Introduction
The reason we were down there to begin with was because of the massive flow of cocaine into the United States, which was killing our kids.Footnote 1
The ‘war on drugs’, like the Cold War, was used to justify everything.Footnote 2
The implementation of President George H. W. Bush's 1989 Andean Initiative brought to the fore competing US and Bolivian agendas: US embassy officials sought to exert control over the Bolivian government and security forces in pursuit of counter-drug goals, while local ambivalence towards the coca-cocaine economy, and the prioritisation of political, social and economic stability, resulted in opposition to US drug war policies and the perceived ‘Colombianisation’ of Bolivia. Distinct US and Bolivian narrative tropes supported this dynamic: for the former, US exceptionalism and securitised conceptions of drugs;Footnote 3 for the latter, the ‘democracy generation’, ‘Yankee Imperialism’ and the legacy of the Cold War. This article elucidates these narratives and traces the contested nature of counter-drug policy at the country level. In so doing, it deconstructs top-down, US-centric analyses of the drug war in Latin America to examine how US power was exercised and resisted in the Bolivian case. Such top-down analyses underplay the ‘messiness’ of policy implementation, and thus fail to acknowledge fully how policy is negotiated by different actors with different objectives.Footnote 4 The article considers interactive effects between the ‘messy’ local context and the conduct of the ‘war on drugs’ to challenge broad assumptions around US–Bolivian power asymmetries.
The analysis focuses on interactions between elite political actors, drawing on 27 oral history accounts gathered during fieldwork in the United States and Bolivia over 2013 and 2014.Footnote 5 Interviewees include US government officials with direct and indirect experience of counter-supply efforts in the Andes in the 1980s and 1990s, some of whom had been based in the US embassy in La Paz; and Bolivian officials and politicians from around the time of the Jaime Paz Zamora government (1989–93). I gained access to these individuals through a variety of means, for example: contact through third parties, such as the American Foreign Service Association or journalists, and ‘snowballing’ from early interviews. During the process of gaining informed consent, all participants were offered options around anonymity and the use of direct quotes.Footnote 6 Many chose to speak on the record, and appeared frank in their views. While some speculation is necessary here, it seemed that the historic nature of the topic underpinned their willingness to provide relatively open accounts.Footnote 7 These actors played pivotal roles in determining the course of counter-drug policy in Bolivia, as well as in the wider political life of the country. The juxtaposition of their accounts exposes the competing priorities of the period, and the tensions between international and domestic political pressures that shaped the construction of policy at the country level. Documentary and secondary sources support interview data to provide granular analysis of US and Bolivian agendas; the narratives, motives and constraints that underpinned them; and the strategies pursued by different actors.
This analysis reveals not only contestation during the policy implementation process and its links to historic political factors, but the instrumentalisation of the ‘war on drugs’ in US–Bolivian relations of power and control. Power relations between the US embassy and the Bolivian government were fluid, as each side pursued its agenda. As well as drawing on US geopolitical and economic power, the embassy employed ‘on-the-ground’ tactics to exert control. Accusations of corruption were used by the embassy to leverage the Bolivian government, while ‘drug war proxies’ – local counter-drug units funded and largely directed by the United States – allowed for the bypassing of ‘uncooperative’ elements of the Bolivian state. Within the Bolivian government, such actions were held as emblematic of US ‘imperialistic’ strategies in South America, with the drug war supposedly used to silence leftist opponents. Here, the narratives and dynamics of the Cold War still had major influence. Bolivian actors responded with their own strategies of resistance. Most notably, the Repentance Decree, discussed below – giving reduced sentences for traffickers who turned themselves in, and thereby representing a less confrontational, Bolivian, ‘solution’ to the issue – stood in contrast to US securitised conceptions of the ‘drug problem’. In such ways, the ‘war on drugs’ was interwoven with local political concerns and historic trends of US–Bolivian relations.
Top-down, US-Centric Analyses of the ‘War on Drugs’ in Latin America
Much of the literature on the US ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America assumes particular North–South power asymmetries.Footnote 8 While it is certainly the case that the United States has been the primary driving force of international counter-drug efforts in Latin America over the past 40 years,Footnote 9 top-down, US-centric analyses often understate country-level dynamics, i.e. the interactions between actors with distinct agendas that affect policy implementation. Examination of these interactions provides insights into how US power was actually exercised and, at times, resisted by local governmental actors. This section thus deconstructs top-down analyses of the US drug war in Latin America. These analyses are important to the Bolivian case: US power ensured the export of the Andean Initiative; and drug war narratives shaped country-level dynamics. However, their underlying assumptions are insufficient to account for the fluidity of power relations.
Extending the US Drug War to the South
The extension of the US drug war to Latin America is built on domestic and international premises. Domestically, Francisco Thoumi argues that the moralistic ‘perceptions, principles and prejudices’ of the US cultural views of drugs have had persistent and enduring influence on US drug policy.Footnote 10 Drugs are viewed as tearing at the fabric of mainstream US society, as evident in periodic domestic drug scares and the demarcation – and demonisation – of ethnic minorities and fringe groups in the United States.Footnote 11 The drug ‘threat’ necessitates hard-line responses, representing a belief that ‘drug evils will be “wiped out” or at least fundamentally contained’Footnote 12 through stringent enforcement measures.Footnote 13 This ‘threat’, in turn, underpins the impulse to pursue counter-supply efforts abroad. For example, as the ‘crack-cocaine epidemic’ came to dominate the US political agenda in the 1980s, attention turned towards the source in Latin America. Presidential administrations of the period asserted that the United States would fight a ‘war on drugs’ in the Andes to stem the flow of drugs from the South and protect US society. Echoing the moralistic dichotomies of domestic narratives, the evils of drug trafficking would be defeated by prohibitionist policies.Footnote 14
International premises of the US drug war in Latin America, meanwhile, were rooted in the advancement of post-Cold War securitisation. A range of non-traditional security threats was identified during this period, as the United States and its Western allies sought to extend order to the ‘ungoverned spaces’ of the world.Footnote 15 The cocaine economy was seen as a threat to regional and global security, incorporating the destabilising effects of powerful and violent drug trafficking empires in ‘America's backyard’, and the use of drug revenues by armed actors, i.e. supposed ‘narco-guerrillas’ or ‘narco-terrorists’.Footnote 16 Within this policy discourse, defeat of the drug trade was a necessary first step to establishing security and the conditions for political and socio-economic development. The moralistic mission of eliminating drugs was thus aligned with other stated US foreign policy goals in Latin America. US political actors have argued that counter-drug policies are beneficial to source and transit nations, securing peace, stability and free-market democracies.Footnote 17 Latin American governments which challenged this model were subject to US sanctions for failing to fulfil international drug control obligations and their motives called into question, with suspicions raised of complicity or permissiveness towards the drug trade. The US government used this narrative to justify the extension of its drug war border to the South:Footnote 18 expanding US counter-drug presence and militarised policies abroad, fortifying foreign state security forces and eradicating drug crops.
