News Release

November 15, 2005

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Mexico Is Becoming the Next Colombia
Time to rethink the U.S. prohibition on narcotics

WASHINGTON -- Mexico is at risk of descending into the kind of maelstrom of drug-related corruption and violence that tore Colombia apart -- and with Mexico sharing a border with the United States, the consequences for the U.S. will be much more severe, according to a study released today by the Cato Institute.

In the Cato Foreign Policy Briefing "Mexico Is Becoming the Next Colombia," Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, argues that violence and chaos in Mexico is "already spilling over the border and will adversely impact the United States -- especially the southwestern states."

The author plots the course of the narcotics-related violence and endemic law-enforcement corruption of the past few years south of the Rio Grande and warns that the Mexican drug-cartels are more powerful now than the traffickers in the source country of Colombia. He says violence between competitive Mexican cartels and between the traffickers and the police is highly reminiscent of what happened in Colombia in the 1990s. U.S. authorities now point to execution-style murders in American cities, just one aspect of the wider drug turf wars waged by, among others, former elite Mexican cops.

While praising the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox for its crack down on police who have been co-opted by the drug cartels, Carpenter says it is "not certain that any institution in Mexico has remained entirely uncontaminated by the drug trade."

Much of what is happening in Mexico, the author explains, is a "direct result of Washington's policy of drug prohibition." He continues: "A prohibitionist strategy inherently creates a huge black-market premium for trafficking in illegal drugs. The enormous potential profit also attracts the most violence-prone criminal elements. It is a truism that when drugs are outlawed, only outlaws will traffic in drugs."

Carpenter takes issue with the assumption underpinning U.S. policy towards the Mexican cartels: that if the Mexican government can eliminate the top drug lords, their organizations will fall apart and reduce the flow of drugs across the border. He points out that that was the policy embraced by U.S. officials during the 1990s in Colombia. Given that "subsequent developments proved the assumption to be erroneous," Carpenter questions why the Colombia model is now being applied to Mexico.

Foreign Policy Briefing no. 87: http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb87.pdf

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