Copyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2001
Mar 25, 2002
The powerful car bomb explosion last Thursday near the US Embassy in Lima, killing nine and wounding 30, was a disturbing prelude to the visit to Peru of President George Bush, who has vowed to `fight `terrorism around the world.'
Bush declared he wouldn't be put off by `two-bit terrorists.' But the suspected bombers, the notorious Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, are anything but `two-bit' terrorists. The Sendero has battled fiercely for three decades to impose a Marxist dictatorship on Peru patterned on Enver Hoxah's crazy Stalinist Albania and Pol Pot's nightmare Cambodia.
In 1985, I was the first North American journalist to interview Peru's then newly elected president, Alan Garcia. I asked Garcia how his government was coping with the Sendero Luminoso, whose guerillas were terrorizing the Andes, waging urban guerilla warfare, and had almost brought the government to its knees. `I can assure you,' Garcia said, `the security situation is completely under control.' Moments later, two mortar shells exploded outside the presidential palace. Garcia shrugged and gave a sheepish smile.
Peru's last president, the tough authoritarian Alberto Fujimori, now in exile in Japan plotting a return, had nearly crushed the Sendero and another dangerous Marxist guerilla group, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru. But after Fujimori was replaced by the softer, more leftward leaning President Alejandro Toledo, Sendero regrouped and appears to be renewing its war against the US-backed Lima government. In his Lima press conference, Bush managed to mispronounce his host's name several times while saying how deeply impressed he was with Peru's new leader.
This time, the Sendero is being fueled by a steady inflow of drug money. Following the example of Colombia's Marxist FARC and ELN narco-guerilla armies, the Sendero earns tens of millions annually protecting Peru's expanding cocaine industry. The Bush Administration's efforts to combat the drug trade in Colombia through spraying toxic pesticides and attacking processing labs has merely pushed the underground drug industry across the jungled borders into Ecuador and Peru.
The much vaunted US war on drugs has proven a total failure in Latin America. The flow of cocaine and heroin into the US has not been reduced, in spite of billions spent to block the flood of narcotics. Ironically, the only nation where the US war on drugs did work was in Afghanistan - thanks to its former Taliban regime. According to the UN drug control agency, Taliban virtually halted cultivation and trade of heroin-producing opium poppies. Afghanistan supplied 80% of Europe's heroin and about 60% of America's heroin. The American invasion and overthrow of Taliban handed power to the Russian-backed Northern Alliance, which fully revived the Afghan heroin trade and now controls 90% of drug exports.
In Afghanistan, Bush's so-called war against terrorism collided head on with his war against drugs. The latter lost. The Northern Alliance, the real power behind the US-installed Karzai client regime in Kabul, pays its fighters and buys its arms from the Russians with heroin money. The US simply turned a blind eye to large-scale drug dealing by its new Afghan allies, just as it did in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Central America, and, for years, with Mexico.
The White House is now under increasing pressure to increase the $1 billion in US aid to Colombia and switch from assisting a campaign against coca producers to all-out combat operations against FARC and ELN guerillas. The Colombian government's inept 136,000-man army has been unable to defeat the FARC's and ELF's roughly 20,000 Marxist guerillas, so the US is now being asked by Bogota for combat troops and fleets of helicopters. An expanded war in Colombia would quickly spill over into Ecuador, Peru, and, possibly into Panama and Venezuela, all economically stressed and politically shaky nations.
Growing instability and violence in northern Latin America will challenge the Bush Administration's plans to launch a large crusade against Iraq, and smaller ones against the diverse Muslim groups opposed to American influence, or those fighting for independence from oppressive rule - all simplistically lumped together by Bush as `terrorists.' Just last week in Afghanistan, the US lost eight soldiers and dropped 3,300 expensive precision bombs against willow-the-whisp opponents in a failed battle in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that the Pentagon claimed was a big victory . America's arsenals are depleted; its military forces stretched thin - and the crusade against the nefarious `axis of evil' hasn't even been launched yet.
The 19th-century American cynic Ambrose Bierce observed that Americans learn their geography from wars. Six months before becoming president, George Bush couldn't name the leader of Pakistan - whom he today hails as a champion of democracy and America's new best friend. In Peru, the non-geographic president will begin to discover the complexities of long-neglected Latin America. He will no doubt discover the continent is rich in new `terrorists,' as the Lima bombing amply demonstrated. Terrorists in Peru and Colombia. Plotting Cubans. Islamic fanatics in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, West Bank and Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Central Asia, Chechnya, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Egypt, Paraguay. America's enemies are everywhere. Even in Detroit and Brooklyn.
Bush says he will defend America by fighting them all. But, as Frederick the Great rightly noted, `he who defends everything, defends nothing.'
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