The literature has generally been critical of this drug war approach, highlighting the structural causes of the illicit economy in Latin America and the harmful effects of counter-drug policies.Footnote 19 Marginalised rural communities, for example, turn to coca cultivation due to poverty rather than greed or moral failure,Footnote 20 while weak state institutions are vulnerable to powerful drug trafficking organisations.Footnote 21 Well-funded, high-level organised crime has wreaked corruption and violence across the region. Drug war policies, though, have intensified and escalated such problems.Footnote 22 Market-disruptive policy interventions, for example, have stimulated violent competition between rival traffickers, heightening insecurity.Footnote 23 Human rights abuses carried out by militarised counter-drug units may be cited here, alongside damage to precarious livelihoods through forced eradication of drug crops.Footnote 24 These perspectives emphasise Latin American victimhood, as a site both of the international cocaine trade and US drug war fervour.
According to this critique, the extension of the ‘war on drugs’ represents not benevolent US foreign policy intentions, but rather the prioritisation of US goals over local concerns. Counter-drug policies have been formulated – or ‘implicitly vetoed’ – in Washington with little meaningful input from host governments.Footnote 25 Unilateral US threats of sanction, including ‘decertification’,Footnote 26 have forced Latin American governments into compliance with drug policies. US geopolitical and economic power has marginalised legitimate concerns over the localised effects of drug war policies. Furthermore, the exercise of US power in this domain has at times been arbitrary and overtly political.Footnote 27 Opaque metrics of progress have been deployed; US allies spared punishment, while opponents of US policy were censured. In this sense, the ‘war on drugs’ has served traditional US hemispheric goals of establishing power and influence throughout Latin America.Footnote 28
Contesting the ‘War on Drugs’
These top-down analyses provide numerous insights into the US drug war in Latin America. At the country level, though, the broad assumption of North–South power asymmetry limits our understanding of how the ‘war on drugs’ has actually been implemented. On the US side, actors based in embassies throughout the region have enjoyed significant autonomy when navigating complex local contexts. To forward counter-drug goals, these actors have negotiated with host government counterparts, as well as weighing wider foreign policy objectives and the interests of other US agencies. Local political actors must also navigate these contexts, and balance myriad domestic pressures against the demands of the United States. Studying the interaction of these differing agendas reveals the reality of power relations in Latin America, and their implications for the ‘war on drugs’. Aside from US geopolitical and economic influence, how has US power been exercised by actors at the country level? How have local political actors responded to US power and pursued distinct priorities?
Answering such questions requires a move beyond ‘drug fetishism’. This refers to a tendency within the literature to view the ‘war on drugs’ narrowly through the lens of policy objectives: focusing on ‘the efficacy of specific counter-narcotics interventions and institutions’.Footnote 29 Coca eradication in one location, for example, has been linked to rises in cultivation in other areas – the ‘balloon effect’.Footnote 30 This is viewed as a simple economic mechanism of supply and demand, but such analysis relegates the livelihood strategies and agency of rural communities to the margins. It downgrades the political effects of changing patterns of cultivation, as different actors gain and lose from eradication policies.Footnote 31 In the Bolivian case, coca unions adopted radical tactics of protest to protect their livelihoods and resist the incursion of US-backed eradication, affecting the terms of counter-drug policy debates and changing the calculations of high-level political actors.Footnote 32 Counter-drug policies are applied within such multi-faceted social, political and economic settings, interwoven with the drug trade and its direct and indirect interests.
This critique draws on David Mansfield's analysis of opium-poppy bans in Afghanistan, where – he argues – drug control interventions are mistakenly seen as ‘discrete and bounded’; and the actions of different actors are viewed exclusively against drug control objectives, as either inhibiting or advancing these goals.Footnote 33 This restrictive focus, therefore, fails to adequately account for wider political dynamics: how counter-drug efforts are weighed against – and subsumed into – other agendas. While grassroots actors such as cocaleros (coca leaf growers) and social movements undoubtedly shape these agendas, this article focuses on interactions between high-level US and Bolivian political actors. It builds on James Siekmeier's history of US–Bolivian relations, which challenges the underlying assumptions of Bolivian dependency to examine the active role Bolivian actors played in shaping US actions.Footnote 34 Active roles were played by officials of the Paz Zamora government, as they sought to manage relations with ‘drug warriors’ in the US embassy and pursued distinct aims.
As part of this analytical focus, it is important to consider the utilisation of drug war narratives in relations between these actors. The ‘war on drugs’ has provided a logic of action for US and local actors in Latin America: US actors linked it to foreign policy goals of security, democracy and development, while political actors, from a defensive position, drew on its conceptual framework to argue that it was an imperialist project of the United States, and that resistance to US influence was a noble fight for security and democracy. Local political actors also claimed legitimacy through their own counter-drug efforts. These incongruous narratives are indicative of the rhetorical malleability of the ‘war on drugs’. The ‘war on drugs’ may be thought of less as ‘a specific guideline or articulated vision’, but rather as ‘multiple narratives’ used to ‘justify political action’ and ‘knit together’ diverse priorities.Footnote 35 Recognising these multiple narratives again moves away from ‘drug fetishism’, which tends to view counter-drug implementation as ‘more coherent, concerted and coordinated’ than is ‘often seen in practice’.Footnote 36 Instead, this article examines how such narratives were instrumentalised in relations of power and control between actors with diverse and, at times, competing goals.
Background: Introduction of the Andean Initiative
As the Cold War drew to an end and public panic spread over the supposed ‘crack epidemic’ in the United States, George H. W. Bush made the ‘war on drugs’ a cornerstone of his presidency (1989–93). The Andean Initiative formed a crucial part of his administration's response to the claimed national crisis. Emboldened by post-Cold War euphoria, the 1989 US$2.2 billion counter-drug aid package signalled the US government's intent to defeat the cocaine supply at source.Footnote 37 During this period, Colombia was the epicentre of the trade, with trafficking dominated by international criminal organisations based out of Medellín and Cali. Peruvian coca was estimated to constitute roughly two-thirds of the total market, while Bolivia accounted for around a quarter of net coca cultivation over the late 1980s.Footnote 38 The Andean Initiative sought to target the trade at each of these points in the coca-cocaine commodity chain.
The three pillars of the strategy established the foundations for the modern-era US ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America:Footnote 39 eradication, interdiction and alternative development. The policy also sponsored a greater counter-drug role for the US Department of Defense's Southern Command (Southcom) and their military partners in the South. The perceived unilateral militarisation of counter-drug efforts, though, was poorly received in the Andes, and so President Bush met with the governments of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru to ease concerns and ‘multi-lateralise’ the issue at the first Andean drug summit in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia).Footnote 40 The governments of the region argued for increased emphasis on institution-building and development, winning additional US funding for alternative development, formal recognition of the idea of ‘shared responsibility’, and a free trade agreement with the United States – the Andean Trade Preference Act (APTA).Footnote 41 However, using the levers of US power (the promise of aid on one hand, decertification on the other), the Bush administration's preferences for policy survived largely intact. Concessions gained at Cartagena were conditioned on acceptance of militarised counter-drug efforts and coca eradication targets.
