Why Mexico’s war on drugs is unwinnable
Posted on | augustus 17, 2011 | 3 Comments
Whether measured by increased public safety, reduced supply of illegal drugs on the U.S. market, or the dismantling of drug trafficking organizations, the war on drugs is failing. It has been four years since President Felipe Calderon announced the offensive and sent tens of thousands of soldiers into the streets. The results are a record 37,000 drug-war related homicides so far and thousands of complaints of human rights abuses by police and armed forces. Arrests of drug kingpins and lesser figures have set off violent turf wars, with no discernible effect on illicit flows. The murder of politicians, threats to civilians and disruption of daily life have furthered the downward spiral.
None of this should come as a surprise. Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has held up Plan Colombia as a model for Mexico, the drug war didn’t work there either. A full decade and $7 billion dollars after Plan Colombia began, regional drug production remains stable and smaller paramilitary groups have replaced the large cartels as traffickers. Some violent crimes, such as kidnappings, have gone down but corruption has deepened with scores of Congressional representatives under investigation, prosecution or sentencing for ties to paramilitaries.
Militarization with the combined rationale of the war on drugs and counterinsurgency has left Colombia with one of the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. Diplomatic relations have been affected as many neighboring nations view U.S. military presence and involvement in Colombia’s drug war as a threat to regional self-determination.
Despite these results, the Obama administration has announced plans to extend indefinitely the Merida Initiative, designed by the Bush administration to last three years and cost $1.3 billion dollars. The administration has asked requested $282 million for Mexico under the initiative in the 2012 budget.
The problem is, the drug war is not underfunded; it’s unwinnable. As long as a lucrative market exists, the cartels will find a way to serve it. Eliminating operatives, even high-level leaders, merely diversifies and redistributes the business. Cartels have years of experience building flexible structures, with new leaders or rival gangs replacing displaced or weakened ones. At the lower levels, they draw from an inexhaustible pool of young men with few prospects in life, who have adopted the slogan, “Better to die young and rich than old and poor.”
If the war on drugs is unwinnable, does that mean we have to resign ourselves to the unbridled power of the drug cartels?
No. The other tragedy of the war on drugs is that it precludes potentially more effective strategies by posing as the only option. As the U.S. government spends millions of taxpayer dollars to pay U.S. private security and defense firms to “fix” Mexico, it has done little to nothing to address the parts of transnational organized crime that exist within its borders—demand, transport and distribution, corrupt officials, gun-running and money laundering.
Rethinking the drug war is not tantamount to surrender. Here are a few key elements of an alternative strategy:
Follow the money. Instead of shoot-outs in the streets, far more could be done in both countries to attack the financial structures of criminal organizations. Billions of dollars are laundered in mainstream financial institutions and businesses. If we’re serious about weakening organized crime, it’s time to be serious about cracking down on illicit financial flows—even when it affects powerful interests.
Increase funding for drug abuse prevention and treatment. Approaching illegal drug use as a health issue is a win-win strategy. Education teaches young people the costs of addiction and abuse, and treatment and harm reduction programs can improve lives and reduce costs to society, as well as cutting demand for illicit substances.
End prohibition, beginning with marijuana. Without the billions of dollars in revenue that pot provides, drug cartels have fewer resources to recruit youth, buy arms and corrupt politicians.
Give communities a role besides “victim”. As Mexican funds and U.S. aid have been diverted to the drug war, social programs in Mexico have been severely cut back. This is exactly backward. Strong communities—ones with jobs, ample educational opportunities and coverage of basic needs and services–are better able to resist the infiltration of organized crime.
The war on drugs strategy lacks benchmarks or any real analysis of the root causes of the violence. Each day it digs itself deeper into a hole. That hole has become a mass grave for thousands of Mexicans, mostly youth.
The Obama administration has announced plans to intensify the drug war in Mexico and extend the model to Central American and Caribbean nations. Congress appears willing to follow suit. This would usher in a new era of military-led relations with our Latin American neighbors and unleash violent conflict in those countries as it has in Mexico.
If that happens, horror stories like the ones from Ciudad Juarez and Matamoros will sadly become the norm rather than the exception.
AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com
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Tags: abuse > Calderon > cartels > drug war > Drugs > homicides > Mexico > Militarization > paramilitary > police > prohibition > war
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3 Responses to “Why Mexico’s war on drugs is unwinnable”
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augustus 17th, 2011 @ 11:20
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs, such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced and widely used by those who desire to do so.
* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered, that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* The massive majority of people who use drugs do so recreationally – getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
* A small minority of people will always experience drug use as problematic.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement – even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* It’s not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste hundreds of billions of our money in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the prohibited drugs have ever done.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it’s own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes.
* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.
* In The Land Formally Known As Free, all citizens have been stripped of their 4th amendment rights and are now totally subordinate to a corporatized, despotic government with a heavily armed and corrupt, militarized police force whose often deadly intrusions into their homes and lives are condoned by an equally corrupt, spineless and reprobate judiciary.
* In a Police State, there is No Personal Privacy, Scarce Personal Freedom, Hardly Any Personal Justice and An Ever Diminishing Amount Of Personal Wealth.
* 2010 Reported Corporate Revenues:
Johnson & Johnson = $61.90 billion
Pfizer= $50.01 billion
GlaxoSmithKline = $45.83 billion
Novartis = $44.27
Sanofi-Aventis = $41.99 billion
AstraZeneca = $32.81 billion
Merck & Co. = $27.43 billion
Eli Lilly = $21.84 billion
Anheuser-Busch InBev (2007) = $16.70 billion
MillerCoors = $3.03 billion
Pabst = $0.50 billion
* As with torture, prohibition is a grievous crime against humanity. If you support it, or even simply tolerate it by looking the other way while others commit it, you are an accessory to a very serious moral transgression against humanity.
* The United States re-legalized certain drug use in 1933. The drug was alcohol, and the 21st amendment re-legalized its production, distribution and sale. Both alcohol consumption and violent crime dropped immediately as a result, and, very soon after, the American economy climbed out of that same prohibition engendered abyss into which it had previously been pushed.
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
- Winston Churchill
augustus 17th, 2011 @ 22:10
We have to face facts. Either we as a country have the ability to eliminate marijuana use in the U.S. or we as a country have to provide a legal supply of the stuff through distributors we can trust – and who better to do this than our supermarkets who we already trust with alcohol and tobacco? Our supermarkets have proven that they’re reputable companies, they know how to card their customers, and they have the ability and the will to price these products at a level too low for illegal suppliers to match. Supermarkets are the ideal way to drive drug dealers off our streets and bankrupt the murderous and sadistic cartels. The status quo of massive, unrelenting demand combined with zero legal supply is simply NOT an option!
We may not ever wish to purchase beer, wine and marijuana ourselves but we should *always* insist on them being legal for supermarkets to sell to adults.
augustus 18th, 2011 @ 02:46
‘As the U.S. government spends millions of taxpayer dollars to pay U.S. private security and defense firms to “fix” Mexico, it has done little to nothing to address the parts of transnational organized crime that exist within its borders—demand, transport and distribution, corrupt officials, gun-running and money laundering.’
The US is spending absurd amounts of money attempting to do all of the things you mention. It has the same problem Mexico does. As long as there are astronomical profits to be made, eliminating any of the players in the drug trade simply opens slots for the entrepreneurs waiting in the wings to fill.