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By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
A powerful car bomb explosion on Thursday near the U.S. Embassy in Lima, killing nine and wounding 30, was a disturbing prelude to the visit to Peru this weekend of President George Bush, who has vowed to "fight terrorism around the world."Bush declared he wouldn't be put off by "two-bit terrorists." But the suspected bombers, the notorious Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, are anything but "two-bit" terrorists. The Sendero has battled fiercely for three decades to impose a Marxist dictatorship on Peru patterned on Enver Hoxha's crazy Stalinist Albania and Pol Pot's nightmare Cambodia.
Back in 1985, I was the first North American journalist to interview Peru's then newly elected president, Alan Garcia. I asked him how his government was coping with the Sendero Luminoso, whose guerrillas were terrorizing the Andes, waging urban guerrilla warfare, and had almost brought the government to its knees."I can assure you," Garcia said, "the security situation is completely under control." Moments later, two mortar shells exploded outside the presidential palace. Garcia shrugged and gave a sheepish smile.
Peru's last president, the tough authoritarian Alberto Fujimori, now in exile in Japan and plotting a return, had nearly crushed the Sendero and another dangerous Marxist guerrilla group, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru. But after Fujimori was replaced by the softer, more leftward leaning Alejandro Toledo, Sendero regrouped and appears to be renewing its war against the U.S.-backed government in Lima.This time, the Sendero is being fuelled by a steady inflow of drug money. Following the example of Colombia's Marxist FARC and ELN narco-guerrilla armies, the Sendero earns tens of millions annually protecting Peru's expanding cocaine industry. The Bush administration's efforts to combat the drug trade in Colombia through spraying toxic pesticides and attacking processing labs have merely pushed the underground drug industry across the jungled borders into Ecuador and Peru.
TOTAL FAILUREThe much-vaunted U.S. war on drugs has proven a total failure in Latin America. The flow of cocaine and heroin into the U.S. has not been reduced, in spite of billions spent to block the flood of narcotics. Ironically, the only nation where the U.S. war on drugs did work was in Afghanistan - thanks to its former Taliban regime. According to the UN drug control agency, the Taliban virtually halted cultivation and trade of heroin-producing opium poppies. Afghanistan supplied 80% of Europe's heroin and about 60% of America's. The American invasion and overthrow of the Taliban handed power to the Russian-backed Northern Alliance, which fully revived the heroin trade and now controls 90% of drug exports.
In Afghanistan, Bush's so-called war against terrorism collided head-on with his war against drugs. The latter lost. The Northern Alliance, the real power behind the U.S.-installed Karzai regime in Kabul, pays its fighters and buys its arms from the Russians with heroin money. The U.S. simply turned a blind eye to large-scale drug dealing by its new Afghan allies, just as it did in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Central America and, for years, Mexico.
The White House is now under increasing pressure to increase the $1 billion in U.S. aid to Colombia and switch from assisting a campaign against coca producers to all-out combat operations against FARC and ELN guerrillas. The Colombian government's inept 136,000-man army has been unable to defeat the FARC's and ELF's roughly 20,000 Marxist guerrillas, so the U.S. is now being asked by Bogota for combat troops and fleets of helicopters. An expanded war in Colombia would quickly spill over into Ecuador, Peru and possibly into Panama and Venezuela, all economically stressed and politically shaky nations.Growing instability and violence in northern Latin America will challenge the Bush administration's plans to launch a large crusade against Iraq, and smaller ones against the diverse Muslim groups opposed to American influence, or those fighting for independence from oppressive rule - all simplistically lumped together by Bush as "terrorists."
Just two weeks ago in Afghanistan, the U.S. lost eight soldiers and dropped 3,300 expensive precision bombs against will-o-the-wisp opponents in a failed battle in the Shah-i-Kot Valley (shades of Vietnam's IaDrang Valley battles). America's arsenals are depleted; its military forces stretched thin - and the crusade against the nefarious "axis of evil" hasn't even been launched yet.Terrorists in Peru and Colombia. Plotting Cubans. Islamic fanatics in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, the West Bank and Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Central Asia, Chechnya, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Egypt and Paraguay. America's enemies are everywhere. Even in Detroit and Brooklyn.
Bush says he will defend America by fighting them all. But, as Frederick the Great rightly noted, "He who defends everything, defends nothing."Eric can be reached by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
. Copyright © 2002, Canoe, a division of Netgraphe Inc.Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com.
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