Strategerie Over Strategy: Mexico and the War On Drugs

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”: a cliché, certainly, but a useful and unheeded one. The United States is now fighting wars on multiple fronts: a war of diplomacy with North Korea, a war for economic hegemony with China, a war on terror in Afghanistan, and a war on drugs in Mexico. The latter is arguably the least effective that we have seen in recent years, a voracious money pit that has failed to produce positive results but succeeded in destabilizing the balance of power in Mexico, as well as provoking civil strife on a horrifying scale. It’s Operation Iraqi Freedom syndrome all over again: where in Iraq we failed to realize that Sunni-Shiite violence cannot be curbed by brute military force, in Mexico both governments fail to realize that an illegal economy cannot be fought with weapons. The “War on Drugs” may have been abandoned as an official phrase by the Obama administration, but its heavy-handed policies remain intact and will continue to fail as long as they are in play.

“If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat” (Sun Tzu). If the drug war over the last 70-odd years has taught the international community anything, it’s that the drug trade is here to stay and cannot be crushed, only marginalized. The war has thus far been fought, however, under the impression that it functions similarly to a traditional military battle: if sufficient force is used against one’s enemy, they will disperse. In reality the drug trade functions roughly the same way as any legal trade, but without the scruples required by international law. What this signifies is that an economy will not disperse if a foreign competitor arises; rather, it will consolidate and organize itself so as to compete on the same level. Fighting an economic war in the same fashion as a military conflict can only lead to escalation and disaster; the Opium Wars, arms races, take your pick, they all testify to the disaster currently occurring in Mexico.

First failure: the failure to remember that cartels know no national borders. While police crackdowns on organizations such as the Los Zetas gang might seem to have been successful in Mexico proper, in reality this comes at the price of the same organizations displacing themselves to more vulnerable nations: the case mentioned evidences this in the case of Guatemala, as shown by the Zetas’ issuing of a death threat against President Colom in March of this year. Likewise, while imports to the U.S. have been slightly disrupted, this comes at the cost of the same imports going to Europe instead, where demand has skyrocketed according to a Stratfor Global Intelligence survey. Furthermore, even if the increased police presence in Mexico has been successful in displacing smaller cartels, said organizations have compensated by capitalizing on the corruption that runs rampant in Mexico’s political and judicial systems, not to mention resorting to acts of terrorism. In any case, what might seem to be an advantage of larger state-sanctioned forces against the smaller cartels only betrays the smaller cartels’ advantage of being harder to hit.

Fruitless as efforts may have been to combat the smaller drug trafficking organizations, they are a paragon of success when compared to initiatives taken against the dominant cartels: Sinaloa, Tijuana, Gulf, and Juarez. In the first place, their nearly bottomless funding allows them to purchase mass quantities of illegal weapons, bribe government officials, and expand their number of human resources. This much at least seems to be obvious. However, when faced with significant threats from either state forces or rival cartels, they have proved quite capable of forging alliances to cement their foothold in Mexico. Loose alliances currently exist between the former two and the latter two cartels, respectively, neither of which has proved dominant over the other, and neither of which is threatened in the least by official police action. Just as the overt efforts made by various governments to combat the Medellin cartel under Escobar were unsuccessful (disregarding, for the moment, the covert operations resulting in his assassination), so too are the efforts against the Mexican cartels serving only to force said cartels to dig themselves in deeper.

Besides the operations of the cartels themselves, the effects on the Mexican population itself are horrifying. 2008 alone saw well over 5,500 deaths, exacerbated by a corrupt and unstable police force, and there is no reason to doubt that these effects will continue to spiral out of control; the violence in Mexico has caused a drop in foreign investments, which forces yet more citizens into the drug trade out of fiscal necessity. Nor are these effects and consequences limited to Mexico proper: in an era of ever-increasing globalization, changes in the Mexican economy (roughly the 10th largest in the world) will prove to have a mushroom effect in geopolitical affairs. A2008 study by the United States Joint Forces Command warned that “two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico”, the latter warranting such a consideration if the drug war continues to worsen over the next 25 years. Such a scenario would undoubtedly destabilize the entire international community of Latin America, not to mention the rest of the world. It is imperative that we not allow this scenario to take place, but our ability to ensure that seems dismal considering the futility of the drug war thus far.

Or is it? It has been admitted earlier that the war on drugs cannot be won; mankind’s insatiable appetite for drugs ensures a constant demand that someone will supply them. The overwhelming majority of efforts to marginalize the illegal drug trade have been colossal failures. The effects of the illegal drug trade have only proven to be ever more destructive to both economies and human lives over the years. But as economic wars go, escalation only takes place if one is incapable of depriving their opponent of a product to sell. Without such control over a product, one’s opponent no longer poses any threat. Federally regulated drugs, both in Mexico, the U.S. and abroad, will deprive cartels of any means of making profit, and transform the jobs once operated by dangerous, illegal organizations into safe and secure means of employment. Add to this the increase in legitimate international trade, the nullification of health risks caused by impurities and fluctuating potencies, and the decrease in police and government corruption, and the possibility arises of eliminating any need for a drug war in the first place.

This case is not an ethical debate: it is a practical necessity. The time has long since passed when we could afford to deny the positive benefits of federally regulated drugs while overlooking the threat that their prohibition poses to the international community. We are currently in a state of affairs where the effects of an illegal drug trade are no longer simply a matter of policing borders, but have developed the potential to topple entire nations. Yet this state of affairs is far from hopeless: the solution is simple, realistic, and transforms a downward spiral of violence and corruption into a blossoming of increased safety and economic benefit. It is high time, in an international community ringing with cries for peaceful change, to abandon Bush-era strategeries and open our eyes to the positive strategies that lie within our reach.