ESCALATIONMORE DRUGS

Washington has begun the annual spring drug certification ritual. First came
the press speculation about whether the President would certify Mexico and
Colombia to have been good allies in the drug war (he did), and then stories
about whether Congress would vote to overturn the President's decision and
impose economic sanctions. Arguing in support of certification, State
Department officials paint a picture of Mexican progress in curbing the drug
traffic that enables them to protect key bilateral relations on issues like
trade, investment, loans and immigration. Those opposed to certification
range from hard-line drug warriors like House Speaker Dennis Hastert to
anti-NAFTA liberal Democrats. Long-term observers see the drama as so much
sound and fury. After all, Mexico has never been decertified.

The important story behind certification, however, is that regardless of who
wins the annual debate, its effect is to spur a steady and troubling
escalation of a drug war that threatens democracy in Mexico while failing to
curb the flow of drugs into the United States. As this year's certification
debate got under way in February, Mexican officials predictably committed to
a $400 million expansion of their drug-interdiction efforts.

Four years ago President Ernesto Zedillo responded to US pressure by calling
in the military to replace the civilian police, widely seen as corrupt. In
December 1996 generals were put in charge of the Federal Judicial Police,
the National Institute to Combat Drugs and the Center for the Planning of
Drug Control. Military personnel have occupied top law-enforcement posts in
two-thirds of Mexico's states. Overall, some 40 percent of the
180,000-member army is reportedly working on drug control.

This new role for the military in internal affairs is particularly
troubling, given the tenuous transition to electoral democracy now under way
in Mexico. If challenges to the seven-decade monopoly by the ruling PRI
succeed in bringing reformers to power, they could confront a military that
will be hard to hold accountable to civilian authorities and the rule of
law.

If an emboldened military is a threat to Mexican democracy, one that is
corrupt as well is a far more serious concern. Defense Ministry files
revealed in 1997 that ten generals and twenty-two officers were under
investigation for alleged ties to traffickers. Things have worsened since.
Three elite Mexican agencies established last year and given US training and
financing may have already been infiltrated by drug traffickers. The names
of fifteen officers from the US-trained Organized Crime Unit within the
Mexican Attorney General's office were found in documents seized from drug
traffickers in mid-1998; five were fired when they failed lie-detector
tests. The Organized Crime Unit was created with much fanfare after the
chief of the previous drug enforcement agency, Gen. JesFAs GutiE9rrez
Rebollo, was arrested in 1997 for selling protection to a powerful drug
lord. GutiE9rrez had been brought in to rebuild the previous antidrug
agency--which had been created to replace its corrupt predecessor.

The pattern of systematic and deepening corruption is a result of the
extraordinary profits of the drug trade, which entice counternarcotics
forces to "trade" enforcement for a share of the take. Even US agents are
regularly drawn into the trade--a point underlined by a recent report by the
US Customs Service of 180 cases of corruption in 1997. And the more
efficient the Mexican police and military become because of US training, the
better able they are to track and find traffickers, and the higher the
bribes they can extract for nonenforcement. The cartels spend an estimated
$500 million a year on bribery in Mexico and still make billions. The
militarization and corruption US policy promotes in Mexico is for naught.
The black market created by the drug war dooms the strategy.

The policy's success in increasing the cost of trafficking has raised US
street prices to as much as ten times the production costs in Latin America,
generating huge profits for producers and traffickers. Like rational
capitalists, they respond to distribution problems by increasing supply,
writing off the costs of interdiction and creating new routes to meet
demand. Steady US demand and unlimited foreign supply insures the US price
is never high enough to significantly reduce consumption and addiction at
home.

The certification debate may be empty, but it is anything but benign. The
escalation it fuels could help foster a southern neighbor with a civilian
government unable to control a powerful and corrupt military. The debate
distracts us from facing the flaws in US drug strategy. Fighting drug abuse
and addiction at home with a foreign war against drug suppliers is bad
policy that can only make bad neighbors.

Eva Bertram and Kenneth Sharpe

Eva Bertram, a Washington policy analyst, is a PhD candidate in political
science at Yale. Kenneth Sharpe is a professor of political science at
Swarthmore College. They are the authors (with Morris Blachman and Peter
Andreas) of Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (California).