Mexican Drug War

[phil.m...@iamwar.org]

During our second meeting – on Thursday, May 1 – we took a look at the
Ongoing Conflicts page, and brainstormed on what tangible next steps I
Am War could take; we were looking for a focus.

After touching on the internal conflict in Burma, the South Thailand
insurgency, and the Second Tuareg Rebellion, we focused on the Mexican
Drug War, to see what we could come up with. I was interesting in
focusing on this conflict, as it’s happening right over the border.

In the Mexican Drug War, a few things are happening. Drug cartels are
killing each other, fighting over prime trade routes; and, the Mexican
government – with support from the United States (via $1.4 billion,
military training, helicopters, etc.) – and the cartels are in armed
conflict as well. About 3,220 people have been killed since 2006.
We thought this through from a number of angles, and we asked
ourselves a lot of questions.

A few assumptions: The market for the drugs is in the United States.
The main drug in question is cocaine – which is found in the leaves of
the coca plant, and was made illegal in the United States in 1970,
after coming into popularity before the turn of the century.

A few angles:

If the margins from cocaine were low, cartels would not be fighting
over trade routes. To get the margins to be low, either A) supply has
to increase or B) demand has to decrease.

Possible ways to reduce demand are: A) increase education, B) have
drug treatment clinics (one study found that clinics have a success
rate of 13%, which I found disappointing, as creating drug treatment
clinics would be in line with the I Am War philosophy), C) a response
to the question, “Why do people do drugs?” which none of us knew the
answer to.

Possible ways to increase supply: A) legalize cocaine use /
manufacturing in the United States.
When looking for the “problem of scarcity,” we came to the conclusion
a few times that there is a scarcity of drugs. However, this is a
social and a political issue, and one of the goals of I Am War is to
remain apolitical. This was disappointing, for me, because wherever I
turn things keep pointing to political action – and the whole idea of
I Am War is to build an environment where the politics become an
exercise in “falling down the hill.”

We considered scarcity of economic opportunity in Mexico. We noted
there was no real correlation between the Mexico HDI map and the areas
where conflict was occurring. We considered why Mexican farmers would
grow coca; we didn’t blame them for anything – after all, they’re not
directly killing people.

We asked ourselves why people in the United States weren’t growing
coca or manufacturing cocaine in a significant way. As I’m writing
this now, the answer is probably that the coca plant doesn’t grow well
in the United States. During the meeting, we thought perhaps it’s
because the United States is more stringent in its law-enforcement
practices, or that in general there are more economic opportunities
with less risk, as the HDI is higher in the United States.

Thinking about drug use and what makes drugs expensive (because they
are declared illegal, they are scarce and expensive to transport) is
one thing, but it still leaves the main question unanswered: Why are
people in Mexico killing each other in an organized way?

There are two sets of killings going on: 1) Drug cartels are killing
other drug cartels and 2) drug cartels and the Mexican military are
killing each other. Thinking this over led us to the “value
hypothesis.”

The “value hypothesis” is that if there exists something – anything –
of exceptional value, there will always be a percentage of people,
however small, that are willing to murder to acquire the valuable
things. Once something goes above a particular, specific value, people
are willing to kill and die over it.

This corresponds with the scarcity hypothesis; as things become
scarce, the value of those things will rise – and, if those things are
too scarce, the values will cross a threshold, and people will go to
war over them. Thinking about this as I write, I think the “value” and
“scarcity” hypotheses are the same, but with different points of view
– or perhaps make each other more robust.

We didn’t think of any specific projects. At the meeting, we all
agreed if cocaine were legal in the United States, this particular
conflict would not be happening.

Is this the root cause, the fundamental problem of scarcity that
people are fighting over? Perhaps. Perhaps fighting over “value” is a
part of being human, and there is something intangible that blinds us
and causes us to devalue the lives of others to such an extent that it
is acceptable to end them.

We didn’t come up with “the answer,” but we took a good step in
thinking about things. If policy change isn’t the answer, how should
we create our environment? If policy change that makes drugs less
scarce is the answer, will that cause a larger problem, or will that
simplify things? There is more to learn.

[Russell]

A key thing I got from our conversation was the different ways you can
solve scarcity: either increase supply or reduce demand. It depends
on the situation of course - it doesn't make sense to rectify a
scarcity of food by reducing demand. But for the drug issue, reducing
demand is probably the only reasonable solution of the two.