The US government viewed Bolivia as an important test case for its counter-drug approach. While it was strategically less significant than its Andean neighbours, US policymakers nevertheless recognised both its role within the regional trade and its symbolic importance to US counter-drug policy in Latin America.Footnote 42 Furthermore, the size and dynamics of the Bolivian coca-cocaine economy made drug war success seem more attainable.Footnote 43 Colombia, for example, was subject to widespread violence from powerful trafficking organisations, while its internal conflict was becoming ever more closely entwined with the drug trade. The ‘Sendero Luminoso’ guerrilla group in Peru was waging a violent campaign against the state, funded in part by drug revenues. Such problems were largely absent in Bolivia, as were the attendant complications of applying counter-drug efforts in such contexts.Footnote 44 Historically, though, Bolivia had tended to be a low priority for US foreign policy due to its limited geopolitical and economic importance. As a result, ‘on-the-ground’ US actors enjoyed a degree of autonomy and influence in shaping US policy in Bolivia, within the broad parameters set out in Washington.Footnote 45 The US embassy in La Paz played a major role in determining what the policy meant in practice.
Former US ambassadors to Bolivia Robert Gelbard (1988–91) and Charles Bowers (1991–4) both noted that counter-drug strategy was subject to oversight mechanisms and hence had to align with the overall US approach. However, policymakers in Washington also recognised the need to adapt the policy to local conditions.Footnote 46 This meant dealing with counterparts in the Bolivian government, balancing the objectives of counter-drug policy with wider US aims within the country, and managing a country team of multiple US agencies with overlapping and, at times, conflicting missions.Footnote 47 How such actors understood and navigated the local context was crucial to the course of the ‘war on drugs’ in Bolivia.
The US Embassy's Priorities
The differing styles of leadership of Gelbard and Bowers shaped US–Bolivian relations. Gelbard argued that his experiences as a young man in the Peace Corps in Bolivia had given him a deep understanding of the local context, equipping him to take a central role in shaping the US counter-drug approach in the country.Footnote 48 His bullish and outspoken diplomacy, though, frequently caused friction with the Bolivian government. Although Bowers looked to keep a lower profile, he continued with the broad strategy put in place by Gelbard and pushed Bolivian counterparts to adopt it. For example, one of Bowers’ first actions as ambassador was to announce continued US support for the introduction of the Bolivian army into counter-drugs, while accepting that this would occur only following ratification from the government.Footnote 49 In our interview, he argued that a specifically Bolivian ‘mind-set’ inhibited cooperation, in that local actors would bargain over certain issues rather than following through on terms they had previously agreed.Footnote 50 Differences in policy emphasis between the two ambassadors’ terms, therefore, may be identified; but the central themes of the US approach remained settled.
Drug control formed a triad of stated US foreign policy objectives in Bolivia, alongside democratic consolidation and economic development. As Bowers explains, ‘We had what we called “the three Ds”: democracy, drugs and development. That's what we were about; what we were trying to do.’Footnote 51 The US government argued that these goals were complementary. Hence, solving ‘America's drug problem’ would also be beneficial to Bolivia. Informed by themes of American exceptionalism, US counter-drug policy was defended in terms of shared interests with the Bolivian people. In a letter to Ambassador Bowers, President Bush clearly asserted this vision.
As leader of the democracies, our Nation faces an historic opportunity to help shape a freer, more secure, and more prosperous world, in which our ideals and way of life can truly flourish. As President, I intend to advance these objectives around the globe, and I look to you, as my personal representative in Bolivia, as my partner in this task.Footnote 52
In reality, the ‘war on drugs’ came to dominate the US agenda in Bolivia, at times to the detriment of other strategic goals.Footnote 53 Former Ambassador David Greenlee (2002–6), who also served as deputy chief of mission to the US embassy from 1987 to 1989, explained that Washington's extensive allocation of resources to counter drugs pulled the US embassy in this direction: ‘When people say, “Well, what is it about Bolivia that links back to the States that really touches our interests?” It was, in those days – back in the late ’80s particularly – Bolivian cocaine hitting the streets of the US.’Footnote 54 In sum, US politicians were more concerned with fighting a drug war in the Andes than in promoting democracy and meaningful development. This impacted on the priorities of the US embassy in La Paz. The domestic premises of the ‘war on drugs’ served as justification for US counter-drug objectives in Bolivia.
I mean, the reason we were down there to begin with was because of the massive flow of cocaine into the United States which was killing our kids. Still is. […] The basic thing is, that product made its way into the United States, so the goal was to stop that product coming in.Footnote 55
Translating this goal into a counter-drug strategy suited to the local context, though, revealed tensions between US objectives, no more so than around the issue of coca eradication.
Coca cultivation was (and remains) a sensitive issue. Coca is interwoven with everyday life in Bolivia, holding cultural significance for indigenous communities, as well as being a widely used consumer product. Coca is also a source of livelihood for many rural families, whether for the local, legal domestic market, or for diversion to the illicit economy. As economic crisis and harsh structural reforms took hold during the 1980s, for example, the coca-cocaine industry acted as a social safety-net for many Bolivians.Footnote 56 Eradicating Bolivia's coca had potentially disastrous socio-economic implications for an already struggling country.
Coca unions provided strong representation for the sector. They drew on nationalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric, and on powerful narratives of coca as indigenous heritage.Footnote 57 By the 1980s, the cocalero movement had fused its traditional Altiplano modes of rural organisation with the more militant tactics of the weakened mining unions.Footnote 58 Frequently, cocaleros provided fierce opposition to US-backed counter-drug policies. Efforts by the Víctor Paz Estenssoro administration (1985–9) to eradicate ‘illegal’ coca and send the army into the Chapare region, for example, were met with road-blocks in June 1987. Resultant clashes with the security forces ended with the deaths of 11 coca growers.Footnote 59 The June 1988 Villa Tunari massacre of cocaleros and peasants by anti-narcotics police caused public outrage across Bolivia, and galvanised the cocalero movement. The coca unions pushed for recognition of their interests, winning significant government concessions. This included, for example, legal recognition of traditional coca growing zones, the prohibition of chemical defoliates in coca eradication operations and a legal obligation for the state to provide alternative development.Footnote 60 Bolivian governments of the period were forced to consider not only the potential socio-economic impact of eradicating coca, but also the activism of the cocaleros. The issue of coca was thus linked to Bolivia's social, political and economic stability.
The US embassy recognised the sensitivity of this issue. Reporting on the fragile political situation to Washington several years before the Villa Tunari massacre, the embassy warned: ‘No, repeat no, Bolivian government has been able to survive against strong and united campesino opposition (campesinos increasingly view coca cultivation as the main escape from abject poverty).’Footnote 61 Although the Paz Estenssoro administration had committed Bolivia to an ambitious programme of eradication in exchange for US development assistance,Footnote 62 progress towards targets was slow. The embassy attempted to balance demands from Washington to meet eradication goal against local realities. This meant promoting a strategy which shifted attention away from direct confrontation with the cocaleros, while promising reductions in coca cultivation.
While accepting the necessity of continuing to pursue the traditional priority on eradication, [the embassy's strategy] argues for greater emphasis on interdiction. The latter appears to have a far more immediate impact on coca by depressing prices (and implicitly cultivation), provokes far less governmental and opposition resistance and ultimately comes closer and faster to objectives.Footnote 63
The quotation indicates the clash of international and domestic pressures, and the embassy's attempt to navigate them. Eradication remained a crucial tenet of the overall US drug control strategy. It served as the main indicator of ‘progress’, and politicians in the US Congress were eager to see a return for counter-drug assistance provided to Andean countries. The embassy had to placate such concerns. Indeed, during this period, US officials leveraged economic aid to pressure the Bolivian government to meet its targets.Footnote 64 Furthermore, the embassy – for the reasons given in the quotation above, and because such an approach would encourage uptake of alternative development programmes – also favoured interdiction.
