Date: Fri, 25 May 2001
US "Andes Drug War"

http://www.mapinc.org/tlcnews/v01/n925/a01.htm
Colombia: Private Firms Take On Jobs, Risks For U.S. Military in Andes Drug War
Author: Juan O. Tamayo

BOGOTA, Colombia — As U.S.  efforts to reduce drug trafficking out
of the Andes escalate, more U.S.-supplied equipment is flowing into
the region and more Americans are becoming involved — and
occasionally coming under fire.  But because of the growing
privatization of U.S.  military efforts abroad, their presence is
often unseen.

Increasingly, the U.S. government is contracting or licensing
private American firms to carry out quasi-military functions in a
practice known as “outsourcing,” a practice that critics brand as
the hiring of mercenaries.  It is largely the result of the shrinking
size of the U.S.  Army and a reluctance to risk the lives of U.S.
servicemen in foreign conflicts.

“Congress and the American people don't want any servicemen killed
overseas,” said former U.S.  Ambassador to Colombia Myles
Frechette.  “So it makes sense that if contractors want to risk
their lives, they get the job.”

Opponents emphasize the dangers of carrying out foreign policy
through private firms, claiming it is fraught with waste and
conducted largely outside Congressional supervision or the public's
view.

“There is little or no accountability in this process of
outsourcing,” said Rep.  Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.  “This is a way of
funding secret wars with taxpayers' money that could get us into a
Vietnam-like conflict.”

A Herald review of the practice has found that at least four American
companies are conducting some of the key operations that implement
U.S.  foreign policy in the Andean region, from tracking guerillas
>from the sky and helping to interdict airborne drug runners to
running risky search-and-rescue missions:

DynCorp, a Reston, Va., firm that handles much of the aviation side
of U.S.  drug eradication efforts in the Andean region, has some 80
pilots and mechanics in Colombia — about half of them Americans and
the rest Latin Americans — running a $30 million to $40 million a
year program to defoliate coca fields.

AirScan, of Rockledge, Fla., sends airplanes loaded with surveillance
gear and manned by U.S.  military veterans to search for guerillas
in the jungles of Colombia and Angola.  U.S.  officials in Bogota
said AirScan's Cessna 337 Skymasters use infra-red and television
cameras to spot guerillas near the Cano Limon pipeline in eastern
Colombia, bombed some 60 times in the past year by the leftist
National Liberation Army, known as ELN.

MPRI, of Alexandria, Va., just finished a $6 million contract with
the Pentagon under which a 14-man team headed by a former army
general advised the Colombian military and police on logistics,
planning and organization. Formerly known as Military Professional
Resources Inc., the firm is headed by retired Gen. Carl Vuono, who
commanded the Army during Desert Storm, and counts a dozen retired
generals and admirals, as well as CIA officials and ambassadors on
its staff.

Aviation Development Corp., a private company based at Maxwell Air
Force Base in Alabama whose pilots were flying a Cessna Citation V
over the Amazon on April 20 in a drug interdiction program when they
mistakenly helped a Peruvian jet target a plane carrying U.S.
missionaries.  As a result of that incident, in which Veronica Bowers
and her her seven-month-old daughter, Charity, died, outsourcing came
under an unwelcomed spotlight. Now, some members of Congress look
skeptically at the practice.

“There wasn't one person aboard that plane sworn to uphold the
Constitution of the United States,” complained a veteran of
counter-drug operations in Latin America, referring to the private
contractors in lieu of U.S. military personnel. “They were all...
businessmen!”

Over the past few weeks, Congress has moved to limit the use of
contractors in the counter-drug efforts in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia
and Ecuador.  Schakowsky has proposed a total ban on contractors,
while Rep.  Bill Delahunt, D-Mass, wants the contracts slowly shifted
to local police forces.

But even before the incident in Peru, the debate over outsourcing had
long been simmering in Washington, especially as U.S.  counter-drug
operations in the Andean region bloomed in the 1990s into a campaign
that today costs about $1 billion a year.

DynCorp has been paid at least $270 million since 1991 to provide
airplane and helicopter pilots and mechanics for the war on drugs in
Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala, according to a
Government Accounting Office report to Congress in March.

Describing itself as a “leading information technology and
outsourcing services firm,” the company has annual revenues of $1.4
billion, most of it from U.S. government contracts, and 20,000
employees around the world.

