitary unit to move against major of the neighboring Chapare region. To- was because of credit. We'd con some g dr
Oally bile uic traff eking aced the Moin Bolivia. day the city's population of 650,000, merchant into selling enough food for a
though still primarily Quechua Indian, is whole battalion on credit." According to
Patrol Unit (UMOPAR), but popularly teeming with flotantes-drifters, or tran- Merwin, this lack of support from La
known as the Leopards, the force would sient peasants searching for work in the Paz was unswerving. "I kept objecting,
be elite-trained as well as or better coca plantations and processing labs. As because the men weren't getting paid
than any other armed unit in Latin the coca economy has relentlessly over- three, four, five, six months at a time,
America, and composed of tough, highly grown all else and food production has but it didn't do an good. And
motivated, and corruption-resistant offs- steadily declined, the valley has become y medical sup lithere was
pees and troops. The Leopards would no budget for medical supples-things
a food importer. any kind of military organization needs.
serve as the model for similar anti-nar- Cochabamba is a cowboy town; deal- It was not provided for at all."
cotics units elsewhere.
This anti-drug strategy had been con ors and cocaine camp followers loiter in
-
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' Although the Leopards unit was in-
tended in the treaties to have priority-
the necessary precondition for any effec-
tive coca-crop-reduction program being
the establishment of governmental au-
thority in the Chapare region-the pro-
gram was lost in the clutter of other U.S.
programs and agencies involved in com-
bating the Bolivian narcotics problem.
The DEA, U.S. Customs, the U.S. In-
formation Agency, the Bureau of Inter-
national Narcotics Matters (and its NAU
arm), the FBI, the CIA, and the Agency
for International Development all an-
ticipate in Bolivia's war on drugs. (Inside
the United States more than thirty gov-
ernment entities are involved in our war
on drugs as of this writing.)
Politically the anti-drug campaign was
byzantine; organizationally it was a
nightmare. While the NAU was funding
a coca-crop-reduction program, AID was
running a separate crop-substitution pro-
gram, aimed at inducing camptsinos to
grow other crops instead of coca. Mer-
win's NAU was in charge of the Leop-
ards unit, but the DEA (which is prohib-
ited from any direct law-enforcement
activity overseas) was responsible for de-
veloping the intelligence needed by the
Leopards to pick targets and make raids.
In addition, the entire U.S. effort in Bo-
livian narcotics control was under the su-
pervision of U.S. Ambassador Edwin
Corr, now the ambassador to El Salva-
dor. Unfortunately, the Ambassador's
principal mission was not to cripple the
drug trade but rather to maintain stable
relations with unstable Bolivian govern-
ments that refused to do so.
THE PROBLEMS THAT Merwin at first
attributed to bureaucracy, indiffer-
ence, and the anarchy of Bolivian poli-
tics took on a new significance when he
discovered that his Leopards command-
er, German Linares, had "accepted gra-
tuities," as Merwin put it, from traffick-
ers. I had met Linares, before Merwin
arrived to take over training and deploy-
ment of the newly assembled Leopards
force. In November of 1983 I accompa-
nied Linares and his troops on a rare raid
against a major cocaine lab, run by Jorge
Cuellar and Jorge Flores, in Beni prov-
ince. Cuellar, before going into business
with Flores, had worked as a pilot for the
legendary drug czar Roberto Suirez
Gomez-reputedly the model for the
Sosa character in the recent movie Scar-
face. Flores also was considered by the
DEA to be a fairly weighty crook. The
raid was planned after intelligence indi-
cated that 3,000 pounds of pure cocaine
would soon be flown out from the Cuel-
lar-Flores ranch. But the operation was
delayed a critical twenty-four hours-
lack of fuel for the aircraft, Linares told
me-and by the time we arrived at the
remote jungle ranch, all that remained
was a few pounds of the drug, $13,000 in
crisp Bolivian pesos, a small aircraft
fueled and ready to go, and Cuellar and
Flores.
What I didn't know at the time, Mer-
win insists, is that Linares accepted a
gold Rolex watch from Cuellar and
"probably some other items or promises
of items." The two dealers were re-
leased from jail after only a few days,
when a La Paz judge cited "irregulari-
ties" in Linares's paperwork. Soon after
the raid Linares's administrative assis-
tant, Captain Pablo Vargas, took to driv-
ing his newly acquired Mercedes
through the streets of La Paz, causing no
surprise that he could afford such a vehi-
cle on his salary of $75 a month. Linares
remained commander until June of
1984, when he led a group of rogue
Leopards officers who participated in a
rightist-backed attempt to kidnap Her-
nan Siles Suazo, then the President. Ex-
iled to Spain, Linares was recently
brought back and reappointed to his old
Leopards command.
