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May 3rd, the U.S. Coast Guard boarded the Belize ship Svesda
Maru in international waters, seized over 26,000 pounds of cocaine,
and the crew into the United States for prosecution. The bust was
hailed as the largest maritime drug seizure ever and is sure to
be used by some as evidence that we are winning the war on drugs.
Actually, it's better evidence that imperialism is one of the side
effects of the U.S. government's addiction to the drug war.
Over the last
five years, the Coast Guard has been involved in the seizure of
over 490,000 pounds of cocaine with value of over 17 billion dollars,
not counting the latest seizure. Yet today in America, cocaine is
cheaper and purer than it was 15 years ago.
In 1997, the
Coast Guard claimed a 16% cocaine seizure rate. The U.S. National
Drug Control Strategy calls for reducing the supply of cocaine by
25% in 2002 and by 50% in 2007 — but this is like a Soviet five-year
economic plan which promised to double steel production and triple
grain harvests. What the Svesda Maru bust suggests is that
more cocaine is actually getting through than ever before. The more
drug shipments carrying more cocaine, the more ships for the Coast
Guard to catch.
The Svesda
Maru was spotted by a U.S. Customs airplane, stopped by a U.S.
Navy Guided Missile Frigate some 1,500 miles from U.S. shores and
boarded by an accompanying Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment
(LEDET) who searched the ship for five days before being relieved
by an actual Coast Guard Cutter, whose crew found the drugs.
The U.S. Code
(Title 14, sect. 89) gives the Coast Guard the authority to "At
any time, to go on board of any vessel subject to the jurisdiction,
or to the operation of any law, of the United States, address inquiries
to those on board, examine the ships documents and examine, inspect
and search the vessel…" In other words, Congress has repealed
the Fourth Amendment for everyone on a ship.
The Coast Guard
can come onboard and snoop around whenever it wants. Recreational
boaters in coastal waters tell numerous stories about the Coast
Guard inviting itself onto fishing boats, sailing sloops, and every
other kind of boat, in order to start looking about for a stray
joint, as a pretext to seize ship. Federal forfeiture laws promote
this form of legalized piracy.
But how did
the Navy get involved in this? What about the federal law (the Posse
Comitatus Act) which forbids the military to participate in law
enforcement? What about the principle that turning the military
into a police agency is a disaster for freedom and due process —
as many other countries have learned the hard way?
During peacetime,
the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Transportation, not
part of the Navy. So the Coast Guard doesn't have to obey the Posse
Comitatus Act. Thus, what the Navy does is put some Coast Guard
personnel on Navy ships. Then, when U.S. Navy guided missile frigate
wants to stop being a warship and become a world's police cruiser,
it hoists a Coast Guard flag, and magically become a legitimate
law enforcement platform.
"Coast
Guard" naval operations have put the Coast Guard very far from
America's coast: in Ecuador, Guatemala, and even on the rivers of
land-locked Bolivia. (Likewise, the United States Border Patrol
has also been sent to Bolivia.) The Coast Guard gets the credit
for the bust, but it is the Navy and the Navy's drug interdiction
budget that runs the drug war at sea.
One of the
authors, Mike Krause, served in the Coast Guard from 1989-1991,
including five joint agency Caribbean patrols on the Coast Guard
Cutter Hamilton. If the Hamilton wanted to board a
foreign vessel in international waters to look for drugs, the crew
would simply ask. Now why would the master of a ship, outside U.S.
territorial waters, consent to the U.S. Navy/Coast Guard boarding
his ship? Because it is more coercion than consent.
The Hamilton
was 378-feet long and in addition to her main 3-inch gun and an
array of M-60 machine gun mounts, she carried six harpoon missiles
on her bow. The captain of a ship in the middle of the ocean would
be hard-pressed to turn down a request from a warship capable of
blowing him out of the water. This would be similar to a squad of
police on your front porch pointing guns in your general direction,
then "asking" to come inside and look around.
But even if
a ship's captain refused, it really doesn't matter. The Coast Guard
already has blanket permission from some nations to board foreign
flagged ships.
The Svesda
Maru was caught in the "Transit Zone", a six million
square mile area that includes the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico,
and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, over which the U.S. seeks to enforce
international anti-smuggling laws, even over foreign vessels and
in cooperating nations' sovereign waters.
Testifying
before Congress in 1999, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Ernest Riutta
explained that Article 17 of the 1988 United Nations Convention
against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psycotropic Substances
requires "cooperation to the fullest extent possible to suppress
illicit traffic by sea, in conformity with the international law
of the sea."
Article 17
is the basis for U.S. agreements with nations within the "zone,"
which give the U.S. authority to board and search vessels of a signatory
nation in international waters and to pursue, stop and search vessels
in sovereign waters. About two dozen nations, including Belize have
signed such agreements with the U.S.
But is Belize
a cooperating nation, or simply afraid of being on the bad side
of the U.S.? In 1999, Belize was removed from the State Department's
list of major drug-transit countries. This is important because
it eases the threat of being decertified as a cooperating nation
and potential loss of U.S. backed international development aid.
("Development aid" is often a euphemism for money taken
from U.S. taxpayers and given to corrupt governments and their local
allies. Only a small fraction of development aid benefits poor people
in the recipient country.)
According to
the State Dept. Narcotics report, U.S. tax dollars have gone to
train Belize's' new Counter Narcotics Task Force, renovation of
the Belize City Police Station, the forming of a Joint Information
Coordination Center in Belize and a Police Canine Unit. Allowing
their rich Uncle Sam to board and seize their ships seems the least
they can do.
But while the
Coast Guard (and the Navy and the Customs Service) are busy policing
the waters of supposedly sovereign nations, who is looking after
the U.S. shores? All those Coast Guard personnel in non-coastal
Bolivia or in the waters of Belize aren't available to help victims
of boating accidents, contain oil spills, or perform the other duties
of an agency whose job is to guard the American coast, not to patrol
the jungles of Bolivia.
And while Latin
American governments have always been eager to surrender their sovereignty
in exchange for American government money that goes straight into
their pockets, the innocent people of Latin America — the ones who
find U.S. Navy cannons pointed at them, and whose fishing boats
get searched for hours or days while the "Coast" Guard
searches for drugs and fish go somewhere else — may begin to wonder
why they are being subjected to American military law enforcement
in a futile effort to prevent some Americans from consuming politically
incorrect substances.
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