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In May, the United States plans to shut down the Joint Air Operations Center (JAOC) at Howard Air Base in Panama, and move its sophisticated computers to Florida. The Pentagon reportedly is attempting to negotiate access to airstrips in Ecuador, Aruba, Curacao and Peru to replace the facilities at Howard. Wherever it is located, JAOC is a key link in the United States military strategy for the drug war, aimed at interdicting the 'air bridge' between Peru and Colombia. Theo Roncken offers an analysis of the strategies failures.

According to U.S. authorities, around 83% of the cocaine that reaches the United States is processed in or passes through Colombia, while between 50% and 60% passes through Mexico, much of it by air. This is the principal justification for increasing budgets aimed at interdiction efforts in South America, and in particular in the Andean region.

"Some in Congress and many in the Clinton Administration are particularly enamored of the effort by the Peruvian Air Force- with U.S. support- to disrupt the "air bridge" to Colombia. Signaling the possibility of increased future support, [in the omnibus budget bill of October 1998, including much of the language of the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act,] Congress calls on the Administration to "review...the Peruvian Air Force's current and future requirements of counternarcotics air interdiction to complement the Peruvian Air Force's A-37 capability."   -Cross Currents January, 1999

The United States employs the following chain of reasoning, based on two assumptions, in order to describe the successes of Air Bridge Interdiction:

First, it is assumed that Air Bridge Interdiction, in combination with other counter-narcotic actions, is capable of permanently damaging cocaine trade in the Andean- Amazonian region, by the following mechanism: • The maintenance of an effective shield against aerial transport of coca paste from Peru to processing centers in Colombia. • Higher supply of coca paste in Peru will lower its price, leading to the disorganization of Peruvian participation in the trade. • The resulting lowering of coca prices will also lead to a permanent reduction in cultivated areas. • Lower supply of coca paste in Colombia will raise the price per kilo and diminish the quality of processed cocaine. • The increase in operating costs for traffickers (in pilots' wages, seized cargo, the use of more costly routes) will raise the price of the final product.

The second assumption is that these changes in the Andean region will affect consumption in the United States. Lower supplies of cocaine in consuming markets will increase the price and lower the purity of the product. The combination of these effects will reflect itself in the reduction of cocaine consumption in the United States.

Today, Air Bridge Interdiction uses a large quantity of human and material resources. In July 1997, Colonel David Hunt of Howard Air Base in Panama gave the following description: Pilots "fly over these countries regularly and with their permission. Everything is coordinated beforehand... They go up; they try to identify these aircraft, find out where they're flying from and where they're flying to. That information comes back here; it's confirmed with other bits of information... So we have a target of interest... we pass the information back to the host country if we think that it's a suspect aircraft, we provide them with the information of where it's going and they take the action against it. They make the decision on what to do about it. We will not do anything to interfere with an aircraft flying over a sovereign nation."

The supposed successes of Air Bridge Interdiction

Robert Fabricio, assistant director of the Joint Air Operations Center, declared in 1997, "Air Bridge Interdiction has a 12% success rate: of every eight aircraft identified as suspicious, one is intercepted." As to the exact quantity of aircraft intercepted there is little consensus. During a hearing in the U.S. Congress in July 1994, figures for Peru varied from zero to 31, leading one participant to exclaim, "It would be nice of our three best experts were prepared to answer such a basic question!"

A similar situation exists for the figures on Colombia. In October 1997, U.S. drug czar General Barry McCaffrey asserted that because of multilateral operations, "narcotics-related flights decreased 47%," attributing a dissuasive effect to interdiction efforts without explaining how he had arrived at that conclusion. Colombian investigators point out that until the amount of flights used in drug trafficking is known, it is very difficult to establish the impact of the military's actions. Between 1989 and 1997 in Colombia 719 aircraft were seized, for an annual average of 90. In the same period, the strengthening of the capacity for production, processing, and trading of drugs from Colombia to different parts of the world is notorious.

All this leads to the conclusion that in the best case, we can speak of confusing and inconsistent tactical results of Air Bridge Interdiction.

The boom and decline of the air bridge

The air bridge served as the principal route for coca paste (an intermediate form in processing cocaine) from the early 1980s until after 1992. The supply of coca and coca paste depended totally on Colombian groups, who sent their airplanes to the different locations of coca production and coca paste accumulation.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Cali and Medellín cartels introduced changes in their business strategies which ended to a large extent their dependence on Peruvian coca. The saturation of the market in the United States led to a lowering of domestic U.S. prices. Better prices in Europe encouraged the development of Colombian coca cultivation.

