Popping the Balloon Theory

For nearly 20 years, something called the Balloon Theory has been used to explain the futility of the United States war on drugs. It is impossible to bring coca, marijuana, or poppy cultivation under control, the theory goes, because if you reduce the acreage devoted to growing coca in Bolivia, you will see a proportional increase in the number of acres being grown in Peru; reduce the acreage in Peru and the traffickers will soon transfer their operations to Colombia. No matter where you pinch the balloon, the air pops right up somewhere else.

As U.S. President Barack Obama heads to Mexico, hoping to start a new chapter in the U.S. war on drugs, he must understand the limitations of the Balloon Theory. The war on drugs has been waged for 40 years. And while the United States invented and encouraged this costly battle, its been fought with Latin American blood, on Latin American soil. Simply altering, bolstering, or newly funding the old policies will do nothing. Nothing has worked. Indeed, Obama should realize that the Balloon Theory isnt powerful enough to express the seriousness of the situation. The drug trade in the Americas is more like the HIV virus: Wherever it is present, it afflicts the body with a deadly disease.

Like a virus, too, it does not respond to conventional force — no matter how forceful. Take, for example, the case of Colombia, the country perhaps most afflicted by drugs. There, for decades, the government has performed a parallel and coordinated attack on drug traffickers and entrenched guerrilla organizations, designed to rout both. Instead, the two main groups forged an unlikely alliance.In 2000 then U.S. President Bill Clinton attempted to alleviate the situation with his $1.3 billion-dollar Plan Colombia. The Colombians gratefully received the funds, which have enabled the military to inflict severe damage on the guerrillas. But this has done nothing to reduce the overall figures for controlled-substances exports. Indeed, in 1998, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that Colombia shipped around 600 tons of drugs. Ten years later, its output remains exactly the same.

Similarly, additional funds have failed to wipe out the disease of drugs in Bolivia and Peru. Drug warriors tout Bolivia as a country where illegal cocaine production in the remote Chapare region was successfully brought down to almost zero. But that was a long time ago: The estimated tons of coca paste produced and exported annually have gradually been rising since 1994, and, ominously, cocaine factories are being found in the city of El Alto, just across the municipal divide from the capital city of La Paz. In Peru, new money from a resurgent drug trade is bringing to life an old nightmare, the Communist Party of Peru — a demented guerrilla organization better known as Shining Path.

As the Obama administration well knows, the situation is no better in Mexico, the country currently on the drug wars front lines. Mexico does not have Colombias entrenched guerrilla problem, and it does not grow coca leaf (40 percent of the Mexican drug trades money comes from the export of home-grown marijuana). What it does have is a dysfunctional law-enforcement apparatus deeply involved — on both sides of the law — in the war between rival cartels and the state.

The profitability of the drug trade, indeed, has meant that the people hired to tackle and fight it — politicians, police officers, and the army — are often on its payroll. According to the Mexican Defense secretariat, one out of every three traffickers has ties to the army, which suffered 20,000 desertions last year. In Ciudad Juarez, a border town, more than a third of the police force was found to be of compromised loyalties.

Just as HIV causes pneumonia and other systemic illnesses, the drug trade has led Mexicans into other illicit businesses. Due to its long border with the United States, the Mexican mafias role as trans-border smugglers has only expanded into other drug and non-drug related industries. The profits, connections and expertise the mafias have acquired as transporters of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, marijuana and assorted other drugs are now being put to use in other areas: Mexican criminals are now the second-largest producers of child pornography, according to some estimates; kidnappings are a growing horror; and drug mafias are very actively involved in the transportation of people — everything from illegal immigrants from all over the world to more or less enslaved prostitutes.

Unfortunately, the steps taken thus far by the United States and Mexico have failed to halt this deadly infection. President Calderon announced during his first week in office that he was deploying the army to cities and regions in which drug violence was escalating. Today there are more than 30,000 troops deployed in over a dozen states, and the most visible outcome has been chaos and mayhem. Nor have the longer-term results been any more encouraging. While there have been numerous arrests of fairly high-level traffickers, it is entirely possible that this will lead to bloody new power struggles among the survivors. Worse, the Mexican army, which has for so long remained absent from Mexican politics, has been thrust into the spotlight on a highly contentious issue and exposed to the apparently unlimited corruptive powers of drug money. Even if the plan succeeds in the short term, once the ruthless extermination measures are suspended, the disease will just flare up again.

Further, despite promises and symbolic concessions from American officials, the existing bilateral anti-narcotics program with the United States is paltry, given what it is expected to accomplish. Around $300 million, less than promised, has been released so far to combat a business worth an estimated $25 billion a year. The package is predictably slanted towards the hardware side of the problem: helicopters, a plane, radar equipment. But surgery doesnt fix a virus. Little attention or funding is allocated to what some anti-narcotics experts consider the crux of the issue: the lack of an efficient, incorruptible Mexican law-enforcement apparatus. Mexico desperately needs officers capable of performing the detective work needed to investigate money laundering; tracking down, arresting and prosecuting leading drug criminals and keeping them in jail; and earning the respect of Mexican citizens by respecting their rights and preserving the peace. U.S. assistance does little on these fronts.

Thus, we are left with a dire situation. In 1974 the cultivation and export of illicit drugs was limited to Mexico, the Andean countries, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia. Now, after 40 years of a failed drug war, traffickers are also operating, and with increasing impunity, in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Paraguay, Central America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, much of Asia and — perhaps most frighteningly for the ravaged societies involved — parts of Africa. Before this senseless militaristic approach inflicts further damage, it is high time for a change of policy.