TO AVOID MAKING MEXICO THE NEXT COLOMBIA ...

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/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
counternarcotics campaigns, not counterinsurgency 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 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.

- -- Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at
the Cato Institute, in Washington, D.C. His latest book is Bad Neighbor
Policy: Washington's Futile Drug War in Latin America (forthcoming
Palgrave/St. Martins).