Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (review)

Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice-President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, offers an impassioned libertarian critique of the United States' counter-narcotics policy in Latin America. Although he adds little new information to the ongoing debate on this issue, his consistently well-written, in-depth analysis of the U.S. war on drugs and its destructive effects on Latin America is very effective. Unfortunately, the drug legalization alternative that the author proposes in his concluding chapter is discussed too briefly and uncritically to be persuasive.

After describing the development of U.S. counter-narcotics policy from the Nixon administration through the current Bush government, Carpenter carefully examines the three principal components of the supply-side strategy employed by the United States: (1) interdiction of drug-trafficking routes; (2) drug-crop eradication measures; and (3) crop substitution and alternative development programs. Each is found wanting. The author cites official sources to prove that interdiction efforts seldom capture more than about 10 percent of illegal drugs bound for the United States from Latin America. Moreover, he shows that even the most successful coca eradication projects in Bolivia and Peru in the late 1990s simply caused cocaine traffickers to increase coca cultivation in Colombia. In addition, he demonstrates that alternative crop programs generally fail because coca growing is much easier and four to tentimes more profitable than the cultivation of bananas, coffee, or other crops. For these reasons, Carpenter argues, none of the three initiatives has produced a significant or lasting decline in cocaine supply to U.S. retail street markets. Indeed, despite the billions of dollars devoted to the drug war, cocaine prices in the United States have fallen dramatically since the 1980s.

Although the U.S. supply-side counter-narcotics strategy has not reduced the availability of cocaine and other illegal drugs, Carpenter shows convincingly that the war on drugs has brought misery to Colombia and other Latin American countries where narcotics are grown, processed, or transported. Bullying tactics by U.S. diplomats have undermined the sovereignty of Latin American governments and forced them into unnecessarily violent confrontations with drug traffickers. Spraying coca crops with herbicides has also alienated large segments of the peasantry, particularly in Bolivia and Colombia. In addition, corruption has increased dramatically as the drug traffickers' offer of "plata o plomo" (money or lead) has proven difficult to refuse. Even U.S. counter-narcotics policies that have achieved their stated objectives have caused unanticipated negative side effects. The highly publicized destruction of the Medellín and Cali cartels during the 1990s produced a proliferation of about 300 smaller drug trafficking groups and no net decline in cocaine exported to the United States. The shift of coca cultivation to Colombia after successful crop eradication efforts in Bolivia and Peru created opportunities for both leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries to enrich themselves by taxing cultivators, processors and others involved in the drug trade. A greatly expanded Colombian civil war was the result.

Although Carpenter is very good at pointing out the deficiencies of U.S. counter-narcotics efforts, he is far less effective at promoting the drug legalization alternative he prefers. He calls legalization the only realistic way out of the current situation, but fails to offer a thorough analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of such a total policy reversal. For example, he recognizes that hundreds of thousands of Americans were addicted to narcotics in the years before the United States made them illegal in 1914, but does not carefully examine the future consequences of the substantial increase in drug usage and addiction in the United States and Latin America that would likely follow legalization. Carpenter also does not seriously consider any drug policy alternatives that might fall in between the current prohibitionist strategy and full legalization.