Cocaine Barons May Fall, but Industry Will Survive : Drugs: As its citizens pay the price, Colombia tires of the war on drug lords; meanwhile the industry regains its balance and U.S. cocaine prices rise.

Less than three months after it was launched, the war against drug traffickers in Colombia has lost nearly all its popular support. That should come as no surprise. The public’s fighting spirit has been extinguished by a cold shower of fear.

To be sure, we are talking about the “war against drugs,” declared with such bravura by the Bush Administration, a war that is no more than a mirage.

It is one thing to try to stop the destructive and implacable attack ordered by two of the most infamous heads of the drug world against government, justice, life, property and the public in Colombia. It’s quite another to control the narcotics industry that, despite the current battle, goes on practically unaffected.

As in any industry, the point is to stay in business, whatever the circumstances. The blood spilled these days in Colombia will not depress the constant demand from the United States for this industry’s product. The economic survival of thousands of people involved in drugs here and in Colombia depends on the store staying open. Like any good shopkeepers, they will brave any obstacles to keep their customers satisfied. No business in the world offers as healthy a profit margin.

The Colombian government--more realistic than the U.S. Administration--knows that even the concept of stopping the flow of drugs is more than just misguided--it threatens the country’s financial stability. Drug money has penetrated to the core of Colombia’s economy.

For that reason, Colombia’s counter-assault has been concentrated on a smaller battlefield than the United States would like, trying to destroy the criminal wave triggered by Pablo Escobar-Gaviria and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, rather than the industry they command.

But the methods of the two drug lords are convincing Colombians their government cannot defend them. Bombs set off in banks, movie theaters, shopping centers and, possibly, airplanes--if that turns out to be the cause of the downing of an Avianca jet last week, killing 110 people--go a long way to undercut support for the government’s crusade.

A national opinion poll published in October by the country’s largest daily newspaper found that 61% of the public believes dialogue with the traffickers is the only way to solve the current situation. Most recently, Norberto Morales, president of the national House of Representatives, entered that chorus, holding private talks with the narcos.

As more Colombians die in a war they don’t believe in, the prevailing national question is this: What for? The public is increasingly being joined by political leaders in the view that all this destruction is happening for a reason that has little to do with Colombia and much with the United States.

But it is difficult from the United States to read the price tag. First, in human lives. Suppose, Time magazine suggested, that drug lords had murdered Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh and his predecessor, Edwin Meese III, then took out half the U.S. Supreme Court and hundreds of federal and state judges. Throw in Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates. And finally, the assassination of candidate George Bush at a campaign stop in 1987.

Then there are the material losses: more than 220 bombs set off in all manner of public buildings, including schools. At enormous cost to the public treasury, army and police have been deployed throughout every major city, manning hundreds of checkpoints and wasting thousands of hours searching cars and citizens.

And, finally, there is the price that cannot be set: psychological terror spread among the public; the trauma people suffer as their political leaders are assassinated, the pernicious effect on press freedom as scores of journalists’ are murdered, and the destruction of the concept of justice in Colombia as the legal system collapses from the chaos around it.

Colombia is poor and cannot sustain such losses much longer. U.S. financial aid is pitiful: just $55 million and military equipment that is outdated and inappropriate. The United States spends much more each year to support El Salvador’s government in its civil war.

On the other hand, the billionaire cocaine barons have the best army and materiel money can buy. A soldier in the Colombian army, composed mainly of young peasants, earns about $5 a month. A soldier in the cocaine army earns more than $2,000 a month. Most important, the drug lords rely on an intelligence network that has infiltrated the highest levels of the country’s institutions. Information keeps them one step ahead of each effort to capture them. Records seized from one trafficker showed that he paid $100,000 a month for that kind of intelligence. Not one of the major drug lords has been captured. In the U.S. media, it sometimes seems that the Colombian drug lords are the only ones in the business. But there are countless U.S. organizations with their own cartels and subcartels, major capos, financiers and young guns. They have converted the ghettos in cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles into little Medellins, Colombia’s drug capital ripped apart by violence.

William J. Bennett, President Bush’s drug czar, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that government must spend $5 billion for extra prison costs alone in the coming year to comply with the recommendations of the Administration’s drug program.

But even as the offensive results in record seizures of cocaine, the market is recovering its balance; cocaine prices are again on the rise.

In Colombia and the United States, the reasons behind the failure to control narcotics trafficking are the same: “The savage but real opportunity that an illicit business offered to a youth alienated from the opulent and distant consumer society that they see every day on television,” wrote Colombian columnist Enrique Santos.

There is no viable formula in these countries--marked as they are by enormous gaps between rich and poor--to eliminate an activity that offers an immediate possibility to leave poverty behind. It appears as the only alternative for the peasant growing coca in the Andes and for the gang member selling crack in Chicago. Separated by thousands of miles, both face the same frustrations in societies that have taught them that money is everything.

There probably is no social crisis as complex as narcotics. It strikes societies at every level--cultural, political, economic. The list is endless. Yet the complexity has been hidden by the current obsession in Colombia and the United States with “the war”--its killings, bombs and military hardware. As long as the conditions that created the narcotics industry prevail, judges can fill jails with traffickers; police can mount offensives against as many Mafiosi as they want.

There will always be fresh bodies to replace them. Santos said it: “This is the story of the dragon who grows two heads each time one is cut off.”