M ERWIN EVENTUALLY recalled Lin-
ares fondly, considering his cor-
ruption "not very serious" when set
against that of later commanders. In an
interview, never broadcast, for the CBS
newsmagazine West 57th, which I co-pro-
duced after Merwin's return to the Unit-
ed States, the reporter Jane Wallace
asked him about corruption.
Wallace: "[You had] eight different
commanders?"
Merwin: "Eight. It was mostly be-
cause they either got too blatant about
accepting bribes or, in the one case of
the only really good tactical field com-
mander we had, he refused to take a
bribe and he got fired by his boss, who
had offered him the bribe."
Wallace: "So the drug dealers were
buying off [former director of the Nar-
cotics Police] Colonel Guido Lopez
while you were there, as far as you
know?"
Merwin: "I was under that impres-
sion. "
Wallace: "How solid is the informa-
tion?"
Merwin: "Very solid."
Wallace: "Can you reveal the source
of it?"
Merwin: "No, not really. . . . The
U.S. is a very technological society and
we have a lot of capabilities. That's
something that the Bolivians never quite
understood. Every time they talked on
the telephone, we knew about it, you
know."
Wallace: "Is [the current director of
the Narcotics Police] on the take?"
Merwin: "I don't even know who he
is right now. . . . If this one isn't, his pre-
decessors all were."
Wallace: "All of them?"
Merwin: "To my knowledge, all of
them."
Wallace: "In what ways?"
Merwin: "New cars. Send your kids
to the States to go to school. One of the
former Leopard commanders who was
dishonest-he was bad when we got
him and he got worse-I understand
that he now has a really nice ranch. Has
a new BMW. Wears very nice clothes.
All of the national directors [of the Nar-
cotics Police], very natty dressers. Some
of them had amazingly good taste."
Wallace: "And the rest of the enforce-
ment structure in Bolivia ... how cor-
rupted was that structure?"
Merwin: "I have to tell you I think
that a hundred percent of the Bolivian
enforcement structure was corrupted."
Wallace: "Bought by the cocaine traf-
fickers?"
Merwin: "Yeah."
HIS MISSION THUS compromised,
Merwin found his operations either
sabotaged or restricted to low-level traf-
fickers. I observed one raid in mid-De-
cember of 1985, carried out against the
tiny village of Cruzpata, about twenty-
five miles south of Cochabamba. Mer-
win and forty-seven Leopards stole into
the village just before dawn, rousting
frightened villagers from their beds at
gunpoint and searching the pitted stone
huts for drugs. The net result, aside
from the seizure of a couple of pounds of
drug, was the arrest of two coca-leaf
mashers (the drug-making process looks
much like primitive wine pressing), a
boy of about sixteen and a woman with
three children who was caught with a
half pound of coca paste. What follows is
a transcript of my videotaped interview
with one of the suspects as she was be-
ing led away:
Question: "Ma'am, why do you have
this [points to bag of cocaine]?"
Woman: "They told me to sell it. My
husband is trying to [find work in] pota-
toes. He's going to try hard...."
Question (to Ed Merwin): "These
people do not seem to be making any
money from this. They seem to be more
victims than perpetrators."
VQ nued
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Mcrwim: "Clearly. That's correct." England, and other Suarezes have
Question: "Then why are they being served as senators and business leaders.
arrested?" Reportedly, Roberto Suarez's fondness
Merwin: "People have to understand for gambling necessitated at one point a
that it is illegal, and be unwilling to do financial "quick fix," as it were, which
it, be unwilling to go to jail to earn even the surging cocaine trade provided. He
what they cam." quickly rose to the top.
Question: "What happens to these One of the most fascinating elements
children if their mother goes to jail?" of the Suarez story is how little his status
Mcrwin: "They'll go with her." as an outlaw has limited his very power-
Question: "They'll go to jail with ful influence in the country. In the late
their mother?" 1970s Suarez became associated with
(Mcrwin sighs.) the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who
It was a difficult moment for Ed Mer- was hiding out in Bolivia. Barbie used
win, one that caught the futility of his his Gestapo experience and his fascist
mission in Bolivia. "It was very frustrat- connections to recruit for the Coca Nos-
ing," he later told me, adding that he tra a small private army known as Los
had interceded with the prosecutor to Novios del Muerte-"the Fiances of
let the woman go. "Picking up these Death." It was actually more a security
campesinos and putting them in jail for force than an army, and probably never
however long is not going to really do numbered more than twenty-five men.
any good. You want the big guys ... But among its top officers was a right-
VV HO ARE THE chieftains of the Coca
Nostra who have fostered this po-
litical corruption? As Bolivian (and some
American) officials tell it, the Coca Nos-
tra is an invisible cabal of conspirators,
each more elusive than the archterrorist
Abu Nidal, each better protected than
Yasser Arafat, and each possessed of
more weapons and resources than Colo-
nel Qaddafi.
