EDITORIAL - Coordinate the battle against drugs

During his fleeting visit to Jamaica last week, Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos Calderón, repeated a suggestion that he made shortly after inauguration in the summer.

The fight against narcotics trafficking in the hemisphere, he asserted, ought not to be the business of the individual countries facing the problem operating separately. The drug trade is a transnational crime that requires multinational and multilateral attention.

"That is why we are telling the United States (US) that they have to put their share (of the effort) because this is a joint battle," President Santos told this newspaper after signing an accord with Prime Minister Bruce Golding that commits Jamaica and Colombia to greater cooperation, including against drugs.

"No one country, however powerful it is, can fight by itself this organised crime," he added.

We hope that this message has penetrated deeply into the power centres of Washington and that the Obama administration will move urgently to create the kind of alliance perceived by President Santos.

It is not that we do not believe that the Americans have failed to understand the issue, or that Washington is callous about the problems faced by countries like Jamaica and others in the Caribbean. Indeed, security matters have been a point of discussion between the US and its Caribbean neighbours in recent times, including at a meeting in Kingston last month between regional and US officials.

We, nonetheless, have a sense that the US anti-narcotics programme remains too fragmented and not sufficiently concentrated.

Colombia, which used to be the world's cocaine capital, has in recent years had great success against drug cartels as well as the paramilitaries and left-wing guerrilla movements that tapped the drug trade for money to finance their insurgencies.

A substantial portion of the cocaine production has moved elsewhere and new routes have developed for the smuggling of cocaine to the major end-user, the US, as well as other countries of the world.

Part of this shifting balance in the global cocaine trade is being played out in the drug wars in Mexico, mostly along that country's border with the US, to which the Americans have concentrated the heft of their anti-narcotics effort.

Trans-shipment points

But cocaine traders are not stupid. They are also seeking out new, less-hot routes through which to traffic their product. Trade routes through Central America and across the Caribbean, intelligence suggests, are on the rise. The possibility is that gains made by Jamaica against this country being among the foremost trans-shipment points for narcotics is likely to be eroded if we are not vigilant.

Against the backdrop of this danger, it makes sense to us that there be a greater coordination of effort in this battle among not only the countries of the Caribbean but, as President Santos suggested, Central America. It may even make sense that the partnership include key South American cocaine producers.

The US, too, will have to be fully engaged in this broad, coordinated fight. Or they may find that, along with instability and threats to democracy in countries like our own, the new battleground against drugs is not along the Mexican border but the eastern seaboard, the Florida Straits, the Midwest ... indeed, all across America.

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