Join 'Em

Remarkably, the billionaire leadership of the Colombian narcotics trade have been able to bribe people. With money. For information.

There is a tone of rather crass naïveté, if such can be said to exist, to the linked article, and I admit it amazes me that on one hand America thinks that it can give some Waziristani goat farmer a Publisher's Clearninghouse outsized prop check for 10 million smackers and get him to turn over Osama bin L, while on the other hand remain shocked, shocked that anyone else might engage the same basic tactic. The difference, of course, is that a cartel is a real business, and you can be sure that deep in the computerized bowels of the international drug trade, some boring accountant has got a full actuarial table to guide the outlay of bribes. Fifty bucks to a subsistence farmer; fifty thousand to a colonel in the army. That sort of thing. Neither a penny more nor a penny less than necessary for the efficacious completion of the task at hand.

Not even Eliot Ness was Eliot Ness, after all, and the utility of a bribe is in direct proportion to the futility of the task. No doubt there are plenty of officials in Key West and SoCom and the DC offices of the DEA who truly believe that the Drug War is winnable, but to the poor bastards cutting through jungle to blow up one more totally expendable coca processing facility, it's just a job with shitty pay. If you can't beat 'em.