The US embassy's dealings with Paz Zamora government (1989–93) in pursuing this agenda, though, were harmed by differing conceptualisations of the ‘drug problem’ and low levels of trust. This would lead the embassy to apply its own particular strategies of control.
US Leverage and Drug War Proxies
US actors expressed frustration over the Bolivian government's refusal to accept the securitised premises of the ‘war on drugs’.Footnote 65 President Jaime Paz Zamora instead argued that Bolivia's coca-cocaine economy was primarily a problem of development. In the following cable, for example, Ambassador Robert Gelbard relates his dissatisfaction at the Bolivian government's lukewarm response to the capture of prominent drug trafficker Carmelo ‘Meco’ Domínguez.
Paz Zamora – along with the bulk of Bolivians – continues to engage in a process of denial regarding virtually any other aspect of the drug problem in Bolivia other [sic] than coca cultivation and the sense that it is a problem only of economic development and poverty. This accounts for the extraordinary lack of reaction on the [Bolivian government's] part after the truly impressive success in the operation against the Meco Dominguez organisation, i.e. if they were to acknowledge successes against drug trafficking organisations they would have to acknowledge the existence of a problem.Footnote 66
Diverging conceptualisations of the ‘drug problem’, supported by distinct narratives, were thus important factors in the competing US and Bolivian agendas of the period. These dynamics were evident, for example, during negotiations for an expanded counter-drug role for the Bolivian army. After sustained US pressure, in May 1990 Paz Zamora signed Annex III of the 1987 US–Bolivian anti-drug agreement, granting the army an ill-defined counter-drug role. The agreement provoked widespread opposition due to fears that ‘an invigorated army [might] endanger Bolivia's fragile democratic institutions’, causing ‘an escalation in human-rights abuses and drug-related corruption’ and ‘unrest among farmers’ that could foster ‘an insurgent movement like those in Colombia and Peru’.Footnote 67 The Bolivian army's past involvement in the drug trade raised concerns of increased institutional corruption,Footnote 68 while recent memories of the Villa Tunari massacre solidified public opposition to the militarisation of counter-drug operations. A coalition of civil society groups, including the cocaleros and the Church, protested against the move, finding support in the Bolivian Congress.Footnote 69 Paz Zamora argued in public that US–Bolivian anti-drug agreement had secured significant economic support for Bolivia, and the military were ‘an inseparable part of the global strategy of alternative development’.Footnote 70 Despite the agreement, though, Paz Zamora stalled on releasing the funds to the army.
Using back channels to Paz Zamora's right-wing coalition partners Acción Democrática Nacionalista (Nationalist Democratic Action, ADN), Ambassador Gelbard pushed for acceleration of the policy. As reported in US embassy cables,Footnote 71 the Bolivian foreign minister, Carlos Iturralde of the ADN, said ‘in a straightforward manner that the “problem” is Paz Zamora, who is still not convinced that there really is a need for interdiction in Bolivia because he is really not convinced of a cocaine manufacturing problem and drug trafficking problem’. Gelbard stated his intention ‘to discuss these issues with the appropriate [Bolivian] officials, including President Paz Zamora, military commanders and other political leaders, particularly including [former US-backed dictator and ADN leader] General Banzer’, making it clear that Paz Zamora's ‘mismanagement of many important issues’ and ‘lack of clear leadership and decision-making ability’ risked losing US economic assistance.
Paz Zamora would eventually bow to this pressure in March 1991, and deploy the army in counter-drug operations. The deployment, though, proved to be short-lived. Societal protests, legal limits on the army's role in the Chapare and historic rivalries with the police rendered the new anti-drug units ineffective. It was agreed on all sides that the policy should be rolled back.Footnote 72 However, the episode demonstrated the willingness of US officials to circumvent opponents in the Bolivian government and deal with (old) ideological allies, to secure compliance with drug war policy.
US mistrust of the Paz Zamora administration, though, went deeper than a divergence of opinion over the nature of the drug problem. US actors believed official complicity in the drug trade underpinned opposition to drug control policies, viewing corruption ‘as the largest, single problem affecting US narcotics control efforts’.Footnote 73 A US government report noted that the ‘political will’ of the Bolivian government was ‘questionable, as demonstrated by some recent appointments of corrupt officials to key drug control positions’.Footnote 74 Gelbard stated ‘we were dealing with a corrupt government’,Footnote 75 while former Ambassador Bowers claimed ‘there were a number of people who were not totally on board, […] in fact, they were corrupt, […] filling their pockets, […] bought off by the narco-traffickers’.Footnote 76
The US embassy thus saw the Paz Zamora government as an unreliable ally, and sought to target its ‘corrupt’ elements to assert control. For example, James C. Cason, the political counsellor at the La Paz embassy (1987–90), constructed ‘family trees’ of Bolivia's drug trafficking organisations through a system of intelligence gathering that trawled public registries, electoral rolls, business records and media reports.Footnote 77 This database was used to vet state officials and politicians.
We managed to get a number of interior ministers[,] police chiefs [and] other people fired and jailed using, in part, this kind of data […] When Jaime Paz Zamora became President we told him not to appoint certain corrupt police as Chief. Don't put the police chiefs in these cities because they're narco traffickers. And we showed them the information and they took our suggestion. And when they did put people in who turned out to be corrupt, with narco ties, we provided information to them about what they were doing and the President fired them.Footnote 78
From the US perspective, this system allowed for the removal of officials who represented a threat to counter-drug goals. Intervening in the internal politics of Bolivia and making definitive judgements on the presumed criminality of certain actors was justified according to drug war narratives: addressing the security threat of drugs and establishing the conditions for democracy.
The embassy's use of drug war proxies – ‘vicarious surrogates’ of the ‘war on drugs’Footnote 79 – formed another part of its control strategy. The establishment and close monitoring of specialist anti-drug police and military units constituted an attempt to bypass ‘corrupt’ officials and exert US control on foreign soil. The Fuerza Especial de Lucha contra el Narcotráfico (Anti-Narcotics Special Task Force, FELCN), for example, was dependent on the US embassy for its resources and intelligence.Footnote 80 Furthermore, the Unidades Móviles de Patrullaje Rural (Mobile Rural Patrol Units, UMOPAR) were funded and subject to oversight mechanisms from the US State Department Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, trained by Southcom special forces in paramilitary tactics, and directed in operations by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).Footnote 81 Close working relationships between the DEA and local commanders allowed the United States to circumvent more senior officials with presumed ‘conflicts’.Footnote 82 US geopolitical and economic power in forming these units was thus translated into US presence and power on the ground in Bolivia.
This dynamic provoked complaints that Bolivian sovereignty had been compromised by unfettered US operations. Former President Jaime Paz Zamora claimed that ‘the US embassy had their own people in the Bolivian police and the army; their own people. We had problems with the US when we did things without their people.’Footnote 83 Bolivian actors sought to resist these modes of US control, arguing that drug war goals had been prioritised over local concerns of political, social and economic stability.