Small organized groups also gained important spaces in the cocaine trade, especially after the death of Pablo Escobar in December 1993. These groups also pressed for domestic Colombian coca leaf production.

Increasing coca production in Colombia along with greater competition from Bolivian coca producers and the strengthening of routes which served the new European markets reduced the importance of the Peru-Colombia route. Colombia was in large part self-sufficient in primary coca production before the initiation of any consistent efforts at interrupting the air bridge.

On April 10, 1992, five days after Peruvian President Fujimori's "self-coup," the government declared a state of emergency in all the airports of the high jungle as well as more than 15 landing strips throughout the Peruvian Amazon. This measure was the formal beginning of Air Bridge Interdiction, although at the same time it began a large military deployment with the goal of ending the presence of the guerrilla groups Shining Path and MRTA.

In May 1994, U.S. authorities provoked a crisis by cutting off intelligence supplies to Peruvian and Colombian authorities, based on two concerns. The first was that Andean military personnel might shoot down "innocent" aircraft. In fact, some observers feared this had already occurred, for example in the disappearance of a small plane from the Bolivian Air Force which was transporting a scientific mission from the World Bank.

The second concern had a more practical nature: North American personnel in charge of supplying information which led to the shooting down of a civilian aircraft in the Andean region could be tried and sentenced to death. The Defense Authorization Act of 1995 took care of this legal problem, giving immunity to U.S. personnel involved in these cases. As a result, the exchange of intelligence about flights in Andean airspace resumed in early 1995.

Price reduction and extension of coca crops

Among the supposed direct consequences of the attack on the air bridge, U.S. authorities mention the reduction of prices and cultivation of Peruvian coca. According to General McCaffrey, airborne transport of coca paste and cocaine was reduced so drastically that the price of coca in Peru fell 50% overall and 80% in some areas because of oversupply.

In fact, the prices of Peruvian coca paste and coca leaf, especially in the Huallaga Valley have seen more than one moment of crisis. Both internal and external factors have influenced this, such as: internal conflict; a series of events in Colombia, including the death of Luis Carlos Galán in 1989, which caused a crisis in prices; and the Fusarium Oxysporum fungus, which diminished the crops of 1992 and 1993. In this last case, the cultivated areas were not eradicated but abandoned, which means they could easily be replanted.

In particular, the 1995 fall in prices is attributed by U.S. authorities to the success of interdiction efforts. Between February and July of that year, the price of coca fell suddenly from three dollars to forty cents per kilo, and coca paste from $850 to $150 per kilo. However, this change wasn't permanent. By the beginning of 1996, the DEA reported that prices were increasing again. Between July and September, 1996, coca recuperated the value of its best times. In addition, the price of coca paste also recuperated somewhat in spite of the extension of interdiction activities between 1995 and September 1996. For all these reasons, it is impossible to establish a single causality, much less in the Air Bridge Interdiction program.

According to official figures the areas of coca cultivation in Peru went down from 68,800 productive hectares in 1997. However, that decrease was not a direct consequence of interdiction efforts. The relationship of cultivated coca in the Andean region between 1993 and 1997 demonstrates that the loss in numbers of hectares in Peru coincides with the increase in hectares of coca in Colombia. It is important to note that several researchers criticize the underestimation in official data of cultivated areas of coca, particularly for Colombia, questioning the alleged reduction of overall cultivation in the Andean region.

The principal cause of the displacement of coca and coca paste supply from Peru to Colombia is in the already mentioned strategy of Colombian groups to become self-sufficient through national coca production. This process was catalyzed by the arrests of the Cali cartel leadership in 1994-5, and to a certain extent by the re-establishment of the exchange of information within the strategy against the air bridge at the beginning of 1995. But these measures have done no more than encourage a process that was already in motion.

The success of a failure

The two assumptions mentioned above are far from the reality of the complex relationship between the illicit drug trade and interdiction efforts.... Even documents from the Office of National Drug Control Policy show that between 1981 and 1996, cocaine prices in the United States have gradually decreased, while the purity of the retail product has been around 70% between 1988 and 1995. Nor has total consumption decreased, settling at around 300 metric tons a year.

These and other indicators led the General Accounting Office in 1998 to point out that in spite of sustained efforts, the investment of billions of dollars, the arrest of drug kingpins, the seizure of large quantities of drugs, and the eradication of illicit coca crops, the availability of drugs in the United States has not been substantially reduced.

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