Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
After a reported “five-hour” conversation, the Presidents of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Colombia, Gustavo Petro, announced an agreement to reconsider the strategy to fight drugs. They apparently decided that the fight against drugs, driven mainly by successive US governments, has been a failure. They agreed to convene an International Conference of Latin American leaders to rethink the strategy of confronting drug trafficking groups.
In different tones, both presidents have recently referred to the issue. While López Obrador has promoted the policy of “hugs, not bullets” and an approach that seeks to address the causes of violence, Petro has spoken generically of the need to end “the irrational war on drugs”.
Apparently, they are on the same page and talking about the same thing. But a closer look leads to the conclusion that they are referring to very different realities.
Colombia has lived for more than fifty years immersed in a guerrilla war where the struggle between socialism and capitalism took place during the years of the so-called Cold War. In response, the Colombian state consolidated an army and a national police force with great military strength to respond to the guerrillas and, later, to the emergence of solid drug trafficking groups. The army confronted the guerrillas as a national security issue, and the national police pursued drug traffickers, which was considered a public security problem.
The FARC laid down their weapons, not the National Liberation Army (ELN). So there is currently a formal state of war in Colombia, even though a negotiating table between Petro’s government and the ELN has been set up on Venezuelan territory.
The ELN continues to operate because it has transformed itself into a drug trafficker, mainly of cocaine to Mexican cartels. This metamorphosis from socialist guerrillas into drug traffickers came about naturally because that is how they financed themselves as guerrillas by protecting drug distribution routes and cashing in with weapons and money. The transition to drug trafficking was very simple. Today they are armies with military origins and ideological structure but dedicated to international drug trafficking.
With these, Petro will negotiate “peace in Colombia”. For this to happen, they must be allowed to continue being drug traffickers in exchange for laying down their arms. But if the business is successful because it is illegal and the ELN has complicities with Venezuelan generals also involved in drug trafficking, then why lay down their arms?
The situation in Mexico is entirely different. There is no ideological bias. In fact, some federal officials want to give the importance of “national industry” to the Mexican cartels. But the reality is that the federal government and the cartels have a dynamic of complicity and accommodation. There is no intention to fight them, and they have become partners in imposing their candidates in elections across the country. The government has given up and allowed the drug cartels to operate with great freedom for their own convenience in doing business. There is a tacit agreement of coexistence between the federal forces and the irregular forces of organized crime. In fact, AMLO has already changed his strategy towards drugs, and Mexico is in a phase of complicit permissiveness towards the cartels. The “war on drugs” does not exist in Mexico.
The presidential claim that such a war exists in Mexico is a lie.
What might be a paradigm shift for Petro is not a paradigm shift for the current Mexican government. The Mexican government and drug traffickers live in a kind of Pax Narcotiana. What Petro is apparently looking for is an institutional framework to be able to agree with his guerrilla-narcos on a pacification route without submission but with the drug business functioning. AMLO, for his part, wants to ask for the coverage and support of Latin American countries for his policy of political-electoral complicity with the drug cartels.
It is clear that there are notoriously different objectives between Mexico and Colombia when it comes to announcing that “the war on drugs has failed”.
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