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USIS Washington 
File

16 October 1998

COOPERATION IS KEY AGAINST DRUGS, MCCAFFREY TELLS CARIBBEANS

(Caribbean Regional Drug Conference in Miami)  (640)
By Hortense Leon
USIA Special Correspondent

MIAMI -- Cooperation continues to be crucial for the United States and
its Caribbean friends in the ongoing work against drug trafficking,
says Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy (ONDCP).

In order to stop drugs, nations must recognize that the problem is not
static, he told about 200 U.S. and Caribbean ministers and
academicians, and representatives of international organizations, at
the Caribbean Regional Drug Control Conference Oct. 15.

The United States hosted the Oct. 14-16 conference to focus Caribbean
attention on ways to curtail trafficking and to share demand-reduction
strategies.

McCaffrey applauded recent collective plans of action that came out of
the Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, last April, which he
called "an astonishing historic moment," and the Caribbean-United
States Summit at Bridgetown, Barbados, in May of 1997. The Declaration
of Principles drafted at the Barbados talks included agreements on
trade, the environment and combatting drug trafficking and money
laundering.

A good example of international anti-drug cooperation, McCaffrey said,
has been the sharing of intelligence on drug trafficking. ONDCP has at
its disposal a satellite system such as the one which the United
States used for 30 years to monitor grain production in the Soviet
Union. Now it is used to track coca and other drug crops in the field,
and the information is shared with other governments.

Among the sectors of the U.S. government working with Caribbean
friends is the military, which employs its intelligence and training
capabilities against drug cartels, he said.

Because drug trafficking patterns are constantly changing, nations
must resist the temptation to "work on problems they understand,"
meaning the drug control problem as it existed two or three years ago.
In the last six years, for example, drugs passing through the
Caribbean corridor into the United States amounted to 32 percent of
the total tonnage. But the routes have been changing. Puerto Rico and
the Virgin Islands have been the focus of vigorous enforcement action
in recent years, but today, much of the drug flow coming out of South
America has shifted to Haiti and Jamaica, he said.

"Haiti is a significant transshipment point for South American
narcotics bound for the U.S.," according to the International
Narcotics Control Strategy Report of 1997. The U.S. Coast Guard, in
cooperation with the Haitian Coast Guard, in four separate maritime
interdictions, seized over two metric tons of cocaine in 1997, said
McCaffrey.

Jamaica, which is a marijuana producer, is also becoming an
increasingly large place for transshipment as well, McCaffrey said of
the narcotics control report. In 1997, while the government of Jamaica
increased the number of drug arrests and cocaine and hashish oil
seizures over the previous year, marijuana seizures were down
substantially, he said.

The threat to Central America is growing also, said McCaffrey, and the
traffickers' preferred route there is along the Pan American highway.

The problem of corruption in the Caribbean and Latin America is
endemic, said McCaffrey. The question is how political systems deal
with it. In the United States, many prosecutions of government
officials have been successful, resulting in convictions of those
employed by the Coast Guard, the Department of Justice, and state and
local agencies. In addition, he said, about 80 current investigations
of corruption along the U.S. southwestern border are underway.

McCaffrey spoke as Congress was wrestling with the U.S. budget for the
new fiscal year, including a drug control appropriation of $17,100
million, an increase of about $1,000 million over the last fiscal
year. A supplemental appropriation of about $700 million is also in
the works.