Does Drug Enforcement Reduce Crime? An Empirical Analysis of the Drug War in Central American and Caribbean Countries

• Author: Horace A. Bartilow
• Pages: 555-577

555

DOES DRUG ENFORCEMENT REDUCE CRIME?

Does Drug

Enforcement

Reduce Crime?

An Empirical

Analysis of the

Drug War in

Central American

and Caribbean

Countries

Horace A. Bartilow

Twenty-Five

INTRODUCTION

The entire Caribbean is facing a wave of

criminal activity linked to narcotics…. You

are seeing increased crime rates right across

the region, from Trinidad and Tobago in the

South through Jamaica and the Bahamas in

the North in the English-speaking

Caribbean…I might add that it is also

occurring in the Dominican Republic and

Puerto Rico as well as the Eastern Caribbean

— Peter Phillips, Jamaica’s Minister of

National Security (The Nation Newspaper

2005).

Policymakers throughout the Caribbean basin

struggle to make sense of the rising levels of

violent crime that currently plague the region.

While government officials and scholars

attribute the rise in violent crime to the drug

trade that transits the Caribbean basin

(Harriott 2002, Harriott 2003), very little

attention is given to how prohibitive drug

control enforcement policies may actually

contribute to the current increase in violent

crime throughout the region. Existing country

studies conclude that the rise in violent crime

and acts of narco-terror in Latin America is

attributed to United States’ (US) sponsored

drug control enforcement policies that

encourage Andean governments to militarise

the drug war, consequently creating an

environment in which the drug trade and the

accompanying violence continues to increase

(Bagley 1992, Crandall 2002).

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CRIME, DELINQUENCY AND JUSTICE

However, while these studies are compelling, the causal inference of the

argument is unclear because drug control enforcement is endogenously related

to violent crime in Latin America. Counterfactually, even in the absence of US

supported drug control enforcement towards the region, violent crime would

most likely increase due to the fact that cocaine is largely produced in Andean

Latin American countries and domestic drug cartels and narco-insurgent

organisations, who are indigenous to the political landscape of these countries

would naturally utilise violence against each other and against governments in

order to expand and protect their enterprise.

Avoiding the endogenous relationship between prohibitive drug control

policies and the increase in violent crime would clarify the causal inference of

the literature’s argument. In this study, endogeniety is avoided through the

selection of observations to be studied and through the utilisation of a series of

structural equations to estimate the data (Berry 1984, King, Keohane, and Verba

1994). Our selection of observations comes from Central America and the

Caribbean. Countries in this region play an important strategic role as drug transit

zones and money laundering centres. In most of these countries, the US actively

supports drug control enforcement policies. However, drug producing cartels and

narco-insurgents organisations are not indigenous to the political landscape of

these countries. The question we ask is: what effect does US supported drug control

policies towards the Caribbean basin, specifically drug interdiction and trafficker

immobilisation, have on violent and property crimes in Central American and

Caribbean countries?

In answering this question, we employ a structural equation model1 to analyse

crime data for Central American and Caribbean countries from 1984–2000. After

controlling for socioeconomic factors that affect overall crime, the regression

estimates show that drug control enforcement contribute to increasing levels of

violent and property crimes. Our findings are consistent with existing country

studies regarding the effects of drug control policies on political instability and

violence in Latin America (Bagley 1989, Crandall 2002, Labrousse and Laniel

2001). The policy implications of these findings suggest that current methods of

executing the drug war may be counterproductive and could exasperate the

domestic security crisis that currently threatens the political and economic viability

of countries throughout the Caribbean basin.

This article is organised as follows. In the next section we begin our analysis

by establishing the causal linkages between drugs and crime. The underlying logic

of how prohibitive drug control enforcement should, in theory, reduce violent

crime is then discussed. Given this context, we then examine the literature

regarding the effects of US sponsored drug control policies towards Latin America

and its effects on violent crime in the region. Here we highlight the limitations in

the causal inference that the literature makes between prohibitive drug control

enforcement and violent crime. In the section that follows, we consider the