Gangster Warlords and the War on Drugs
P. Schultz
I have
recently finished reading a book, Gangster
Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America, by
Ioan Grillo. As the title makes clear, the book deals with Latin America,
specifically, Honduras, Brazil, El Salvador, and Mexico with regard to illegal
drugs and how those who cultivate and sell them have impacted politics in Latin
America. The power, both legitimate and illegitimate, that is wielded by these
drug lords, who Grillo argues should be called “warlords,” is quite amazing. In fact, they are so powerful, it is quite
clear that the war on drugs is being won by, as some put it, the drugs.
It also
becomes clear that so long as “the war on drugs” continues, there will be no
end to drug abuse and the violence that accompanies it. The war on drugs
guarantees the continuation of the very conditions it is being waged to end.
Put differently, as long as the war on drugs continues, just so long will there
be “gangster warlords” as these warlords are the inevitable product of this
war, just as the war on terror will produce, inevitably, terrorists.
But the
situation is worse than that because those who started and those who continue
the war on drugs knew and know this. They knew that a war on drugs would
produce drug lords or cartels, and they chose or embraced their war anyway.
Why? Because both the war on drugs and those Grillo calls “gangster warlords”
serve to keep the political class, the prevailing regime in power, while
simultaneously rendering any significant change unlikely, even to the point of
being unthinkable.
In other
words, the war on drugs, which was and is presented to us as a great effort
aimed at great change, eradicating drug abuse, is actually nothing of the sort.
It is rather a way of preventing change, a way of preserving the status quo.
This will
seem strange to most, even inane to some. One reason this is so is because so
many assume that preserving the status quo does not require great efforts and,
indeed, dictates against great or visionary political agendas. Status quo
politicians are, it is commonly thought, opposed to ambitious public policies,
are conservative, and in favor of government doing as little as possible. But
this is where people go wrong. It is anything but easy to preserve the status
quo; in fact, it takes great efforts involving great force to do so. It even
takes, as the war on drugs illustrates, significant violence.
Once it is
realized that the status quo is not, to say the least, self sustaining or self
perpetuating, the actions, the deeds of the political class(es) appear in a
different light. For then it appears that what is presented to us as an agenda
for change is, in reality, a means of preserving the status quo. Hence, the
political class(es) persevere in their actions, their policies long beyond the
point where their failure, their ineffectiveness is obvious. Why? Because it is
their ineffectiveness that makes them successful in helping to preserve the status
quo.
Strangely
then, for the political class(es), the fact that the war on drugs is failing is
not an argument against it but rather an argument for it. A politics of the
status quo requires such “failures” because as long as drug abuse and its
consequences continue, it will seem imprudent, unwise, even “radical” to change
those holding power or to change their policies. The war has not yet been won,
drugs are still being abused, and cartels and drug lords are still doing
business. Thus, it can be made to seem, even in a time of considerable
dissatisfaction with the prevailing regime and popular unrest, that changing
policies that don’t seem to be working is “radical.”
It is this
sleight of hand – disguising status quo policies as the vehicles of change - that
helps to explain the power of incumbency, of the tendency for the voters to
continue the same people in office even though they recognize that things are
not going well, to put it mildly. This sleight of hand is also a sleight of
mind, so almost without knowing why, voters continue to re-elect members of the
ruling class(es). It is as if they, the voters, have lost the capacity to think
they have or could have alternatives, at least what are labeled “realistic”
alternatives. Almost as a matter of course, the alternatives are made to appear
“unrealistic” and this despite the fact that it is the prevailing policies,
those policies underlying the status quo, that are genuinely unrealistic.
Our
politics has then the quality of being almost all “smoke and mirrors,” or the
character of a magic show where change, real change is made to disappear while
the status quo is made to seem like real change, “change we can believe in,” In
the year Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, more people died in the U.S. from
falling down stairs than died from ingesting or injecting both legal and
illegal drugs. Why then the war on drugs? Because that way, Nixon could
preserve the status quo while seeming to be seeking real change, change that could
be believed in. Nixon practiced the same kind of politics in Vietnam, seeking
change, “peace with honor,” while continuing the war and LBJ’s policies, which
meant continuing the captivity of our POWs until his re-election was on the
line.
As Bob
Dylan wrote and sang, “there is no success like failure, and failure’s no
success at all.” Failure eventually catches up to us, but the damage done until
it does is quite considerable.
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