The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Gersony sensed a “minimalism” about Micronesia at the State Department and USAID, the kind of lack of urgency that he had also sensed during Hurricane Mitch and the first days in Iraq when the DART leaders had failed. In his mind, what was needed was a proactive approach best epitomized by Fred Cuny in Kurdistan in 1991. It would be hard to generate interest, though, mainly because of the tyranny of distance: each of these islands was just so far from the others, and all of them were so far from Honolulu, and Honolulu so far from Washington. Who said geography no longer mattered?

  * * *

  —

  Gersony traveled from island to island for several months on two separate trips, interviewing 266 people in fifteen locations, including Guam and the Philippine capital of Manila. His conclusion was stark. The Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands constituted, much like Puerto Rico, a U.S. dependency, entailing a special obligation. Yet USAID had no one permanently stationed here on the ground, and despite the regular typhoons, there were almost no emergency supplies. “When disaster struck, these places were completely on their own for a week, since in the context of a typhoon, we would be unable to get there for quite a few days,” he explains. About the suffering, he says: “Storms cause mudslides. You can’t imagine how painful the wounds of a mudslide are, because of the stones, sticks, and other debris that hit people with such a powerful force!” One boy he interviewed had to have part of a stick removed from his stomach without anesthesia.

  Thus emerged his recommendations, all of which were obvious:

  Position in advance, on the islands, anesthetics and other emergency trauma supplies. Pre-position generators and desalinization units. Despite the willingness of the U.S. military to help, use regional NGOs in any emergency since they were less bureaucratic than the Department of Defense. Bundle projects together to attract outside contractors, with all the projects coming under the direction of a “master NGO implementer,” who would coordinate the work of the various non-governmental organizations. Employ private-sector companies in Guam and Honolulu to avoid the far less efficient U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Bury high-voltage electric lines so they wouldn’t be toppled in a storm. Create water-collection units on rooftops to capture clean drinking water from the rains. Replenish mangrove swamps as natural barriers against sea and wind damage.

  Eventually, everything he recommended was implemented. “Gersony’s work in Micronesia was a tour de force,” says Peter Morris, an unassuming USAID official who had also worked with Gersony in Albania. “Gersony practically negotiated the details of the changeover from FEMA to USAID on these islands. Others had methodologies like Gersony’s. But he had this special genius arising from an ability to conduct a dialogue with ordinary people, take voluminous notes, and then brief it down to the last detail.”

  Still, Gersony was discouraged. After a dreary and drawn-out bureaucratic battle, he ultimately failed to get a USAID officer permanently stationed in Pohnpei, the Micronesian capital—the officer went instead to the Marshall Islands capital of Majuro, a bit further removed. Small bureaucratic potatoes, but it mattered to him.

  He was clearly troubled. Maybe it was his age and the fact that he was now working exclusively with lower-level people, not with the USAID administrator himself, or with assistant secretaries of state, but Gersony detected a new and growing weak-kneed avoidance of controversy and taking hard decisions in the bureaucracy. Every decision was more of a struggle now. Alas, USAID had never fully recovered from the short, disastrous tenure of Randall Tobias. Although new civil servants and Foreign Service officers began being hired after Tobias left, because of the downsizing during his reign, these new people lacked a sufficient number of mentors and the tradition that the old subject-matter experts embodied. The Iraq War also played its part. Humanitarian development workers were supposed to always be “neutral,” but in Iraq you couldn’t be, since you were part of an occupation.

  Gersony perceived that the military takeover of foreign policy of recent years may have been not only the result of faulty analysis, romantic delusions about exporting democracy, and misbegotten wars, but also an organic osmosis that had been years in the making, ever since the end of the Cold War undermined disciplined thought. The military was simply the force of nature that had filled a vacuum: the vacuum of a slowly declining USAID and State Department bureaucracy, of which Hurricane Mitch in 1998 had provided Gersony with his first inkling. He felt that he was headed downhill, with fewer consequential assignments, and the State Department and USAID were headed in the same direction.

