Misguided Moralizing : The U.S. is on shaky ground if it ‘decertifies’ Colombia; cocaine corruption lies closerto home.

March 1 is not a date of great significance in Washington, but in a few foreign capitals, notably Bogota, La Paz and Mexico City, it is awaited with enormous anxiety. For that is the date President Clinton sends Congress his annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, identifying nations that are to be “certified” as having cooperated fully with the U.S. to control the drug trade. Recent events in Colombia make this year’s report the most sensitive ever. They also point to the inherent weakness of the whole certification process.

Certification was created by Congress after the torture-murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena revealed systemic high-level corruption in Mexico. A nation that is “decertified” loses certain U.S. assistance and will be subject to other economic penalties, including negative U.S. votes on loans in the World Bank. Presidents Bush and Reagan used decertification exclusively to punish America’s adversaries (Iran and Syria) or international pariahs (Myanmar [Burma], Afghanistan and Panama in the later years of the Noriega regime).

This pattern has undermined the legitimacy of a process that clearly serves symbolic purposes unrelated to the drug trade. The Iranian government is probably more aggressive in suppressing its opium and heroin trade than is Pakistan and is certainly responsible for less U.S. heroin than its neighbor. Yet the U.S. routinely certifies Pakistan under a national interest waiver, citing Pakistan’s strategic importance.

Colombia has been certified every year, recently under the national interest waiver, notwithstanding the continuing flow of revelations about high-level corruption. The 1995 report’s statements about the Colombian government and political elites read like the opening paragraphs of an indictment. Yet certification was said to be necessary because the rise of xenophobic elements in Colombia would end whatever cooperation it now provides on drug control.

Colombia’s President Ernesto Samper has been accused by his former campaign manager of knowing that his 1994 campaign received $6 million from the Cali cartel. Though Samper probably will have to resign, the revelations will bring no great rewards to his political rivals: The Cali leaders insured themselves, as do major economic interests in any country, by supporting both major parties and numerous candidates.

The threat of decertification has been a potent tool for coercing other countries into making at least symbolic gestures of good behavior. But decertifying Colombia has a shaky moral and policy basis. U.S. cocaine consumption, which is at least 60% of the world market, creates most of the trafficking problems in Latin America. While the U.S. government is tough on traffickers, as it pushes the producer countries to be, it does poorly in curbing consumption. Expanding treatment for the addicted, imperfect as it is, could significantly reduce our import demand for cocaine. Getting the right moral sequence for production and consumption is a demanding task unless you happen to be the government of the world’s only remaining superpower and can ignore the complexities. Thus we certify producer nations, but they don’t get to comment on U.S. policy failures that create problems for them.

Nor can decertification be justified for what it accomplishes, either as reality or threat, in reducing drug-related corruption in the source countries. The U.S. can do little to reduce corruption in other nations. It made a hash of the matter in its Cold War client states; the corruption of the U.S.-supported regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia was a significant factor in their fall. Endemic corruption is also scarcely unknown among our close allies, as government-toppling scandals in Japan and Italy demonstrate; in both countries, organized crime has been a beneficiary of that corruption. Political integrity is a domestic product, and Yankee meddling will not help it flourish; indeed, a resentful backlash may produce the opposite effect.

In any case, corruption is not a major factor in the flow of drugs to the U.S. Aggressive drug control efforts by Colombia or Mexico are not very likely to have much consequence for U.S. drug problems. Although Colombia’s crackdown in 1990 did cause a noticeable decline in the flow of cocaine into the U.S., the effect had disappeared within a year, probably because new competitors to the Cali cartel forced the price down. Mexico’s seizures of large quantities of cocaine in the early 1990s did not prevent the maintenance of the supply at a low price. The drug trade is robust now, with Bolivian and Mexican traffickers much more active in U.S. markets than in 1990.

U.S. human rights certification shows that moral imperialism can sometimes do good. That process, applied in a fairly nonstrategic fashion, has pushed some nations to make real changes in how they treat their citizens. But the drug certification process is neither morally justified nor likely to have much effect in reducing our drug problems. It mostly just reaffirms Latin American beliefs about U.S. self-righteousness.