Book Review : ‘Desperados’--a War We May Not Win

Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win by Elaine Shannon (Viking: $21.95)

“All the United States is to Mexico is a rich, fat whore who wants to be plundered.”

These words--angry, bitter, abusive to both America and Mexico--are spoken by a field agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration in “Desperados” by Elaine Shannon, a sock-in-the-eye work of reporting about America’s losing struggle against the multinational, multibillion-dollar drug industry. Shannon wants us to understand the frustrations of the men who serve on the front lines of the war on drugs--but these ugly words also help us to understand exactly why the war may be unwinnable.

“Colombians are not corrupting Americans. You are corrupting us,” a former president of Colombia explains. “If you abandon illegal drugs, the traffic will disappear.”

The message is written between the lines of “Desperados,” which is largely about the skirmishing between the beleaguered DEA agents and the wealthy, audacious and brutal drug traffickers who are their unequal enemies. Shannon wants us to see the war on drugs through the eyes of its foot soldiers, who, rather like the soldiers in America’s other futile war, feel that it is only the lack of political will that keeps them from victory. “It’s like Vietnam,” one DEA agent is quoted.

“It’s the war we’re not supposed to win.”

A Moving Account

“Desperados” is framed by Shannon’s moving account of the murder of Kiki Camarena, the DEA agent who was kidnaped and tortured to death by a gang of drug traffickers in Guadalajara. Although the book is a work of journalism--Shannon is a Washington correspondent for Time, and “Desperados” is dense with facts and figures, names and dates--it is Shannon’s heart, rather than her head, that enlivens the prose when she tells the harrowing, ultimately heartbreaking story of Camarena and his comrades-in-arms:

“By day, Guadalajara wore a placid face,” she writes. “This was not the Guadalajara the agents and their wives knew. They had seen the city’s night side. It was evil and impenetrable, like the countenances of the brujas, the witches, who lived in the back streets and sold incantations to vengeful peasants.”

Shannon gives us to understand that the DEA agents are merely pawns in a terrible game played by politicians and bureaucrats--a game that turns on diplomatic and economic concerns rather than tactical considerations. Thus, for example, the agents who stalk the most violent drug traffickers in the Mexican underworld are not allowed to carry sidearms, while the robber-barons of the drug trade in Mexico move freely in the company of bodyguards who carry genuine police credentials and assault rifles.

Corrupt Enforcers

Indeed, Shannon depicts law enforcement throughout Latin America as corrupted, intimidated and ineffective. By contrast, the drug underground is shown to be a kind of reckless but opulent Mafia, a shadow government with armies, arsenals and vast treasuries of its own. “ Que quieres ? O plata , o plomo ?” says Caro Quintero, a brash young don of the drug traffickers, to a new commandante of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. “What do you want? Silver or lead?”

The villains of Shannon’s story, of course, are not only the drug traffickers but also the politicians, both American and Latin American, who have failed to understand the immensity of drug trafficking or who have been too distracted and fainthearted to fight it. Shannon describes the irresolute, ineffective or plainly hypocritical drug enforcement policies of four presidents, including the “vacuum of presidential leadership” during the Reagan Administration--a vacuum in which the bizarre machinations of Bill Casey and Oliver North in the netherworld of “narco-terrorism” were allowed to run wild.

Shannon seems to embrace the point of view of her key informants, the DEA agents who put their lives on the line in the backwaters and back alleys of Latin America: The war on drugs can be won with enough manpower and technology--if we decide to win it. But Shannon’s book only persuaded me that the problem of drug trafficking begins with a simple concept that every law-and-order politician in Washington ought to understand--the law of supply-and-demand. As long as Americans pay top dollar for marijuana, cocaine and heroin, then the sinister entrepreneurs of the Third World will supply the market at any risk. In that sense, the war on drugs resembles the war in Vietnam in another way--how can we prevail over a ruthless and determined enemy abroad if we are unable to win the hearts and minds of our own people at home?