Playing the Cocaine Card II

As mentioned earlier, in a strategic effort to destabilize Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the Bush administration has been mounting its rhetoric accusing Venezuela of facilitating narcotraffic from Colombia through Venezuela.

Following is a recent example:

The cocaine passing through Venezuela on President Hugo Chavez’s watch has risen by as much as 30 tons a year since 2002, reaching an estimated 300 tons in 2006, according to U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield.

The Bush administration had previously been implicated in the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002, according to a story in the British paper, The Observer.

Playing the Cocaine Card

Look for the Bush administration to intensify its rhetoric alleging Venezuela is becoming an increasingly popular drug route, as per a recent MSNBC story:

The spread of the coca frontier eastward toward Venezuela is in line with comments by U.S. anti-drug officials who have alleged that corruption within the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may be converting Colombia’s neighbor into a major drug route.

Similar language was used by the Reagan administration and Oliver North in the 1980’s to destabilize the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, despite evidence that US-supported Nicaraguan Contras were involved in drug trafficking.

A Pattern Emerges

At the risk of being cynical, the two-act tragic comedy moves on to….

Act 3: April 30, 2007

(04-30) 19:31 PDT BOGOTA, Columbia (AP) –

Colombia’s navy made the largest drug seizure in the nation’s history when it uncovered about 27 tons of cocaine buried along the Pacific coast, the defense minister said Monday.

The cocaine, with a wholesale value of more than $500 million, was found Sunday buried in 1,000 packages of 55 pounds each near the coastal town of Pizarro, 250 miles west of Bogota, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a news conference.

Santos said the seizure was the result of eight months of undercover police work and he called it the “biggest in the history of Colombia.”

The cocaine was buried near an estuary accessible only by sea, he said.

There were no arrests in the operation, but the drugs were believed to belong to Colombia’s biggest drug trafficking organization, the Norte del Valle cartel, which operates near the area.

Colombia is the world’s leading cocaine producer, producing annually more than 500 tons of cocaine that represents 90 percent of the drug consumed in the United States.

Most of the cocaine leaves the country by sea, on go-fast boats that transport the drugs up along the Central American coast for their eventual smuggling into the United States overland through Mexico.

Although drug seizures are an everyday affair, they rarely reach such large numbers. Last October, Colombia’s navy made headlines when it found 9.3 tons of cocaine on three go-fast boats near the Pacific coastal port city of Buenaventura — its biggest seizure of the year.

President Alvaro Uribe travels to Washington on Tuesday to shore up support on Capitol Hill and the White House for the U.S.-backed Plan Colombia, an anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency program that has cost American taxpayers more than $5 billion since 2000.

A Two-Act Tragic Comedy

Act 1: May 18, 2000

The Associated Press

BOGOTA, Colombia (May 18, 2000 10:10 a.m. EDT -
A police search of a farm near Colombia’s Caribbean coast turned up more than five tons of cocaine stashed in an underground cellar, authorities said Wednesday.

Six men were arrested in the operation, one of the largest single cocaine seizures ever in the South American country that produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s cocaine.

The search involving police and naval units occurred Tuesday in San Onofre, a town 240 miles north of Bogota near the Gulf of Morrosquillo.

Before the raid, cocaine warehoused on the farm was moved by speedboat to larger ships that carried the drugs toward the United States, said Jorge Lagos, the state security police director in Bolivar State.

The huge drug seizure comes as the U.S. Congress debates a Clinton Administration plan to give Colombia more than a billion dollars to combat cocaine and heroin trafficking.

President Andres Pastrana flew to the nearby port of Cartagena on Wednesday to inspect the 5.2-ton stash, which was brought by helicopter from the farm where it was found.

“Once again we are dealing blows to the great financiers of violence in Colombia,” the president said.

The cocaine bricks laid out at the president’s feet represent one percent of Colombia’s 520 ton annual production of the drug. Pastrana put the drug’s street value at $1.2 billion, about what his government hopes to receive from Washington.

In December, 1998, police in Cartagena discovered more than 7 tons of cocaine hidden in shipping containers modified to conceal it. Officials called it the largest cocaine seizure ever on Colombia soil.

More on Act 1.

Act 2: May 13, 2005

Friday, May 13, 2005 Posted: 2:16 PM EDT (1816 GMT)

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) — Colombian authorities seized $300 million worth of cocaine that far-right paramilitaries had stashed on a jungle riverbank, the police said Friday, in their biggest drug bust in five years.

Police and the Navy confiscated 12 tons of cocaine hidden on the banks of the River Mira, near the Pacific Ocean port of Tumaco in southern Colombia, in an operation lasting several days that ended early Friday.

With a street value of about $25,000 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) in the United States, where police think the drugs were headed, the cocaine would sell for a total of about $300 million.

“This is the biggest seizure in the country in the last five years,” [see Act 1] the head of Colombia’s judicial police, Col. Oscar Naranjo, told Reuters.

The drugs belonged to members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, an outlawed far-right militia known by its Spanish initials AUC that has killed thousands of people in its brutal campaign against Marxist rebels, Naranjo said.

The seizure came just as the U.S. Congress debates a Bush administration request for $600 million in aid money for Colombia’s anti-cocaine effort.

Some congressmen have complained that there is no evidence showing the amount of cocaine on U.S. streets has declined despite more than $3 billion in assistance to Colombia since 2000.

Armed agents made five arrests and seized nine assault rifles, communications equipment and eight boats in the operation.

Working with the United States, Colombian authorities have significantly increased seizures in recent years, and confiscated 148 tons of cocaine last year.

The lawlessness caused by a four-decade-long guerrilla war has helped make Colombia the worlds largest producer of the drug, with the U.S. government estimating the countrys criminals produced about 430 tons in 2004.

But this is down from about 700 tons in 2001, thanks to a U.S.-backed program of spraying illegal coca crops.

Critics of the program point out that U.S. street prices for cocaine have hardly budged over the period, indicating that just as much is probably flowing into the country as ever.

Both the AUC and Marxist rebels draw on cocaine money to buy weapons in a conflict that claims thousands of lives a year. But, while they are bloody rivals on the battlefield, the AUC often cooperates with the rebels in the drug trade.

The paramilitaries probably bought the cocaine found on the River Mira from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Naranjo said.

The story originally appeared here.