And it’s all tragic. I don’t fault CR for doing what it can, because it is literally caught in the crossfire. There will be more murdered fishermen, more murdered students, more police and judicial corruption, more local kids on dope, more money laundering, and all the rest the longer this problem persists. CR has no choice but to combat it as best it can.

However, as rusty points out, this is not a battle CR will win. Maybe it’s doing better than the 10% confiscation/arrest rate that is the usual estimate, but it will likely never reach 90%, or even 50%. The problems will only get worse over time, no matter what CR does.

My understanding is that we can’t even pin all of the blame on the US, since a lot of the drugs end up in Europe too. Eliminate demand in the US, and there would still be a problem.

However, after reading an interview with the general heading the Southern Command a few months ago, I was aghast at my own naivete. The general clearly explained that the objective of the Southern Command was to maintain US military dominance in the region vis-a-vis China and Russia, and was particularly leery of Russia’s offer of assistance to fight drug trafficking, since an increased Russian presence would diminish US military dominance. Indeed, the general pitched a fit about budget cuts, warning that they risked diminishing US military dominance.

Meanwhile, the general said nothing of much note about the war on drugs, and his silence revealed a lot. Plainly, while probably not intentional, the US war on drugs has come to function as an excuse to keep a dominant military presence in the region, as well as a task to occupy the troops while they sail around maintaining dominance. Basically, the US has no intention of winning this “war,” or incentive to change policy, since the perpetual “war on drugs” justifies a perpertual US military presence.

Read some ways, stories like this one in this article have much drama, and years from now may make movies as good as the ganster movies set during Prohibition in the US. And the drama can have engaging subplots of inernational cooperation. In the end though, I’m afraid that it’s only an entertaining drama set against terrible global drug policies, themselves a functional front for displays of military rivalry among the wannabe empires, with the result that humble fishermen are gunned down in broad daylight.