Critical Analysis Of The United States’ Counter Narcotics Assistance To Colombia And Mexico

Motivated by the internal drug problem, the United States found itself fighting a drug war in Latin America, a continent stalled with violence and complicated drug conflicts. Most analysts describe the United States government’s assistance to Colombia and Mexico as narcotization, which means that practically every part of US foreign policy in Colombia has been narcotized ever since the early ’80s. During the 1980’s up to 70 to 80% of narcotics and 60% of marijuana available in the United States was smuggled in from Colombia, Mexico and other Latin American countries. The notorious Medellin Cartel, for example, is estimated to earn up to $4 billion a year as a result of drug trafficking. This lucrative industry has led to huge amount of violence, and murder across Latin America, with a record of 29,168 murders in Mexico alone in 2017. In 1986 the United States government declared war on drug trafficking organisations (DTO) in Latin America, particularly in Colombia and Mexico. The US started to deploy a great deal of assistance towards stopping the supply of cocaine from Latin America. The United States approach in its counter narcotics assistance in Colombia focused on policies of eradication, interdiction and enhanced law enforcement programs that aimed to significantly decrease the level of production of narcotics in Colombia. In Mexico, America provided over $2.5 billion in funding and intelligence over more than a decade, in order to help the Mexican government apprehend the leaders of the drug cartels. However, the effectiveness of these strategies was short-lived and actually gave rise to the drug trafficking organisations, because of the failure to recognise the real problem which is the demand for narcotics in the United States. Rather than focusing on the demand of drugs in the United States, the US-led counter narcotics assistance to Colombia predominantly focused on funding the Colombian government and sending law enforcement agents. In doing so meant that the majority of American resources was provided to Colombia, in Colombia, meaning the domestic aspect of drug trafficking was not taken into great consideration. During the year 1978 to 1979, the Medellin cartel successfully established its dominance in Latin America and therefore turned its attention to gaining total control of the distribution of drugs in the US. This led to a series of violence in Florida, known as the cocaine wars, reaching its peak in 1981 with a report of over 101 drug-related murders in Florida alone. Since America makes the most profits for the cartels, it created the terrains for violence and the Colombian drug cartels fought severely among one another for control of the drug supply in Miami. In the process, the Medellin cartel disposed of a number of Cuban informants who were working with the intelligence service and other law enforcement agencies. The United States government believed that implementing policies of extensive custom checks for tourists and products coming from Colombia would reduce the distribution of drugs.

However, this was majorly in-effective because it fuelled growing nationalism and anti-America resentment, and only revealed that the US does not understand the drug problem that’s facing Colombia. In addition, the US anti-Samper notion during his presidency in 1994-1998 had as much to do with the counter-narcotics policy as well as the fact that America did not trust Samper, because he had allegedly taken up to $6 million from the Cali cartel. As a result of such allegation, the US was able to use Samper more effectively in the counter narcotics arena. The state department exploited the drug-stained Samper administration as a suitable ‘scapegoat’ to moderate a new democracy controlled by Congress that demanded success on the counter narcotics arena. The United States shifted its attention form arresting and prohibiting drug traffickers too aggressively and openly trying to put an end to Samper’s scandal-ridden but democratically elected presidency. This is not a surprise because the war on drugs was viewed as a pivotal national interest, meaning the US was prepared to go to any extent to win this war. Even if it leads to overstepping boundaries of state sovereignty and destroying relations with one of the most important regional allies for America. For instance, the US went to the extent of repealing Ernesto Samper’s visa in 1996. The US deliberately put Samper on the defensive, by coercing him, so he may prove that he was not corrupted, which was effective in allowing the US to exploit Ernesto Samper’s drug relations. However, after several years of following a set of strategies to destabilise Ernesto Samper’s presidency, it appeared to have been ineffective on the log run and counterproductive because the anti-Samper strategies were weakening the establishments of the Colombian Presidency. This policy proved to be ineffective because it increased revenues from the drug trade, made paramilitary and guerrilla groups stronger and threatened the existence of the Colombian state. Nevertheless, the United States joined forces with the Colombian government, to create a new strategy, known as Plan Colombia (1999), in response to the problem of increased cocaine production and hasty decline of security conditions. This strategy aimed to significantly reduce the manufacture and trafficking of illicit drugs, mainly narcotics by 50% within a 6 years period and improve security conditions in Colombia by retrieving control of critical regions of the state that previously were in the hands of drug trafficking organisations or militant groups. According to the US accountability office, United States funding for the military aspect of Plan Colombia was up to $540 million per annum, between the years 2000 and 2008. It cannot be denied that this strategy was effective to an extent, predominantly in the area of coca cultivation. The UNODC estimates the number of square units dedicated to coca cultivation reduced quickly between the years 2000 and 2003 from roughly 160,000 square units to 80,000. Ever since the implementation of Plan Colombia in 1999, the main policy for reducing the cultivation of narcotics has been the spraying of cocoa farms with herbicides. However this has proven to be highly expensive and in-effective, therefore manual eradication of narcotics have also been applied, where a number of workers under the protection of the Armed Forces move from various coca growing farms and manually terminate the crops.

