IS MEXICO SLIDING DOWN COLOMBIA ROAD?

Washington

AS PRESIDENT BUSH prepares to travel to Latin America, one of the top
issues for discussion will be 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
narco-trafficking 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
counter-insurgency campaigns.

The fears about Colombia are not unfounded, but U.S. policy makers 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 during 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
between 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.