Former Colombian president César Gaviria, who battled drug kingpin Pablo Escobar during his campaign against drug trafficking, said President Rodrigo Duterte’s war against drugs was wrong and would likely backfire.
But Duterte scoffed at his advice and called him an “idiot.”
“Throwing more soldiers and police at the drug users is not just a waste of money but also can actually make the problem worse,” Gaviria wrote in an opinion piece, “President Duterte is repeating my mistakes,” in The New York Times.
“Locking up nonviolent offenders and drug users almost always backfires and instead strengthens organized crime.
“That is the message I would like to send to the world and, especially, to President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Trust me, I learned the hard way.”
Gaviria, who was president of Colombia from 1990 to 1994 and was involved in taking down international drug trafficker Escobar, said using brute force in combating illegal drugs just creates more problems.
“Not only did we fail to eradicate drug production, trafficking and consumption in Colombia, but we also pushed drugs and crime into neighboring countries,” he said.
He said that strategy ultimately failed in Colombia, and that the heavy-handed approach to drugs “did little to diminish the drug supply and demand in Colombia, much less in markets like Western Europe and the United States.
“Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in our anti-drug crusade. Many of our brightest politicians, judges, police officers and journalists were assassinated. At the same time, the vast funds earned by the drug cartels were spent to corrupt our executive, judicial and legislative branches of government.”
Gaviria also said taking a tough stance against criminals may be popular for politicians, but the human costs were enormous.
“I was also seduced into taking a tough stance on drugs during my time as president,” he said. “The polls suggest that Mr. Duterte’s war on drugs is equally popular. But he will find that it is unwinnable.
“They started making a positive impact only when they treated drug use as a social problem and not a military one. This is a test that many of my Colombian compatriots have failed. I hope Mr. Duterte does not fall into the same trap.”
Duterte recently said he would enlist the military to combat drug gangs and kill addicts.
Following the death of South Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo, Gaviria said, Duterte’s idea of using the armed forces in the war on drugs would be “disastrous.”
“Bringing the army in to fight the drug war, as he now suggests, would also be disastrous. The fight against drugs has to be balanced so that it does not infringe on the rights and well-being of citizens.”
Instead, Gaviria recommended that the Philippines and other countries in a similar situation focus on rooting out corruption and addressing the issue at the root causes and expand the fight beyond enforcement”•including providing access to public health and legalizing certain drugs.
“The war on drugs is essentially a war on people,” Gaviria said.
“No matter what Mr. Duterte believes,there will always be drugs and drug users in the Philippines.”
Malacañang said that while it respected and appreciated the former Colombian president’s opinion, it lamented that the attention of the public was on the killings rather than on the breakthroughs in the drug campaign.
“The Philippine President rightly understood the same insight when he began to address not just crime and illegal drugs but also broadened government efforts into a public health issue,” Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella said.
