USA Freedom Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his leadership, and I wish to ask my colleague if he is aware of the testimony the commanding general of U.S. Southern Command, General Kelly--a marine four-star general--gave to the Armed Services Committee and to the Foreign Relations Committee recently, in the last couple of weeks?
Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I am aware of the testimony of General Kelly, but given his role at SOUTHCOM and in particular its location in Florida and the fact that the Senator from Florida was there for the testimony, I would ask him to remind us exactly what General Kelly had to say about how we are or in some cases are not interdicting and dealing with the flow of narcotics and particularly cocaine that has been at the root of so much of the instability and violence we see in these three Central American countries today.
Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, the Senator from New Mexico has put his finger on exactly the root cause of the problem. It is the substantial loads of cocaine that are coming into these three Central American countries; that because of the violence, because of the killing, the parents have three choices when their child gets on up toward their teenage years. Their first choice is to let their kid join the gang.
These gangs are criminal gangs, and they are tied in with the drug lords. The drug lords have taken over the country because of all the money that is being made from these big shipments that come in.
The parents have three choices: No. 1, let their kid join the gang; No. 2, go to their child's funeral; or No. 3, they become subject to the subtle and direct plea by the coyotes: Oh, for $1,500, $5,000, we can get your kid to the border and your child will be safe in America.
Why those three countries? Why are the children who have been showing up in the last several months at the border not coming from Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama? They are coming from three countries--El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--because that is where the big shipments of drugs are coming from--from South America into those areas in a boat with 1 to 3 tons of cocaine. Once they get on land, they break them down into small packages, and they go through a very efficient distribution system that is drugs and criminal elements--they can distribute just about anything they want, including trafficking in humans. And they are going north.
So if Honduras is the murder capital of the world and if El Salvador and Guatemala are not far behind, how do you get at that immediately to stop the flow of children going north? You more effectively interdict the drug shipments. That is why the United States has been so successful.
General Kelly, the commanding general of Southern Command, tells us that sadly he has to sit there with his Joint Interagency Task Force--all the agencies of the U.S. Government arrayed together and headquartered in Key West--and they have to watch 74 percent of primarily these boats--not so much the flights; primarily boats because they can carry big loads of cocaine--get through.
If it gets to the point of voting for the supplemental, I would certainly vote for it, but it doesn't get to the root cause of the problem. What we have done--and I have shared this with as many people as I can, consulting with General Kelly. They boiled this down to $122 million out of the President's request of $3.7 billion, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has pared that down to $2.7 billion.
This Senator is asking for $122 million, and it will cover such things as $31 million for U.S. Government interagency task force maritime patrol craft; $40 million for maritime patrol requirements to deploy U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement detachments; $15 million for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance by putting up contractor-owned Predators 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. That contract is being drawn up. If we did this, General Kelly could execute that contract immediately, and then you would start to see some results.
Mr. HEINRICH. If I understand the Senator from Florida correctly, General Kelly simply does not have the resources to do the job we have done historically in terms of interdicting cocaine moving north for the market that, frankly, is in North America--
Mr. NELSON. That is correct.
Mr. HEINRICH. --in the United States and Canada. They have to literally sit there and watch these narcotics go by without having the resources to stop them in their tracks.
Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct. Whereas General Kelly--and I am just using him as the symbol since he is a four-star general. It is the Joint Interagency Task Force in Key West that is actually headed by a Coast Guard admiral. They can interdict, and do interdict, about 25 percent of those big shipments coming from South America. They go through the Caribbean on the east and also through the Pacific on the west. And because they have been effective at 25 percent of the shipments, what we are seeing is a shifting of those shipments. They are now actually sending more of them to the east--not only to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but now to Puerto Rico, which is a U.S. territory. When they get those drugs into Puerto Rico--and that is American territory--they can ship them by mail from there to the rest of the United States and avoid detection.
Mr. HEINRICH. My understanding is that the resource situation in Southern Command has changed so dramatically in recent years that not only is this interagency task force limited, but they have literally canceled more than 200 engagement activities and multilateral exercises with our partners in the region who can multiply that effect and interdict even more narcotics as they are moving forward.
Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct. As a matter of fact, the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee, with whom I have consulted, is very familiar with the great operation of the Joint Interagency Task Force to go after these drugs. As the Senator from New Mexico said, you can imagine their frustration when they know about the boat shipment, and sometimes they can watch it from their overhead assets, and they can't do anything about it.
As a result, look at what has happened over the last several months. We are trying to solve the problem on the border. We have all of these children showing up at the border. We ought to solve that problem. We need to go back to the very beginning and stop what is causing this problem.
Mr. HEINRICH. The Senator from Florida also brought up another issue that I think is worth exploring. It is my understanding that he was recently briefed on the relationship that exists between these drug cartels and the entities that are actually engaging in human trafficking and moving people, for a fee, through Central America and Mexico and to the U.S. border. Can the Senator tell us a little bit about the nature of that relationship?
Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct on how all of these things are interlocked. You can imagine how a sufficient quantity of drugs, which is worth so much, is a corrupting influence on any kind of law and order. As a result, the systems of governments--and Senator Kaine and I both met with the President of Honduras. He is trying as hard as he can. He has a bounty on his head by these drug lords because he is opposing them. The judicial system is corrupted. The local police are corrupted. When that happens, then you can imagine when other criminal activities occur, in addition to other drug activities, such as human trafficking, and terrorists potentially being utilized in these efficient delivery networks, then it is all the more a threat to the national security interests of the United States.
I think the U.S. Congress and the U.S. administration better wake up to the fact of what is happening right under our nose and get at this, in addition to solving the problems that we see that are a symptom, ultimately, of the root cause--the creation of a whole criminal network that is, in large part, fueled by the drug trade.
Mr. HEINRICH. If the Senator from Florida will yield for a minute, the sad thing is it didn't used to be that way in this part of Central America, and I know that for a fact because my wife and I traveled there 15, 16 years ago. We traveled extensively in Honduras, and at that time these gangs simply did not have the influence. They did not have this level of destabilization and they did not have this murder rate.
I always joke about trying to drive into Tegucigalpa, and I would not recommend it to anybody who has not had time to acclimate to the speed and crush of cars in that capital city, but it was a completely different country at the time. We traveled extensively in urban areas in San Pedro Sula and rural areas such as Santa Rosa de Copan, and it was an economically challenged country.
For those folks who have claimed that all of these immigrants are simply heading north out of economic desperation, the economic situation has not changed all that much. It is worth looking at the rest of Central America. The surrounding countries, such as Belize and Costa Rica and other countries in Central America, are also seeing refugees from these countries.
Nicaragua, which has substantial economic challenges right now, is losing economic immigrants, and those immigrants are not making it to our southern border in any substantial numbers. In fact, less than a year ago, I was in Costa Rica and many Nicaraguans are working in Costa Rica because the economy is better there. Yet we don't see them showing up--especially the unaccompanied minors, 7,
8, 12-year-olds--at our border by themselves. They are not being driven out by the extreme violence we have seen in these three nations where the drug cartels have such a disproportionate influence on their country's stability.
Mr. NELSON. If the Senator will yield, to underscore his point, we can look at the extraordinary success of Plan Colombia. Outside of Central America--if you go a little further south, you are on the continent of South America. And lo and behold, 15, 20 years ago, a large part of Colombia was controlled by elements that were controlled by the drug lords. With the assistance of the United States and extraordinary heroism on the part of the Government of Colombia, we have seen the Government of Colombia take back control of most of its country. Even though cocaine is still grown there and the FARC is still operating, their criminal element is a diminished insurrection of what it used to be. If you visited a place like Bogota, the capital city, it was not safe to go out alone and walk on the streets. Now you can easily walk on the streets. The situation there has changed.
We are seeing the same replicated now in Central America where the drug lords have basically taken over by buying off people with considerable money, and therefore it makes it very difficult to have the rule of law in those struggling governments, as it is for the President of Honduras, who is trying so hard to bring back his country.
Mr. HEINRICH. If the Senator from Florida will yield for a moment, having formerly served on the House Armed Services Committee, I know the Department of Defense budget is somewhere in the order of $550 billion. Surely SOUTHCOM must have a substantial amount of resources to be able to meet this, right?
Of that $550 billion, does the Senator from Florida know how much actually goes to Southern Command?
Mr. NELSON. What this Senator knows is that before the sequester started hitting the defense budget--even though we were conducting a war in two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq--with all of the multiplicity of threats that are around in the region, including what we see now with ISIS between Syria and northern and western Iraq, the Department of Defense had to make some hard choices. They had to cut back because of this mindless budgetary meat ax called the sequester, and as a result they had to set their priorities.
When they came down to it, they had to support the troops out in the field and had to cut back on other commands. The U.S. Southern Command is one of those commands that was cut back. But now we are seeing the lack of wisdom to these budgetary policies--sequester--and the scarcity when you cannot allocate the defense resources to other agencies. Remember, this is a Joint Interagency Task Force. We are now seeing the effects of that in what has been on the front pages of the newspapers which is reporting all of the children coming to the border.
By the way, the children are just a diminutive percentage of the total people still coming to the border. I can't remember if it is 20 percent or 40 percent, but it is something well less than half of all of the people who are still coming to the border. But, of course, the children, because of the humanitarian crisis for them, are the ones who have received the attention.
If we know there is a problem, how do we fix the problem? Well, we need to go back to the root cause, and that is the case I have been making on that side of the aisle and on this side of the aisle. Yet we are at this point of impasse, and needless to say, it is very frustrating to this Senator.
Mr. HEINRICH. I thank the Senator from Florida for continuing to be an advocate for this cause. I know that Southern Command's annual budget now is about $1 billion--literally $1 billion out of $550 billion in the Department of Defense.
Given the necessity of engaging with Central and South America on these issues, I think it is time to reevaluate, in terms of resources but also in terms of priorities, how we look at Central and South America, to reengage with our neighbors and try to address some of these issues at the root level instead of always at the symptom level.
I see we have been joined by our esteemed chair of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Mikulski of Maryland. So I thank the Chair for allowing the Senator from Florida and I to indulge in this colloquy. And, once again, I wish to say how much I hope we take this opportunity to do something, not just about the symptoms of the current crisis which has to be dealt with, but also the underlying causes of this crisis.
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