(SANITIZED)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90M00005R000700030023-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 4, 2013
• Sequence Number: 23
• Publication Date: July 19, 1988
• Content Type: MEMO

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LEVEL 1 - 1 OF I STORY
U! Atlantic Copyright,@ 1988 Information Access Company;
U! Copyright @ The Atlantic Monthly Co. 1987
May, 1987
SECTION: Vol. 259; Pg. 22
HEADLINE: 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; Clarence Edgar
Merwin
BYLINE: Kine, David
BODY:
HOW TO LOSE THE COKE WAR
FORMER AIR FORCE Major Clarence Edgar Merwin has seen America's war on
drugs as few others have--from the front lines of one of its losing battles.
For two years Merwin combated Bolivia's "Coca Nostra," the barons of the
cocaine trade. The story of his struggle helps to explain why the United States
is far from winning this much heralded conflict.
d-Merwin ent to Bolivia, at age forty-five, uniquely qualified to take on
the underground empire of the drug traffickers. He had recently retired from
a twenty-one-year career in the military, during which he had served as the
director of the Latin American branch of the Air Force's Special Operations
school, chief of the indications and warning branch of the U.S. Southern Command
in Panama, and a senior U.S. representative to the Organization of American
States Mission in Central America. He had also served in combat_i.n_Sout.beast
Asia and 1had been detached from the Air Force for two tours with the CIA.,,/ He
was highly regarded in Washington circles as an expert in special"ope arions.
Shortly after he entered the civilian job market as an
"international-security consultant," the State Department's Bureau of
International Narcotics Matters came to Merwin with an unusual offer. They
wanted him to join the department's Narcotics Assistance Unit (NAU) team in
Bolivia, on a civilian contract, and become the chief adviser to the Bolivian
Narcotics Police. His task would be to create and train a first-of-its-kind
paramilitary unit to move against major drug -trafficking organizations in
Bolivia. Officially designated the Mobile Rural Patrol Unit (UMOPAR), but
popularly known as the Leopards, the force would be elite--trained as well as or
better than any other armed unit in Latin America, and composed of tough, highly
motivated, and corruption-resistant officers and troops. The Leopards would
serve as the model for similar anti-narcotics unit elsewhere.
This anti- drug strategy had been conceived in four treaties on narcotics
signed by Bolivia and the United States on August 11, 1983. In addition to
launching UMOPAR, the agreements created a Bolivian government entity known as
DIRECO, the Coca Reduction Directorate, and committed the government to a
five-year program to reduce coca production to only the level needed by the
domestic population of coca-leaf chewers. In 1985 Bolivia estimated that
level to be 20,000 metric tons of dry coca leaf annually, a figure though by
most experts to be exaggerated. The figure was recently revised to 10,000
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tons. In any case, perhaps 240,000 tons of coca are grown--over twenty times as
much as domestic consumption could warrant. This huge crop has the potential to
produce 240 tons of cocaine hydrochloride. Bolivia supplies about 40 percent
of the worldwide market in the drug. In the agreements Bolivia was
initially obligated to eliminate 4,000 hectares of coca production--some experts
estimate that as many as 200,000 hectares are under cultivation there--by
December 31, 1985.
Under the treaties about $ 7.5 million was allocated by the United States for
the agricultural and law-enforcement support of the various programs. This was
followed in later fiscal years with additional funding in foreign-aid
packages--with, however, the stipulation that portions of the assistance would
be suspended unless the Bolivian government took steps to eliminate cocaine
trafficking, including meeting the target of the 4,000-hectare reduction.
In this hopeful context of ambitious policy goals and generous funding to
reach them, Ed Merwin took his family to Cochabamba, Bolivia, on March 1,
1984. Sprawled across a valley 8,500 feet above sea level, southeast of La Paz,
the city was until recently referred to as the breadbasket of Bolivia. That
was before coca became king and Cochabamba became the gateway to the vast coca
fields of the neighboring Chapare region. Today the city's population of
650,000, though still primarily Quechua Indian, is teeming with
flotantes--drifters, or transient peasants searching for work in the coca
plantations and processing labs. As the coca economy has relentlessly
over-grown all else and food production has steadily declined, the valley has
become a food importer.