Since the year 2002, over 1.6 million hectares of coca harvests have been sprayed and over 413,000 have been manually uprooted. This reveals that, in spite of the US effort to reduce the production of cocaine through severe operations, the amount of coca grown per year has not meaningfully decreases, especially between the years 2005 and 2008. During the majority of the 1990s, the US overemphasised on interdiction activities as significant policy in its overall strategy for its counter narcotics assistance to Colombia. Interdiction policies were effective in terms of the impact it had on the cartels financially because the cost of a cocaine shipment seized and demolished by DEA is considerably more than the amount it cost when a coca turf is destroyed via aerial spraying or eradication. In the ’80s the Medellin cartel was the most dominant drug trafficking organisation in Colombia, and it stood as a major challenge for the US with its main trafficking routes passing through the Caribbean into the United States, through the south of Florida and in different places along the US Atlantic coast. However, the US counter-narcotic assistance began to apply pressure on the drug trafficking organisations and its smuggling routes. In response, the Medellin cartel gradually shifted away from the Caribbean trafficking routes to new ones going through Mexico, Central America and across the United States south-west border. By the early 1990s, over 80% of the cocaine trafficked out of Colombia entered America, while only 30% continued to come from the Caribbean routes. It has to be argued that the major shift in trafficking routes was undeniably caused by the intensified interdiction efforts of US Drug enforcement agency (DEA), reinforced by the rising involvement of the United States military. In this case, the US counter-narcotics assistance to Colombia was arguably in-effective because, it did not result in a substantial reduction in the availability of illicit drugs like heroin or cocaine in the US market, but rather a rise in street prices during the 1990s. Furthermore, the Air Bridge Denial (ABD) plan was an initiative led by the United States in the Andean region, aimed to increase the capabilities of the Colombian government to stop aerial smuggling of drugs and to capture unauthorised flights suspected of trafficking illicit drugs. The programme originally started in Peru to control the movement of cocoa to Colombia but was stopped in 2001 after a legitimate aeroplane was shot down, leading to the death of two American civilians. The program was however re-established in Colombia in 2003 and has had limited success ever since. As a result of the Air bridge denial plan, the rate of cocaine seizures has increased, with variations throughout the 1980s, steadying an estimation of 360 tons per year since the year 2000. However, more worrying stats suggest that the Air Bridge Plan was, in reality, counterproductive, for example in 2003 to 2005 the Colombian air force only managed to locate 48 aeroplanes out of 390 suspected trails pursued (Gao.org, 2005). Additionally, a number of suspicious tracks are near perimeters close to Venezuela and Brazil, which is extremely far from ABD Headquarters. This directly impacts the ABD plan because it is more difficult for them to intercept suspected traffickers without needing to refuel their aircraft. This reveals that although the ABD plan increased the level of cocaine seizure, it, however, did not meaningfully affect the number of illicit drugs being trafficked into America because the Colombian armed forces do not have the capabilities to fight rebels, transport troops and intercept planes trafficking drugs simultaneously.

