War Against a Filthy Trade

Colombia is losing its war against illegal drug traffickers, and losing it badly. A poor but proud nation of 28 million people is literally under siege by a relative handful of powerful and violent criminals.

In a world plagued by illicit drugs, and the corruption and other social problems that they cause, no other nation has suffered the way Colombia has in recent years. Judges there are being murdered at the rate of one a month, according to a recent dispatch from Bogota by Times correspondent William Montalbano, and even a Supreme Court justice was killed by assassins. Three newspaper editors who crusaded against drug traffickers have been murdered, as have several top police officials --including one sitting attorney general. Even a former attorney general who was given an ambassadorial post behind the Iron Curtain to help protect him from restribution was tracked down in Hungary and killed by a hired gunman. And those are only the most extreme examples of the arrogant lawlessness of the Colombian drug gangs.

So rich and powerful have Colombia’s drug lords become (they control an estimated 80% of the cocaine sold in the United States) that they have even begun spending their ill-gotten gains to try to win support from Colombia’s poor. They have built social centers, funded food programs and tried to run for public office, portraying themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods. Some have gone so far as to suggest that they might repatriate the money that they have hidden in foreign banks to help bolster the Colombian economy--if the government of President Virgilio Barco lets up on the legal pressure that it has put on them.

To their credit, Barco and many other honest Colombian officials have resisted all efforts by the drug lords to intimidate them or to seduce them with the fantastic wealth that their filthy trade produces. Last month, in a particularly courageous act, Barco signed into law a new extradition treaty with the United States under which any arrested drug kingpins can be sent to this country for trial. It is the legal system in the United States, still largely beyond their corrupt and violent reach, that the Colombian drug lords fear most.

But the Colombians will not win their war on drugs by themselves. They need more help than they are getting from their allies, especially the United States. How sad and ironic that, as Colombia’s president was exposing himself to physical danger by signing an extradition treaty with the United States, President Reagan was submitting to Congress a budget that would reduce the Administration’s spending on drug-education and drug-eradication programs.

It should come as no surprise that, as in Mexico and Peru, prominent Colombian politicians are starting to ask why their nation should bear the pain of the drug war when the rich nation that consumes most of those illegal drugs is not doing enough to control the problem within its own borders. Until the United States is willing to do more to fight the war on drugs in this country, such as spending more to educate potential consumers about the dangers of drug use and to help police crack down on drug traffickers here, smaller and poorer nations like Colombia will fight a bloody but losing battle against the brutal drug kingpins of this world.