As Bolivia’s top counternarcotics police official, Rene Sanabria’s loyalties straddled two worlds: one of tight cooperation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the other dominated by an intensely nationalistic president who rose to power as a militant coca grower.
In the end, it appears, Sanabria betrayed both.
The retired police general was arrested last week in Panama on charges he ran a cocaine-smuggling ring while leading an elite, 15-person anti-drug intelligence unit within Bolivia’s Interior Ministry.
His capture badly bruised the credibility of Bolivian President Evo Morales’ policy of zero tolerance for cocaine and can only hurt his efforts to end a global prohibition on coca leaf chewing.
It offered vindication to the DEA, because Sanabria’s alleged crimes took place after Morales expelled the US agency in late 2008 for allegedly inciting his autonomy-seeking opponents in eastern provinces.
According to US officials, the expulsion of the roughly 30 US drug agents allowed trafficking in this landlocked South American nation to spin out of control.
In the DEA’s absence, Mexican, Brazilian, Colombian — even Russian and Serbian traffickers — have taken advantage and boosted exports from the world’s No. 3 cocaine-producing nation.
Drug-related killings are on the rise and bigger, more sophisticated processing labs equipped with Colombian technology are increasing output as new actors join the trade.
This week, the UN International Narcotics Control Board criticized the Morales government for letting Bolivia’s crop of coca, the basis for cocaine, grow to 30,900 hectares, the most since 1998.
US State Department figures released this week put cultivation even higher: at 35,000 hectares.
“Cocaine is resurgent in Bolivia,” said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami professor who specializes in drug policy. “Morales has a big problem on his hands.”
Morales’ critics at home were quick to seize on Sanabria’s arrest as proof traffickers now have the upper hand in Bolivia.
“The DEA should come back,” Ernesto Justianino, who as deputy social defense minister was in charge of Bolivia’s counterdrug operations from 2001 to 2002, wrote in a newspaper column.
The DEA “kept police, prosecutors and judges accountable,” he said.
However, Morales insisted on Thursday he has no intention of inviting the DEA back. He alleged “interests of a geopolitical nature” were behind the Sanabria case.
“They are using police to try to implicate the government,” he said, without elaborating.
Bolivian Vice Minister of Social Defense Felipe Caceres suggested earlier in the week that Sanabria’s arrest was the DEA’s revenge for being expelled.
The president also hinted at US hypocrisy, recalling reports — denied by US agencies — that US agents ran guns to Nicaraguan Contra rebels in the 1980s with the proceeds of cocaine sales in the US.
However, Morales acknowledged in an interview in September that Bolivia alone cannot stop the traffickers.
He has not yet found a suitable partner to match the US either in funding or manpower.
In July, Morales told foreign diplomats that traffickers routinely intercept government communications, but Bolivian authorities don’t have the technological means to eavesdrop on criminals.
Yet Morales spokesman Ivan Canelas defended Bolivia’s efforts this week, saying police have “arrested major narcos and encountered big drug labs without the DEA.”
Last year, the government reports, 3,054 people were arrested for drug trafficking and 25.4 tonnes of cocaine seized. That’s twice the amount seized in Peru, whose coca crop is twice as big as Bolivia’s.
Bolivians are expressing doubts. In several recent high-profile cases, police have been jailed on drug trafficking charges. In one, a prosecutor and two police officers were jailed on the Brazilian border in June, charged with replacing confiscated cocaine with flour.
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