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Here There Be Dragons
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11523 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
3,074 Words |
| Author
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Edmond Jacoby
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The summer of 1986 was a good season indeed for anti-narcotics rhetoric.
The rising tide of public indignation over such incidents as the murder and mutilation of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique Camarena by Mexican narcotics traffickers (who appeared to enjoy at least some official protection in that country) seemed to have reached flood level with the cocaine overdose deaths of two popular athletes in a single week. President Reagan declared that American tolerance of drug trafficking was at an end and promised to renew the hard line he said his administration always had taken against smugglers and pushers of narcotics. And Congress, ever conscious of the November elections, began a flurry of legislative activity to suppress the trade.
But presidential pronouncements and congressional demonstrativeness notwithstanding, there is no real likelihood that the international supply of such substances as cocaine, opium, or marijuana will fall short of demand.
Even though the individuals involved in America's so-called war on drugs may be committed personally to stamping out the trade and incarcerating the traders, their hands are often tied by policies that mandate the protection of other priority items or the pursuit of conflicting goals.
Thus, at the same time that the president declares a new campaign against drug smuggling and promises 300 new customs agents to interdict illegal substances along the U.S.-Mexican border, he also proposes to Congress a personnel reduction of 700 in the Customs Service. Shortages of personnel to fight the nation's drug war have become so acute already that agencies like customs face a classic "critical man" crisis: When a flight engineer assigned to one of the two initial P-3 Orion radar planes flying patrols along the U.S.-Mexican border insisted on taking leave to visit his family for a recent holiday, both airplanes had to be grounded. He is the unit's only flight engineer and had worked every day for eight months.
Conflict of interests
It is not that the United States and other concerned nations lack the resources to put a contraband industry out of business: Their will to do so has been corrupted.
As one spokesman for the DEA phrased it, "Drugs are not a monolithic thing. We have a host of interests with these countries."
"These countries" was his way of referring to not just any nation growing or shipping illegal drugs but to the five nations in the Western Hemisphere that contribute most to the regional narcotics trafficking problem and that should be the most susceptible to official pressure from Washington to end their contributions. For the record, the countries are Peru and Bolivia, sources of most of the world's coca; Colombia, where most of Peru's and Bolivia's coca is refined into cocaine; Panama, an important crossroads on the trafficking map and a key money launderer that helps traffickers hide their profits from governmental eyes; and Mexico, which overcame an apparently successful anti-drug-trafficking campaign to become the source of fully one-third or more of all the narcotics and illegal drugs entering the United
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