Cochabamba is a cowboy town; dealers and cocaine camp followers loiter in
outdoor cafes along the Avenida Ballivian, acting out their vision of themselves
as outlaws in their BMWs and Mercedes. Outside town, in the Chapare, impatient
dealers have occasionally taken to weighing hundred-dollar bills--so many pounds
of dollars buys so many pounds of drug --as they sit behind their
lemonade-stand-style folding tables.
From the moment that Merwin arrived in Cochabamba, there were portents of
trouble. Merwin had told his State Department liaison that he would accept the
job only if his family was guaranteed a secure, defensible home. It had to be
on a quiet street; there had to be a stone wall around the property at least
twenty feet from the house itself; and there had to be a route of escape, should
the perimeter of the house ever be breached.
The State Department liaison had given his solemn promise: "We don't take
chances where the safety of our people is concerned," Merwin recalls the man's
saying. But what Ed Merwin saw on his first day in Cochabamba was a house with
no protective wall at all. And it was located on a dead-end street, a
cul-de-sac. Shaken, he found another house himself.
His unease deepened when he set to work training the Leopards unit. The 1983
agreements obligated the United States to outfit the strike force with virtually
all of its nonlethal equipment--vehicles, communications devices, and uniforms.
(U.S. law prohibits the transfer of weapons or ammunition to foreign police
organizations.) The government of Bolivia agreed to provide the rest--weapons,
food, housing, medical support, and salaries for the troops.
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But Merwin quickly discovered that the wording of treaties is often a far cry
from the language of reality. "The troops would go months without receiving
money for rations," he told me recently. "They had food, of course, but it was
because of credit. We'd con some merchant into selling enough food for a whole
battalion on credit." According to Merwin, this lack of support from La Paz was
unswerving. "I kept objecting, because the men weren't getting paid three,
four, five, six months at a time, but it didn't do any good. And there was no
budget for medical supplies---things any kind of military organization needs. It
was not provided for at all."
Although the Leopards unit was intended in the treaties to have priority--the
necessary precondition for any effective coca-crop-reduction program being the
establishment of governmental authority in the Chapare region--the program was
lost in the clutter of other U.S. programs and agencies involved in combating
the Bolivian narcotics problem. The DEA, U.S. Customs, the U.S. Information
Agency, the Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (and its NAU arm), the
FBI, the CIA, and the Agency for International Development all participate in
Bolivia's war on drugs. (Inside the United States more than thirty
government 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 program, aimed at inducing campesinos to
grow other crops instead of coca. Merwin's NAU was in charge of the Leopards
unit, but the DEA (which is prohibited from any direct law-enforcement activity
overseas) was responsible for developing the intelligence needed by the Leopards
to pick targets and make raids. In addition, the entire U.S. effort in Bolivian
narcotics control was under the supervision of U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr, now
the ambassador to El Salvador. Unfortunately, the Ambassador's principal
mission was not to cripple the drug trade but rather to maintain stable
relations with unstable Bolivian governments that refused to do so.
THE PROBLEMS THAT Merwin at first attributed to bureaucracy, indifference,
and the anarchy of Bolivian politics took on a new significance when he
discovered that his Leopards commander, German Linares, had "accepted
gratuities," as Merwin put it, from traffickers. I had met Linares, before
Merwin arrived to take over training and deployment of the newly assembled
Leopards force. In November of 1983 I accompanied Linares and his troops on a
rare raid against a major cocaine lab, run by Jorge Cuellar and Jorge Flares, in
Beni province. Cuellar, before going into business with Flores, had worked as a
pilot for the legendary drug czar Roberto Suarez Gomez--reputedly the model
for the Sosa character in the recent movie Scarface. Flores also was considered
by the DEA to be a fairly weighty crook. The raid was planned after
intelligence indicated that 3,000 pounds of pure cocaine would soon be flown out
from the Cuellar-Flares 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, Merwin insists, is that Linares accepted a
gold Rolex watch from Cuellar and "probably some other items or promises of
items." The two dealers were released from jail after only a few days, when a La
Paz judge cited "irregularities" in Linares's paperwork. Soon after the raid
Linares's administrative assistant, Captain Pablo Vargas, took to driving his
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newly acquired Mercedes through the streets of La Paz, causing no surprise that
he could afford such a vehicle 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 Hernan Siles Suazo, then the
President. Exiled to Spain, Linares was recently brought back and reappointed
to his old Leopards command.
