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11: The Evolution of “Narcoterrorism”: From the Cold War to the War on Drugs
- University of New Mexico Press
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281 · Chapter Eleven · The Evolution of “Narcoterrorism” From the Cold War to the War on Drugs 5 Michelle Denise Reeves In November 1985, M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril) guerrillas infiltrated the Colombian Palace of Justice, taking the entire Colombian Supreme Court hostage and destroying thousands of documents, among which were numerous U.S. extradition requests for major narcotics traffickers. A little over twenty-four hours later, Colombian troops stormed the building, ending the siege and contributing to a grisly death toll. Among the casualties were forty insurgents, fifty Palace of Justice employees, and eleven of the twenty-four justices, including Supreme Court President Alfonso Reyes Echandia.1 A report later surfaced alleging that drug traffickers, including Pablo Escobar, head of the notorious cocaine-trafficking Medellín cartel, had paid the guerrillas almost $1 million to destroy the extradition requests.2 The incident stunned Colombians, drew international attention to a phenomenon known as “narcoterrorism,” and prompted a momentous shift in the scope and definition of U.S. national security. Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry coined the term “narcoterrorism ” in 1982 to describe the activities of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist guerrilla group whose origins were rooted in the factionalism unleashed in the mid-1960s by the Sino-Soviet split.3 In the late 1960s, university professor Abimael Guzman and other pro-Chinese dissidents Michelle Denise Reeves 282 criticized the proximity of Velasco’s left-wing military regime to the Soviet Union.4 Guzman went on to found Shining Path, which remained largely confined to academic circles until the late 1970s, when it coalesced into a guerrilla movement centered in Ayacucho province. By the early 1980s, Sendero insurgents had infiltrated the Upper Huallaga Valley—one of the major sites of coca cultivation in the country—to provide protection for the coca farmers in exchange for payments that were used to fund terrorist activities aimed at destabilizing the Peruvian government. Throughout the decade , U.S. counternarcotics policies focused on destroying drug production had the unintended consequence of enhancing the legitimacy of Sendero Luminoso and of strengthening its base of peasant support.5 The insurgents became more involved in the drug trade as the decade progressed, expanding from merely providing protection to growers and taxing traffickers to adopting a more active role in the actual cultivation and processing of the drug. As more evidence of the insidious narco-guerrilla connection accumulated , Latin American and U.S. officials began to link the threats posed by drug trafficking and leftist insurgency in sweeping rhetoric that failed to adequately distinguish between the goals of guerrillas, growers, and traffickers . The term narcoterrorism became shorthand for a wide variety of behaviors adopted by a motley crew of actors—the drug cartels whose terrorism was designed to cow the Colombian government and populace into submission , the guerrilla insurgencies in Peru and Colombia that became ever more deeply implicated in the drug trade, and the right-wing paramilitary death squads whose extrajudicial approach to justice involved their own brand of terror and increasing involvement in narcotics trafficking. While the situations in Colombia and Peru were very different—rendering narcoterrorism’s catchall definition unhelpful at best—both countries were nevertheless victims of terrorism that was in some way related to the production and trafficking of narcotics. The United States, however, was relatively unaffected by these developments. Domestic demand for cocaine remained remarkably impervious to price fluctuations resulting from the availability of coca. But because of rising public concern over drug abuse (and particularly the media blitz surrounding the “crack epidemic”), which coincided with the drawdown of Cold War hostilities and the resulting search for a mission within the Defense Department, U.S. officials declared that drugs were a national security threat by linking narcotics trafficking with international terrorism. The U.S. public, moreover, had demonstrated a palpable aversion to [44.204.65.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:22 GMT) The Evolution of “Narcoterrorism” 283 becoming involved in any conflict that even remotely resembled the war in Vietnam. Congress had slapped restrictions on funding the Contras in the form of the Boland amendments, and as the deescalation of tensions with the Soviets proceeded apace, the threat of communist subversion in the Western Hemisphere no longer animated the fears of the U.S. public. In short, the drug issue was potent enough to command the attention and commitment of the American people while that of leftist guerrilla insurgency had been neutered by the denouement of the Cold War. In...