Word: bolivia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Word leaked out almost as soon as the giant U.S. Air Force C-5A transport plane touched down in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. As U.S. embassy spokesmen in the capital city of La Paz and Defense Department officials in Washington tried to downplay the matter, headlines in Bolivia and the U.S. were blaring the news: in the first use of a U.S. military operation on foreign soil to fight drugs, Army Black Hawk helicopters, armed with .30-cal. machine guns and escorted by about 160 U.S. soldiers, had been flown into the South American jungle to assist Bolivian...
...three days because a wildcat gasoline strike prevented refueling at Santa Cruz airport. While the huge C-5A sat at the airport in full view of TV cameras, reporters and, presumably, drug merchants, U.S. troops needed four days to transport supplies to a base camp north of Trinidad, in Bolivia's lush northeastern Beni region, where most of the coca leaves are processed. "This thing has turned into a bad dream," confessed one Pentagon official...
...week's end the operation was at last under way, as U.S. pilots flew Leopards (as the special police of Bolivia's antidrug unit are known) on four raids. In the first one, 30 of the troops jumped out of two choppers near a 15-tent drug complex just as a Cessna aircraft was landing nearby. The pilot fled into the jungle, but his 17-year-old helper was seized. The raiders destroyed a log-frame laboratory where coca leaves were converted into coca paste...
...scope and results, the operation represented a significant escalation in the Reagan Administration's open-ended commitment to use the military against cocaine, the addictive white powder that is now the fastest-growing segment of the approximately $125 billion illicit U.S. drug market. American soldiers will remain in Bolivia for at least two months, transporting the Leopards on search-and-destroy missions into the countryside. U.S. officials are said to be reviewing similar requests for military assistance from Peru, Ecuador and Colombia -- countries that, along with Bolivia, produce almost all the cocaine sold in the U.S. and Western Europe. Moreover...
...everyone applauded the move. Capitol Hill accepted the Administration's assurances that since Bolivia was not a combat zone, the President need not consult with Congress under the provisions of the War Powers Act of 1973. But a few critics were uneasy about the possibility that someday American soldiers could find themselves in a shoot-out with drug gangs. Others expressed concern about the increasing use of the military in civilian law-enforcement procedures. While finding "no serious problem" with the Bolivia operation, Allan Adler, legal counsel for the A.C.L.U., was worried that "if drug smuggling can be declared...