Actually, I found the men of the Coca
Nostra to be more accessible than the
average big-city mayor in America. I
spoke on the telephone to members of
the Roberto Suarez family, and they
were forthcoming about many of their
activities, especially their charitable
work in behalf of the poor. I visited (and
even filmed inside) a well-guarded cock-
fighting club on a main street in the
town of Santa Cruz, where I saw men re-
puted to be among the biggest traffick-
ers in the country betting tens of thou-
sands of U.S. dollars in cash on a single
fight.
I'm speaking of people whose traf-
ficking enterprises handle from 2,000 to
10,000 pounds of pure cocaine a month,
and generate gross monthly sales of $20
million to $70 million-people like the
Razuk family and the Malky brothers,
descendants of Palestinian merchants
who emigrated earlier in this century.
There are also the Chavez Rocas broth-
ers, a former air force lieutenant called
"Teniente" Morales, Loncho Paz, and
two of the biggest drug traffickers in the
world, Hugo Anez (more on him later)
and the more famous Roberto Suarez.
Like several other drug barons, Ro-
berto Suarez comes from a prosperous
cattle-ranching family. His great-grand-
father was Bolivia's first ambassador to
wing Italian terrorist, Pier Luigi Pagliai,
who was wanted for the 1980 bombing
of a Bologna train station in which
eighty-five people were killed. And it
seems to have concentrated on attacking
and intimidating left-wing labor leaders
rather than defending the cocaine enter-
prises of its employers against rivals or
the police.
Suarez is known to have been in-
volved with General Luis Garcia Meza
in the coup d'etat of 1980 (Garcia Meza
was alleged to have been paid a million
dollars in cash by the Coca Nostra),
which for the first time anywhere in
the world handed state power over to ac-
tive traffickers. Garcia Meza's Interior
Minister, Luis Arce Gomez (who was
popularly known as the Minister of Co-
caine), was eventually indicted by U.S.
grand juries. In 1981 Garcia Meza's gov-
ernment fell, after Washington suspend-
ed aid to Bolivia, and a year later he and
Arce Gomez fled to Argentina. Shortly
thereafter the new civilian government
of Hernan Silez Suazo extradited Klaus
Barbie to France and Pagliai to Italy. But
Suarez remains, his public presence
strong. For example, he has taken out
full-page newspaper advertisements to
argue against more-stringent narcotics
laws. And he has several times publicly
offered to pay off Bolivia's $3.8 billion
national debt.
Other members of the Coca Nostra
are similarly visible. They own TV sta-
tions, cattle ranches, and other busi-
nesses, they operate small fleets of air-
craft out of major airports, their
addresses are in the phone book, and
their whereabouts at any time are prob-
ably not too difficult to ascertain. If
someone wanted to get them, it would
But U.S.-Bolivian anti-narcotics ef-
forts have consistently avoided these
bosses of the underground drug empire
end have focused instead on the mass of
impoverished peasants that makes up
the empire's work force. According to a
1986 State Department report, the work
force is growing steadily. "The country 's
entire economic structure-labor, mar-
keting, supply and demand-is being
distorted by growing reliance on coca,"
the report notes. "Diversion of re-
sources, transportation and skilled labor
have severely disrupted normal legiti-
mate trade patterns." The report adds,
"The poor continue to migrate to key
coca producing regions seeking ready
work and cash. This trend could in-
crease dramatically as Bolivian tin mines
close down in the face of the dramatic
fall in world tin prices and as landless
and unemployed miners seek employ-
ment alternatives."
The economy is paralyzed. Inflation
at one point in 1985 reached levels that
would produce an annual rate of 20,000
percent. Development has ground to a
halt. The very idea of capital investment
is laughable. For the first time anywhere
in the world, the illegal traffic in drugs is
no longer just an underground economy.
In Bolivia it is the economy.
