Who's Winning the War for Mexico?
AFP/ Getty Images A Mexican soldierguarded packages of  marijuana outside a tunnel discovered in Tijuana on Nov. 26. The  2,200-foot tunnel was used to transport drugs to the U.S. Last week, U.S. drug enforcement agents  uncovered a 2,200-foot tunnel for smuggling marijuana that ran between a  private house hard by the border in Tijuana, Mexico, and a warehouse  across the border in Otay Mesa, Calif. The tunnel was no crude  construction; it had electricity, a ventilation system and a rail track  for transporting drugs. Several tons of cannabis, bundled and ready for  transport, were found inside.  Each week seems to bring new reminders of the severity of Mexico's  drug problem, and Washington is starting to worry. The Mexican drug  cartels, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this fall, "are showing  more and more indices of insurgencies. It's looking more and more like  Colombia looked 20 years ago, when the narcotraffickers controlled  certain parts of the country." The statement caused an uproar in Mexico,  and President Barack Obama took the unusual step of repudiating it  publicly. But the similarities cannot be escaped so easily, even if Ms.  Clinton doesn't have the parallel exactly right.  Though we are certainly not winning  the drug war, it has changed in important respects in recent years. Two  decades ago, when the Medellin and Cali cartels were at their height in  Colombia, Mexico was largely a trans-shipment point for narcotics.  According to the Justice Department, in 2009, the last year for which  reliable statistics are available, most of the drugs coming into the  U.S.—heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana—were either  produced or refined in Mexico, although Colombian cocaine continued to  be trans-shipped as well. Demand for particular drugs fluctuates, as in  any market, according to supply and demand. At present, cocaine is down,  but heroin and, above all, Mexican-produced marijuana and  methamphetamines are up sharply.  This continued and still largely  unstanched flow of narcotics into the U.S. is only part of the problem.  Over the course of the past four years, fighting over turf and control  of smuggling routes among the various Mexican drug cartels has made many  Mexican cities and towns along the border virtual combat zones.  "Amexica: War Along the Borderline," a recently released book by the  British journalist Ed Vulliamy, paints a terrifying and authoritative  portrait of this violence, in which at least 28,000 people have now  died.  In an effort to restore some semblance of order, President Felipe  Calderon has deployed the Mexican army, but despite some initial  successes, the Mexican authorities have been unable to stem the  violence. A cable from the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, recently  released by WikiLeaks, notes that in Ciudad Juarez, one of the  epicenters of the killing, only 2% of those arrested on drug or weapons  offenses are ever brought to trial. And the violence is spreading. The  northern city of Monterrey, one of Mexico's richest and most dynamic, is  now the scene of considerable cartel violence. The tourist resorts of  Cancun and Acapulco have also been hit, even if, so far, foreign  tourists have not been targeted.  The fear in the U.S. is that the  violence will spread north across the border. The fear in Mexico is that  the capital itself, home to 20 million Mexicans, will eventually be  hit. If this happens, the argument goes, Mexico will repeat the downward  trajectory of Colombia during its struggle 20 years ago with the  Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels. But there are important differences. In Colombia, narcotraffickers  like Pablo Escobar, the boss of the Medellin cartel, really did believe  that they could force the traditional Colombian establishment to share  political power. The Mexican cartels have killed a large number of local  mayors and security officials, above all in towns and cities along the  border, but so far they do not seem interested in killing leading  figures in the Mexican establishment.  The crisis in Mexico is real and growing, but observers on both sides  of the border have not yet come to grips with what can and can't be  done about it. The expectation that Mexico, with U.S. help, can win its  war on the cartels, just as Colombia eventually triumphed over its  narcotraffickers, is based on an understandable but nonetheless  dangerous misunderstanding. A sober look at what actually happened in  Colombia would show us not the possibilities but rather the limits of  what we can expect to achieve in Mexico. Consider Plan Colombia, the long-term  package of U.S. aid that allowed President Alvaro Uribe to prosecute a  serious war not just against the drug cartels but against the FARC, the  leftist guerrilla army that effectively controlled a sizable part of  Colombia. Bogota was successful in finally turning the tide against the  FARC, which was allied with the drug dealers and drew much of its  funding from them.  But the two groups were not identical.  Though the Colombian government's victory over the FARC heralded the  end of a serious insurrectionary movement in the country, its success in  breaking up the big cartels in Medellin and Cali emphatically did not  break the back of cocaine exports from Colombia. The Colombian drug  trade has been hurt by the government's advances (a recent UN report  estimates that coca cultivation dropped by 18% in 2008), but the country  remains the largest global producer of cocaine. Instead of two cartels  controlling its distribution, now there are dozens. These smaller groups  do not pose the systemic risk to the Colombian state that the big  cartels once did, but their eclipse has not stopped the cocaine trade. In some ways, the Mexican situation is even more difficult.  Realistically, supply routes into the U.S. cannot be cut off, even if we  were to build walls from San Diego to Brownsville and radically  increase our interdiction efforts. Drugs now mostly come through densely  populated urban areas along the border—precisely those areas,  incidentally, where interdiction efforts have drastically reduced mass  illegal immigration. These areas have by now become one interconnected  and interdependent economic zone. The amount of cross-border trade is so  great that interdiction, even with vastly increased resources, is  unlikely ever to be all that effective, unless we are willing to  radically diminish trade flows, which would wreck the legitimate economy  on both sides of the border. Nor are we making serious progress in the fight against demand for  drugs on the U.S. side. Prohibition is not working any better with  regard to Mexican methamphetamine and marijuana, and trans-shipped  Colombian, Bolivian and Peruvian cocaine, than the prohibition of  alcohol in the U.S. did in the era of the Volstead Act. Does this mean  that we should legalize? My own view is that we should, as people with  political views as different as George Soros and William F. Buckley Jr.  have to one extent or another believed as well. But it is perfectly  possible to oppose legalization without imagining, at the same time,  that the laws of supply and demand are somehow going to disappear. With diligence, patience, sacrifice and a little luck, the Calderon  government in Mexico and its successors may succeed in eventually  restoring some kind of status quo ante to the border, thus restoring  calm and safety for bystanders and for the tourists whose expenditures  play such an important role in the Mexican economy. But if we couldn't  stop the drug trade from Colombia, which is far away from the  continental U.S., what are the real chances of stopping the movement of  drugs across a border that is all about the movement of goods?  We must not let our hopes, or the  world we would like to live in, blind us to the realities of the world  in which we actually live. Yes, the cartels need to be tamed, for the  sake of both Mexico and the U.S., and the more resources that are  committed to that fight, the better. But we should not delude ourselves  that breaking the power of the big cartels will stop the drug trade to a  market whose appetite for drugs is all but insatiable, any more than it  did when the Medellin cartel was brought down in Colombia. That is a  fantasy, and a dangerous one at that, for the authorities and citizens  of both countries. (The Wall Street Journal; David Rieff is the author of "A Bed for the  Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis" and is working on a book about the  global food crisis.)