Via the BBC: Colombia urges more drugs war aid

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has told the BBC the world must play a bigger role in helping his country combat illegal drugs and rebel groups.

“There are many countries helping us and there are many countries that do not help us yet,” the president said.

This is, in fact, one of the basic logics of Plan Colombia, that governments interested in combating cocaine would contribute funds directly to that fight in Colombia. Of course, the US has been the main contributor to this point. Indeed, while Pastrana’s (the president before Uribe) plan was to obtain ongoing contributions from other Latin American states and Europe, it has basically been a US-Colombian partnership. No doubt that in speaking to the BBC, Uribe is trying to draw attention to the fact that Europe is also a major market for cocaine.

Certainly this is also driven by the campaign, by showing Uribe being tough with foreign governments on this issue.

Such statements by Colombians (or Latin Americans in general) always raise the debate as to whom to blame for the drug problem: those who produce, and those who consume (and along the same lines, whether one can blame the entirety of a given country for either problem–i.e., all Americans are to blame for consumption/all Colombians are to blame for production). Of course, such positions are false dichotomies, but it is hardly unusual to hear someone in the US wish to blame the Colombians alone for the cocaine problem. Such statements are facile, but quite common. They also reveal the notion that if we could, for example, eliminate all coca leaf, that the drugs problem would go away. Such thinking is, of course, incorrect, because if all the cocaine blew away in the wind then those seeking a high would find a domestically produced intoxicant to consume.

Indeed, in the overall problem with drugs, I would argue that the key factor is not production, but consumption. There would be no production sans the demand of consumers. Nevertheless, the preponderance of drug war policy is aimed at supply. As such, it is the case that the policies are predicated on severe misapprehension of how markets work, and are therefore doomed to fail (and to cost billions in the process).

Back to Uribe, part of what has increased his ire the last couple of days in terms of the FARC and funds in regards to fighting narco-trafficking is the incident that took place near the Sierra Macarena National Park, where troops were manually removing coca plants, because aerial spraying could have affected the park. During the process, the FARC attacked and killed 29 soldiers (via the Miami Herald: Uribe declares war on coca after attack

About 400 rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, used mortar shells, land mines and heavy artillery to attack a camp of 80 soldiers just before daybreak Tuesday, the army said.

[…]

the government was eradicating the crops by hand in this region because of its close proximity to the Sierra Macarena National Park, a 1.6 million-acre reserve that environmentalists say would be permanently harmed by aerial fumigation.

With the government refusing to conduct aerial spraying of crops in the national parks, the FARC has begun growing much of its coca inside the parks, Uribe said.

The event fully underscores the degree to which the decades-old guerrilla war has fused with drug trafficking.