Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.

• Author: Ratliff, William
• Position: Book Review

By Ted Galen Carpenter

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. iv, 282. $24.95 cloth.

Ted Galen Carpenter's new book is an indispensable, up-to-date examination of "Washington's futile war on drugs in Latin America," as its subtitle states the topic. The author, a vice president at the Cato Institute, surveys the history of this policy, dissects the "ugly American" tactics used to carry it out, and concludes with "a blueprint for peace."

The title Bad Neighbor Policy cuts to the quick by twisting Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" phrase of the 1930s to fit the current reality of destructive buck passing that characterizes the U.S. drug war in Latin America today. Most Americans, including drug policy analysts, seldom take this international aspect seriously. Although U.S. policymakers since the Cold War have trumpeted U.S. support for legal, democratic, and market reforms in the region, the "prohibitionist [drug] strategy works at cross purposes to all of these objectives" (p. 167). Indeed as Venezuelan American journalist Carlos Ball remarks, "The war on drugs has done more harm to democratic institutions in Latin America than all the communist guerrillas of the last four decades of the twentieth century combined" (personal correspondence, Ball to William Ratliff, June 24, 2003).

The United States began antidrug initiatives in the Americas before the 1970s but "escalated the stakes" when Nixon made drug policy "the functional and moral equivalent of war" (p. 12). Ford and Carter expanded the "supply-side" offensive, and then Reagan "launched a new and decidedly militant phase" (p. 19), more than tripling the funding for drug eradication, interdiction, and crop substitution. These programs, Carpenter argues in a chapter on "flawed strategies," began and remain in large part propagandistic and "hopelessly impractical" (p. 91). Over the decades, U.S. policy increasingly has sought to "encourage, persuade, bribe, or coerce foreign governments into joining the U.S.-led drug war" (p. 21). Latin American governments have often supported the war just enough to qualify for U.S. aid without losing all the income and graft that are central to the war. The profit margins of the drug trade "have created powerful economic and political constituencies in drug-producing and drug-transiting countries" (p. 153) and in annual funding expectations for involved U.S. institutions.

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