AirScan's Web page says it has provided the Colombian air force and
the Angolan government with “security surveillance services ” for
oil pipelines, as well as leasing the Colombians one its
sensor-packed airplanes and training three air crews and six
maintenance teams.

PINPOINTING COCA

AirScan uses multi-spectrum cameras to pinpoint coca plantations in
Colombia for later spraying by Dyncorp's pilots, according to
officials in the State Department's International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement Affairs Bureau.

AirScan declined comment on its work in Colombia or the value of its
contracts.  Florida state records shows the company, founded in 1989,
is owned by John Mansur.

To the harshest critics of outsourcing, it is simply an attempt by
the executive branch to escape Congressional supervision of the
growing U.S.  involvement in Colombia, where a civil war has claimed
some 35,000 lives in the past decade.

“Privatization is a way of going around Congress and not telling the
public.  Foreign policy is made by default to private military
consultants motivated by bottom-line profits,” Army Col. Bruce
Grant wrote in an essay while attending the Army War College in 1998.

Supporters of outsourcing say one of their top concerns is that the
main U.S.  actors in the counter-narcotics battle — the State
Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement
Affairs, INL and Defense Department — have no expertise in the area.

“The State Department is embassies, cables and vouchers, not
pilots,” said Cresencio Arcos, former deputy assistant secretary of
state for International Narcotics Matters. “It has no core
competence in spraying coca crops.”

And even when Congress allocates funds for counter-drug programs
abroad, it's never certain that the agencies who have the job will
have the means to carry it out.

“Congress gives you money, but money doesn't give you bodies or
[equipment].  And if the bodies exist, can they teach, do they know
the language, do they know the region?” said Ana Maria Salazar,
former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Drug Enforcement
Policy and Support.

MPRI got the Colombia contract, Salazar added, because the
Miami-based Southern Command, in charge of all U.S.  military
activities in Latin America and the Caribbean, “didn't have 14 guys
it could spare for a year.”

The boom in the outsourcing business came in the 1990s, when the
U.S.  Army shrank from 790,000 soldiers to 480,000.  The Department
of Defense is now estimated to have 700,000 full and part-time
contractors on its rolls.

MPRI now hires retired officers to staff ROTC programs in 217
universities and 29 military recruiting centers under contract with
DOD, said Ed Soyster, a retired army general and former director of
the Defense Intelligence Agency now with MPRI.  “We simply provide a
product, like Coca-Cola.”

MPRI also hired and deployed a 20-member team for a U.S.  contract as
truce observers in Bosnia within two weeks, boasted Soyster, a move
that he said would have taken the regular military months if not
years.

RETIRED GENERALS

Founded in 1988 by retired American generals, the firm now has a
database of 11,000 former military and law enforcement officers “on
call,” has worked in Bosnia, Macedonia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and
Taiwan and is pitching Costa Rica on a contract to help develop its
Coast Guard.

Critics of outsourcing said there's little real difference between
risking the life of a U.S.  serviceman or a contractor in places like
Colombia, wracked by violence from leftist guerillas, right-wing
paramilitaries and drug traffickers.

“This is done primarily because we lack popular support at home to
commit military forces for these kinds of things,” said Sanho Tree,
head of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies
in Washington.

As for the firms' vaunted ability to move faster than the government
bureaucracy, said Rep.  James McGovern, D-Mass., “part of the
bureaucracy's job is precisely to make sure we don't step in [it]
like we did in Peru.”

Some of those involved in outsourcing said it is marred by occasional
featherbedding and padding of bills sent to Washington, as well as
back-scratching between firms and U.S.  officials who supervise their
contracts but hope to land a job with the firms after government
retirement.

“There's a lot of taxpayers' money being wasted on
counter-narcotics, and every contractor and bandit is trying to get
at the trough,” said a retired U.S.  Army officer who worked in the
Andean region.

Money, indeed, is what attracts the private companies, the sources said.

“There is just too much money coming down the pike to control this
thing,” said a former State Department official, recalling his own
efforts to phase out DynCorp's work in Colombia and turn it over to
the local police in 1995.

“I had an entire 'nationalization' plan worked out to train the
police,” he said.  “But then our coca crop estimates began shooting
up, Washington threw more money at the problem and the Colombians
were back to being spectators because we had to ramp up a program
quickly.”

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