New Paraguay-Brazil Cocaine Smuggling Routes

Yesterday's daily Folha de São Paulo (registration required), Brazil's largest newspaper, reports that a recent policy enacted by the Brazilian government to shoot down suspected drug smuggling airplanes has simply caused narco-smugglers to change their routes from the air to the land.

It's the classic drug-war story of "the golf ball under the rug." You can swat down that bump in the carpet in one place, only to find that it will pop up somewhere else.

And so it is with the failed policy of "interdiction" of drug shipments, as the Folha article explains... Folha reports:

New Route

To Avoid Aerial Surveillance, Drugs Come from Paraguay Via Land

Seizure Law Changes the Strategy of the Drug Traffickers

By Hudson Correa
Folha Agency, in Campo Grande

Brazilian drug traffickers control cocaine distribution bases in Paraguay. The drug - which arrives in airplanes from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru - is sent over land through Brazil, thus avoiding the Law of Seizure of Airplanes, which took effect in October of 2004...

...The Seizure Law authorizes the Brazilian Air Force (FAB, in its Portuguese initials) to shoot down airplanes in cases that the pilots don't identify themselves and refuse to land. After two months of the law, the number of irregular flights has been reduced by half.

So, again and again, we can see how "interdiction" of drug shipments on one front does nothing to stop the commerce and flow of drugs under prohibition: it simply changes the routes, in this case, from air to earth.

Needless to say, Brazilian military officials and police agencies, unable to collect bribes and percentages from shipments that once flew over their heads, are more easily able to "get their share" from the traffickers they can find crossing national territory by land. And so it goes with the so-called "war on drugs" - the fountain of corruption for fledgling democracies, where policies said to have one intent, in fact, have another altogether.