America is in real danger of turning its metaphorical "war on drugs" into a bloody reality. With the failure of every other enforcement effort, from crop eradication through border interdiction to street-level policing, a growing chorus of influential Washington policy makers is urging the ultimate escalation — sending U.S. troops to Latin America to battle traffickers.

The calls for military intervention are coming fast and furiously from Congress, where frustrated members from all points on the ideological spectrum share a conviction that only armed force will rid America of drugs. "We should engage in joint military and paramilitary operations, with congressional approval, including helicopter and air strikes on cocaine fields," Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) told a Tufts University audience this year. Defending a similar proposal, Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.), chairman of the House narcotics committee, said, "I have deeper commitment to fighting the drug traffickers than I did the North Koreans." Sen. William Cohen (R.-Maine) has argued that the only solution is to "go to the source," even if that means "taking out the machine-gun nest with troops."
 

Hit Drug Labs

Key officials in the Bush administration favor a similar approach. Drug czar William Bennett privately advocates the use of special operations forces to hit foreign drug labs and shipment centers. A National Security Council task force reportedly will recommend to President Bush that he greatly step up the military's role in fighting drugs overseas, including a possible combat role in fighting drugs overseas. Mr. Bush will be receptive: He told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in March that drugs represent "a threat no less real than the adversaries you have battled" and vowed to "combat drug abuse with...our nation's armed forces."

The major source of bureaucratic resistance to this groundswell is the Pentagon itself, which doubts whether the drug war is winnable and fears becoming embroiled in an endless, ill-defined commitment that detracts from its traditional mission.

The military has good reason to resist this call to arms. Given how many countries produce drugs, including the U.S. itself, the chances of winning are small compared to the likelihood of tearing apart the social and political fabric of countries in which the military intervenes.

The first problem for U.S. anti-drug expeditionary forces will be defining the enemy Simply shooting a few known kingpins in Medellin wouldn't dry up the supply of either drugs or criminal entrepreneurs willing to run them across borders. Peasant growers and traffickers don't wear uniforms. Nor do they belong to a single, defmed organization that can be forced to surrender. "There is a perfect textbook example of guerrilla warfare," Michael Perez, a Drug Enforcement Agency agent stationed in Bolivia, was quoted as saying earlier this year. "You never know who's who — who's a good guy and who's a bad guy."

U.S. troops would have to treat entire sectors of Latin American society as potential foes. More than half a million Bolivians live off the profits of coca and cocaine production. Tens of thousands of peasant cultivators are tightly organized into militant unions with powerful links to national worker organizations. Their roadblocks, mass demonstrations, strikes and other non-violent tactics have paralyzed government efforts to eradicate coca planting. Trying to conquer them with force would be no easy feat.

To complicate matters, U.S. troops wouldn't know who their friends are, either. Corruption is so endemic in the drug-supplier nations that anyone up to presidents and army chiefs of staff can be on the traffickers' payroll. In Colombia, according to a recent Bogota television news report, traffickers appear to "have access to practically all confidential government information, such as minutes of cabinet meetings." The corruption ensures that the kingpins enjoy protection even as they use the local police and military to knock off upstart competitors.

Colombia, at least, has never been taken over entirely by the traffickers. Bolivia was, in 1980, during the famous "cocaine coup." The situation is not much better now that the corrupt generals and colonels no longer rule. Said a former American adviser to the country's narcotics police to an Atlantic Monthly writer, "I have to tell you I think that 100 percent of the Bolivian enforcement structure was corrupted." After the U.S. sent troops to Bolivia in 1986 — the model for current interventionist proposals — a Bolivian congressional investigation accused the interior minister who oversaw the whole operation of taking payoffs to protect the major drug lords.

Peru is no better. A recent staff report by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs observes that "corruption in all segments of the Peruvian government continues to impede meaningful anti-narcotics efforts."

Even honest segments of these societies loudly protest the introduction of U.S. forces in the drug war. The Latin allergy to anything smacking of "Yankee imperialism" ties the hands of even the most sympathetic leaders. The one exception to that rule is the 1986 U.S. anti-drug raid in Bolivia which damaged the otherwise-high popularity of President Victor Paz Estensoro's government. Today, Bolivian leaders state emphatically they will never permit such an operation again.

Latin leaders know that escalating the drug war risks not only their political future, but their nation's survival. In Peru, the army frankly confesses the reasons for its reluctance to take on the traffickers at the same time as it fights the fanatical Shining Path guerrillas. It needs popular support to fight terrorism — and it can't retain popular support if it tries to eradicate coca.

Unlike traditional counterinsurgency, which relies on winning the loyalty of peasants and isolating radical guerrilla forces, a military campaign against the peasant economy in the Andean states could unite the entire rural population against the intruders. "It would create another Vietnam or another Central America," says Edmundo Morales, author of Cocaine: The White Gold Rush in Peru. Already, adds Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, "the Shining Path guerrillas have been able to maneuver both the Peruvian government and the Americans into doing exactly what they wanted. They have made the fight against eradication and punitive raids from police and helicopter-borne units piloted by Americans the cause to unite most of [the peasants]. Any kind of escalation of the current commitment will play nicely into their hands."

The Shining Path, although not yet successful at penetrating Bolivia, maintains strongholds on the border between the two nations. Its proximity may fuel concerns of the Bolivian government, expressed in a 1986 study, that the response of traffickers to military attack might result in "the emergence of a new and deadly guerrilla movement joining extremists, destitute peasants and drug traffickers."

"Narco-Terrorists"

Some proponents of military intervention ignore this danger by assuming traffickers, guerrilla insurgents and terrorists are one and the same — "narcoguerrillas" or "narco-terrorists" — despite their vastly different social and political agendas. Groups like the Shining Path derive some income from drug taxes but ultimately aim to impose a puritanical communist regime; most traffickers have no problem with democracy or capitalism as long as they are left alone. In Colombia as well as Peru, traffickers and guerrillas have waged bloody vendettas for control of territory. Yet, a foreign invasion that targets them both is likely to bring them together.

As long as U.S. demand for drugs swamps Latin American societies with narco-dollars, military intervention will succeed no better than any of the other failed strategies that have attempted to eliminate the supply at its source. Unlike them, however, it will risk substantial numbers of American lives abroad on an open-ended, exceedingly dangerous mission. Worse, it promises to inflame urban nationalism and peasant radicalism, social forces that together could destroy the fragile governments of any cooperating countries. So far no South American country has volunteered to commit suicide for the sake for the sake of the U.S.'s frustrated drug warriors. North Americans should be glad they haven't.

Jonathan Marshall, "In the War on Drugs, Keep the Troops in the Barracks," The Wall Street Journa4 July 27, 1989, p. A10.