2024-02-11 02:39:03
Since the pandemic, some workers around the world have adopted the trend of “quietly quitting,” where they don’t actually quit their jobs, but rather try to do the minimum amount of work necessary to avoid negative attention.
The term came to mind during the terrifying outbreak of drug-related violence in Ecuador a few days ago, in which gangs kidnapped police and prison guards, invaded a television station and paralyzed Guayaquil, the business capital.
In response, conservative President Daniel Noboa vowed to crack down, calling the gangs “terrorist groups” and ordering the military to arrest hundreds of suspected cartel leaders.
If Noboa reverses the current course, it would be something of a novelty. Today, several key Latin American countries, including Mexico, appear to be moving in the opposite direction: quietly abandoning the war on drugs.
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Quietly quitting in the corporate world has been described as a way to cope with burnout or a lack of commitment to the core mission of the job. It’s easy to understand why some regional leaders might be suffering the same affliction without, as the term suggests, being willing to say so publicly.
More than 50 years after Richard Nixon declared narcotics “public enemy number one,” and despite Plan Colombia, the Mérida Initiative and other aggressive anti-drug initiatives by Latin American governments over many decades, both supply and demand have continued to reach new records. Global cocaine production has doubled in the last decade, according to UN estimates. Almost all the raw materials are grown in only three countries: Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
The consumer profile has also evolved. While North America remains the main market for cocaine, with about 30% of global users, there are now as many users in Latin America and the Caribbean (24% of the world total) as in Europe, according to UN estimates. Asia (11%) and Africa (9%) have also seen increased demand.
Smuggling routes have changed in response to this, which helps explain why previously peaceful countries such as Ecuador, Chile and Uruguay have experienced spikes in violence, as gangs fight each other, and sometimes governments, for control. of ports and other territories.
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Some governments, especially Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador, have redoubled the fight.
But others, faced with what they see as the futility of the drug war, while unwilling to risk being considered a pariah by renouncing it entirely, appear to be backing off—quietly and sometimes subtly.
In Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has eschewed the tactics of his immediate predecessors, who took on the cartels with unprecedented vigor starting in 2007 and saw Mexico’s homicide rate quadruple over the next decade, while drug trafficking of drugs did not decrease lastingly.
‘Imaginary war’
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico.
Photo:
Isaac Esquivel. EFE
López Obrador has repeatedly described drugs as primarily a U.S. problem, one of “social decay,” and did not mention the issue at all in his latest State of the Union address.
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Although Mexico has continued to dutifully carry out some arrests and seizures, successive delegations of US officials have visited the country in recent months to try to urge the government to take the fight against drugs, especially fentanyl, more seriously. A recent Reuters investigation found that even when Mexico raids drug labs, most are already abandoned, prompting Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to accuse López Obrador of waging “an imaginary war on drugs” ( a few days ago he presented a bill to ban fentanyl).
Some Mexican observers reach similar conclusions. “The president himself, with his rhetoric of ‘hugs and not bullets,’ his courteous gestures toward members of criminal families and his allusions to the United States as the main interest in combating some criminal organizations, seems to be sending a message that the fight against “Crime is an issue far from their will,” wrote prominent security analyst Eduardo Guerrero in a recent column.
In Colombia, which produces about 60% of the world’s coca, President Gustavo Petro has said that “the war on drugs was a failure,” and pressured other Latin American leaders at a summit in September to address drug use. drugs primarily as a public health problem. Although the Petro government has continued some repression efforts, manual eradication of coca plants has fallen almost 80% in the last year, according to data from the National Police. Cultivation has soared 65% since the pandemic began (under a previous government), reaching new all-time highs.
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Similar, although not identical, trends are observed elsewhere. In Bolivia, where coca growers are an important constituency for the ruling party, law enforcement has long seemed lukewarm. Peru’s political volatility has undermined drug interdiction in that country, according to authorities. Although Brazil’s government has recently militarized security at some ports and airports, some officials say privately that they hope not to disturb the timid balance between the country’s two main drug gangs. And, of course, the Venezuelan regime abandoned the anti-drug fight years ago, allowing officials to enrich themselves from smuggling.
They are not a panacea
None of these strategies can be considered a panacea. In López Obrador’s Mexico, the homicide rate has fallen slightly. But the cartels, apparently feeling less pressure, have dramatically expanded extortion, kidnapping and robbery while buying more and more politicians, Guerrero wrote. A similar dynamic can be found in São Paulo, where the Primeiro Comando da Capital operates with considerable impunity. Homicide rates are among the lowest on the continent, but the gang controls large sectors of the economy, such as illegal gold mining and logging in the Amazon, and kills anyone who stands in its way.
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Still, it is a balance that many officials seem willing to maintain, considering it a better set of problems than the chaos unleashed by the
direct confrontation.
The irony is that Ecuador’s latest crisis appears to have been presaged by a previous wave of silent resignations. According to some observers, the presidency of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) followed an accommodative strategy with the cartels while they drastically expanded their operations in the country. When subsequent governments tried to arrest judges and police co-opted by the gangs, the cartels lashed out, which helped explain the violence in early January.
It remains to be seen whether silent abandonment is truly a novel trend or just a new name for an old, cyclical behavior, both in the workplace and in drug policy.
BRIAN WINTER
AMERICAS QUARTERLY
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