What kind of Covid-19 response do you think these U.S. and Canadian-backed drug-trafficking regimes are providing for their majority populations?

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Rights Action
May 14, 2020
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Climate crisis and State-backed drug trafficking in Central America
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What kind of Covid-19 response do you think these U.S. and Canadian-backed drug-trafficking regimes are providing for their majority populations?



Republican and Democratic governments in the U.S., and Liberal and Conservative governments in Canada have provided full economic, military and political support to 11 years of drug-trafficking, repressive, “open-for-global-business” regimes in Honduras, dominated and led by accused drug-trafficking President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

In the U.S. and Canada there has been close to complete media censorship about these complicit, empowering government to government relations. In Washington and Ottawa, there has been zero political or legal oversight or accountability.

It is international business and politics as usual, the well-being of Honduras’ majority population and environment be damned.

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Climate Change in Central America: The Drug War Connection
By Kendra McSweeney and Erik Nielsen, May 13, 2020
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In 2010, a drug trafficking group moved into the heart of Honduras’ Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve [the eastern region of Honduras’ north Caribbean coast]. At gunpoint, the gang terrorized indigenous Pech and Miskitu residents into giving up their subsistence lands and ancestral rainforests. Within two years, the narcotraffickers had felled 150 hectares, about 280 football fields, and this destruction continues ([link removed]) unabated ([link removed]) .

Ecological destruction by narcotics traffickers is hardly unusual; similar dynamics are reported across Latin America ([link removed]) . It is particularly widespread in Central America, however. There, it is estimated ([link removed]) that cocaine-smuggling “narcos” have been directly responsible for 30 percent of all recent forest loss in some countries, up to 60 percent of which has been in protected areas.

The associated loss of environmental services—like water and soil protection—is valued at close to $150 million annually ([link removed]) , far more than is budgeted for protected area conservation.

Central America does not have a lot of forest left to lose. Forests in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala are particularly hard-hit ([link removed]) . Most susceptible are the highly biodiverse, broadleaved forests of the Caribbean slopes—the very carbon-storing forests most critical ([link removed]) for mitigating climate change.

Their loss, in turn, renders the isthmus far more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change that are already being felt there: drought ([link removed]) , diseases ([link removed]) , and severe storms ([link removed]) . Twenty years ago, when Hurricane Mitch slammed into northern Central America, it was already clear ([link removed]) that deforested watersheds greatly intensified the floods and mudslides that killed over 11,000 people.

Continued forest loss in the decades since ensures that Central America’s urban and rural poor will bear the brunt of climate extremes.

Drug trafficking - Cattle production - African palm – Mining - Dams
Of course, drug traffickers are not the only forces transforming Central America’s biodiverse frontiers. Forestlands are being cleared for the expansion of industrial agriculture, often converted first to cattle pasture, then into rapidly-expanding ([link removed]) palm oil plantations. As regional governments increasingly pursue extraction-led economic growth models ([link removed]) , forests are also felled for foreign-financed mines ([link removed]) and related mega-projects, including port expansion ([link removed]) , new highways, and hydroelectric dams ([link removed]) .

What is seldom recognized, however, is the extent to which the drug trade itself lubricates and accelerates these other forms of frontier transformation, and the ways in which US-led counternarcotic strategies make the situation worse. In short: the drug war exacerbates Central America’s contribution and vulnerability to climate change. Here is how.

Like any logistician, cocaine traffickers seek to move drugs along the shortest routes possible. In the late twentieth century, that meant sending South American cocaine exports northward through the Caribbean or directly into Mexico. But US-supported counternarcotic operations—particularly Plan Colombia beginning in 2000 and Mexico’s war on cartels after 2006—made those routes increasingly inconvenient.

So, traffickers began to route more cocaine through Central America ([link removed]) ; by 2011, about 80 percent ([link removed]) of all the cocaine consumed in the United States was transshipped through the region.
To receive all of the cocaine-laden planes and boats landing in Central America, traffickers need remote spaces—often protected areas, indigenous territories, and landscapes of smallholder agriculture. Once there, they amass land and destroy forests ([link removed]) because it makes economic sense to do so.

Not only does it allow traffickers to secure land routes from rivals and otherwise enhance the efficiency of transshipment, but rural land is also a lucrative and convenient way to launder dirty cash ([link removed]) . That’s because traffickers can buy land in remote rural areas cheap, and they can sell it dear to the many actors, legitimate or otherwise, keen to invest in this new speculative land market. ([link removed])

Drug trafficking – Corrupt governments
It almost goes without saying that traffickers’ ability to illegally buy and sell “protected” land, and to do so with impunity ([link removed]) , relies on the complicity of state actors ([link removed]) at every level. That complicity runs deep—forged decades prior with the help of US covert operatives ([link removed]) looking to raise cash to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. The relationship between drug traffickers and Central American states has only deepened since ([link removed]) , evidenced by the ongoing willingness of military, police, judges, and politicians to look the other way, for a price. Indeed, so entrenched are these relationships that it can be hard to tell
([link removed]) state actors apart from traffickers.

