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.