Yes, There Is A War on Drugs. Part XIV.

On the one hand, it’s good that Ed Vulliamy is in the Guardian today highlighting the appalling miseries of the Mexican Drug War; on the other it’s unfortunate that his piece is so very desperately confused.

But this is not just a war between narco-cartels. Juarez has imploded into a state of criminal anarchy – the cartels, acting like any corporation, have outsourced violence to gangs affiliated or unaffiliated with them, who compete for tenders with corrupt police officers. The army plays its own mercurial role. “Cartel war” does not explain the story my friend, and Juarez journalist, Sandra Rodriguez told me over dinner last month: about two children who killed their parents “because”, they explained to her, “they could”. The culture of impunity, she said, “goes from boys like that right to the top – the whole city is a criminal enterprise”.

Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora – bonded assembly plants where, for rock-bottom wages, workers make the goods that fill America’s supermarket shelves or become America’s automobiles, imported duty-free. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia, casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market.

[…] People also ask: what can be done? There is endless debate over military tactics, US aid to Mexico, the war on drugs, and whether narcotics should be decriminalised. I answer: these are largely of tangential importance; what can the authorities do? Simple: Go After the Money. But they won’t.

Narco-cartels are not pastiches of global corporations, nor are they errant bastards of the global economy – they are pioneers of it. They point, in their business logic and modus operandi, to how the legal economy will arrange itself next. The Mexican cartels epitomised the North American free trade agreement long before it was dreamed up, and they thrive upon it.

What? This is just bananas. In what possible sense is Juarez a “model for the capitalist economy” (Marks and Spencer, perhaps?) and how on earth can the Mexican cartels be said to epitomise NAFTA far less “thrive upon it”? Last I checked, cocaine wasn’t covered by NAFTA and, gosh, there’s an enormous government-run industry designed to thwart the drug trade (this doesn’t trouble the cartels either since, naturally, it increases the entry costs for any new player in the game while also, happily, keeping prices at a satisfactory level).

Markets are often good things in and of themselves but this need not mean they should always be expected to work perfectly, merely that much of the time they’re more efficient and useful than other means of arranging these things and exchanges. That’s not, of course, how the drug market currently works but given the extent to which it is subject to government intervention you can only think it’s a “free” market if you actually have no conception in how markets, trammeled or not, actually work.

Previously: Yes There Is A Drug War.

[Via Mr Worstall]