Drug, arms trafficking big SouthCom concerns - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Drug, arms trafficking big SouthCom concerns

Despite rumblings from Venezuela and evidence of Iranian and terrorist support for Latin American-based insurgencies, the U.S. Southern Command chief views the traffic of drugs, people and small arms as the greatest threat to the U.S. and its allies.

“The biggest concern I have within the region is not a … conventional military threat,” Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser told reporters during a Tuesday breakfast meeting in Washington. “It’s illicit trafficking. … Drugs, human trafficking, weapons, bulk cash. … And it affects almost every part of the region.”

Fraser’s greatest military worry, outside of growing tension between Columbia and Venezuela, is the number of small arms Venezuela is purchasing — 100,000 AK-103s and up to 2,400 Igla-S shoulder-launched, surface-to-air missile systems — as well as the Russian-supported construction of a factory that will produce as many as 25,000 more rifles annually.

“My concern there is the potential for proliferation of those arms,” Fraser said.

Concern over growing Iranian influence in the region was briefly raised in the Pentagon’s April report on Iran’s military power, which stated that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force has an “increased presence” in Latin America, particularly Venezuela. Fraser said he does not yet see the force providing military support, and said he doesn’t think his view contradicts that report.

“I don’t see any arms or indications of arms coming from Iran,” Fraser said. “What I see is that Iran has had, from a diplomatic and a commercial standpoint, a growing interest in Latin America. … Our concern is their connection to Hezbollah, Hamas.” Both groups, he said, have organizations within Latin America, but “all that we see right now — is focused on [providing] logistic support, financial support for parent organizations within the Mideast.”

“I haven’t seen evidence of [an Iranian] military presence” or of an effort to build a terrorist capacity in Latin America, Fraser said. “I’m a skeptic, and so we’re watching for that. To date, we have not seen that kind of support.”

The sort of support Fraser would like to see from his own country is more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets he can focus on the illicit trafficking enterprise — specifically, Fraser said, in the areas of illegal drug supply, transit and demand, as well as the financing that underpins the enterprises. Much of the growing U.S. capability, however, is targeted for the war effort in Afghanistan.

The interdiction effort is a continual uphill climb. Fraser said SouthCom annually interdicts — that is, finds or disrupts — only about 25 percent of the cocaine traffic that passes through the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, 80 percent of it on “go-fast” boats and submarine-like, hard-to-see, semi-submersible diesel-powered vessels that leave the western coast of Columbia and range far out to sea and back with payloads of up to 10 tons of cocaine.

The normal tactic for the semi-submersibles is to travel at night and dock in Central America, Fraser said. According to the Drug Enforcement administration, most foreign-produced illegal drugs are smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico and, to a lesser extent, from Canada.

In 2008, SouthCom “detected and disrupted” 76 semi-submersibles; last year, that number dropped to 52. “I don’t know whether that means the trend has fallen off in the use of these vessels, or they’ve changed their tactics and we just didn’t see as many as we did the year before.

“They change tactics as we change tactics,” Fraser said. “They’re well-financed.”

Finding the semi-submersible construction sites, as well as labs, trafficking trails and other telltale signs of the illicit drug trade, particularly when shielded by jungle, is a tremendous challenge, Fraser said.

“In some cases, people say that in the mangroves swamps in western Columbia, you can be 10 feet away from where somebody’s building a semi-submersible, and never see it,” Fraser said.

That’s where more airborne ISR comes in, Fraser said. He said the command is asking for an aerial ISR capability that can penetrate the jungle canopy and provide usable intelligence.

Fraser said that the Army is now testing an experimental ISR pod, mounted on an A-160 rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle, that would provide such a capability.

Other than that capability, what SouthCom specifically lacks, he said, is numbers: the ability to have persistent ISR presence over the vast maritime region that smugglers exploit.

“It does limit some of the capacities,” Fraser said. SouthCom mitigates this to some degree by working with law enforcement agencies, such as the U.S. Border Patrol, and partner nations to detect and interdict drug shipments, he said.

“We’re working with all the capacities that we can get,” Fraser said.

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