Bolivia, Peru and Burma all made major gains in the fight against drugs several years ago but then squandered them away in a lack of resolve, handing a decisive victory to traffickers, a State Department report says.
The report, issued Wednesday, said the three countries violated the "simple military principle" of giving up ground they already had seized.It said Bolivia eradicated more than 20,000 acres of coca in 1990 two years after Peru had destroyed 12,000 acres. For Burma, the figure for 1988 was more than 30,000 acres of opium poppies.
"The drug trade suffered," the study said. "Had that peak rate been maintained subsequently and new cultivation prevented, Bolivia by now could have limited production to that required to meet legitimate needs, Peru's cultivation could have been checked much earlier and Burma could have been down to half the opium poppy acreage detected at the end of 1994."
Whatever the reasons for not sustaining the pace of eradication, "these countries showed what is possible when a government throws its weight behind drug control," the report said.
Bolivia, Burma and Peru are three of 29 countries identified as engaging in the production or shipment of drugs that are subject to annual evaluation by the U.S. government. President Clinton announced Wednesday that 18 of the 29 are cooperating fully with U.S. anti-drug efforts.
Burma, the world's largest producer of heroin, remained on an administration list of countries that do not fully cooperate and is thereby subject to U.S. economic sanctions.
The action was largely symbolic because official ties between the United States and Burma's military regime are extremely limited. The same list includes Iran, Nigeria, Syria and Afghanistan, a new addition.
Bolivia and Peru also were found not to be cooperating, but Clinton rejected imposing sanctions against the two countries, citing national security consider- ations. Colombia, which controls 80 percent of the world's cocaine trade, was placed in the same category.