U.S. Southern Command’s counternarcotics fund was slated for a 20% hit to meet a $7.2 billion contribution to President Trump’s border wall when its leader made a case before Congress for more ships to fight the drug trade.
“They’re critical for the security of the United States of America. They’re saving lives,” U.S. Southern Command’s Adm. Craig Faller said March 11 while testifying before the House Armed Services Committee.
Faller said diversion of the money to the United States-Mexico border wall project would deplete about a third of the funds allotted to Southcom, the Miami-based outpost responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation for Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, including protecting U.S. military forces in the hemisphere.
Faller was careful not to criticize the border wall or funding cuts, even telling Pentagon journalists later that day that there was no connection.
“There has been no impact to my counternarcotic money top-line funding based on any discussions on border wall to date,” Faller said. “The money that I have needed to do my mission has remained in that fund, and we’ve been able to continue our mission.”
Last week, Faller got his ships.
“The president has directed the deployment of additional ships, aircraft and security forces to the United States Southern Command area of responsibility [in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean Sea],” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper before the start of the coronavirus task force briefing in the White House on Wednesday.
Included in the new force package to double counternarcotics operations in the region were Navy destroyers and littoral combat ships, Coast Guard cutters, P-8 patrol aircraft, and parts of an Army Security Force Assistance Brigade.
The win was a big one for Faller’s efforts to curtail the drug trade, one of Southcom’s top regional priorities.
Only a month prior, Faller had been telling Congress that planned cuts would defund programs, reduce joint exercises, military education, and important finances needed to fight the drug trade and transnational criminal organizations that profit handsomely from it.
“Those programs that we will defund are likely ones that have made an impact, that have increased our partners’ ability to do things like counternarcotics,” Faller argued to Congress in justifying the importance of the South-facing regional command.
What changed? Arguably, the coronavirus.
“We came upon some intelligence some time ago that the drug cartels, as a result of COVID-19, were going to try to take advantage of the situation and try to infiltrate additional drugs into our country,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley at the White House briefing.
But for some regional experts, the counternarcotics mission wasn’t working, and the 20% cut would be hardly missed.
“It’s really not been a very successful program,” Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Washington, D.C. think tank Inter-American Dialogue, told the Washington Examiner.
Hakim said the countries of Central America, as well as Mexico and Colombia, have come to depend on “dollops of U.S. support” while rates of violence have not declined.
“The security assistance hasn’t brought any sort of improvement in homicide rates. It hasn’t brought any improvement in the amounts of drugs coming to the United States,” he said. “I don’t think that a 20% cut is going to make much difference in the war against drugs.”
Hakim, instead, argued for handing the lead to the nations of the region rather than urging them to follow the U.S. model.
“I’m not confident that the U.S. really should be the one to design and manage sort of the anti-drug war,” he said. “Even then, I think the prospects of having an easy sort of reduction of the flow of illegal drugs is uncertain.”
Southcom spokesman José Ruiz told the Washington Examiner that security assistance is working, disrupting 280 metric tons of cocaine last year, with regional partners doing half the work.
“That level of contribution is only possible because many of those partners received training and equipment support through U.S. security assistance and cooperation programs,” he said.
Ruiz said DoD’s efforts to build partner capacity contributes “to the security of our homeland.”
“What they can do is limited by the fiscal resources they have available,” he said. “We’ve seen countries really step up in a major way after receiving U.S. security assistance and cooperation support.”
With time, Ruiz said, countries such as Costa Rica and Jamaica have built up their security forces and counternarcotics efforts, weaning off U.S. dollars. Countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala, he added, now patrol many miles beyond their territorial waters, doing a job that the U.S. Navy would otherwise do to keep drugs off American streets.
Southcom also said security assistance programs help to counter China and Russia’s influence in the region.
“Our security cooperation programs are critical in maintaining the United States as the partner of choice in the region,” he said.
Still, Hakim says powerful economic investments by China matter more and will remain a challenge for the U.S. to overcome if it focuses instead on building a wall.
“The border wall, frankly, is more of a symbol,” said Hakim. “It’s a symbol of the sort of future we envision with Latin America, and it’s a U.S. on one side of the border, more independent than ever from Latin America, and Latin America, more distant from the United States.”
