PERSPECTIVE ON THE DRUG TRADE : The Underworld Goes Mainstream : The new, businesslike and influential breed of narco-traffickers poses grave policy choices for the United States.

Recent revelations about more direct and flagrant links between drug lords and political elites in Latin America suggest significant changes in the traditional ways of doing drug business. They also highlight some of the contradictions that U.S. drug enforcement policy is encountering, with serious consequences for the United States.

Leaks from American officials, together with investigations and arrests in Mexico and Colombia, show that the drug lords are modernizing, becoming businessmen instead of simply rich, high-rolling, quick-burnout delinquents. This is more clearly apparent in Mexico than in the rest of the hemisphere, if only because the previous image of Mexico’s “narcos” was strongly stereotypical: the young, ostentatious, gold-bracelet-and-necklace set of Rafael Caro Quintero and the rest of the Pacific Coast cartels. The sophistication of the current drug lords puts such icons to shame. Today, according to growing suspicions both in Mexico and in the United States (as revealed in the Mexican press), the Gulf and Juarez cartels were deeply involved in the Mexican privatization program, chiefly the banking sector, and in at least part of the political violence that has rocked the country since mid-1993 when Guadalajara’s Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas was assassinated. They established links of one sort or another with high-level government officials or their families, with state governors and money-laundering corporations in various sectors of the economy, and entrapped or otherwise persuaded the authorities to deal with them on such issues as capital repatriation, support for the peso and managing the U.S.-Mexican drug enforcement relationship. While little of this is entirely novel, and none of it has been fully corroborated, there is more than sufficient reason for believing that most of the suspicions are well-founded and most of the changes are far-reaching. From local gangsters in Sinaloa and Guadalajara to venture capitalists manipulating the government, the transition in Mexico has been swift and spectacular.

In Colombia, the charges regarding the Cali cartel’s funding of the Liberal Party’s campaigns, including that of President Ernesto Samper last year, while quite possibly false are also symptomatic. The Cali cartel and its presumed chieftains, the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers, are, in a sense, the “good guys” in the Colombian drug business, at least compared to the Medellin-based Pablo Escobar and Rodriguez Cacha clan. The Cali bosses seemed agreeable to negotiation with the authorities and seemed sensitive to the government’s need to accommodate American demands. They took drug trafficking seriously, running it like a business, with less of the violence that had traumatized the country; they’ve even been sending their sons and daughters to study at U.S. universities.

If ever a government and a society had wanted to negotiate a modus vivendi with a drug cartel whose power and wealth made war against it unwinnable and coexistence inevitable, the Cali cartel seemed an ideal candidate. Not that coexistence is without problems. There have been serious confrontations between the Samper administration and the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers, and a parallel conflict between Washington and Bogota over the sincerity and intensity of Colombia’s commitment to American-style drug enforcement. No one in Colombia wants a new war, but securing peace with Cali necessarily entails arrangements, tolerance and deals--all of which the United States accepts for its own streets and greenhouses but rejects for others. Acknowledging that the region’s drug traffickers have a viable claim on membership in the business and political elites may be the least costly way to address the entire issue domestically, but obviously it creates frictions on the drug war’s external front.

Those frictions are part of Washington’s own creeping dilemma. The cultivation, processing and transshipment of drugs is attaining an unheard-of magnitude in Latin America, as years of economic stagnation and recent deregulation and trade liberalization policies all kick in. Indeed, the production of illicit drugs is one sphere of economic activity in which the region undoubtedly enjoys a significant advantage, for climatological, legal and historical reasons. Many of the governments that the Clinton Administration considers paragons of free-market policies and democratic governance are also fine examples of association with or at least tolerance for drug cartels like Cali. Should the United States look the other way, as it clearly did with the Salinas administration in Mexico, and in fact encourage the strengthening of the cartels? Or should it denounce the complicity, as it is tending to do with the Samper regime in Colombia, and undermine the legitimacy and power of a government it otherwise sympathizes with? Not only the Latins have tough choices these days.