AP: “Washington, Colombia near deal on base access”
The “War on Drugs” is a prime reason for the success of the military groups that are attacking the government and civil society in Colombia; it provides a comparative advantage in fundraising to groups that are well organized at brutality and violence. The best friends FARC in Colombia and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have are in the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Without US drug laws, it would be much harder for them to get money to pay for weapons, soldiers, etc. And now, in an example of Ludwig von Mises’s insight that one intervention begets another, we have military interventions to combat the well financed forces that are financed so well because of the earlier intervention. More interventionism of this sort will raise the rents to the purveyors of violence who, under violent conditions, dominate drug markets, leading to more financing for narco-terrorism. To get rid of narco-terrorism, we need to get rid of the prohibitionist drug laws that make it possible.