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New York Times,March 29, 1997
letters@nytimes.com

Fighting the Drug War With Boomerangs

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

MEXICO CITY Ever since the Nixon administration,
Washington has been pressing Mexico to crack down on its
marijuana and poppy fields. The results have been mixed, and now, over
the last decade or so, something more pernicious has occurred.

Policies meant to push narcotics trafficking out of the Caribbean and
destroy Colombia's Medellin and Cali cartels have produced the
unwelcome side effect of funnelling drugs through Mexico on their way to
the rich American market.

As a result, the emerging Mexican cartels have grown richer, leaving a
mounting toll of assassinations and corruption all the way from the steamy
jungles of Tabasco to the ribald streets of Tijuana.

"We push the drugs around," said Bruce Bagley, a professor of
international relations at the University of Miami, "and new networks and
new routes are established. As a result, we have overwhelmed Mexico's
weak political and law enforcement institutions."

Just in the last couple of months, the corrosive effect that drugs inevitably
have on any society appears to have reached the upper echelons of the
Mexican Army.

Two Mexican generals have already been arrested one of them the
country's former drug czar, who had been privy to many of the most
intimate details of Washington's antinarcotics strategies.

These aren't just any high officials, either; corruption of the army is a
development that threatens this country's gradual move toward
democracy. As President Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada of Bolivia once
put it: "When you have a corrupt chief of police, you fire him. When you
have a corrupt chief of the army, he fires you."

Of course, there is no telling how strong the international cartels would be
if it weren't for the efforts of United States law enforcement. Drug
supplies might be even more plentiful and purer in the cities of North
America, and prices even lower.

Victories over traffickers in the Caribbean and Colombia have brought
periodic spikes in cocaine prices in the United States over the last couple
of decades that just might have persuaded some potential firsttime users
to buy a sixpack of beer instead.

Drugs, after all, are international commodities that follow the laws of
economics. And however the sources of supply are squeezed or
displaced, demand for one drug or another has been fairly steady in the
United States in recent years, making supply the most important
determinant of price.

The Mexican government would like Washington to reverse that equation
by doing something to change the continuing American taste for illegal
highs.

The Clinton administration, like its predecessors, would love to oblige but
finds it difficult, to say the least. Its next effort, scheduled to be
launched soon, is an aggressive media campaign to discourage teenage drug
use.

In the meantime, the Mexican cartels are rapidly expanding internationally,
according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. They are linking up
with coca growers in Bolivia and Peru and violently seizing local drug
markets in Los Angeles and across the southwestern United States.

The leaders of the competing Cali cartel in Colombia have suffered
billions of dollars in losses already, but there is little they can do since
they have been imprisoned in Colombia over the last two years as a result of
pressure from Washington.

"I have seen firsthand how so many of our programs that we hoped
would help can have unintended, adverse consequences," said Mathea
Falco, who was assistant secretary of state for international narcotics
matters in the Carter administration.

Ms. Falco recalled that American pressure on South American
governments to eradicate drug plants began at the end of the Carter
years, and that as that policy blossomed through the 1980s, "it alienated
and intensified tensions between the Peruvian government and the
peasants, helping the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement grow, and
that's what is happening in Colombia now."

A metaphor, which has become a cliche in narcoticscontrol circles,
describes the problem. It's called the "balloon effect:" Squeeze a balloon
in one spot and it billows out in another.

When the Nixon administration closed down Turkey's "French
Connection," heroin production spread to Burma, Pakistan and ultimately
Afghanistan. When the Bush administration urged Bolivia to eradicate
coca plants on the eastern slopes of its Andean range, cultivation spread
into Bolivia's Amazon Basin and into Brazil.

When the Clinton administration urged the Peruvian Air Force to intercept
planes carrying raw coca to Colombia, traffickers began shipping their
goods on the Amazon River and growing more coca in Colombia.

"Stop the traffickers on the ground, and they take to the air," sighed Gen.
Enrique Salgado Cordero, chief of the Mexico City police. "Control the
air, and they go by sea. It's a battle with no end."

Still, President Ronald Reagan had little choice but try to stem the flood of
drugs that was pouring into Miami from the Caribbean in the early 1980s.

Miami was plummeting into an abyss: its streets had become a
battleground of dealers fighting for turf, its police force was corrupted by
bribes, and the integrity of its banks was threatened by a deluge of
laundered money.

The Reagan administration unleashed the Coast Guard, the Navy, the
Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration to block the
fleets of boats launched from Colombia that made their way to Miami
through Jamaica, Haiti and the Bahamas. At the same time, pressure was
exerted on Colombia to crack down on the Medellin cartel.

The operation was so successful that panicked Colombian drug lords first
made war on their Government and then took refuge in Panama in 1984.
With the help of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, they rerouted their
shipments up through Central America and Mexico.

Once the Medellin mafia was crushed, the Cali cartel took up the slack
with the help of emerging Mexican organized crime groups.

Miami was saved, but the police forces and militaries of Panama,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were all corrupted to
varying degrees. Drug corruption led to an American invasion in Panama,
and now it appears to promise years of tensions between Washington and
Mexico City.

And still, for all the international turmoil, cocaine and heroin prices in
the United States keep dropping, and the potency of the drugs keeps rising.


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