Drug Cartel May Die, Drug Trade Lives On : U.S. must keep pressure up in wake of Colombia arrest

With the capture of Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, the Cali [drug] cartel has died,” an exuberant President Ernesto Samper told the Colombian people Sunday night. Thomas Constantine, the director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, was only slightly less conclusive in his diagnosis. “The Cali cartel is wounded and on life support,” he said after Rodriguez was seized in his hide-out in the cartel’s headquarters town and quickly moved to jail in Bogota.

Official optimism about the cartel’s future would seem to be justified, given that six of its top seven leaders are now in custody. Locking up its top executives cannot help but be disruptive to cartel business. What has to be remembered at the same time is that the cartel was basically a management tool for more efficiently organizing and profiting from Colombia’s production and export of drugs, chiefly cocaine. What remains undisrupted is the downstream market for drugs, especially in the United States. DEA officials estimate that about 80% of the cocaine sold in this country comes from Colombia.

The drug market, in the United States and worldwide, remains big, demanding and of course hugely lucrative. The Cali cartel may indeed have been laid low, but that does not mean that the international drug trade has suffered a mortal or even a crippling blow. Market forces alone guarantee that in time, probably fairly soon, something will come along to replace the organization that had its headquarters in Cali.

None of this is to suggest that the expensive, dangerous and as often as not deeply frustrating effort to pinch off the supply of illegal drugs should in any way be relaxed. On the contrary: It’s clear that strong and continuing U.S. pressure was instrumental in encouraging the Colombian government to move against the cartel’s ringleaders. It’s almost certain that U.S. intelligence agencies provided key information to help track and locate Rodriguez and others who now have been taken into custody. The pressure--and the cooperation with authorities in Colombia and other countries that are drug producers or conduits--should continue.

The political fallout in Colombia from Rodriguez’s capture and what proceeded it could help determine how vigorously the Samper government pursues its anti-drug campaign. Samper, in office just one year, has been deeply embarrassed by revelations from his campaign treasurer, Santiago Medina, that drug traffickers contributed large sums of money to his race. Samper has denied knowing anything about such tainted money, $5.8 million of which is said to have come from Rodriguez and his older brother, Gilberto, who was taken into custody earlier. Medina is in jail now, and the scandal has forced the resignation of the minister of defense, Fernando Potero, who was Samper’s campaign manager. Colombia’s House of Representatives is considering whether to investigate allegations about the president’s involvement.

Meanwhile, Samper can claim with some justification that he has shown his good faith in the anti-drug effort by decapitating the Cali cartel, whatever political debts he may have owed to it. For that he deserves credit. But the real test will be whether the government shows similar energy and zeal in moving to prevent the emergence of a successor organization. And the challenge remains for U.S. leaders--not only in politics but in medicine, education, culture and religion--to focus on how to curb the seemingly insatiable U.S. appetite for illegal drugs.