WASHINGTON — In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American trafficking organizations that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.
The growing U.S. involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of anti-drug efforts in Central America, according to documents, congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.
In both regions, U.S. officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling — like Mexico and Spain — have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them.
“We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues,” said Jeffrey Breeden, the chief of the DEA’s Europe, Asia and Africa section. “It’s a place that we need to get ahead of — we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”
The initiatives come amid a surge in successful interdictions in Honduras since May — but also as U.S. officials have been forced to defend their new tactics after a commando-style team of DEA agents participated in at least three lethal interdiction operations alongside a squad of Honduran police officers. In one of those operations, in May, the Honduran police killed four people near the village of Ahuas, and in two others in the past month U.S. agents have shot and killed smuggling suspects.
To date, officials say, the DEA commando team has not been deployed to work with the newly created elite police squads in Africa, where the effort to counter the drug traffickers is said to be about three years behind the one in Central America.
The officials said that if Western security forces began to play a more direct operational role in Africa, for historical reasons they might be European and not American.
In May, William Brownfield, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, a leading architect of the strategy on display in Honduras, traveled to Ghana and Liberia to put the finishing touches on a West Africa Cooperative Security Initiative, which will try to replicate across 15 nations the steps taken in battling trafficking groups operating in Central America and Mexico.
Brownfield said the vision for both regions was to improve the ability of nations to deal with drug trafficking, by building up their own institutions and getting them to cooperate with one another, sharing intelligence and running regional law enforcement training centers.
But because drug traffickers already have moved into Africa, he said, there is also a need for the immediate elite police units that have been trained and vetted.
“We have to be doing operational stuff right now because things are actually happening right now,” Brownfield said.
Some specialists have expressed skepticism about the approach. Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on Latin America and counternarcotics, said making trafficking more difficult in one place simply shifts it to another.
“As they put on the pressure, they are going to detour routes, but they are not going to stop the flow, because the institutions are incredibly weak — I don’t care how much vetting they do,” Bagley said. “And there is always blowback to this. You start killing people in foreign countries — whether criminals or not — and there is going to be fallout.”
U.S. government officials acknowledge the challenges, but they are not as pessimistic about the chances of at least pushing the trafficking organizations out of particular countries. And even if the intervention leads to an increase in violence as organizations that had operated with impunity are challenged, the alternative, they said, is worse.
U.S. counternarcotics assistance for West Africa has totaled about $50 million for each of the past two years — up from just $7.5 million in 2009, according to the State Department. The DEA also is opening its first country office in Senegal, officials said, and the Pentagon has worked with Cape Verde to establish a regional center to detect drug-smuggling ships.
While the agency has not sponsored units in West Africa before, it has long worked with similar teams — which are given training, equipment and pay while being subjected to rigorous drug and polygraph testing — in countries around the world where security forces are plagued by corruption, including the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama.
William Wechsler, the Pentagon’s top counternarcotics officer, said observing drug traffickers’ advances into West Africa, and the response from U.S. and local authorities, was like watching a rerun of the drug war in this hemisphere in years past.
“West Africa is now facing a situation analogous to the Caribbean in the 1980s, where small, developing, vulnerable countries along major drugtrafficking routes toward rich consumers are vastly underresourced to deal with the wave of dirty money coming their way,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 9 on 07/22/2012