More And More, a Real War

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In a sense, the resourceful smugglers are emulating the Viet Cong by shifting to low-tech means of evading high-tech interception. Large cargo planes and big ships carried marijuana in the 1960s, and light planes were favored in the 1970s and early '80s. Today's traffickers prefer tramp steamers out of Haiti, rattletrap tomato trucks out of Mexico and the large shipping containers that move through all U.S. ports and border crossings. Last year, through the use of a new computerized profiling system, authorities made huge cocaine seizures from containers. Of the 8 million containers arriving in the U.S. by truck or ship in 1989, only 3% were checked by inspectors. If military forces were to search a large percentage of such shipping, commerce would be choked and the outcry would be thunderous.

Beyond the practical problems, U.S. military involvement in the antidrug battle looks like Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick policy to many Latin Americans. And in Peru and Colombia, where antigovernment guerrillas work in tandem with the drug gangs, Americans escorting local narcotics teams could well become targets. The military involvement in a drug war thus risks slipping into a shooting war over South American politics, a development that few Americans, North or South, would welcome.