The Bolivian Government Agenda
During his electoral campaign in 1989, Paz Zamora had emphasised his anti-drug war credentials. He looked to seize on public unrest over US-backed counter-drug efforts on Bolivian soil, from the Villa Tunari massacre to the joint military raids of Operation Blast Furnace in 1986.Footnote 84 Paz Zamora drew on a Bolivian tradition of ‘coca nationalism’ that played into domestic politics, binding the ‘sacred leaf ’ to national identity and seeking to reclaim its cultural heritage.Footnote 85 He wore a coca leaf pin in his lapel on the campaign trail,Footnote 86 promising that his Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Leftist Revolutionary Movement, MIR) party would restore national dignity and sovereignty to Bolivia.Footnote 87 Upon taking office, he was critical of the Andean Initiative's militarised focus and argued on the international stage for a shift to a more development-led approach.Footnote 88 While his ADN coalition partners were more closely aligned to the United States, the Bolivian government generally looked to change the narrative around the nation's ‘drug problem’. Slogans such as ‘coca for development’, ‘coca is not cocaine’Footnote 89 and ‘shared responsibility’ played down US securitised conceptions of drugs and defended the reputation of the coca leaf.
These arguments also reflected pragmatic views of Bolivia's coca-cocaine economy. President Paz Estenssoro had implemented deep structural reforms as part of the Nueva Política Económica (New Economic Policy, NPE) in 1985. The government's neoliberal policies brought hyperinflation under control and made Bolivia a poster child of the Washington Consensus.Footnote 90 The three major Bolivian political parties – the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, MNR), ADN and MIR – were convinced of the necessities of continuing down the path of neoliberal reform.Footnote 91 However, the social costs of these policies were high: levels of poverty increased, living standards dropped and unemployment soared.Footnote 92 As one of the few booming areas of the economy, the coca-cocaine trade offered a solution for many of those affected. A US government report in 1991 estimated that 350,000 people were directly or indirectly reliant on coca for income and the drug trade accounted for up to 30 per cent of Bolivia's GDP.Footnote 93 It was also widely accepted that cocaine dollars had helped to stabilise national reserves during the country's mid-decade debt crisis, an ‘unintended consequence’ of neoliberal reforms that lifted capital controls in the banking sector.Footnote 94 In addition to this, Bolivia did not experience high levels of drug-related violence. Comparing Bolivia to Colombia, with its descent into violence, former Interior Minister Carlos Saavedra claimed: ‘Here, drug trafficking was not violent. Here, there had been no bomb blasts or kidnappings of politicians, journalists or judges. Here, there had been practically no revenge killings by traffickers.’Footnote 95 These realities created a level of ambivalence towards the illicit economy. Former-president Jaime Paz Zamora stated, ‘Dirty money, yes, but [money] that enters our country: [investment] that will die if we combat [the drug trade]’.Footnote 96 During negotiations over the Andean Initiative, therefore, the Bolivian government argued for policies that recognised these dynamics.
The Bolivian government claimed success in these negotiations, winning significant concessions. Paz Zamora took a similar approach to his predecessor, leveraging the drug issue for further economic support to mitigate and bolster the government's neoliberal reforms.Footnote 97 The APTA free-trade deal and more funding for alternative development aimed to reduce the national economy's dependence on coca. Bolivia would also receive US$830 million in aid over the course of the planned five-year initiative, with a sizeable proportion allotted to Economic Support Funds (ESFs) (see Figure 1).Footnote 98 ESF funding would be used to compensate for the economic effects of curbing the drug trade, as well as for financing ‘government payment of US and multilateral debt and US exports to the Bolivian private sector’.Footnote 99 Support was linked to counter-drug targets and back-loaded, i.e. designed to kick in as interdiction and eradication efforts took hold. ‘I more than achieved my objectives’, Paz Zamora argued. ‘I was going [to Washington] with the problem of opening the market and [easing] the external debt. We resolved it thanks to direct conversations with the President.’Footnote 100 As the policy was implemented, though, cracks began to appear: ‘Bush was a very good president, but the administration was bad.’Footnote 101
Figure 1. US Counter-Drug Related Assistance to Bolivia (1987–95)
Actors within the Bolivian government believed that enforcement-led policies had come to dominate the US approach. Indicating a gap between the policy as written and the policy as executed, one ADN senior minister argued that ‘the plan didn't work, because we were never able to give the same intensity to the two dimensions [of the strategy]. The United States each time pressured us more on the issue of repression [and] they didn't show anything tangible’ on the development aspect of the Andean Initiative.Footnote 102 For example, alternative development programmes were plagued by problems of design and funding, with the United States’ development agency USAID refusing to engage local coca unions in the planning and implementation of projects.Footnote 103 The perception that the US embassy was more interested in waging a drug war than in advancing democracy and development linked into fears over the ‘Colombianisation’ of Bolivia.Footnote 104 Here, the militarised approach of the United States threatened to spark drug-related violence and economic crisis. Former Interior Minister Guillermo Capobianco stated that ‘there was great pressure for counter-drug policies to be more indiscriminate; tougher, give more emphasis to repression, less emphasis to prevention or alternative development’.Footnote 105 Given local realities and ambivalence towards the coca-cocaine economy, the US approach was at times viewed as representing the greater threat to social, political and economic stability.Footnote 106 Such instability had potentially serious implications for Bolivia's still recent democratic transition of 1982. These concerns transcended drug war goals and underpinned resistance to US strategies of control.
The ‘Democracy Generation’, the Cold War Legacy and Yankee Imperialism
For Bolivia's ‘democracy generation’, protecting the political transition was advanced as an overriding priority. Paz Zamora's government had come to power in the second free and fair election of Bolivia's post-transition period. To prevent legislative deadlock, Paz Zamora's MIR formed a political pact with former dictator – and former persecutor of the MIR – Hugo BanzerFootnote 107 and his right-wing ADN party. While criticised by some for perpetuating Bolivia's patronage politics, this Acuerdo Patriótico (Patriotic Agreement) was hailed as representing a new spirit of compromise and democracy. Paz Zamora described this dynamic by reference to the MIR's struggles under authoritarianism, and the party's commitment to preserving Bolivia's fledgling democracy.
I'm from what's called – what some in Bolivia call – the democracy generation. We were moved to consider the idea of a democratic Bolivia, because we were born in the Bolivia of the military golpista […] This was our struggle. We were seven years in the underground resistance against the military, with all that entailed: exile, imprisonment.Footnote 108
These experiences had imbued actors such as Paz Zamora with a sense of mission. Forming an alliance with a former enemy demonstrated his commitment to ensuring ‘democratic governability’ and engendering a ‘democratic culture’ for the first time in Bolivia. Resistance to US drug war control was framed against this democratising narrative. Where US actors saw misguided denial of the ‘drug problem’ and narco-corruption, Bolivian actors declared their defence of the country's vital interests – specifically, sustaining a still fragile democratic transition. As fellow MIRista Guillermo Capobianco explained, ‘The topic of drugs wasn't a priority for us. Transforming the country was. For the country to transition from the dictatorship of Banzer to democracy: this was our priority. Political stability, economic stability, these were our priorities.’Footnote 109
Ambassador Gelbard's abrasive style and the embassy's strategies of control, including the use of US economic power, bypassing of senior officials and pressuring to remove ‘corrupt’ actors created the sense that Bolivian sovereignty was being compromised. ‘We had a strong-willed ambassador of a type … how should I put it? A fanatic’, stated Capobianco; ‘the level of dependence on the United States [meant] that the suggestions of the ambassador were not really suggestions. They were orders. He was saying, “Right, [expletive], do this.”’Footnote 110 To actors such as Capobianco, animosity towards the United States stemmed not only from opposition to the drug war approach, but also from the MIR's leftist roots and the legacy of the Cold War.
