16 October 1998
(Caribbean Regional Drug Conference in Miami) (640) By Hortense Leon USIA Special Correspondent MIAMI -- Cooperation continues to be crucial for the United States and its Caribbean friends in the ongoing work against drug trafficking, says Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). In order to stop drugs, nations must recognize that the problem is not static, he told about 200 U.S. and Caribbean ministers and academicians, and representatives of international organizations, at the Caribbean Regional Drug Control Conference Oct. 15. The United States hosted the Oct. 14-16 conference to focus Caribbean attention on ways to curtail trafficking and to share demand-reduction strategies. McCaffrey applauded recent collective plans of action that came out of the Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, last April, which he called "an astonishing historic moment," and the Caribbean-United States Summit at Bridgetown, Barbados, in May of 1997. The Declaration of Principles drafted at the Barbados talks included agreements on trade, the environment and combatting drug trafficking and money laundering. A good example of international anti-drug cooperation, McCaffrey said, has been the sharing of intelligence on drug trafficking. ONDCP has at its disposal a satellite system such as the one which the United States used for 30 years to monitor grain production in the Soviet Union. Now it is used to track coca and other drug crops in the field, and the information is shared with other governments. Among the sectors of the U.S. government working with Caribbean friends is the military, which employs its intelligence and training capabilities against drug cartels, he said. Because drug trafficking patterns are constantly changing, nations must resist the temptation to "work on problems they understand," meaning the drug control problem as it existed two or three years ago. In the last six years, for example, drugs passing through the Caribbean corridor into the United States amounted to 32 percent of the total tonnage. But the routes have been changing. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands have been the focus of vigorous enforcement action in recent years, but today, much of the drug flow coming out of South America has shifted to Haiti and Jamaica, he said. "Haiti is a significant transshipment point for South American narcotics bound for the U.S.," according to the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report of 1997. The U.S. Coast Guard, in cooperation with the Haitian Coast Guard, in four separate maritime interdictions, seized over two metric tons of cocaine in 1997, said McCaffrey. Jamaica, which is a marijuana producer, is also becoming an increasingly large place for transshipment as well, McCaffrey said of the narcotics control report. In 1997, while the government of Jamaica increased the number of drug arrests and cocaine and hashish oil seizures over the previous year, marijuana seizures were down substantially, he said. The threat to Central America is growing also, said McCaffrey, and the traffickers' preferred route there is along the Pan American highway. The problem of corruption in the Caribbean and Latin America is endemic, said McCaffrey. The question is how political systems deal with it. In the United States, many prosecutions of government officials have been successful, resulting in convictions of those employed by the Coast Guard, the Department of Justice, and state and local agencies. In addition, he said, about 80 current investigations of corruption along the U.S. southwestern border are underway. McCaffrey spoke as Congress was wrestling with the U.S. budget for the new fiscal year, including a drug control appropriation of $17,100 million, an increase of about $1,000 million over the last fiscal year. A supplemental appropriation of about $700 million is also in the works.