Colombia's New President Is Importing a Drug War That Already Killed 221 People and Didn't Work

Abelardo de la Espriella took office in Cali on August 9 under armed guard — 11,000 troops, anti-drone systems, a city bracing for retaliation — and inside a week his government asked Washington for something specific. Bring the boat-strike campaign onshore, against the labs and the coca fields — coca being the plant whose leaves get refined into cocaine — not just the water. The Washington Post reports that the request folds Colombia into “Shield of the Americas,” the Trump administration coalition already carrying out strikes on suspected smuggling boats in the Pacific and Caribbean. De la Espriella won by less than a single percentage point and ran on scrapping his predecessor’s peace talks outright — “the option of dialogue is completely exhausted,” he told reporters, according to the Taipei Times — in favor of bombing jungle cocaine labs and building what he calls mega-prisons, backed by a $1 billion U.S. security package.

Killing more people at sea has not put one gram less cocaine on one American street, and hoping the same math works on land isn’t a plan.

By the time de la Espriella made his ask, the campaign he wants imported had already run 66 strikes and killed 221 people, per Reason’s tally of Pentagon actions since the campaign began. Nobody has had to prove in court that any of them were trafficking anything — that’s what “extrajudicial” means here: no charge, no trial, someone just doesn’t come home. Meanwhile Colombian cocaine production has climbed to nearly nine times what it was in 2012, the highest level UN researchers have ever recorded. That’s the actual scoreboard, and it says the deterrence theory already failed once, offshore, before anyone signed up to try it onshore too.

Nobody at that inauguration was talking about the guy in Ohio doing a bump on a Friday, or the one nine months out trying to stay away from it, who has zero government-approved medications to lean on — the FDA still lists no approved drug treatment for cocaine use disorder, a gap the drug war has never once tried to close because closing it was never the point. A billion dollars aimed at interdiction over treatment — the military term for intercepting shipments before they leave the country — and mega-prisons is a billion dollars not aimed at the treatment side of this, where the actual leverage over whether someone keeps using lives. Coca has been sprayed, burned, and bombed for twenty-five years straight, and supply is at a record high anyway. That’s not a policy with a bug in it. That’s the policy working exactly as designed, just not at the thing it claims to be for.

Someone in a Colombian jungle is going to get killed under the label “narco-terrorist” with no evidence entered into any record, so a president who won by a coin flip can say he did something. The cocaine gets here either way. It always has.