Nonetheless during the mid-90’s the US and the Colombian law enforcement was able to dismantle the Medellin and the Cali cartel. However the Mexican drug mafia began to expand its role in the Colombian cocaine trade during the 1990’s, by increasing their illegal profits exponentially, leading to the formation of a number of Mexican cartels, such as the Juarez cartel and Gulf cartel, that immediately rivaled the Colombian drug organisations in power, violence and profitability. Without a doubt, the emergence of such powerful Mexican drug trafficking organisations released an extraordinary surge of drug-related violence and corruption in Mexico that extremely threatened the fragile democratic process of the country. As a form of assistance, the US responded to the increase in drug trafficking by strengthening US drug enforcement throughout the south-west and by pressurizing the Mexican government to cooperate more efficiently with the United States authorities in a combined drug control operation on the border and in Mexico. Although this was only moderately effective, in enlisting Mexican co-operation because of the widespread drug-related corruption in the state. By the end of the 1990s, the US-Mexican border interdiction began to make some effective developments in decreasing the flow of Colombian narcotics across the border. The United States counter narcotics assistance to Mexico was given a major boost by the gap that opened up in the towards the end of the 1990s between the Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking organisation over the excessive size of the Mexican share of the illicit drugs trade. The outbreak of internal violence among competing Mexican mafia’s, particularly after the death of Juarez drug Lord, Amado Carrillo in 1997; undeniably contributed to the deterioration of the Colombian use of Mexican trafficking routes. This consequently made the US-led counter-narcotic assistance to Mexico appear more effective than it truly is. In addition, in October 2007 the United States announced the Merida Initiative and $1.4 billion proposals for US counter narcotics assistance to Mexico. This marked a significant turn in US foreign drug policy because Colombia had previously been the main receiver of US drug assistance, not Mexico. The main objective of the Merida Initiative was to decrease the level of drug violence and the trafficking of illicit drugs in the United States. An indirect aim of the Merida Initiative was also to reduce the demand for illicit drugs in the United States, through decreasing supply. The Merida Initiative has been effective to a degree, in terms of starting a dialogue between the US and Mexico and improving relations between both countries. President Calderon’s visit to the US after Obama's inauguration marked a major transition in diplomatic relations between both states, suggesting more collaboration in the future. However, none of the goals has arguably been met, because of the weak execution of the initiative. A Carnevale Associates study of America’s drug policy found that consumption of narcotics from 2002 to 2008 had not profoundly changed and that the federal expenses for supply reduction rose by 64%, in comparison to the spending on demand reduction, which only rose by 9%. It cannot be denied that some US drug policies towards Mexico have actually benefitted the DTO’s and increased drug trafficking. The interdiction efforts in areas like Florida, in an attempt to put a stop to the supply of Colombian cocaine, left Mexico has an attractive substitute.

The Merida initiative was overall ineffective because drug demand has remained more or less the same, with an increase in the supply of illicit drugs over the years. Meyer supports this claim, by arguing that the Merida Initiative made the same mistake of over-relying on military aid to fight drug trafficking, which is similar to previous in-effective strategies implemented by the United States in Colombia. The US counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico during the Obama administration sought to follow the model of the Merida Initiative with the presence of a more bilateral cooperative approach. This strategy is referred to as ‘Beyond Merida’, which is essentially the refinement of the Merida Initiative. However ‘Beyond Merida’ was more focused on establishing institutions, as opposed to military intervention to help decrease the demand for drugs in America. As President Calderon rightly states, “While there is no reduction in demand in your territory, it will be very difficult to reduce the supply in ours”. According to the National Drug Intelligence Centre (NDIC), the use of illicit drugs in America will not diminish in the near future, but will actually increase because of the growing demand and increased manufacture in Mexico. Undeniably the effectiveness of the Beyond Merida policy has been limited because of internal corruption. When a leader of a cartel dies, he’s simply replaced by another. It is estimated that although, thousands of fighters and millions of dollars have been committed by the US in its counter narcotics assistance, less than 1% of the billions of dollars trafficked into the United States every year is detained. With drug trafficking on the rise, Carnevale found that drug demand in the US has also remained the same. The policy fails to acknowledge the domestic factors influencing the trafficking of narcotics, and completely ignores the underlying historical and economic problems in Mexico. This reveals that the Beyond Merida initiative has overall, been in-effective in reducing the demand for drugs, which would have significantly reduced the supply of narcotics.

In conclusion, although the United States counter narcotics assistance to Colombia and Mexico has been successful in some areas, it, however, has proven to be significantly in-effective on a macro scale, because of the failure to detect and solve the real problem of demand in the US. The policies that have been employed so far as distributed huge financial and human resources to the counter narcotics assistance. Undeniably, however, these strategies have clearly proven to be inadequate, drug trafficking remain the fastest emerging industry in the world. Although persistent implementation of counter-narcotics policies has improved security outcomes in Mexico, the worth of cocaine manufacture and supply of narcotics continues to be worth over $4.6 billion per year. An actual commitment to the trafficking of drugs must be made solely through the acknowledgement of the role the US plays, in terms of demand and the impact this has on supply and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. Military support to Mexico for example only helps in eradicating the influence of the cartels, however as historic consequences imply, a wider policy focus is vital to success. Arguably if there is no demand for cocaine and heroin in America, there would be no need for drug trafficking organisations to manufacture the drugs. This therefore suggests that the problem of demand in America first must be solved, in order to help reduce the manufacturing of illicit drugs. As a result, drug-related crime will reduce, meaning more lives can be saved in America as well as in Colombia and Mexico.