Analysis: The high cost of an unspoken war

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Foreign Policy, February 2009
(On violence in Latin America)

Analysis by Reese Neader. March 12, 2009
(Creative Commons photo, retrieved from www.pet.dfi.uem.br)

Low-intensity conflict sustained by narcotics trafficking has ravaged Latin America for over half a century. As regional governments continue their efforts to centralize control and reign in separatist groups, a recent spike in drug-related violence has focused new attention on Latin America’s protracted and so-called Drug War. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed 46,000 troops and federal police across the country to combat the rising power of heavily armed drug cartels that are striking back in response to a government crackdown on narcotics trafficking. Likewise, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe continues to escalate a government and paramilitary campagin against the FARC, the communist rebel group that both Venezuela and Ecuador are suspected of aiding to sustain a bloody conflict in Columbia. U.S. government efforts to disrupt the globalized supply and production chain of narcotics have led to protracted, covert military support to escalate the Drug War.

Late last month, the former heads of state of Brazil, Mexico, and Columbia met in Sao Paulo in a highly publicized panel discussion that condemned current U.S. anti-narcotics policies. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former President of Brazil, spoke about the pressing need for policy reform. "[The U.S. drug war has] demoralized democracy. The population regards the government as inefficient and the policy as corrupt, and altogether this damages the image of the [United States] as well as the efficiency of democracy… being strong and hard-line in combating…drugs has caused democracy to recede," the former president told Foreign Policy magazine in a recent interview.


Impoverished agricultural regions respond to global commodity pricing by pushing the production of high-value cash crops such as coca and marijuana. The production is controlled by heavily-armed political opposition groups that sustain their military resistance campaigns with a steady influx of cash from the international drug trade. The United States, on the other hand, has used billions of tax dollars to support unpopular right-wing governments and their proxy militias that use American combat advisers and military hardware to rage sometimes brutal wars of attrition against separatist groups.

Cardoso complains that U.S. foreign policy in Latin America has proved un-reflexive to the socio-economic pressures and nascent political realities that have redefined the region in recent years. "There is an enormous amount of pressure from the United States and there are no alternatives. That's why it's important to have a new perspective." Now governments across the political spectrum in Latin America, varying in their ideological intensity, are calling loudly for the United States to institute a genuine shift in its regional foreign policy. "Now because of the new administration in the United States, I think there is an opportunity to open the debate," said Cardoso, reflecting a desperate hope across the region that U.S. policy will take a meaningful shift under the direction of President Obama.

Failure to respond will ensure that "…the U.S. government will continue to exert enormous pressure on the Latin American countries to follow their position," continuing a cycle of violence that is spiraling out of control as the global economic crisis intensifies, the former president fears.

Cardoso and the Latin American Commission on Drugs & Democracy advocate the decriminalization of marijuana, focusing law enforcement resources towards the disruption of criminal trafficking networks, and implementing crop replacement campaigns in response to failing coca crop eradication efforts. Cardoso also added that anti-drug campaigns in Latin America must adopt a deeper and more integrated social-based approach, the "mobilization (of) families, churches, workers, and unions."

"The new paradigm is not to depenalize; it's to decrease demand."