Meanwhile, rather than attacking the
handful of men, and their organizations,
who have such a stranglehold on the so-
cial and economic life of the nation, the
State Department's strategy has been, in
its words, to place its "highest priority
on crop control." Merwin considers this
approach ludicrous.
He describes flying from the town of
Santa Cruz to Cochabamba in the com-
pany of a representative from Earth Sat-
ellite Corporation, which had been con-
tracted by the Bureau of International
Narcotics Matters to conduct surveys
and determine the precise number of
hectares of coca under cultivation.
"We're flying up there at ten thousand
feet," Mcrwin recalls, "and as far as the
eye can see in any direction is coca plan-
tation. I tell this guy, 'Take a look out
there! What's the difference if we eradi-
cate four hundred or forty thousand
hectares? There'll still be enough to
bury the world in cocaine!"'
Nothing short of immense crop reduc-
tions has even a theoretical possibility of
making an appreciable dent in cocaine
manufacturing. But there is the small
matter of trying to implement such a
program. In the 1983 treaties the Boliv-
ians promised to destroy 4,000 hectares
be easy to do. C*nued
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of coca by December 31, 1985. In that
year traffickers planted thousands of
new hectares. But, as the Department of
State concedes, La Paz managed to
eradicate only thirty hectares. Washing-
ton praised this as a "demonstration of
the government's political will to combat
narcotics production."
Today, with less than two years to go
before all illegal coca cultivation is sup-
posed to be eradicated in Bolivia, Wash-
ington reports that the bilateral efforts
have succeeded in pulling up a total of
200 hectares' worth of coca bushes out of
the 200,000 hectares estimated to be now
in cultivation. This 200 hectares could
have produced about 250 kilos of co-
caine. Thus it seems that what was
bought with the $7.5 million of U.S. tax-
payers' money initially authorized under
the treaties could have been bought
wholesale in Miami for $6 million.
W NILE MERWIN WAS being tied down
Gulliver-like by the Lilliputian
detail of Bolivian coca eradication, he
and his family were in growing danger.
There were bomb threats to his home.
The electricity was shut off for days at a
time-his was the only home in the
neighborhood to suffer such outages.
The family dog was first knifed and then
poisoned. Finally, Merwin discovered
through highly classified intelligence
gathered in another country that the
Coca Nostra had ordered his assassina-
tion. Although he still won't discuss de-
tails, he does say that the order came
from the "highest levels" of the drug
mob.
Ed Merwin felt betrayed by his allies,
abandoned by his superiors, and held
back from truly grappling with his en-
emies, who now seemed intent upon
murdering him and possibly his family,
as well. U.S. drug agents had always
been considered inviolate-until the re-
cent torture and killing of Enrique Ca-
marena Salazar, in Mexico, that is. Mer-
win repeatedly asked for-begged for-
more support, or at least more pressure
on the Bolivians. It never came.
So Merwin decided to act. The DEA
had managed to place an informant in-
side a large-scale cocaine laboratory near
the jungle town of Trinidad, in Beni
province. This lab was located at the
ranch of no less a personage than Hugo
Ancz. Merwin moved quickly, scroung-
ing up a C-47 transport that even with
load restrictions would allow him to ferry
twenty-eight troopers, himself, and the
air crew to the Anez ranch. The oper-
ation was organized as previous ones had
been, with one exception: La Paz was
not informed of the raid until after Mer-
win was airborne, and the plane was
twenty minutes en route to the target
before Merwin told the air crew where
they were going.
The Leopards seized thirty-four sus-
pects, two small planes, and an un-
impressive assortment of weapons (it
did not include any of the surface-to-air
missiles that La Paz officials keep insist-
ing are in Coca Nostra hands). On the
property they also found a working co-
caine lab stocked with 210 kilos of
ready-to-ship cocaine. And in the haci-
enda, having lunch with a Bolivian sena-
tor, was Hugo Anez himself.
Anez was brought to the lab, where he
denied knowledge of how drugs had
come to be present there. Merwin came
in a bit later to find Anez smoking ciga-
rettes and joking with his Leopards
guards. Everyone became quiet, except
Anez, who smiled.
"Tell you what, my friend," he said.
"['II give you a check, and you fill in the
number of zeros you want, okay?"
Without a word Merwin (who tells the
story in a matter-of-fact way) grabbed
Anez by his open shirt collar, pushed
him back, and sat him on a chair in front
of a table on which was piled the 210 ki-
los of cocaine. Then Merwin pulled out
his Polaroid and snapped a picture,
much as one might of an animal cap-
tured on safari. Anez's smile disintegrat-
ed; Merwin turned and walked out.
