WASHINGTON – The United States needs to phase down its drug war and tighten the reins on its cooperation with local militaries and police in Latin America, according to a new report released here Wednesday by three influential think tanks.

Of particular interest is the increase in training deployments to Latin American and the Caribbean by the Special Operations Forces (SOF) – elite units like the Army’s Green Berets and Navy SEALS – due in part to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and drawdown from Afghanistan.

Over the past decade, SOF ranks have more than doubled to about 65,000, and their commander, Adm. William McRaven, has been particularly aggressive in seeking new missions for his troops in new theatres, including Latin America and the Caribbean where they are training thousands of local counterparts.

“You can train a lot of people for the cost of one helicopter,” Adam Isacson, an analyst with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told IPS.

He noted that the increased investment in SOF was part of a much larger Pentagon strategy of maintaining a “light (military) footprint” in countries around the globe while bolstering its influence with local military institutions.

The Pentagon, however, is much less transparent than the State Department, and its programmes are often not subject to the same human-rights conditions and do not get the same degree of Congressional oversight.

Moreover, McRaven has sought the authority to deploy SOF teams to countries without consulting either U.S. ambassadors there or even the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), making it even more difficult for civil society activists to track what they’re doing and whether they’re working with local units with poor human-rights records that would normally be denied U.S. aid and training under the so-called Leahy Law.

Last summer, according to Isacson, McRaven’s command even tried to work out an agreement with Colombia to set up a regional special operations coordination centre there without consulting SOUTHCOM or the embassy.

“What these developments mean is that the military role in foreign policy-making is becoming ever greater, and military-to-military relations come to matter more than diplomatic relations,” he said. “What does that mean for civil-military relations not only in the region, but also here at home?”

The 32-page report, entitled “Time to Listen”, describes U.S. policy as “on auto-pilot”, largely due to the powerful bureaucratic interests in the Pentagon and the Drug Enforcement Administration and their regional counterparts that have built up over decades.

“The counter-drug bureaucracies in the United States are remarkably resistant to change, unwilling to rethink and reassess strategies and goals,” said Lisa Haugaard, director of the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF) which released the report along with WOLA and the Centre for International Policy (CIP).

The report also noted that new security technologies, including drones, whose use by the U.S. and other countries is growing quickly throughout the region, and cyber-spying of the kind that prompted this week’s abrupt cancellation by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff of her state visit here next month, pose major challenges to the security environment and civil liberties in the region.