WASHINGTON — President Bush has determined that Bolivia is no longer cooperating in the war on drugs, placing it on a counter-narcotics blacklist along with Venezuela, as U.S. ties with the leftist Latin American governments plummet.
The two nations — Bolivia for the first time and Venezuela for the fourth year in a row — were found to have “failed demonstrably” to meet commitments to combat the production and trafficking of illicit drugs, mainly cocaine. Myanmar, a major producer of methamphetamine, also made a repeat appearance on the list.
The designations can result in significant cuts in U.S. aid, but Bush spared both Bolivia and Venezuela from such penalties, citing a national interest waiver.
The Bolivia and Venezuela determinations were made as Washington’s relations with populist leaders in La Paz and Caracas fall to new lows. Both countries last week expelled the U.S. ambassadors, prompting tit-for-tat reciprocal expulsions of their envoys to the United States.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has long been a thorn in the side of the Bush administration’s Latin America policy, but Bolivian President Evo Morales has recently moved to boost his anti-American credentials, accusing the United States of helping to foment widespread and worsening political unrest in his country.
Due to the security situation in Bolivia, where protests against Morales in the opposition-controlled eastern lowlands have erupted in violence, the State Department has allowed nonessential personnel at its embassy in La Paz and the families of all diplomats there to leave the country. On Tuesday, it announced that it was organizing flights for Americans who want to depart. The Peace Corps has moved all its volunteers from Bolivia to Peru.
The U.S. State Department denied that politics played any role in either the Bolivian or Venezuelan designations.
“This was not a hasty decision,” said David Johnson, the State Department’s point man for counter-narcotics, as he presented the findings. “Bolivia remains a major narcotics producing country and its official policies and actions have caused a significant deterioration in its cooperation with the United States.”
He noted that Morales, a former coca growers’ union leader, was encouraging farmers to boost production of the leaf, which many Bolivians chew as a mild stimulant but which is also the precursor for cocaine. There was a 14 percent increase in land used for coca cultivation last year, increasing the potential cocaine yield from 115 to 120 metric tons, he said.
Johnson also noted that the Bolivian government had barred U.S. aid workers and drug enforcement agents from the major coca production area of Chapare.
“These actions represent a retreat from Bolivia’s international obligations to control cocaine trafficking,” he told reporters.
Bolivia is the world’s third-largest coca producer after Colombia, the biggest anti-drug partner of the U.S., and Peru, which received about $125 million in aid from the United States in 2007, of which $55 million was for an anti-narcotics program. That amount was reduced to just over $100 million in 2008.
In Bolivia on Tuesday, soldiers arrested an opposition governor on suspicion of directing a massacre of government supporters. The opposition-controlled provinces are demanding a larger share of the country’s natural gas wealth and trying to block attempts to direct resources to the long- suffering indigenous majority.
The arrest of Leopoldo Fernandez, governor of the remote Amazonian province of Pando, had seemed to jeopardize attempts to seek compromise after Morales opponents ransacked government offices in Pando and three other eastern provinces last week.
But the two sides took a step toward detente by signing a pledge to return to talks, the Bolivian state news agency reported.