While going on to adopt a broadly social democratic agenda, the MIR had radical beginnings in the student movement. This radicalism had included admiration for the Cuban Revolution and anti-US sentiment. Capobianco claimed that the party's history coloured relations with the US embassy. He believed that its victory had irritated the United States, and that its subsequent deal with Banzer had blind-sided the embassy. Discussing his ministerial responsibility for counter-drugs, Capobianco argued that ‘There was distrust of our party due to the way we entered government […] I got the poisoned chalice of combatting drugs […] The American ambassador did not want me. He considered me a bloody lefty.’Footnote 111 Indicating that Capobianco's beliefs were not without some substance, Cason stated that the embassy had ‘wrongly’ viewed the MIR as an ‘extremist far left party’, and noted a ‘tendency in those days, unfortunately, to stay away from the left, rather than to try to get to know them and influence their thinking’.Footnote 112
From the perspective of MIRistas within the Bolivian government, this Cold War legacy had significant implications for the conduct of the US drug war in Bolivia. The ‘war on drugs’ may have replaced the Cold War as justification for US engagement in Bolivia, but the same tendencies remained. ‘They faced [the “war on drugs”] with the Cold War mentality’, Paz Zamora argued; ‘it was the same personnel that had fought the Cold War. [They] didn't retire, they moved on to another enemy and they took the issue of the day, which was drug trafficking.’Footnote 113 In support of US geopolitical Cold War goals, such personnel had backed authoritarian regimes, including the Banzer dictatorship, and had helped to suppress leftist actors, such as the MIR. Drawing on narratives of Yankee imperialism, Paz Zamora argued that similar US interference in Bolivian politics was evident during his government, although this time in service of the drug war and neoliberal goals. The post-Cold War US view was ‘“This planet is ours, including Bolivia.” [The United States] was already involved in everything here.’Footnote 114 According to this view, US embassy accusations of narco-corruption primarily served to eliminate legitimate opposition to US policy and advance the drug war strategy.
Accusations of Narco-Corruption
The capture of Colonel Luis Arce Gómez exposed many of these tensions. Arce Gómez had backed the notorious ‘cocaine coup’ in which right-wing elements of the Bolivian military formed an alliance with the country's drug traffickers to overthrow the democratically elected leftist coalition, the Unidad Democrática y Popular (Democratic and Popular Unity, UDP) and install the regime of General Luis García Meza (1980–1). Following its collapse Arce Gómez, the ‘Minister for Cocaine’ – as he had been dubbed by the US mediaFootnote 115 – went on the run to escape prosecution for his complicity in human rights abuses and drug trafficking. In early 1989, the US embassy received intelligence that Arce Gómez was living openly in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. Reportedly fearful of the consequences of bringing the former colonel's case to a Bolivian court, Paz Zamora authorised the US embassy to lead the operation and secretly transport Arce Gómez for trial in the United States. Indicating Bolivian perceptions around the fragility of the transition, Gelbard claimed that Paz Zamora ‘still feared a military coup, even though the military was discredited’.Footnote 116 The joint DEA-FELCN operation was completed in December 1989 and, despite the lack of a US–Bolivian extradition treaty, Arce Gómez was convicted in Miami of drug trafficking offences.
The operation and its fall-out deepened mistrust between the US embassy and the Bolivian government. Interior Minister Guillermo Capobianco had been completely bypassed in the operation. ‘We didn't trust Capobianco’, explained Gelbard; ‘we didn't tell Capobianco what we were doing because we were afraid he would blow it. He was from Santa Cruz, and we didn't know what his connections might be with Arce Gómez.’Footnote 117 Capobianco claimed that such exclusion was not unusual, as the United States frequently marginalised his office in the planning and execution of counter-drug operations. He stated that during ‘the most important operation of my time with respect to combating the mafias [the capture of Arce Gómez], I was at a barbeque […] Nobody had told me.’Footnote 118
Relations would reach their nadir shortly thereafter, though, following the appointment of Faustino Rico Toro to the head of the FELCN in February 1991. To many observers, Rico Toro's appointment was baffling. The former colonel had been heavily implicated in drug trafficking and human rights abuses during Bolivia's authoritarian period.Footnote 119 In replacing trusted US drug war ally General Lucio Áñez, the Bolivian government came under immediate pressure. Paz Zamora defended the decision as an attempt to reaffirm Bolivian sovereignty over counter-drug operations.
[Áñez] was suffering from heart problems. It was bad. Not only could he not work, [but] his character was failing; he was fading. The DEA and the entire American administration were abusing this, and they acted as they liked. So, I said, ‘Right, we're going to put in a Bolivian military man from days gone by; a military man with nerve.’ And Rico Toro was there, who was this type of guy, and he hadn't been involved in drug trafficking. But he was from that era, this phase of Bolivian military [government], and he carried out certain functions. He was the President of the Corporación del Desarrollo [Development Corporation] de Cochabamba, and he was a member of General Banzer's party, who was our ally, so I put him in. I didn't know him well, but I put him in because he was a man – tough – and the Americans wouldn't be able to do whatever they wanted with him. This was the problem; as simple as that.Footnote 120
From this perspective, Paz Zamora had reasserted Bolivian control, inhibiting the US drug war proxy model. Gonzalo Torrico, an ADN government minister, stated that ‘Capobianco told [the United States] that this is a sovereign country; that the government can name whomever it sees fit.’Footnote 121 The embassy, though, saw it as a cynical attempt to slow down progress in the fight against the coca-cocaine trade and to protect narco-allies: ‘We were engaged in trying to train highly capable Bolivian units; […] hard to do, because people would get transferred […] The government didn't want people to be too capable.’Footnote 122
Despite Rico Toro's strong connection to US ally ADN, the embassy held Paz Zamora and the MIRistas responsible for the appointment.Footnote 123 Indeed, Ambassador Gelbard lobbied ADN members of the government – reportedly aghast at the news – for Rico Toro's removal: ‘I went to see General Banzer, and I said, “This is just beyond the pale, unacceptable. This will destroy the relationship. I have frozen all your aid. I will get others to do so too.”’Footnote 124 This show of US economic and geopolitical power ensured that the decision to appoint Rico Toro was quickly reversed. Sensing blood, the embassy then went after other ‘corrupt’ officials. The embassy claimed that Paz Zamora's government had received ‘drug trafficker money for their election campaign’; that ‘Guillermo Capobianco was the bag man for all this’, and that he was aided by ‘the man who became National Police Chief [Felipe Carvajal]’.Footnote 125 Using the Rico Toro case as leverage, the embassy secured the resignations of both men.
