"Of the three other major Colombian organisation's, the Cali Cartel, founded in the late 1970s or early 1980s, comes closest to rivalling the Medellín Cartel in wealth and influence… A tacit agreement of ten years' standing, giving the bulk of the New York City cocaine trafficking distribution to the Cali Cartel, was breached, and tons of cocaine were shipped directly into that market by the Medellín organization."
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On August 25, the Medellín Cartel announced that ten judges would die for every Colombian extradited. Over a hundred judges resigned. Seventeen bombs exploded within a few days, which were all blamed on Pablo. The Ochoas and Gacha tried to make peace with the government, but the president said that he would not rest until the traffickers were destroyed. Over a two-week period, the price of cocaine in Miami rose from $13,000 a kilo to $19,000, indicating that the crackdown had disrupted the short-term supply.
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On August 29, old Fabio Ochoa Sr wrote an open letter to the president, identifying himself as the father "of so-called Extraditables, poor fellows, may God protect them," who "prefer a tomb in Colombia to a life term in a cell in the United States - in other words, a living death..." But they "are also human. They have mothers, fathers, children, brothers, relatives and friends. They also have a heart. We are all brothers." He asked the president to "let there be dialogue, let there be peace, let there be forgiveness, let us try wiping the slate clean and starting a new account. Let us forgive as Jesus Christ taught us." The president ignored him.
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On September 2 at 6:40 am, a pickup truck at a petrol station by the headquarters of the newspaper El Espectador, carrying 220 pounds of dynamite, exploded, injuring 75 people. Windows were shattered and the newspaper's photo lab was destroyed. The damage totalled $2.5 million. The next day, the public bought half a million copies of the Sunday edition to help the newspaper.
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On September 5, 1989, President Bush went on TV to deliver a speech:
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In Colombia alone, cocaine killers have gunned down a leading statesman, murdered almost 200 judges and seven members of their supreme court. The besieged governments of the drug-producing countries are fighting back, fighting to break the international drug rings. But you and I agree with the courageous President of Colombia, Virgilio Barco, who said that if Americans use cocaine, then Americans are paying for murder. American cocaine users need to understand that our nation
has zero tolerance for casual drug use. We have a responsibility not to leave our brave friends in Colombia to fight alone.
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The $65 million emergency assistance announced two weeks ago was just our first step in assisting the Andean nations in their fight against the cocaine cartels. Colombia has already arrested suppliers, seized tons of cocaine and confiscated palatial homes of drug lords. But Colombia faces a long uphill battle, so we must be ready to do more. Our strategy allocates more than a quarter of a billion dollars for next year in military and law enforcement assistance for the three Andean nations of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. This will be the first part of a five-year $2 billion program to counter the producers, the traffickers and the smugglers.
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I spoke with President Barco just last week, and we hope to meet with the leaders of affected countries in an unprecedented drug summit, all to coordinate an inter-American strategy against the cartels. We will work with our allies and friends, especially our economic summit partners, to do more in the fight against drugs. I'm also asking the Senate to ratify the United Nations antidrug convention concluded last December.
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To stop those drugs on the way to America, I propose that we spend more than a billion and a half dollars on interdiction. Greater interagency cooperation, combined with sophisticated intelligence-gathering and Defense Department technology, can help stop drugs at our borders.
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And our message to the drug cartels is this: the rules have changed. We will help any government that wants our help. When requested, we will for the first time make available the appropriate resources of America's Armed Forces. We will intensify our efforts against drug smugglers on the high seas, in international airspace and at our borders. We will stop the flow of chemicals from
the United States used to process drugs. We will pursue and enforce international agreements to track drug money to the front men and financiers. And then we will handcuff these money launderers and jail them, just like any street dealer. And for the drug kingpins: the death penalty.
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Bush was challenged in an open letter from Milton Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Laureate in Economics:
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The path you propose of more police, more jails, use of the military in foreign countries, harsh penalties for drug users and a whole panoply of repressive measures can only make a bad situation worse. The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without undermining the human liberty and individual freedom that you and I cherish.
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You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. You are not mistaken in believing that the majority of the public share your concerns. In short, you are not mistaken in the end you seek to achieve.
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Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law
forces, so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.
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Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalising their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
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I append excerpts from a column that wrote in 1972 on "Prohibition and Drugs." The major problem then was heroin from Marseilles; today, it is cocaine from Latin America. Today, also, the problem is far more serious than it was 17 years ago: more addicts, more innocent victims; more drug pushers, more law enforcement officials; more money spent to enforce prohibition, more money spent to circumvent prohibition.
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Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years ago, "crack" would never have been invented (it was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version) and there would today be far fewer addicts. The lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent victims would have been saved, and not only in the US. The ghettos of our major cities would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands. Fewer people would be in jails, and fewer jails would have been built.
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Colombia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of narco-terror. Hell would not, in the words with which Billy Sunday welcomed Prohibition, "be forever for rent," but it would be a lot emptier.
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