Coast Guard and Navy, sailing for 2,512 ship days at a cost of $40 million, resulted in the seizure of a mere 20 drug-carrying vessels. During the same period, the combined efforts of the U.S. The grand total of drug seizures from that effort was eight. Air Force spent $3.3 million on drug interdiction, using sophisticated AWACS surveillance planes over a 15-month period ending in 1987. According to a Government Accounting Office study, the U.S. We have been trying that for years, and it simply cannot be done short of militarizing the borders.
Second, the Bush strategy calls for interdicting cocaine at our borders. So far, cocaine cultivation uses only 700 square miles of the 2.5 million square miles suitable for its growth in South America. And even if those producing countries could be rid of coca tomorrow, production would simply be moved somewhere else, and the eradication effort would have to be started all over again in Southeast Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan and other countries far less likely to let us call the shots. But even if only military advisers are sent, they will soon discover in the field what our advisers found in Vietnam: an army not really committed to a fight. To test public reaction, the Bush administration may talk about sending in U.S. The drug lords have also bought limited public acceptance by sponsoring the national soccer league, diversifying into legitimate businesses, supporting charities and offering to pay off the government’s $10 billion external debt. In one week last fall, the Colombian national police fired 2,075 officers for having links with the cartels. With an income in the billions of dollars, drug leaders are able to buy generals, judges and police. For in certain areas of the country the military has formed a marriage of convenience with drug traffickers and landowners in a common front against a 30-year-old leftist guerrilla insurgency. Moreover, the Colombian army has seldom confronted the 140 paramilitary private armies of the drug lords, or raided their training bases. Officials and journalists are being gunned down on the streets, civilian homes are being raided and seized, civilian government is increasingly being taken over by the military - and so far the drug lords have only engaged in selective terrorism. Already we see signs that Colombia is collapsing into civil war. First, it requires cutting off the drug source in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. This principle of mimetic opposition is illustrated abundantly in the drug War.īush’s drug-war strategy has three elements. More often, however, both sides grow, fed by their mutual resistance, as in the arms race, the Vietnam war, the Salvadoran civil war and Lebanon. If one side prevails, the evil continues by virtue of having been established through the means used. Evil makes us over into its mimetic double. When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we commit the same atrocities, violate the same civil liberties and break the same laws as do those whom we oppose. Applied to the drug issue, this means, "Do not resist drugs by violent methods." Do not mirror evil, do not let evil set the terms of your response. So Jesus’ words should be translated, "Do not resist evil by violent means. It means to stand up against an enemy and fight. When it is used by the Greek Old Testament or by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, however, the word is usually translated, "to be engaged in a revolt, rebellion, riot, insurrection." It is virtually a synonym for war. Our attempts to stamp out drugs violate a fundamental principle that Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount: "Resist not evil." The Greek term translated "resist" is antistenai. Forcible resistance to evil simply makes it more profitable. We should know that prohibition doesn’t work. We merely repeated the mistake of Prohibition: the harder we tried to stamp out the evil, the more lucrative we made it. Whatever the other factors, we lost primarily for spiritual reasons. We lost it long before the latest declaration of war by President Bush. It is not drugs but drug laws that have made drug dealing profitable. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock. Current articles and subscription information can be found at.
This article appeared in the Christian Century, August 8-15, 1990 pp.736-739, copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission.
BITING THE BULLET HARD TIPS CODE
His books include: The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millenium (1999), Homosexuality and Christian Faith (1999), and Cracking the Gnostic Code (1993). from Union Theological Semianry, has been active in peace movements throughout the world, and is a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. Walter Wink is professor at Auburn Theological Seminary, New York City.