I called the President and I told him [that] I really needed to talk to him about further corruption problems. He invited me over to his house, we sat down and went through a bottle and a half of Scotch whisky. I remember – my wife remembers – I stumbled home, and I fell into bed saying, ‘God, what I do for my country!’ He agreed to get rid of them.Footnote 126
Leveraging Political Opponents?
The exercise of US control was thus backed by the regional hegemon's power, used to maintain its drug war proxies and remove supposedly corrupt officials. For Capobianco, though, the US embassy's efforts to remove him stemmed not from corruption, but from his leftist background and outspoken criticism of the United States. Aside from his radical leftist roots, he had publicly criticised the US embassy for its failure to provide adequate weaponry to the anti-narcotics police. On a visit to UMOPAR's base in the Chapare, and in the presence of the media and DEA officials, Capobianco ‘said strongly, in raised voice, “I'm giving the Ambassador a 72-hour deadline to change these arms and put in place modern, functioning arms.”’Footnote 127 Capobianco claimed the US embassy never forgave him for his actions, which challenged the United States and its commitment to counter-drug efforts. According to this narrative, US drug war control was used to leverage the removal of a politician perceived as hostile to the United States.
Indeed, Paz Zamora argued that the ‘war on drugs’ was widely applied against him and the MIR. Prior to his presidency, Paz Zamora had come under scrutiny after pictures emerged of him meeting with known drug trafficker and former army captain Isaac ‘Oso’ Chavarría. Allegations of narco-links re-emerged following the end of his term, as Chavarría was captured in January 1994 and began to disclose the supposed details of his relationship with the MIR. A congressional investigation resulted in the arrest and prosecution of Oscar Eid – a prominent MIRista – for his role in accepting campaign contributions from Chavarría. Paz Zamora accepted that Chavarría was friendly with the MIR and that he had provided ‘in-kind’ support to election campaigns, but asserted that no money had changed hands.Footnote 128 Meetings between the MIR and Chavarría were dismissed as ‘an error, but not a crime’.Footnote 129 The US embassy contradicted this, stating ‘that Paz Zamora and others in his political party had received funds’ from the drug trafficker, accusing the now-former president ‘of providing cover for Chavarría during his tenure’.Footnote 130 As a result, Paz Zamora's US visa was revoked in 1996, alongside those of several other MIR members.
For Paz Zamora, the episode demonstrated attempts by the United States, in conjunction with its Bolivian political allies, to sabotage his political career. He argued that most military officers of the García Meza period had links to the drug trade. While Chavarría was no different in this regard, Paz Zamora claimed that he had left these links behind by the time he expressed support for the party. ‘The other parties saw that this type of guy had approached us, and they all used it politically against me’, claimed Paz Zamora, ‘and later, the American embassy used it, but [only] when I had left the presidency’.Footnote 131 Accusations of corruption were thus used as a political weapon against Paz Zamora and the MIR: ‘We were the youngest party, the new boys […] If anyone had problems with drug trafficking, it was the old parties: the MNR, ADN.’ The goal of the United States in all of this was clear to Paz Zamora: ‘To sanction a president who had rebelled against certain things and to give a message to the political world: be careful! […] I confronted the Americans on the way they wanted to act in counter-drugs and also on their neoliberal policies. [I tried to] address the abuses and the militarisation, the violence. I didn't want violence to arrive here.’Footnote 132 In this view, the United States aimed to discredit Paz Zamora and his record, ensuring more favourable conditions for the neoliberal agenda of his ‘US-backed’ successor Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (MNR). ‘They were sure that I was going to return after Sánchez de Lozada and reverse [his programme of privatisation]’, Paz Zamora argued; ‘these were the typical psychological warfare operations that came from Cold War working methods […] The “war on drugs”, like the Cold War, was used to justify everything.’Footnote 133
The idea that the United States had used supposed drug links to target political enemies had a long history in Bolivia. It was argued that the United States held back evidence of drug links until opportune moments. This tactic would be used to maintain control over troublesome actors, protect allies or eliminate rivals. For example, in 1961 prominent leftist and labour leader Juan Lechín temporarily withdrew from politics following accusations of drug corruption by the US embassy and Bolivia's right-wing press.Footnote 134 Furthermore, Hugo Rodas Morales argues that former allies of García Meza were targeted for their involvement in the drug trade post-1982, while Banzer-aligned officers and politicians were kept in play.Footnote 135 The reason: Banzer and the ADN continued to be useful assets for the United States. The threat of scandal, it was argued, forced ‘the major political parties into a constant state of alert, [keeping] Bolivian policy in line with US demands […] Those Bolivian collaborators closest to the US embassy generally [had] skeletons in their own closets.’Footnote 136 In this view, corruption allegations formed part of the US agenda of control in Bolivia: the instrumentalisation of the ‘war on drugs’ followed in the historic lineage of US Cold War tactics.
The Repentance Decree
Demonstrating the fluidity of power relations, though, the Paz Zamora government introduced the Decreto de Arrepentimiento (Repentance Decree) in July 1991. This Bolivian-led initiative offered reduced sentences for drug traffickers who turned themselves in and cooperated with the authorities. In contrast to the US securitised approach, it sought a negotiated settlement with organised crime. Different conceptualisations of Bolivia's ‘drug problem’ once more came to the fore, as the government applied a policy aligned with Bolivian priorities.
The US embassy argued that Bolivia's presence in the global drug trade had increased over the course of Paz Zamora's administration. Whereas previously Bolivian coca paste had been exported to Colombia for final processing, Gelbard claimed that local traffickers had shifted to producing and transporting cocaine via their own, more lucrative, routes.Footnote 137 ‘The Americans wanted to sustain the theory that Bolivia was already a producer of cocaine, a world producer of cocaine’, Paz Zamora argued; ‘I never accepted this; I rejected it.’Footnote 138 US officials were adamant, though, that ‘Bolivia had become the second-largest cocaine producer after Colombia’, processing one-third of Bolivian coca-paste into cocaine within the country by 1990.Footnote 139 Notoriously problematic statistics on the illicit economyFootnote 140 were used to counter the Bolivian narrative that the country's role in the drug trade was limited to humble coca cultivation. The US embassy painted a picture of increasingly influential native criminal organisations posing a threat to Bolivian society and politics. As such, the embassy argued that the development-led approach favoured by Paz Zamora was insufficient to deal with the ‘security threat’ of Bolivia's coca-cocaine economy. Aligning with this narrative, the US embassy planned a large DEA-UMOPAR operation in June 1991: a raid designed to secure state authority in ‘Bolivia's Medellín’, Santa Ana de Yacuma (Beni department). The aftermath of the operation would open space for the Bolivian government to push for a different approach.
