Why the War on Cocaine Still Isn’t Working
Starting in the 1970s, Pablo Escobar bribed and murdered his way to running the world’s most powerful cocaine cartel, dominating smuggling routes from South America into the United States. He didn’t merely order the killing of rivals. He attempted to assassinate a politician by bombing a commercial flight he was expected to take, killing all 107 passengers on board. He bombed a city block in Colombia’s capital, killing 63 people and injuring 1,000. He financed a paramilitary assault on the Palace of Justice, the Colombian Supreme Court building, killing nearly 100 people, including 12 justices. He terrorized the country’s population, spreading corruption, mass shootings, torture, rape, mutilated corpses, extortion, and more.
Little wonder that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spent so much time and energy to catch him. Yet when Escobar was killed in 1993, rival cartels simply took over. Colombia remains a mass exporter of cocaine, and the U.S. continues to wage a costly war on drugs in the country.
Is there any prospect of that war succeeding? In hopes of answering that question, I talked with the foreign correspondent and documentary filmmaker Toby Muse, who moved to Colombia in 2000 to cover the country’s civil war. At the time, a huge U.S.-backed effort called Plan Colombia invested billions of dollars in a massive effort to cut coca production by half in five years. It failed.
Muse followed the civil war through the 2016 peace process with the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which surrendered its coca territory. The Colombian government was supposed to step in and provide basic law and order, education, and health care. But the government dropped the ball. New narco-militias got to