  Says one longtime USAID official about the situation today:

  “The Bob Gersonys, Fred Cunys, and Paul Bells of this world are gone. We’re outsourcing our assessments to consulting groups now. We assume because of Twitter that we know what’s happening on the ground in distant places, even if we don’t.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Northern Mexico by Way of Central America

  2010–2013

  Sleeping with His Notebook Between His Legs

  Indeed, Bob Gersony looked around and did not like what he saw. One by one, all his senior mentors had retired or left: Fred Schieck, Gene Dewey, Jim Purcell, Jonathan Moore, Janet Ballantyne, Brian Atwood, Andrew Natsios. He was now working with people with insufficient bureaucratic clout to enforce decisions, and who generated far less of a sense of mission. Instead of two long and substantive assignments per year, he was now averaging one that was less substantive, more routine, and less prominent on account of how Iraq and Afghanistan had swallowed up all bureaucratic energies. The stage lights were dimming for him. In his midsixties, he was doing curtain calls.

  But these curtain calls were dangerous and consequential and shed a light on the current mayhem on America’s southern border.

  They constituted three long trips: first it was back to Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, then to northern Mexico, and finally to the remote northeastern region of Mosquitia in Honduras. But all these assignments had to do with just one thing: the scourge of narcotics.

  * * *

  —

  On May 11, 2012, a passenger boat was slowly moving along a river in Mosquitia when it was fired upon by a Honduran military helicopter. The nighttime action killed four civilians. Because the helicopter was actually being operated by the State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement bureau (INL), with an adviser from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on board, a small controversy erupted in Washington.

  In particular, Vermont Democratic senator Patrick Leahy was concerned. Over the decades, Leahy had carved out an important niche as a liberal Democrat absolutely committed to the rule of law, to human rights, and to pushing back at the increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Right behind Leahy stood Tim Rieser, Leahy’s powerful aide, who actually articulated the senator’s foreign policy instincts on a day-to-day and issue-by-issue basis. Rieser may arguably have been the most formidable staff aide in Congress when it came to matters of human rights intersecting with strategic interests. He was one of those people who are famous and influential in Washington and unknown just about everywhere else. Whereas Leahy had been a county prosecutor, Rieser had been a public defender, so both men’s commitment to justice at all costs was baked into their professional life experiences. And both internalized a particular clear-eyed form of idealism and fair play, arguably unrealistic at times, yet characteristic of rural Vermont, the same state that had produced Bernie Sanders.

  Vermont Democratic senator Patrick Leahy (seated) with his top foreign policy staffer, Tim Rieser. Rieser supported Gersony’s work in Central America.

  In the wake of the helicopter incident, Tim Rieser had a conversation with Mark Wells, the director of INL’s Latin American and Caribbean division. Rieser and Wells agreed that INL did not have an acceptable strategy for dealing with the Honduran Mosquitia. The two men also agreed that it was Bob Gersony who sho
uld travel through the region in order to design a strategy for fighting narcotics that did not infringe upon human rights. As Rieser recounts:

  “The area was very remote, very dangerous, where it was hard to distinguish fact from fiction. So Bob Gersony was a good choice. There is only one Bob Gersony in this world.”

  As a State Department official told me, “Tim Rieser was a formidable policy intellect and he was therefore hard to argue with, but Bob Gersony could move the needle on him.”

  Between Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, where he had recently been, and the adjacent Honduran Mosquitia, Gersony would end up visiting 75 towns and villages where he would interview 357 people, 75 percent of whom were Miskitos and Creoles, and the rest Spanish-speaking. He would cover 750 miles of lakes and rivers, and 625 miles of road, through pine savannas, tropical forests, swamps, and steep mountains, interviewing every kind of person from jellyfish harvesters, disabled lobster divers,1 fishermen and farmers, and small cattle owners, in addition to the usual drumroll of teachers, clerks, local officials, and so on. He will always remember the big turtles sunning themselves on logs as he sped along the vast rivers.