Although the US embassy claimed the operation had significantly disrupted the drug trade and re-established ‘Bolivian sovereignty over Santa Ana’, no major traffickers were arrested.Footnote 141 Moreover, the raid became a major source of US–Bolivian discord. In the midst of the operation, the local navy garrison commander was detained and accused of collusion with drug traffickers.Footnote 142 Military officers rallied against the actions of the DEA and UMOPAR, claiming that the commander had been assaulted, and that the United States had exceeded its authority.Footnote 143 Gelbard's robust public defence of the operation and further accusations of high-level corruption in the Bolivian military stirred more anti-US sentiment,Footnote 144 while reports of heavy-handedness and police brutality added to the public backlash.Footnote 145 Interior Minister (1991–3) Carlos Saavedra claimed that ‘The city had been very angry about the intervention. The army had arrived, the police [and] planes, so the population was afraid: kids, people sought refuge in the churches. [It was] like a film.’Footnote 146 The incident seemed to confirm Bolivian fears over the ‘Colombianisation’ of the country, and the view that US counter-drug operations risked Bolivia's stability.
Believing that they had been marginalised in the execution of the Santa Ana operation, the Bolivian government sought to capitalise on the negative spin around the episode and reassert control. The government introduced new limits on DEA operationsFootnote 147 and, more significantly, the Repentance Decree. Saavedra described the aftermath of the operation as an opportunity to take a different approach, claiming that the residents of Santa Ana and drug traffickers themselves wished to cooperate with the government.
A Mrs Roca delivered a letter to me [while I was still in Santa Ana], in which she explained that her husband wanted to turn himself in. I took the letter away, I read it, and it said that her children couldn't study in foreign schools because the American and Europeans knew about their life and they blocked their studies. And that they didn't have a social life; they lived in hiding and the family were outcasts, because of the husband.Footnote 148
Just over a month after the raid, the Repentance Decree was passed. In contrast to a similar measure in Colombia, Saavedra argued that it was a success: ‘This was the best road for the counter-drug fight in Bolivia. Why? Because there was no violence.’Footnote 149
The decree halted work towards the introduction of a new US–Bolivian extradition treaty, a major goal of the US embassy.Footnote 150 The embassy also viewed it as allowing traffickers ‘off the hook’. Where the United States had successfully imposed its will in other areas of drug policy, here the Bolivian government asserted its own vision. Adding to tensions, Paz Zamora pushed through the decree while Ambassador Gelbard was out of the country.Footnote 151 According to Saavedra, ‘When [Gelbard] saw the decree he threw out a cry to the heavens, got angry and said we should never have made the decree without consulting with them, […] saying that the United States was not going to permit it.’Footnote 152
The surrender of seven of Bolivia's top ten traffickers less than six months after the introduction of the decree was held as vindication of this stance. Some argued, though, that heightened US-led militarised counter-drug efforts and the possible threat of extradition underpinned the willingness of the traffickers to turn themselves in. Other critics claimed that reduced sentencing and the prospect of continuing to direct business from prison was too good an opportunity for the traffickers to turn down.Footnote 153 It was clear that the ‘repentant ones’ had agreed collectively to hand themselves over to the authorities. There were doubts over the veracity of their testimonies, including statements accounting for their drug wealth.Footnote 154 Regardless of these criticisms, the decree was hailed as a success by the Bolivian government, representing an alternative approach to that of the United States to the problem of drug trafficking. The decree placed local Bolivian priorities ahead of drug war goals.
Conclusion
In summary, the implementation of the Andean Initiative in Bolivia demonstrates the contested nature of US counter-drug policy at the country level. US actors were largely informed by the language and logic of securitisation. The perceived security threat posed by the coca-cocaine economy was used to justify US counter-drug efforts in Bolivia. US strategies of control included bypassing ‘uncooperative’ elements of the Bolivian government and pressuring for the removal of ‘drug-tainted’ officials. These practices were held as complementary to stated US goals of forwarding free-market, liberal democracies throughout the region. By contrast, the drug trade was generally not conceptualised as a national security threat within the Bolivian government, given its relatively peaceful nature and importance to the national economy. Militarised US counter-drug policies were instead seen as posing a threat to social, political and economic stability. Bolivian interlocutors spoke of the drug war's place within the broader function of US foreign policy in Bolivia. The US embassy's use of leverage over the Bolivian government, for example, represented the continuation of Cold War-era ‘imperialist’ politics and tactics: voices critical of US policy were targets of drug corruption allegations. For the self-proclaimed ‘democracy generation’, the preservation of the country's still fragile transition was prioritised over the ‘war on drugs’. This goal led to resistance to securitised US drug war policies, as the Bolivian government attempted to navigate domestic imperatives and external US drug war demands.
Accounting for ‘on-the-ground’ dynamics and the ‘messiness’ of counter-drug policy implementation, the article thus advances a more nuanced understanding of drug war power relations than more simplistic US-centric analyses. The exercise of US geopolitical and economic power was evident in the export of the Andean Initiative to Bolivia, while narratives of the drug war shaped the perspectives of key US and Bolivian actors of the period. However, the article also demonstrates the need to move beyond these top-down approaches, widening analysis beyond narrow ‘drug fetishism’. The issue of counter-drug policy was absorbed into the distinct agendas of multiple actors, with historical forces, such as the legacy of the Cold War, weighing on interactions between them. Different narratives wove these agendas together: domestic imperatives of the drug war ‘justified’ US actions in Bolivia, and consolidation of democratic transition ‘justified’ resistance to US securitisation. This contextualised analytical approach reveals the instrumentalisation of the ‘war on drugs’ in US–Bolivian relations of power and control. Such insights deepen our understanding of how the US drug war has unfolded in Latin America.
Bolivia has since cut a new path in its approach to the coca-cocaine economy, although many similar dynamics from the Andean Initiative period may be identified. Evo Morales – a prominent coca union leader at that time – rose to the presidency in 2006, in part propelled by his strong opposition to US influence in Bolivia. Bolstered by fellow ‘pink tide’ governments in the region and booming international prices for Bolivian commodities, Morales resisted US control. The Bolivian government severed counter-drug cooperation with the United States, expelling Ambassador Philip Goldberg in September 2008, then the DEA in January 2009. Morales accused the United States of meddling in the internal affairs of the country, drawing on familiar themes of Yankee imperialism. The US response has also followed a similar path. The US government has decertified Bolivia on multiple occasions for ‘failing’ to fulfil its drug control obligations, while accusing Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) party of narco-corruption.Footnote 155 Despite this, Bolivia continues to reject securitised drug war policies, again reflecting the view that these lie contrary to local priorities. The Morales government's policy of ‘social control’, for example, seeks a collaborative approach with coca-growing communities in limiting cultivation and fostering sustainable development.Footnote 156 It represents a distinctly Bolivian solution to the coca-cocaine economy. Once again, diverging drug war narratives are used by US and Bolivian actors to project particular agendas. However, where officials of the Paz Zamora government had sought to keep the United States on side while pursuing distinct Bolivian aims, Morales’ repudiation of US influence has been clear and decisive. The issue of drug control remains embedded in US–Bolivian power relations.
Author ORCIDs
Allan Gillies, 0000-0002-4578-7957
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to Mo Hume for her helpful comments on early drafts of this article. My thanks go also to the reviewers and editors for engaging with my work and providing constructive feedback. Finally, I am grateful to all of those who participated in this research. Interview participants were uniformly generous with their time, courteous and helpful.
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under Grant ES/P009875/1; and the University of Glasgow Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Scholarship scheme.
Annex A Interview Participants
