By Phillip Smith
Last Friday, the White House released its annual score card on other countries’ compliance with US drug policy demands, the presidential determination on major drug producing and trafficking countries. It identified 22 countries as “major drug transit and/or major illicit drug producing countries,” but listed only three — Bolivia, Burma, and Venezuela — as having “failed demonstrably” to comply with US drug war objectives.
Among those countries that are not listed as having “failed demonstrably” are the world’s largest opium producer (Afghanistan), the world’s two largest coca and cocaine producers (Colombia and Peru), the leading springboard for drugs coming into the US (Mexico), and the weak Central American states that serve as lesser springboards for drug loads destined for the US. They are all US allies; Bolivia and Venezuela are not.
Both the Bolivians and the Venezuelans responded angrily to the determination.
“We strongly reject the accusation… The United States is trying to ignore our government’s sovereign policies,” Alejandro Keleris, the head of Venezuela’s national anti-drug office, said late on Saturday in response to the US report.
Keleris said Venezuela had arrested more than 6,400 people for drug trafficking so far this year and seized almost 80,000 pounds of various drugs. Venezuela had arrested over a hundred drug gang bosses since 2006 and extradited at least 75 of them, including some to the US, he said.
Drug enforcement ties between Washington and Caracas have been strained since at least 2005, when then President Hugo Chavez threw the DEA out of the country, accusing it of intervening in internal Venezuelan affairs. Venezuela is not a drug producing nation, but has been a transit country for cocaine produced in Colombia.
Bolivia’s denunciation of the presidential determination was even stronger.
“The Bolivian government does not recognize the authority of the US government to certify or decertify the war on drugs,” Vice Minister of Social Defense and Controlled Substances Felipe Caceres said Saturday. “The only internationally accredited body is the UN, whose report was recently met.”
The UN report that Caceres referenced was last month’s Bolivian Coca Monitoring Survey, which found that the government of President Evo Morales had successfully reduced the number of acres under coca cultivation for the second year in a row.
“President Obama makes that statement even though only two months ago the Office of National Drug Control Policy of the White House verified that the total cocaine production in Bolivia has fallen by 18% since 2011,” the Bolivian government said last Friday. “The United States seeks to undermine that the government of President Evo Morales has achieved these things with dignity, sovereignty and social control without any type of interference from abroad.”
Like Venezuela, Bolivia has thrown out the DEA, which has been absent from the country for five years now. In May, Bolivia announced it had expelled a USAID official, and in June, the US embassy announced it was ending anti-drug efforts with the Bolivians.
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