Mexico’s illegal-drug trade and the accompanying violence there and in neighboring Central American countries is again a hot topic for members of the foreign-policy community in the United States. The latest catalyst is a new study from the Council on Foreign Relations arguing that the “flow of high-powered weaponry from the United States exacerbates the soaring rates of gun-related violence in the region.”
It is hardly a new argument. Former secretary of state
Hillary Clinton repeatedly embraced the Mexican government’s view that
permissive gun laws in the United States were a major contributor to the
drug-related violence that has now claimed an estimated eighty thousand in
Mexico over the past six-and-a-half years. In summit meetings with both the
current Mexican president and his predecessor, President Obama has adopted a
similar position. But such arguments misconstrue the symptoms of the problem
for the cause. The underlying reason for Mexico’s agony is not the easy
availability of guns, but the enormous profitability of the illegal-drug trade
and the various pathologies that it spawns, including violence and pervasive
corruption.
The CFR study’s author, Julia Sweig, Nelson and David
Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council, is
unsparing in her criticism of U.S. policy. With the launch of the 2007 Mérida
Initiative to combat drug trafficking, Sweig contends, “the U.S. and Mexican
governments agreed to a regional security framework guided by the principle of
shared responsibility. Among its domestic obligations, the United States
committed to intensify its efforts to combat the illegal trafficking of weapons
and ammunition into Mexico.” Six years later, she charges, “little has changed:
the U.S. civilian firearms market continues to supply the region’s
transnational criminal networks with high-powered weaponry that is purchased
with limited oversight.”
In contrast, she praises Latin American governments for
having “moved to disarm criminal networks by tightening their own gun law
codes. Mexico prohibits the sale of handguns with calibers greater than .38,”
and Mexico, along with several other countries, “have implemented gun buyback
programs.” Given the drug-related carnage in Mexico and its Central American
neighbors in recent years, it would appear that the strategy Sweig cites hasn’t
worked very well. To be blunt, the Sinaloa cartel, the Zetas, and other
trafficking organizations are not going to be stopped, or even seriously
inconvenienced, by tougher gun-control measures in the United States.
Indeed, the argument that supposedly lax U.S. gun laws
are a major reason for Mexico’s drug violence is a bit of a red herring. It’s
not to say that the cartels don’t get some of their weaponry from gun shops,
flea markets, pawn shops, and gun shows in the United States, as Sweig charges.
They do, but they also get them from numerous other sources. As I note in
chapter nine of my latest book on the international drug war, the cartels
obtain weapons from the international black market, the armories of Central
American countries the U.S. helped fill during the fight against communist
infiltration of the region in the 1980s, and even Mexico’s own military depots.
The principal reason that the drug gangs can obtain all
the firepower they want from multiple sources is that they have vast financial
resources at their disposal. Mexico’s share of the $300 billion to $350 billion
global illegal-drug trade is estimated to be at least $35 billion, and
according to the former DEA liaison at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, perhaps
as much as $60 billion, per year. That sum is in a country that the CIA
estimates has a modest legal gross domestic product of $1.18 trillion. In other
words, the drug trade is equal to at least 3 percent and perhaps nearly 6
percent of Mexico’s entire economy.
That enormous wealth gives the cartels the power to
corrupt, intimidate, or eliminate law-enforcement personnel, media figures,
elected officials, and business leaders nearly at will. They even have the
financial clout to tempt large, respected financial institutions in the United
States and other countries into laundering their profits.
As long as the traffickers possess such funds, trying to
halt their turf fights over the valuable trafficking routes into the United
States by restricting access to guns is as futile as the reputed attempt of
King Canute to hold back the tides. A far more effective solution would be to
greatly reduce the profits available from the drug trade. Nearly 90 percent of
the retail price of illegal drugs is simply the result of their illegality.
Ending the failed prohibition strategy, both domestically and internationally,
would drastically slow the flow of profits. Mexico’s former president, Vicente
Fox, Brazil’s former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and a growing roster
of past and present Latin American leaders seem to be reaching that conclusion.
A Mexican drug industry of $4 billion or $5 billion a year would pose
considerably less danger to Mexico’s government and society than one nine or
ten times that size. That’s true even if the trade remained exclusively in the
hands of criminal elements—which, absent prohibition, it probably would not.
It is time for a strategy that gets to the root cause of
Mexico’s drug-related corruption and violence, not merely attempts to treat the
symptoms with the legislative equivalent of patent medicine. The only way to
significantly reduce the violence is to defund the cartels. And that requires
rethinking the entire prohibition strategy.
**Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato
Institute and a contributing editor to The National Interest, is the author of
nine books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s
Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (2003) and The Fire Next Door: Mexico’s
Drug Violence and the Danger to America (2012).