Mercurial

The famous and stupid War on Drugs is fought differently in Colombia; air fumigation with glyphosate, restriction of civil rights, death and corruption are among the problems the drug traffic and its attempted restriction engender. To make the problem more complex, the forceful hand of the USA in Colombian politics ends up complicating the panorama, often to their own pain.
When the Medellín and Cali cartels were dismantled, it was known that the USA was trying to crush their powerful structure, even though they knew that this would generate myriads of small scale operations. The logic there was that, with no more cartels, the small ones would be easier to contain.
Well, no.
To anybody that has studied emergent systems, or history, or simply guerrilla warfare, it has always been obvious that small, decentralized, unconnected cells are incredible more tough to control and destroy that one simple big system, no matter how powerful. Why? The small cell has mobility, low operative costs, its elimination has a minimum impact in the whole organization and its low profile operation goes on unnoticed much easier than the one by the big cartel.
We all discussed that at the time. We knew that all those young, powerful and armed entrepreneurs would turn the drug traffic business around, and as a matter of fact they have:

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And now, oh surprise, by allowing he new generations to appear, now they have numerous exporters, instead of the previous two.

So it would make sense to deviate so much of the money used against the war on terror to education, rehabilitation and social alternatives to drugs, you know, specially due to the high price that the USA social fabric is paying for ignoring and jailing its addicts.
Colombia? We just have the deaths and the constant fear. Oh, never mind, we are used to that.