In a country that has made admirable progress on other fronts, the drug war is preventing the government from finishing off the narco-terrorist organizations. Between 2002 and 2005, Uribe’s “democratic security” policy successfully pushed those organizations, especially the Marxist empire known as FARC, away from many cities. There was a one-third drop in the number of murders and a two-thirds drop in the number of terrorist attacks. The economy picked up handsomely. But then a stalemate ensued in the campaign against the terrorists that cannot be attributed only to the country’s jungles. The mafias that owe their existence to the criminalization of cocaine continue to generate enough funds to match every attempt by the government to beef up its military capability.
The frustration is reopening the debate on the drug war. Some politicians are openly calling for decriminalization. Others propose intermediate mechanisms. Analyst Olga Gonzalez says that “in the last 15 years, hundreds of Colombians have been extradited to the United States and hundreds of thousands of hectares have been fumigated, and yet cocaine remains an excellent business. The link between mafias and politics has now reached the upper echelons of power, as the revelations of ‘para-politics’ show.” She recalls that Colombia had a lucrative marijuana trade in the 1970s. When Americans started to grow their own, the Colombian mafias disappeared. Why don’t American laboratories, she asks, continue to develop the synthetic cocaine for which there is already a prototype? Or why don’t Americans develop a genetically modified coca leaf needing less solar radiation and tropical humidity so that consumers can grow it in their balconies?
Actually, all of these solutions would face the barrier of prohibition at the consumer level. And in the case of synthetic cocaine, the real thing is much cheaper to produce—the drug war notwithstanding. The debate that needs to be addressed is the one about decriminalization. The place to open that debate is not Colombia but the United States. No Latin American government could decriminalize drugs unilaterally without incurring the fatal wrath of the United States, exposing its country to ferocious reprisals. A recent example is former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s attempt to sign into law a bill passed by Congress legalizing tiny amounts of certain drugs for personal consumption. When the seven plagues of Egypt fell upon Fox—courtesy of Washington—the conservative president was forced to rethink.
