The U.S. Military Can’t Solve the Fentanyl Crisis

Crenshaw is the author of a bill in Congress authorizing the use of military force against Mexican cartels or any actor “carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.” He argues that the “American partnership” with Colombia helped make the country safer today than it was 25 years ago and that this provides a model for dealing with Mexican cartels:

“We need to somehow figure out diplomatically how to make this Mexico’s idea. That they’re asking for our military support, such as close air support, such as an AC-130 gunship overhead while they’re prosecuting a target and surrounded by sicarios. … If I was in that situation as a Navy SEAL, we would just call in close air support, all those guys would be gone, and we’d move along our merry way.”

This is bad analysis on a number of levels: bad history, bad economics, and bad political science. Since Crenshaw has volunteered himself as an expert on Colombia—he went to high school there—and its lessons for fighting the war on drugs with the U.S. military, we can start with his proposals.

In an Instagram post, Crenshaw stated, “Anyone who has watched Narcos knows that the Colombia of 30 years ago looked a lot like Mexico does today.”

The problem with that theory—beyond its reliance on a Netflix series to formulate U.S. foreign policy—is twofold. To begin with, if you consider annual homicide rates, today’s Mexico looks an awful lot like today’s Colombia. In 2021, Mexico had 28 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, whereas Colombia’s rate was 27. This convergence—Mexico’s homicide rate surpassed Colombia’s for the first time in 2017—is certainly bad news for the former country, whose homicide rate was 8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007, one year after then-President Felipe Calderón deployed Mexican Army troops to fight the drug cartels. Nonetheless, despite seeing its homicide rate more than triple in less than two decades, Mexico is still nowhere near Colombia’s levels of violence during the Narcos era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the country reached the alarming rate of 85 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Comparing Mexico’s violence in 2023 to that of Colombia in 1993 borders on the preposterous.

Crenshaw’s argument also overlooks that Colombia today is slipping back to the 1990s, when the country, under siege from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a narco-guerrilla group, was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Although the homicide rate remains comparatively low, large swaths of the national territory are still under the control of the FARC and other illegal armed groups, which are expanding their spheres of influence. In May, the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory to warn that three of the country’s 32 departments (the equivalent of U.S. states)—Cauca in the country’s southwest, Arauca and Norte de Santander in eastern Colombia—were high-risk areas due to widespread organized criminal activities including homicide, assault, armed robbery, extortion, and kidnapping.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, seven different armed conflicts are now taking place in Colombia (an increase from six in 2022). While the Colombian state battles the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Clan del Golfo, the latter armed group is waging its own war against the ELN. The FARC, meanwhile, is fighting two of its own splinter groups, Segunda Marquetalia and Comandos de la Frontera, the latter of which operates along extensive parts of the Venezuelan border. Finally, the FARC and the ELN, both communist narco-guerrilla groups, are facing off against each other for control over Arauca, a department that also controls key access routes into Venezuela.

Although each of the unofficial armed actors takes part in illegal mining, extortion, and other criminal activities, their main source of financing—and the main source of the conflicts among them—is the cocaine trade. The major difference between the situation now and that of the 1990s is that no single group enjoys a monopoly over the drug trade while waging an all-out war against the state, as the FARC then did. Instead, a multitude of armed actors fight both the state and one another over strategic coca-growing areas and export routes.

It is true that, overall, the conflict now has a lower intensity than in the 1990s, but Crenshaw’s thesis that Colombia is a safer, more peaceful place today than it was when he lived there at the turn of the century is valid only up to a point. For the population in entire departments like Arauca, Norte de Santander, and Cauca, the security situation is no less lethal now than two or three decades ago. It is unquestionable that the change in strategy in Bogotá and the assistance from Washington helped the Colombian military in its struggle against insurgent groups. But this misses the point. From a U.S. perspective, the reason for getting involved in the first place was to stanch the flow of cocaine into the United States. As seen above, that objective was not attained. From Colombia’s perspective, the tactical victory provided a some Colombians refuge from the conflict, but the country is still afflicted by the endemic violence that plagues countries stuck in the middle of the drug war.

The last four years have also seen a resurgence of the type of violence that struck the country when the Medellín Cartel and the FARC were at the apex of their powers. In 2019, the ELN carried out a deadly terrorist attack against the National Police Academy in Bogotá, killing 21 with the detonation of a car bomb. In March, the ELN attacked a military base in Norte de Santander with explosives, leaving nine soldiers dead. The FARC, meanwhile, recently reestablished its 53rd Front in Sumapaz, a rural locality of Bogotá, thus reviving dark memories of 1999, when the terrorist group threatened the Colombian capital itself.

