Pubdate: Sun, 31 Mar 2002
Source: Orange County Register, The (CA)
Copyright: 2002 The Orange County Register
Contact:  http://www.ocregister.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/321
Author: Ted Galen Carpenter
Note: Mr. Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy
studies at the Cato Institute. His latest book is "Bad Neighbor
Policy: Washington's Futile Drug War in Latin America" (forthcoming
Palgrave/St. Martins).
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

THE NEXT COLOMBIA?

During President Bush's trip to Latin America, one of the issues for 
discussion was the war on drugs. The Bush administration is especially 
alarmed at the situation in Colombia, fearing that the democratic political 
system in that country could collapse under an assault by leftist 
insurgencies allied with powerful drug traffickers. Washington's nightmare 
scenario is the emergence of a Marxist/narcotrafficking state.

U.S. leaders are so worried about that possibility that they are ready to 
expand America's military aid to Bogota and eliminate the restriction that 
the aid must be used only for counter-narcotics campaigns, not 
counterinsurgency campaigns. The fears about Colombia are not unfounded, 
but U.S. policymakers have a serious problem brewing much closer to home.

The prominence of the drug trade in Mexico has mushroomed in recent years. 
Just two years ago, Thomas Constantine, head of the Drug Enforcement 
Administration, told Congress that the power of Mexican drug traffickers 
had grown "virtually geometrically" over the previous five years and that 
corruption was "unparalleled."

Matters have grown even worse in the past two years. As is often the case 
with lucrative black markets, the illicit drug trade in Mexico has been 
accompanied by escalating corruption and violence. In a number of troubling 
ways, Mexico is beginning to resemble Colombia a decade or so ago.

Indeed, Mexicans are beginning to refer to the trend as the 
"Colombianization" of their country. True, Mexico does not face a 
large-scale insurgency like that afflicting Colombia, but the similarities 
of the two countries are greater than the differences. U.S. policy seems to 
assume that if the Mexican government can eliminate the top drug lords, 
their organizations will fall apart, thereby greatly reducing the flow of 
illegal drugs to the United States.

Thus, U.S. officials have rejoiced at the recent capture of Benjamin 
Arellano Felix - the leader of one of Mexico's largest and most violent 
drug gangs - and the apparent killing of his brother. But that is the same 
assumption that U.S. officials used with respect to the crackdown on the 
Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia during the 1990s. Subsequent 
developments proved the assumption to be erroneous.

The elimination of the Medellin and Cali cartels merely decentralized the 
Colombian drug trade. Instead of two large organizations controlling the 
trade, today some 300 much smaller, loosely organized groups do so. The 
arrests and killings of numerous top drug lords in both Colombia and Mexico 
over the years have not had a meaningful impact on the quantity of drugs 
entering the United States.

Cutting off one head of the drug-smuggling hydra merely results in more 
heads taking its place. Of all the similarities between Colombia and 
Mexico, the most troubling may be the increasingly pervasive violence. It 
is no longer just the cocaine and heroin trade that is characterized by 
bloodshed.

Even the marijuana trade, which traditionally had generated little 
violence, is now accompanied by horrific killings. Indeed, the biggest and 
bloodiest massacres over the past three years in Mexico have involved 
marijuana trafficking, not trafficking in harder drugs. Mexico can still 
avoid going down the same tragic path as Colombia. But time is growing 
short. If Washington continues to pursue a prohibitionist strategy, the 
violence and corruption that have convulsed Colombia will increasingly 
become a feature of Mexico's life as well.

The illicit drug trade has already penetrated the country's economy and 
society to an unhealthy degree. The brutal reality is that prohibitionism 
simply drives commerce in a product underground, creating an enormous 
black-market potential profit that attracts terrorists and other 
violence-prone elements.

U.S. officials need to ask whether they want to risk "another Colombia" - 
only this time directly on America's southern border. If they don't want to 
deal with the turmoil such a development would create, the Bush 
administration needs to change its policy on the drug issue - and do so 
quickly.
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