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Judi Lynn

(160,211 posts)
Fri Jun 27, 2014, 08:29 PM Jun 2014

The Evil Hour: The Honduras Drug War

Weekend Edition June 27-29, 2014
The Evil Hour

The Honduras Drug War

by JOSEPH GROSSO


The inherent imbecility of the War on Drugs can most easily be measured in terms of sheer carnage. There are the decades of mandatory sentencing, racist policing, and inflated prison numbers that have many African Americans living on the economic fringes without voting rights, in what Michelle Alexander correctly labels a new American Jim Crow. Or the gruesome example of Colombia where even conservative estimates number of three million internally displaced paper, helped in part by Bill Clinton’s Plan Colombia, originally intended to simply be a collectively destructive anti-drug policy but with a series of waivers and provisions by Clinton and Bush Jr. puts the U.S. government into direct conjunction with a corrupt military to whom repression and murder are stables. Meanwhile in Mexico another mass grave has recently been found, this one with more than 30 bodies, to add to the over 85,000 people killed violently since the drug war was officially declared there in 2007.

In recent times the spotlight has expanded to include Honduras, now the third poorest country and possessing a murder rate that dwarfs even other high crime territories (Honduras’ homicide rate in 2012 was 90.4 per 100,000. Venezuela and Belize were a distant second and third at 53.7 and 44.7 respectively). The initial flashpoint for this expansion took place in the wetlands of La Moskitia (the Honduras side of the Mosquito Coast named after the Mosquito tribe) in the early morning hours of May 11th 2012, when an anti-drug mission made up of a mix of American DEA agents and Honduras security forces targeting a shipment of 400 kilos of cocaine, gunned down a family sailing upriver to their hometown of Ahuas killing four including a 14 year old boy. Apparently the boat carrying the family was mistaken for a drug boat after the mission managed to get the canoe carrying the cocaine off to a riverbank (the men carrying the shipment pushed it to drift and scattered into the woods to avoid arrest) just as the family sailed into the scene.

It was quite fitting that the incident took place a week after the New York Times proclaimed in a headline “Lessons of Iraq Help U.S. fight a Drug War in Honduras’. A few sentences in the Times summed up the lessons like this:


This offensive, emerging just as the United States military

winds down its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and is moving

to confront emerging threats, also showcases the nation’s new way

of war: small-footprint missions with limited numbers of troops,

partnerships with foreign military and police forces that take the lead

in security operations, and narrowly defined goals…

A big component of the U.S. government’s effort is the Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team

(FAST). FAST has its roots in Afghanistan (another theater in the war on drugs where American policy has been to wage war on Afghan farmers best cash crop- a policy they once shared with the Taliban) where the original unit gained some fame with the arrest of Afghan drug lord Haji Bagato. In the words of a New Yorker story from earlier this year (A Mission Gone Wrong by Mattathias Schwartz) the unit is ‘part special-forces manhunters, part detectives, FAST operators were trained to kick doors down, work informants, and collect evidence’. It wasn’t long before the DEA asked Congress to fund two more FAST squads for the Western Hemisphere. Since then the Mosquito Coast is a ‘battlespace’ with Honduras itself being described as ‘downrange’. In 2011 the Pentagon increased its contract spending up 71 percent to $53.8 million.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/27/the-honduras-drug-war/
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