MERWIN EVENTUALLY recalled Linares fondly, considering his corruption "not
very serious" when set against that_of later commanders. tIn_an_interview, never
roadcast,_for the CBS newsmagazine West 57th, which I co=p-r_odu.ce.d after
9rwin's return to tthe United States, the reporter Jane Wallace asked him-about
corruption.
Wallace: "[You had] eight different commanders?"
Merwin: "Eight. It was mostly because they either got too blatant about
accepting bribes or, in the one case of the only really good tactical field
commander 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
Narcotics Police] Colonel Guido Lopez while you were there, as far as you know?"
Merwin: "I was under that impression."
Wallace: "How solid is the information?"
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 predecessors 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 Narcotics
Police], very natty dressers. Some of them had amazingly good taste."
Wallace: "And the rest of the enforcement structure in Bolivia . . . how
corrupted was that structure?"
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Merwin: "I have to tell you I think that a hundred percent of the Bolivian
enforcement structure was corrupted."
Wallace: "Bought by the cocaine traffickers?"
Merwin: "Yeah."
HIS MISSION THUS compromised, Merwin found his operations either sabotaged or
restricted to low-level traffickers. I observed one raid in mid-December of
1985, carried out against the tiny village of Cruzpata, about twenty-five miles
south of cochabamba. Merwin 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 being 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]
potatoes. 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."
Merwin: "Clearly. That's correct."
Question: "Then why are they being arrested?"
Merwin: "People have to understand that it is illegal, and be unwilling to do
it, be unwilling to go to jail to earn even what they earn."
Question: "What happens to these children if their mother goes to jail?"
Merwin: "They'll go with her."
Qestion: "They'll go to jail with their mother?"
(Merwin sighs.)
It was a difficult moment for Ed Merwin, one that caught the futility of his
mission in Bolivia. "It was very frustrating," he later told me, adding that
he had interceded with the prosecutor to let the woman go. "Picking up these
campesinos and putting them in jail for however long is not going to really do
any good. You want the big guys . . . 11
WHO ARE THE chieftains of the Coca Nostra who have fostered this political
corruption? As Bolivian (and some American) officials tell it, the Coca Nostra
is an invisible cabal of conspirators, each more elusive than the archterroris t
Abu Nidal, each better protected than Yasser Arafat, and each possessed of more
weapons and resources than Colonel Qaddaf1.
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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 cockfighting club on a main street in the town of
Santa Cruz, where I saw men reputed to be among the biggest traffickers in the
country betting tens of thousands of U.S. dollars in cash on a single fight.
I'm speaking of people whose trafficking 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 brothers, a former air force lieutenant called
"Teniente" Morales, Loncho Paz, and two of the biggest drug traffickers in the
world, Hugo Anez (more an him later) and the more famous Roberto Suarez.
Like several other drug barons, Roberto Suarez comes from a prosperous
cattle-ranching family. His great-grandfather was Bolivia's first ambassador
to England, and other Suarezes have served as senators and business leaders.
Reportedly, Roberto Suarez's fondness for gambling necessitated at one point a
financial "quick fix," as it were, which the surging cocaine trade provided. He
quickly rose to the top.
One of the most fascinating elements of the Suarez story is how little his
status as an outlaw has limited his very powerful influence in the country. In
the late 1970s Suarez became associated with the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie,
who was hiding out in Bolivia. Barbie used his Gestapo experience and his
fascist connections to recruit for the Coca Nostra a small private army known as
Los Novios del Muerte--"the Fiances of Death." It was actually more a security
force than an army, and probably never numbered more than twenty-five men. But
among its top officers was a right-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
enterprises of its employers against rival or the police.
Suarez is known to have been involved 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 active traffickers. Garcia Meza's Interior Minister,
Luis Arce Gomez (who was popularly known as the Minister of Cocaine), was
eventually indicted by U.S. grand juries. In 1981 Garcia Meza's government
fell, after Washington suspended 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
stations, cattle ranches, and other businesses, they operate small fleets of
aircraft out of major airports, their addresses are in the phone book, and their
whereabouts at any time are probably not too difficult to ascertain. If someone
wanted to get them, it would be easy to do.
