Morales Will Just Say No to US Government Drug War Funds

This morning’s Los Tiempos (the Cochabamba daily) carries an article in which the MAS advisor responsible for security issues announced that the new government will stop accepting US funding for a host of Bolivian activities associated with the US War on Drugs.

Most people don’t realize that, in Bolivia, the army, the police, even prosecutors all get funding from the US government. And that isn’t about the US ¨just being helpful¨ with the bills. It is about having heavy influence in the domestic law enforcement of a nation.

Take the prosecutors, for example. According to a the former Public Advocate for Cochabamba (Defensor del Pueblo, a public office) the special prosecutors for drug-related charges receive a personal salary bonus directly from the US Embassy, often greater than their Bolivian government salaries. When I worked on a human rights case some years ago dealing with the prosecutors, we hired a former member of their team as a defense attorney. She told me, ¨If we heard it once, we heard it a hundred times, we have to justify the bonuses.¨

Is it any wonder that, according to the US Embassy itself, arrests on drug charges have leapt from 955 in1996 to 4,138 in 2004? The Embassy touts these figures as a measure of success in its Bolivian ¨War on Drugs¨ effort, not noting however that these are figures for arrests, not number of people guilty. And getting arrested on a drug charge is the name of the game in Bolivia. Thanks to an anti-drug law forced on Bolivia by the US in 1988, anyone accused is tossed in jail without any possibility of bail for a year and a half.

So as the hackles go up over the new Bolivian government just saying No to US War on Drugs funding, perhaps we might ask this question. How would the people of the US feel about government prosecutors in the US receiving monthly salary bonuses from, say China or Venezuela, or US police and military units receiving financial support from Argentina or India? My guess is that it would not go over too well at all.

Bolivia would also like to control its army and law enforcement, just as any nation would.
posted by The Demo