  Gersony discovered that because Mosquitia had relatively few roads, no governance, and complete isolation, it had one asset: it could easily be taken over by narcotics traffickers, which is exactly what had happened. In particular, the traffickers had essentially made their own sovereign little country out of the northeastern corner of Mosquitia, located on the Atlantic coast, hard up against the Nicaraguan border. An army of thugs maintained this territory and had turned it into a principal trafficking point for Colombian cocaine on its way to the United States.

  Gersony dared not enter this sovereign narcotics terrain, but he did interview dozens who lived right on the edge of it. As per his modus operandi, he traveled alone. But now for the first time in his life he grew a beard, in order to look like an aging hippie or butterfly collector, so as to attract a bit less suspicion. He slept with his notebook high up between his legs, “because my notebook was a death sentence for those I had interviewed, who had told me about what the narco-traffickers were up to.”

  The story he composed, based on his interviews, had many themes and avenues of entry. Here is one:

  The narco-traffickers often transported the cocaine from Colombia northwest to the United States on boats, hugging the Atlantic seaboard of Central America, storing the cocaine in tightly sealed, waterproof bundles. The smugglers would be regularly attacked by Nicaraguan and Honduran naval vessels, forcing the smugglers to ditch some of the bundles in the water. The floating bundles later washed ashore and were discovered by the local Miskitos and Creoles, who referred to the bundles as langostas blancas, or “white lobsters.” Because of the sheer amount of cocaine that washed ashore, many in Mosquitia and Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast became addicted: 15 percent of the men aged 12 to 40 on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast and 40 percent in the Honduran Mosquitia, according to Gersony’s calculations, based on his interviews. Moreover, this cheap bulk cocaine became the organizing principle and unofficial currency of this remote region. Gasoline for boats was paid for in cocaine. Political and cultural organizations came under the influence of those tied to the local cocaine traffic.

  Crime surged. Gersony ticks off:

  “You couldn’t leave your house unguarded. You couldn’t leave your pigs and chickens without somebody watching them. You couldn’t leave your propane cylinder outside, or your yucca field unattended at night….”

  In Puerto Lempira, the capital of Mosquitia located on a sweltering long lagoon parallel to the Atlantic coast, Gersony watched as “13- to 14-year-old girls were sold as prostitutes.” The cocaine that had not managed to make it through the Nicaraguan and Honduran security gauntlet to the United States was enough to corrupt an entire population.

  States in the developing world fail or are weakened for a plethora of simple and complex reasons: environmental deterioration, demographic explosions, bad governance, ethnic and tribal divisions, and so on. In Central America it was simple: the key ingredient to state failure—which was in turn driving migrants to the U.S. border—was America’s own appetite for cocaine and other drugs, and the profit motive that subsequently kicked in, undermining people’s values and state institutions.

  Meanwhile, various NGO projects, mainly European, had failed in Mosquitia. Electrification, mechanized rice milling, gravity-fed water systems, and other ideas never succeeded not because of lack of money, but because, at least in Gersony’s opinion, of bad designs caused by NGO workers not listening sufficiently to the advice of the local inhabitants about what would work for them. This only intensified cynicism in the area.

  Gersony’s suggestions at the end of his journey were “modest” in the extreme. “People here liked the United States,” he advised. “It wasn’t like in the Spanish-speaking heart of Central America where they distrusted us. So the relationship that the U.S. government builds with Mosquitia and the Atlantic coast should not be transactional”—that is, it should not be reduced to cynical deal-making.