Two days later Hugo Anez was released
from jail in Trinidad on orders from La
Paz. The U.S. Embassy did not protest
his release.
M ERWIN NEVER AGAIN moved
against a major drug trafficker. He
spent the remaining months of his tour
breaking in new commanders, organiz-
ing more raids against mostly low-level
operators, and trying not to get killed.
His last act in the war on drugs was to
write a report summarizing his mission.
In it, though taking pride in his skill and
in the knowledge that he had done all he
could, he challenged the willful opti-
mism of Washington's assessment of
progress in Bolivia. One would never
guess that Merwin and his employers
were talking about the same country.
The October, 1986, update of the State
Department's International Narcotics
Control Strategy report, in reference
to coca-crop eradication, says that "Bo-
livia continues to postpone widescale
coca eradication," but "plans [are] being
finalized." Some ten months earlier, Ed
Merwin wrote in his report, "Voluntary
crop reduction and legal control of coca
"-
will never work. There is too much cor-
ruption and inefficiency, and the prob-
lem m is too staggeringly large to ever have
such measures yield results."
The State Department report says
that La Paz had decided to "emphasize
interdiction and cocaine lab destruc-
tion." Merwin's report says, "There are
simply no sanctions being applied
against any but the lowest level of
traffickers. "
The State Department report says
that the goal of the Bureau of Interna-
tional Narcotics Matters (INM) "of
maintaining effective, simultaneous
eradication programs in all narcotic
source countries affecting the U.S. drug
market is becoming a reality." Compare
Ed Merwin's final report: "Our current
level of effort is largely a waste of time
and money."
Since Merwin's departure from Boliv-
ia it appears to have been business as
usual in Washington's war on drugs
there. To be sure, last year the State De-
partment withheld $8.5 million of the
total $72.5 million in aid earmarked for
Bolivia. Shortly thereafter the United
States launched with great fanfare Oper-
ation Blast Furnace, a four-month effort
in which 160 U.S. soldiers and civilians
ferried the Bolivian Leopards on 256 vis-
its to suspected cocaine labs. What was
the end result of this "significant new
initiative," as the State Department
termed it? At its close the operation had
led to the seizure and destruction of
twenty-two coca-paste or cocaine-hydro-
chloride labs. Unfortunately, all of these
were empty labs-in other words, all that
was found was a few barrels of precursor
chemicals, maybe a few kilos of leftover
drug, and a few brightly colored plastic
buckets. Significantly, not one trafficker
was arrested.
Still, Washington insisted that Oper-
ation Blast Furnace had "disrupted co-
caine trafficking in Bolivia." That was in
October. But by December, according to
The New York Times, narcotics experts
and U.S. embassy officials in La Paz
were conceding that "cocaine activities
had picked up." The newspaper also re-
ported that the Bolivian Planning Minis-
ter, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, had
claimed that Bolivia would "get out of
the cocaine business in three years, if we
can get the financing." That financing,
he estimated, would be in the neighbor-
hood of $450 million, of which Bolivia,
"with great sacrifice," could possibly
bear 20 percent.
Continued
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403220032-9
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403220032-9
? In February, Pr,:sident Reagan certi- V
fied to Congress that Bolivia has made
progress in controlling narcotics traffick-
ing, which means that the country will
once again receive its full foreign-assis-
tance allocation. However, the INM's
1987 Strategy Report says, "Optimism
about the future must be tempered by
the reality of what has actually occurred
in Bolivia since 1980. `Voluntary' eradi-
cation campaigns ... have not worked.
Far from reducing total hectareage, Bo-
livia's coca cultivation expanded during
1986 by at least 10 percent." And cor-
ruption is, if anything, getting worse. In
late February, Interior Minister Fer-
nando Barthelemy was sacked, follow-
ing reports that he was receiving payoffs
from coca traffickers.
"The only thing that will work," Mer-
win insists, "is force. I see it as a war. It's
a threat to our national security at the
same level as a military threat from an-
other nation or a group of nations." His
prescription is a blunt one: "Internation-
alize a strike force. Arrest the major traf-
fickers. Put them in jails where they
would stay. I would destroy their means
of production, the millions of dollars'
worth of chemicals that they have
around their laboratories and factories. I
would burn their houses down, is what I
would do." How long would it take to
cripple (albeit not eliminate) the cocaine
trade in Bolivia if Washington and La
Paz were really committed to it? I asked.
"With up-to-date intelligence they
could do it in a couple of weeks," Mer-
win said. "Maybe less."
-David Kline
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403220032-9