Drug cartels
Colombian official warns of drug cartels' growing reach
By Dane Shille, Houston Chronicle
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Santos laments lack of U.S. focus on Latin America
The United States should return its attention to Latin America because drug cartels are spreading their influence through the region and streets and nations are lost to crime, Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos said Tuesday.
"Drug trafficking has spread like a cancer, like a cancer, in countries with very weak institutions," Santos said during an interview with the Houston Chronicle editorial board, in an effort to promote the Andean nation as a strong partner to the United States. "You are going to have a huge problem on your hands in the very, very near future."
Santos, who in 1990 was kidnapped by then-cocaine king Pablo Escobar, said that while Colombia has wrestled mightily with drug cartels, worse could now be ahead for other nations.
The drug cartels are looking to Peru, Bolivia and other countries to expand their coca crops, he said, and Mexico, now home to the world's most powerful cartels, had better fortify itself.
"You need to be tough, really tough, because they are tough criminals and the business is so big that they will try to fight it out to the end," Santos said.
Colombia serves as an example of how dramatic a nation's battle with cartels can get.
Although activity has comparatively quieted there since the 1990s, the cartels had run roughshod over the society as they terrorized the population, murdered politicians and judges, and, in a famous incident, blew up an airliner in flight, killing an alleged witness and more than 100 others.
A region forgotten
Many Latin Americans have said the United States has largely forgotten about the region over the last six years as it has focused on the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fight against terrorism.
"You need to pay attention to the continent, and you don't see that, to tell you the truth," said Santos, a former newspaper editor who was elected in 2002.
He said the United States focuses largely on economic issues. "It is like the policy is free trade, that is it," he said. "Not good enough."
Santos held out his country's efforts to extradite drug traffickers to the United States and spray poison on crops as evidence of its policies, but conceded it has not had much success in reducing the supply - a problem many say is caused by the United States remaining the world's biggest cocaine market.
John Walsh, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights and foreign policy monitoring organization, said that although the amount of Colombian cocaine has not dropped, the Bogota government is doing more than any other country to eradicate coca crops.
It has also done a lot in terms of busting covert laboratories, arresting traffickers and extraditing major players to the United States, he said.
In 2000, a $5 billion Clinton administration initiative called Plan Colombia was enacted to help Colombia take on the cartels and attack illegal coca production.
Colombia is aggressively seeking to show that it is trying to be a good partner, Walsh said, in hopes of persuading U.S. lawmakers to approve a free-trade agreement. The accord, signed in November 2006, has been languishing in Congress.
"With regard to the trade deal," Walsh said, the Colombians "are saying, 'Do not treat us badly because we have been a good partner and want to remain that way' "
dane.schiller@chron.com
