The True Narco-Governments

The cocaine business migrates to Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, where populist leaders are ambivalent or openly hostile to cooperation with the U.S., as said in yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The newspaper, which represents the interests of financial corporations that wash out most of the money derived from illicit drugs, cited figures that illustrated how the cultivation of the coca leaf, as well as the production of cocaine, rose in these nations and fell in Colombia. It was said that such trends are the result of successful efforts of Plan Colombia and the Mexican government’s strategy against the cartels has led them to move to Central America.

The WSJ also referred to the expulsion of the DEA in Bolivia in Evo Morales’ government and to its significant reduction in Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela. Consequently, the paper affirmed that both countries have gradually become hotspots for the illegal drug business, as drug traffickers “search out friendlier operating environments amid changes in Latin American politics.”

One speaks of, as far as we can see, a new ideological construct which justifies an economic, diplomatic and ultimately, a war-like escalation against four sovereign countries in the region. Each country has in its own way engaged in sovereign processes of social and economic transformation that, therefore, have attracted Washington’s enmity. If President George H.W. Bush invented the concept of narco-guerrillas to endow the superpower of new enemies — the “evil empire” — as dissolved then, it now seems to find a link between sovereignty and drugs to jump-start a new category of narco-governments to include in that same bag those who preside Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Ollanta Humala and Rafael Correa. Nevermind that the characterization has little or no relation to reality.

It is true that La Paz suppressed DEA presence in its territory and that the presence in Caracas was reduced significantly. Incidentally, in both cases we speak here of proper measures to combat the drug business, since it is never clear to what extent this and other U.S. agencies like the ATF and the CIA have fought to eradicate it and how they promote it. They’re more likely to do both things, as how it’s done in Mexico: while the ATF supplies weapons to the cartels, the DEA provides them with money laundering.

Outside this real data, published by the WSJ, there is a mass of uncertain figures, half-truths and outright lies. There is no way to accurately measure what the New York newspaper called “the potential to produce cocaine” from a country — with Peru with 325 tons and 270 in Colombia — where there is no mechanical relationship between the amount of coca leaf grown and the amount that is produced. In Bolivia’s case, the increase of the former is irrelevant to compute the latter.

It is true that the war declared by Felipe Calderon to supposedly combat organized crime has resulted, in addition to 50,000 deaths and other catastrophic balances not mentioned by the WSJ, the presence of Mexican cartels in Central America. However, judging by available data, we’re not talking about a forced move, but rather of a business expansion derived from a strengthening war. Both financial and political aspects have been involved in those groups through Calderon’s course. An illustration of that fact is that, as said by Eduardo Buscaglia, the cartels have taken local institutions to the point where 71 percent of the country’s municipalities are already under the control of the traffickers.

Nor does the WSJ make links between the main executor of Plan Colombia, former president Alvaro Uribe, with drug traffickers — Pablo Escober in first place —and paramilitaries, who have been critical links in a national “pacification” that could deliver a lot of political power to organized crime.

Thus, the regimes best qualified to aspire to the classification of narco-governments are those of Mexico and Colombia, which are the two closest continental allies of Washington in a “war on drugs,” that, so increasingly clear, is emerging as a war in favor of the drug trafficker.