Recent US government prosecutions make clear, for example, that politicians in Honduras not only benefit ([link removed]) from cocaine traffickers’ largesse, but they participate actively in the trade themselves.

These are the same corrupted and interconnected elites that benefit handsomely from the opportunities created when traffickers make frontiers “open for business” ([link removed]) —that is, available to entice domestic and foreign investment in agribusiness, mining, and other big projects, including “climate-friendly” ([link removed]) hydroelectric dams.

These profit-driven enterprises compound Central America’s “growth without development.” ([link removed]) In other words, they may spur macro-economic indicators of modest growth, but they can undermine social development by aggravating wealth and income inequality ([link removed]) , rural dispossession, unemployment, and declining agricultural productivity ([link removed]) .

US taxpayers currently spend billions of dollars per year ([link removed]) on the government’s multi-agency effort to intercept cocaine shipments that typically land first in Central America. The United States spends millions more to encourage, equip, and train “partner nations” ([link removed]) to help with this counternarcotic mission. The stated goal is to make cocaine scarce and expensive in the United States.

In reality, it does neither, and never has.

In Fiscal Year 2018, for example, counternarcotic forces intercepted only 6 percent ([link removed]) of all known cocaine shipments in the Caribbean/Central American transshipment corridor, while cocaine production in Colombia has surged to unprecedented levels ([link removed]) .

The real consequences of all that drug war spending are often called “unintended,” ([link removed]) but it is more accurate to describe them as both predictable and perverse. For example, chasing the traffickers who are moving cocaine out of northern South America ensures that they stay perpetually agile ([link removed]) , penetrating and destroying ever more forests and rural landscapes in Central America and elsewhere.

Additionally, the United States’ drug war aid to Central American governments will never be enough to compete with traffickers’ bribes. Thus, the same administrations ([link removed]) that swear fealty to the US counternarcotic mission—and therefore receive funding, military training, weapons, and other support—are simultaneously, predictably, and generously corrupted.

The outcomes are hardly surprising. Rather than seriously tackle corruption or trafficking, several crooked administrations have used the United States’ diplomatic support and aid to their military and police to violently repress ([link removed]) those who criticize them, and to bolster paramilitary and private security forces who protect ([link removed]) stolen lands.

Citizens who dare to stand up ([link removed]) for forests and who stand in the way ([link removed]) of extractive projects and elite land grabs are harassed ([link removed]) , imprisoned, and killed ([link removed]) . It is often hard to know exactly who is responsible for the abuse and murders of indigenous people ([link removed]) , campesinos ([link removed]) , and environmentalists ([link removed]) , as well as those of the lawyers ([link removed]) who represent them and the journalists
([link removed]) who cover them.

Were the rapes and killings ordered by drug traffickers ([link removed]) , police, military, mining consortia ([link removed]) , energy companies ([link removed]) , or rich landowners ([link removed]) ?

Whoever is orchestrating the brutality, several things are clear: the interests of all these groups are deeply aligned, they operate with near impunity, and the outcome is the same: Central America is one of the deadliest places ([link removed]) in the world in which to be an environmental defender.

So, the drug war is contributing, directly and indirectly, to the loss of Central America’s forests, with dire climate change consequences. Recognizing this linkage helps to illuminate policy options that might otherwise appear unconnected. A crucial place to start is to support legislative efforts in the United States—such as the stalled Berta Caceres bill ([link removed]) —that would suspend police and military aid to governments guilty of egregious human rights abuses.

A complementary approach is to finally and seriously re-assess ([link removed]) the basic logics ([link removed]) of supply side strategies ([link removed]) in the drug war. The billions currently wasted each year in the futile effort to keep cocaine out of Central America can instead go towards non-militarized solutions to fight the effects of drug trafficking there. That includes meaningful multilateral anti-corruption initiatives ([link removed]) and programs ([link removed]) to fight impunity and (re)build the legal institutions required to investigate and prosecute crimes.

These efforts must also go hand-in-glove with sustained, serious, and multilateral support for indigenous and campesino groups’ varied ([link removed]) and courageous ([link removed]〈=es) efforts to govern their own lands ([link removed]) and territories and to shore up their climate resilience ([link removed]) .

In Central America, mitigating and adapting to climate change requires protecting ([link removed]) and supporting ([link removed]) those who are already living and dying in defense of the region’s lands, rivers, and forests.

(Kendra McSweeney is a professor of geography, Ohio State University. Erik Nielsen is a professor of environmental science and policy at the School of Earth & Sustainability of Northern Arizona University)

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We are not “all in this together”
There should be no “going back to normal”
***
Recommended daily news:
Democracy Now’s “Coronavirus Report”
www.democracynow.org ([link removed])

Rights Action’s COVID-19 Response Fund
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Rights Action continues to prioritize getting emergency funds to partner group in Guatemala and Honduras. Their Covid19 response work is about saving lives. The funds we are sending are drops in a bucket, and they are important. Our work is also to contribute to discussion and hopefully empower political activism premised on the basic notion that: We are not “all in this together” / There should be no “getting back to normal”.

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