Caribe

Armies, drugs and illegal weapons in Caribbean magical geopolitics

Jesús Dávila

24/07/2013

Opinión

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The highly militarized Caribbean region presents several riddles, like the contradiction of the drug and weapon traffics making wealthier the crime world in the United States while that nation keeps most of its troops deployed in the Caribbean in Puerto Rico guarding strategic facilities that ceased to exist long time ago.

Up to 57 percent of all Latin American armies are stationed within the zone between San Juan River in southern Colombia to the Rio Grande at the north of Mexico –this includes all countries with Caribbean shorelines- a fact that speaks about the strategic importance attributed to the region.

On the other hand, U.S.A, England, France and the Netherlands assign less than 40,000 army and navy troops for Caribbean surveillance. But these powers have the benefit of technological superiority, agreements with subservient governments and friendly military elites, as well as bases and colonies supposed to protect maritime passes.

Sometimes it looks like a maneuvers operations theater for learning the teachings of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in the hope that this time around Washington, as the new democratic Athens, would maintain its hegemony without losing its empire to the Latin American Sparta.

Among the most revealing facts is the irregular smuggling forces which so far have shown an impressive capability to readjust, recover and even use military blockades to catapult their illicit commerce routes.

A study published in 2009 revealed disturbing discrepancies between weapon imports reports to the United Nations filed by Latin American countries and the same figures offered by the countries that originated the exports. Such discrepancies could be explained by military secret or accounting errors, but the study warned that it could also be the footprint of contraband.

There is the case of Mexico, transformed by the North American Free Trade Zone into an important exporter of firearms parts to be assembled in the U.S. that in turn sends back an illegal weapons intense flow. That contraband is a factor in the gang war for the control of the domestic drug market and its export to the United States, where crime groups are the main beneficiaries of that illegal trade.

The Organization of American States’ 2013 report on drug traffic shows that the price paid for drugs in the harvesting, processing and shipment phases before reaching U.S. is considerably less that the market value of the product once it is in the American market, where it is completed, distributed and sold.

The billions worth proceeds of contraband –whether weapons, drugs or other items- along with other associated criminal activities serve as material basis for organized crime.

The Center for Intelligence on Crime Gangs estimates that there are 33,000 gangs with 1.4 million members in the United States, numbers large enough to almost match the American active military forces.

Although the report claims that the gangs phenomenon is growing in the U.S. this claim is at odds with another report of the Justice Statistics Center, published in 1992 and which analyzes the nineteen seventies in the last century. That second study reported that in the nearly 2,000 cities with 10,000 inhabitants or more, there were almost 180,000 gangs with some 1.5 million active members.

Such discrepancies and the data about the leading role of the domestic situation with regard to contraband trade are not main issues for the White House’s strategy on international crime. President Barack Obama is more concerned with the problem posed by common criminal groups that may deal with terrorist or unfriendly governments.

Another case in point is Puerto Rico, the small island nation equidistant from Guantanamo and Caracas in the northeastern Caribbean and U.S. colony since 1898, which due to its geographic position as an artificial border some 1,000 kilometers away from the nearest real American shore have become a major transshipment point for contraband in that sub region.

During the decades of the rise and apogee of the American empire, Puerto Rico became base for many long-range military operations, like the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station and the Ramey Field Air Force Base home of one of the Strategic Air Command bases with B-52 bombers for the nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Along with those, there were also communication facilities of the same level like the “major” center for radio teletype serving the many local bases, Guantanamo and Trinidad, as well as the communication centers of Roosevelt Roads and Toa Baja that were part of the “Echelon” program.

Notwithstanding that all those have been gone for many years, still there are some facilities of relative importance, like the Re-locatable Over The Horizon Radar that keep an eye on South America from Venezuela to northern Bolivia, another system in Aguada that is a minor component of the fleet network and some small mercenary bases. Also most the submarine telephone and internet cables between U.S. and Latin America form a cone that meet in the vicinity of Puerto Rico, to spread again towards different destinations.

Nevertheless, the huge gap between what the island had and what remains presents another riddle, why do so many troops are stationed there and the fact that its cost has more than tripled in the last ten years.

- SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, July 24th, 2013 (NCM)

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