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But U.S.-Bolivian anti-narcotics efforts have consistently avoided these
bosses of the underground drug empire and have focused instead an 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, marketing, supply and demand--is
being distorted by growing reliance an coca," the report notes. "Diversion of
resources, transportation and skilled labor have severely disrupted normal
legitimate trade patterns." The report adds, "The poor continue to migrate to
key coca producing regions seeking ready work and cash. This trend could
increase 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
employment 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 social 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 company
of a representative from Earth Satellite Corporation, which had been contracted
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," Merwin recalls, "and as far as the eye
can see in any direction is coca plantation. I tell this guy, 'Take a look out
there! What's the difference if we eradicate four hundred or forty thousand
hectares? There'll still be enough to bury the world in cocaine!"
Nothing short immense crop reductions 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
Bolivians promised to destroy 4,000 hectares 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. Washington
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
supposed to be eradicated in Bolivia, Washington report 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 cocaine. Thus it seems that
what was bought with the $ 7.5 million of U.S. taxpayers' money initially
authorized under the treaties could have been bought wholesale in Miami for $ 6
million.
WHILE 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
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was first knifed and then poisoned. Finally, Merwin discovered through highly
classified intelligence gathered in another country that the Coca Nostra had
ordered his assassination. Although he still won't discuss details, 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 enemies, who now seemed intent upon murdering
him and possibly his family, as well. U.S. drug agents had always been
considered inviolate--until the recent torture and killing of Enrique Camarena
Salazar, in Mexico, that is. Merwin 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 inside 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
Anez. Merwin moved quickly, scrounging 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 operation was organized as previous ones had
been, with one exception: La Paz was not informed of the raid until after Merwin
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 suspects, two small planes, and an
unimpressive assortment of weapons (it did not include any of the surface-to-air
missiles that La Paz officials keep insisting are in Coca Nostra hands). On the
property they also found a working cocaine lab stocked with 210 kilos of
ready-to-ship cocaine. And in the hacienda, having lunch with a Bolivian
senator, 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
cigarettes and joking with his Leopards guards. Everyone became quiet, except
Anez, who smiled.
"Tell you what, my friend," he said. "I'11 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 kilos of cocaine. Then Merwin pulled out
his Polaroid and snapped a picture, much as one might of an animal captured on
safari. Anez smile disintegrated; 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.
MERWIN NEVER AGAIN moved against a major drug trafficker. He spent the
remaining months of his tour breaking in new commanders, organizing 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 optimism of Washington's
assessment of progress in Bolivia. One would never guess that Merwin and his
employers were talking about the same country.
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The October, 1986, update of the State Department's International Narcotics
Control Strategy report, in reference to coca-crop eradication, says that
" Bolivia 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 corruption and inefficiency, and the problem 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 destruction." 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 International
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 Bolivia it appears to have been business as
usual in. Washington's war on drugs there. To be sure, last year the State
Department withheld $ 8.5 million of the total $ 72.5 million in aid earmarked
for Bolivia. Shortly thereafter the United States launched with great fanfare
Operation Blast Furnace, a four-month effort in which 160 U.S. soldiers and
civilians ferried the Bolivian Leopards an 256 visits to suspected cocaine lab.
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-hydrochloride 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 Operation Blast Furnace had "disrupted
cocaine 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 reported that the Bolivian Planning Minister, 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 neighborhood of $ 450 million, of which Bolivia, "with great sacrifice,"
.could possibly bear 20 percent.
In February, President Reagan certified to Congress that Bolivia has made
progress in controlling narcotics trafficking, which means that the country will
once again receive its full foreign--assistance 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'
eradication campaigns . . . have not worked. Far from reducing total
hectareage, Bolivia's coca cultivation expanded during 1986 by at least 10
percent." And corruption is, if anything, getting worse. In late February,
Interior Minister Fernando Barthelemy was sacked, following reports that he was
receiving payoffs from coca traffickers.
LEXISO NEXIS? LEXIS' NEXIS
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"The only thing that will work," Merwin insists, "is force. I see it as a
war. It's a threat to our national security at the same level as amilitary
threat from another nation or a group of nations." His prescription is a blunt
one: "Internationalize a strike force. Arrest the major traffickers. 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? .1 asked. "With
up-to-date intelligence they could do it in a couple of weeks," Merwin said.
"Maybe less."
GRAPHIC: Cartoon
TYPE: Column
SUBJECT: Cocaine, government policy; Drug smuggling, prevention; Bolivia,
relations with the United States; United States, relations with Bolivia
NAME: Merwin, Clarence Edgar, attitudes
GEOGRAPHIC: Bolivia; United States
LOAD-DATE-MDC: March 31, 1988
LEXIS? NEXIS? LEXIS? NEXIS
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