A while back, I heard the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, explain to a small group of people that it took him three years to declare total war on narco-trafficking and to involve the army in it. This ferocious war has left more than 15,000 dead, countless injured, and enormous material damages.
The panorama that President Calderón outlined is hair-raising. The cartels had infiltrated state bodies like a hydra and were suffocating them, corrupting them, paralyzing them, or putting them at their service. They had formidable economic machinery at hand for this, which allowed them to pay functionaries, policemen, and politicians better salaries than public administration, and infrastructure of terror capable of liquidating anyone, no matter how protected. He gave some examples of cases in which it was proven that the final candidates of competitions to provide candidates for important official positions relating to security had been previously selected by the mafias.
The conclusion is simple: if the government didn’t act immediately and with utmost energy, Mexico would run the risk of soon turning into a narco-state. The decision to incorporate the army, he explained, was not easy, but there was no alternative: it was a body prepared to fight and relatively untouched by the long, corrupting reach of the cartels.
Did President Calderón expect such a brutal reaction from the mafias? Did he suspect that narco-traffickers would be equipped with weaponry so lethal and a communications system so advanced that it allowed them to counterattack the armed forces so efficiently? He responded that no one could have foreseen such a development in the narcos’ capacity for war. They were being beaten, but, they had to accept it, the war would last and, unfortunately, there would be many victims along the way.
This policy of Felipe Calderón’s, which was, at the beginning, popular, has been losing support as Mexican cities fill with dead and wounded, and violence reaches indescribable manifestations of horror. Criticism has increased and opinion surveys indicate that now the majority of Mexicans are pessimistic about the dénouement and condemn this war.
The reasons critics cite are mainly the following: You should not enter a war you cannot win. The result is to mobilize the army into a type of battle for which it has not been prepared and will have the perverse effect of contaminating the armed forces with corruption and will give the cartels the possibility of also using soldiers for their ends. Narco-trafficking should not be confronted openly and in the light of day, like an enemy country: it must be combated the same way it acts, in the shadows, with stealthy and specialized security bodies, which is a police task.
Many of these critics do not say what they really think, because we’re dealing with something beyond words: that it is absurd to enter a war that the drug cartels have already won. That they are here to stay. That no matter how many bosses and fugitives are struck dead or taken prisoner, or how many shipments of cocaine are captured, the situation will only get worse. The fallen narcos will be replaced by other, younger ones, more powerful ones, better-armed ones, greater in number, who will keep an industry running that has done nothing more than extend itself across the world for decades, without being significantly wounded by the hits it receives.
This truth is applicable not only to Mexico but also to a fair part of Latin American countries. In some, such as Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, it is already evident, while in others, like Chile and Uruguay, it is happening more slowly. But we are dealing with an irresistible process that, despite the dizzying sums of resources and effort, is still there, vigorous, adapting itself to new circumstances, overcoming the obstacles placed in its way with notable quickness, and making use of new technologies and of globalization like the most developed transnational companies of the world do.
The problem is not one of policing, but an economic one. There is a market for drugs that is growing in an unstoppable way, as much in developed countries as underdeveloped countries, and the narco-trafficking industries feed it because it yields abundant wealth. The victories that the war against drugs can show are insignificant compared with the number of consumers on the five continents. And it affects all social classes. The effects are as damaging to health as they are to institutions. And in the democracies of the third world, like cancer, it is eating away at them.
So, then, is there no solution? Are we condemned to living, sooner or later, in narco-states like the one President Felipe Calderón wanted to prevent? A solution does exist. It consists of decriminalizing drug consumption through an agreement between consuming countries and producing countries, as The Economist and a fair number of lawyers, professors, sociologists, and scientists in many countries have been saying without being heard. In February 2009, the Commission on Drugs and Democracy, created by three former presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, César Gaviria, and Ernesto Zedillo, proposed the decriminalization of marijuana and a policy that prioritizes prevention over repression. These are encouraging signs.
Legalization entails dangers, naturally. And as such it should be accompanied by a redirection of the enormous sums that are today invested in repression toward education campaigns and rehabilitation and information policies like the ones that had such good results when applied to tobacco. The argument according to which legalization would incite consumption like a fire, especially among young people and children, is, without a doubt, valid. But it is probably a passing and containable phenomenon if countered with effective prevention campaigns. In fact, in countries like Holland where permissive steps have been taken in the consumption of drugs, the increase was fleeting and after a certain time has stabilized. In Portugal, according to a study by the Cato Institute, consumption decreased after the decriminalization of drug possession for personal use.
Why do governments, who confirm daily how costly and useless political repression is, refuse to consider decriminalization and carrying out studies with the participation of scientists, social workers, judges, and agencies who specialize in the gains and consequences it would bring? Because, as explained twenty years ago by Milton Friedman, who foresaw the magnitude the problem would reach if not resolved in time and suggested legalization, powerful interests prevent it. Not only those who oppose it for reasons of principle. The greatest obstacles are the bodies and people who benefit from the repression of drugs and, naturally, defend the source of their labor tooth and nail. Their reasons are not ethical, religious, or political; rather, crude interest is the greatest obstacle to ending the overwhelming criminality associated with narco-trafficking, the greatest threat to democracy in Latin America, more so than the authoritarian populism of Hugo Chávez and his satellites.
What is happening in Mexico is tragic and is a harbinger of what, sooner or later, will be lived in countries that insist on unleashing a war that has already been lost against the other state that has risen up right under our noses without our wanting to see it.
Lima, January 2010