  He recommended the establishment of interagency working groups in the U.S. embassies in Managua and Tegucigalpa, and the continual cratering of runways in the region, using small explosives, in order to reduce the number of planes landing to drop off cargoes of cocaine, refuel, and return to Venezuela or Colombia. Yes, the runways would be repaired, but it would slow down the trafficking nonetheless and help demoralize the traffickers. Moreover, he wanted to bring the number of State Department INL helicopters used against cocaine traffickers down from six to two, in order to satisfy Senator Leahy’s office. Also, he suggested that the United States begin actively supporting non-narcotics, civil society elements throughout Mosquitia and the Atlantic coast, and do the usual road and bridge repairs in order to announce a benign presence.

  Very small stuff. Completely unoriginal. Rolling the rock back up the hill considering all the work he had done for years in the 1990s on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.

  The embassies were delighted. But as obvious and minimalistic as Gersony’s recommendations were, not one thing was implemented. The Obama administration, in addition to its obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan, had its priorities set more on sub-Saharan Africa now; so that America’s troubled near abroad in Central America—the consequence of America’s own appetite for drugs—got shortchanged once again, even though Tim Rieser believed Gersony’s recommendations were generally spot-on.

  There was also an honest and legitimate disagreement in Washington bureaucratic circles, based on genuine philosophical differences, regarding what to do in yet another deeply troubled state of Central America run by corrupt elites. Some wanted to work with those elites, however corrupt, since there was no other choice; others wanted to do the minimum in order to be completely true to America’s values. Nevertheless, it might also be argued that, little by little, a spirit of distraction and contentiousness—the fruit of too much ideological confrontation—had been gradually taking over Washington, as facts on the ground in this overwhelmingly complex world of ours, best revealed by gumshoe reporting, became less relevant to decision-makers. The Internet had theoretically united the world, but the world remained more a mystery than ever. Nobody cared about a crisis if the media wasn’t talking about it.

  It was now 2013. Mosquitia would turn out to be Gersony’s last assignment, yet there was no gold watch.

  * * *

  —

  But let me go back in time to describe an earlier trip, which in a thematic sense concluded Gersony’s career.

  On Monday, October 17, 2011, Bob Gersony took a trolley south from San Diego and walked across the international border to Tijuana, Mexico. It was the first time that he had ever walked to an assignment. He was about to travel clean across northern Mexico, parallel to the U.S. border, from the Gulf of California in the west to the Gulf of Mexico in the east, a region where 90
percent of the cocaine and much of the marijuana and methamphetamines were coming into the United States.

  The specific background to this assignment had started half a decade back in December 2006, when Felipe Calderón assumed the presidency of Mexico. At that time, northern Mexico was settled down. The small number of major drug cartels were all established and up and running. Each cartel had its own retail operation. The drug lords were dominant in the country, but, at least in cynical terms, it was a nice quiet business. However, Calderón was dead set on defeating the cartels and establishing the rule of law in Mexico. Rewarding his enthusiasm for such a risky venture in late 2007, the administration of President George W. Bush made a pact with Calderón known as the Mérida Initiative, named after a resort town in Mexico where the two leaders met. Henceforth, the United States poured $1.4 billion into training Mexican counter-narcotics squads. But because the two leaders decided to decapitate the cartels, going after their leaders, the very success of the initiative led to an explosion underneath. After all, the cartels were really federations with component units and individual gangs, which, without the big leaders at the top, began fighting for turf and killing each other in the process.

  Bush and Calderón had no idea what they had set in motion. All order was destroyed, as a significant part of northern Mexico was plunged into an abyss. It was vaguely like what had happened when the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, only more anarchic. In Iraq it was wholesale murder of Sunnis versus Shi’ites. In northern Mexico there was block-by-block retail murder of one gang against another. By the time Gersony crossed into Tijuana, four years after the signing of the Mérida Initiative, 47,000 people had been killed. In part, the Mérida Initiative was an outcome of insufficient knowledge, not only in Washington but also in the capital of Mexico City, about the lawless north of the country—Mexico being one of the most sprawling and mountainous countries on earth, breeding incredible diversity and historically weak central control.2