American drug traffic big threat

Press, 24 August 1988, Page 30

American drug traffic big threat

NZPA-Reuter Washington A new cause for alarm about the debt crisis is that it risks making Latin America more dependent on selling drugs mostly to the United States. “The most efficient entrepreneurial system operating in Latin America today is the drug trafficking cartel,” said Irving Tragen, of the Organisation of American States. The cartel which floods North America with cocaine did not develop because of debt. But it feeds on the misery of debt-laden economies in which some of the poorest have had to turn to drug production to survive, experts on Latin America say. Tragen, the executive secretary of the InterAmerican Drug Abuse Control Commission, said that most coca leaf production was in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and to some' extent, Argentina. In Brazil, the biggest Third World debtor owing more than SUSIOO billion

($149 billion), people are also growing coca now. Tragen and others estimate that a farmer growing coca can earn SUS9OOO ($13,410) a hectare. The next most lucrative crop is citrus yielding only about SUSSOO ($745). Working for the drug cartel brings other advantages, too. The cartel provides cash to get a farmer started at a time when banks are less generous — "Given the debt overhang, almost all of the private banks or the Government agricultural banks have no money to lend,” said Tragen. A decline in commodity prices has added to the problem. Growing coca leaves — first step in making cocaine — is confined to countries in the Amazon Basin and Andes, but other States are part of the transportation system or consumers. Meanwhile, drug abuse is a hot issue in the United States presidential election, raising the possibility that it might prove

the spur to a new initiative on debt by the next Administration. Many experts say that without a big effort to get Latin economies growing again, the drug traffic will continue to advance. “If one wants to understand for your constituents why this is an issue I would point them to Peru and Bolivia to see what happens to our country when our neighbours go into total economic collapse and find the only way they can eat —- that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of peasants can eat — is to engage in cutting coca,” a Harvard economist, Jeffrey Sachs, told Congress recently. • He said the Reagan Administration and international lending institutions had approached the debt crisis piecemeal using a country-by-country approach when a broader effort was needed. But burned once, the West’s creditor banks are in no mood to pump new money into the Third World.