DRUGS RETURN WITH A VENGEANCE

MIAMI President Clinton came to Miami on Thursday to raise money.

But lost in all the frenetic fundraising activity was some serious
government business to attend to namely, the drug war.

The president, accompanied by his drug policy director, retired Gen. Barry
McCaffrey, eagerly promoted what the administration says are its latest
successes in battling the drug trade. But what the White House calls
success, experts who monitor drug trafficking in the Caribbean region see
differently.

During a visit to the Miami Beach headquarters of the Coast Guard, Clinton
paid tribute to law enforcement agencies who in the last year have achieved
the highest number of drugrelated arrests and cocaine seizures in the
nation's history.

"This is an impressive record," the president said. "Thanks in no small
measure to heroic efforts on the high seas, in the air and along our
borders, the strategy is starting to show promising results."

Experts disagree. "True, they have had a lot of of dramatic quoteunquote
"successful' seizures," said Ivelaw Griffith, a political scientist at
Florida International University and one of the region's top drug experts.
"But increased success indicates that the problem is not going away; in
fact it's getting bigger."

Clinton said that in the past year, the Coast Guard and other agencies
operating in the Caribbean had seized more than 103,617 pounds of cocaine,
more than triple the amount the year before. He also said arrests were up
1,000 percent. The policy was working so well, the president said he had
approved spending another $73million on top of the Pentagon's $800million
budget to fight drug trafficking.

If the war was so effective, why the need to spend more money?

Ironically, Clinton's visit came only a few days after the Customs Service
in Miami announced that it had seized more than five tons of cocaine in
just the last six weeks.

The upsurge in drug trafficking was highlighted by a dramatic latenight
boat chase Monday in the Florida Keys in which a ton of cocaine was seized.
Flush with excitement, local officials said the chase reminded them of the
days of Miami Vice, the popular TV series inspired by the city's cocaine
heyday in the 1980s.

Indeed, a decade after the drug trade in the region was largely tamed, and
Colombian cartels shifted their routes to the U.S.Mexico border, South
Florida and the Caribbean are again awash in cocaine. Heroin is also
turning up in ever larger quantities.

The second time around, U.S. agencies may be better equipped to deal with
the traffickers. But the same cannot be said for the small, vulnerable
Caribbean islands through which the drugs pass on the way to America's
13million drug consumers.

United Nations counterdrug officials say more than 60 percent of the South
American cocaine sold in the United States and Europe now moves through the
Caribbean. At a conference last week, the head of the U.N. Drug Control and
Crime Prevention Program, Pino Arlacchi, said the impact of drug
trafficking has been devastating for the Caribbean.

"The sad reality is the following: Drug trafficking and abuse, as well as
the legitimation of the proceeds of crime, are negatively affecting the
Caribbean region in terms of health, corruption, internal security,
violence, economic development and the integrity of financial systems."

Arlacchi added that the Caribbean was also "the center of the world's
moneylaundering business today."

The evidence of devastation keeps piling up. This week, the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration reported that after the U.S. invasion of Haiti
dismantled the local armed forces in 1994, the absence of an effective
police and judicial system left the country wide open to drug trafficking.

Next door to Haiti, drugmoney laundering is rampant in the Dominican
Republic. According to a U.S. federal indictment in Miami, two prominent
Dominicans funneled millions in Colombian drug money through local casinos,
hotels and a national baseball team.

In the eastern Caribbean, an independent commission investigating drug
corruption in the tiny island of Dominica issued a report last month that
led to the firing of 12 national police officers. Drug violence on the
nearby island of St. Kitts has inspired a secession movement on its even
smaller sister island, Nevis.

Ironically, on the day Clinton arrived in Miami a number of Caribbean
leaders concerned about the effects of the drug trade on their smallisland
societies were leaving after a threeday conference.

Many in the Caribbean complain that U.S. trade policies are hurting their
small, bananadependent economies, making them less able to resist the
traffickers. Their small budgets and police forces are easily overwhelmed
by the wealth and technical sophistication of the cartels.

The World Trade Organization, under pressure from the Clinton
administration, ruled in September against the longstanding preferential
access to the European market given to Caribbean banana producers.
Caribbean leaders say the WTO ruling could destroy the region's banana
industry, leading to economic collapse and political instability.

"We want to appeal to the U.S. administration to consider the matter more
carefully, to give due weight to our concerns," said Kenny Anthony, prime
minister of St. Lucia.

It's a shame Clinton wasn't in Miami a day earlier to listen to their
worries. Of course that would have taken precious time away from
fundraising.

©Copyright 1997 St. Petersburg Times.

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