Given the persistence of armed groups financed with cocaine proceeds and the continuation of drug-fueled violence in Colombia, it is telling that Crenshaw, while heralding Colombia as a model for U.S. policy in Mexico, does not mention cocaine once. That was the reason the United States got involved in Colombia in the first place. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, there was an enormous increase in the flow of powder and then crack cocaine into U.S. cities. U.S. politicians concluded that the solution was to use U.S. military aid to help solve problems inside Colombia, drying up the supply of the drug at the source. As a result, under Plan Colombia and its successor counter-narcotics programs, nearly $12 billion was dedicated to helping the Colombian military eradicate coca leaf and undermine actors participating in the cocaine trade between 2000 and 2021.

Unfortunately, as an Office of National Drug Control Policy study showed in October 2008, cocaine prices in the United States consistently declined in the 1980s, and then remained relatively flat throughout the 1990s. The idea of attacking the drug supply at the source relies on the idea that interdiction will reduce availability and drive prices up, limiting consumption and negative consequences at home. If price is not even increasing, that is proof positive that a supply-side model is not working.

The large expenditure of American taxpayer money in Colombia did nothing to halt the spread of coca crops, illicit drug production, or the continuous export of cocaine to the United States. On the contrary, coca cultivation in Colombia increased between 2000 and 2020, from roughly 136,000 planted hectares to a record 245,000. In this sense, Plan Colombia’s counter-narcotics element can be seen as an utter failure, even if its military component did help the Colombian military launch an effective offensive against the FARC in the 2000s.

That is why Crenshaw’s soliloquy on how Colombia should be a model for our policy in Mexico is so strange. The U.S. government failed to solve the cocaine problem, but Crenshaw now heralds the “Colombia model” as an unqualified success. The reason we went into Colombia in the first place, cocaine, just fell out of the story altogether. The “do something!” impulse in U.S. foreign policy is strong, but surely a proposed solution to a problem should be able to pass scrutiny better than this.

Colombia’s drug war has proved to be a Sisyphean struggle, with each victory against the dominant drug cartel leaving a power vacuum that is quickly filled by new drug cartels. The Medellín Cartel’s fall led to the rise of the Cali Cartel, whose own demise allowed the FARC and a series of paramilitary groups to take over the cocaine business.

Between 2002 and 2010, then-President Álvaro Uribe’s government successfully fought the FARC, but this was undercut by the fact that it was impossible to do away fully with the FARC’s main source of financing (cocaine). Hence, the FARC, despite heavy blows to its leadership structure, didn’t surrender fully and was able to outlast Uribe’s government. Uribe’s successor, Juan Manuel Santos, negotiated with the FARC and amnestied its leadership, yet only a part of the FARC demobilized in 2016. The rest, known locally as FARC dissidents, remained up in arms and, as mentioned, remain fully immersed in the drug trade.

As shown above, this hardly made a dent on the supply of cocaine to the United States. If anything, the fentanyl problem is even more daunting. Cocaine is much more expensive and difficult to produce than fentanyl. During Plan Colombia, U.S. and Colombian pilots sprayed more than a million acres of Colombian territory with glyphosate in an attempt to eradicate coca crops. Fentanyl is produced on a much smaller scale with comparatively tiny amounts of precursor chemicals that are easy to obtain. Fentanyl could be produced in meaningful quantities almost anywhere. Even if Mexico stopped producing any fentanyl, there is little reason to believe U.S. supply would evaporate.

And the profit margins are astounding: According to an indictment of the Sinaloa Cartel in the Southern District of New York in April, $800 of fentanyl precursor chemicals can produce up to $640,000 worth of retail value in U.S. cities. Even if greater interdiction cuts into those margins, they are large enough to absorb a lot of pressure.

As an unintended result of the drug war, Mexico has already become a heavily militarized country. As one of us has previously noted, the tendency has increased dramatically under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has put the army in charge of infrastructure projects, customs duties at ports and airports, gasoline and fertilizer distribution, school textbook deliveries, and the provision of hospital materials, among other mundane or strictly logistical tasks that, even in many Latin American countries, fall well outside the military sphere.

In 2019, López Obrador created the National Guard, a new branch of the armed forces with over 100,000 regulars (compared to less than 150,000 in the army proper). In recent years, influential members of the armed forces have waded into politics, thus breaking the decadeslong tradition of an apolitical military. If anything, the United States should refrain from abetting any further militarization of Mexico. Plans to further involve the U.S. military against Mexico’s drug cartels, however, would likely add fuel to the fire.

A final word might bear mentioning, since Crenshaw referenced the Netflix series Narcos. The series continues after the denouement of the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia. There is a second series, set in Mexico. The first episode sets the scene quite clearly, with DEA agent Walt Breslin growling over a spliced cut of grim drug war clips:

“I’m going to tell you a story, but I’ll be honest: It doesn’t have a happy ending. In fact, it doesn’t have an ending at all. … It’s about … a war. … A drug war. The kind that’s easy to forget is happening, until you realize that in the last 30 years in Mexico, it’s killed half a million people—and counting. … I can’t tell you how the drug war ends. Man, I can’t even tell you if it ends.”

Crenshaw, and the leading Republican candidates for president, want you to believe that they have a plan for how the drug war in Mexico ends.

Ask yourself: Should you believe them?