Americas view

ASK anyone involved in Colombia’s long battle against organised crime about the keys to the country’s success, and one of the first responses will inevitably be the state’s attack on the mobs’ finances. In 1996 the government passed a law that allowed it to confiscate any asset whose owner could not demonstrate that it was acquired legally. At first, officials made little use of the tactic. But once Álvaro Uribe became president in 2002, he had the law streamlined, and began using its inversion of the burden of proof to strip hundreds of suspected drug lords of their presumably ill-gotten gains, with no need for a criminal conviction that would have been difficult to secure. Mr Uribe has called asset seizure one of the anti-narcotics tools “most feared” by the mafias.

So far, Colombian officials have managed not to abuse their confiscatory power to persecute political opponents, the most obvious pitfall of the policy. However, a successful asset-seizure programme also depends on a much more mundane task: safeguarding the forfeited property until it can be sold off, auctioned or given away to victims of organised crime. In 1992 Colombia established an agency called the National Narcotics Directorate (DNE), whose official responsibility was determining drug-control policy. In practice, however, it has focused on managing the 76,000 items the government has snatched from the narcos, such as jewelry, art, cars and real estate (including agricultural, residential, and commercial property).

By administering such a lucrative portfolio, the DNE became an automatic target for corruption. Sadly, it appears that the government’s efforts to maintain the agency’s integrity have fallen short. For months several Colombian newspapers have been reporting that some seized assets, including luxury hotels, had ended up in the hands of other criminals. Just five weeks after Juan Manuel Santos became president this year, he began acting on the allegations. On September 16th he had the head of the agency, Omar Figueroa, removed after learning that a DNE officer overseeing property seized from a well-known drug dealer had links to that dealer’s gang. He took an even bolder step on November 2nd, ordering a raid on the DNE’s offices, and letting the contracts of 100 employees lapse. Mr Figueroa’s successor, Juan Carlos Restrepo, discovered hundreds of cases of suspicious activity at the agency, and called it a “playground for the mafia and corruption”.

By responding so decisively, the new president is leaving no doubt about his desire to clean up the agency. But the fact that it became so thoroughly corrupt despite Mr Uribe’s commitment to fighting organised crime shows that Colombia’s achievements in establishing the rule of law and honest government are fragile and incomplete. If the DNE’s reputation cannot be quickly reinstated, citizens may begin to doubt the usefulness of one of their most powerful weapons against the mobs.