Mexico Signals It's Had Enough of America's Stupid War on Drugs
/ icon and title message Hey, if you guys have some time to read it, it's worth it. Pretty scary stuff.
Even on his most homicidal of days, Al Pacino's character in Scarface
couldn't even approach the level of drug trafficking-related brutality
bleeding down Mexico's streets. It is no longer unusual for the Mexican
news media to report on yet another, freshly decapitated head stuck
atop a fencepost or a metal spike, or a garbage bag filled with body
parts, usually with a hand-scrawled note or placard attached. That
amounts to a cartel's calling card, and it's usually delivered in the
form of a warning to a rival cartel, or for the Mexican authorities to
stay away and stop seizing their drugs. Other times, it's just a
chilling placard intended to strike terror into the hearts of the
people who come across the gory scene and the text: "Ha Ha Ha." To be
sure that their message is heard, cartels are known to send regular
text messages to newspaper reporters, place newspaper advertisements,
or to even upload their own killing videos (sometimes accompanied by
narco-corridos as background music) to YouTube.
Mexican drug cartels are, rather effectively, fighting the government's
War on Drugs with their own War of Terror, often swelling their ranks
(and combat/terror tactics) with former members of law enforcement. The
Zetas, for instance, are members of former Mexican counter-narcotics
squads (some with U.S.-assisted training under their belts), who have
become the self-proclaimed and much-feared hit men of the Gulf cartel.
So far this year, roughly 3,500 murders have been directly attributed
to the drug war in Mexico, surpassing last year's estimate of 2,500.
(These numbers include the murders of at least 500 soldiers, cops,
judges, politicians -- and their family members -- in nearly two years.
The drug war rages across Mexico's urban and (mostly) rural terrain,
and murders are usually targeted toward pronounced rivals, but
increasing numbers of victims are innocent bystanders, including women
and children who were previously considered off-limits where acts of
drug war-related retaliation were concerned.
Reports of attacks are rolling in daily, sometimes several times a day.
This Sunday, unidentified gunmen shot up the United States consulate in
the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. While no injuries were reported
there because the consulate was closed, six young adults attending a
private celebration were killed on Saturday in the
violence-and-drug-plagued Mexican border state of Chihuahua, in Ciudad
Juárez. Those murders, as yet unsolved, followed on the heels of 11
homicides in a Chihuahua bar, when a gunman opened fire on unsuspecting
patrons, including a prominent journalist who may or may not have been
a specific target.
It should be of note that much of the worst drug war violence is
happening right at the border: Tijuana, adjacent to San Diego, saw
nearly 40 people murdered in the last week of September alone, in
addition to nearly 25 deaths of male and female prisoners the previous
week due to two major riots at the vastly overcrowded Tijuana State
Prison. (Prisoners alleged frequent incidents of torture and sexual
violence, sometimes leading to death, at the hands of guards.)
American newspapers located in border cities and states tend to report
some of the more gruesome events and mass killings, but the rest of
this country seems remarkably in the dark about what's happening to our
Mexican neighbors, much less the fact that the violence has increased
dramatically since U.S. drug war dollars have increased in the form of
support for Mexican President Felipe Calderón's militarily-minded
crackdown on trafficking, with the goal of dismantling the cartels'
leadership apparatus, as well as breaking apart close alliances between
local authorities, cops, and drug traffickers. (Corruption in Mexican
law enforcement and military is epidemic; consider that many police
officers in Mexico make no more than $5,000 per year.)
Since President Calderón took office in December 2006, he has
authorized large-scale troop deployments (roughly 30,000 troops), in an
attempt to diminish the power lorded over Mexico and its citizens by
rival Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, as well as affiliates like La Familia,
which has earned a reputation for particularly memorable and gruesome
acts, including the night that five decapitated heads were thrown onto
a dance floor packed with people.
Seizures of illicit drugs, particularly cocaine, have indeed increased.
But so has the bloodshed and the level of fear: a national poll
published on October 4th indicated that more than 40% of Mexicans felt
less secure since Calderón's drug war offensive began. Another poll
published by the Mexico City daily, Reforma, showed that more than half
of Mexicans believed that the cartels, not the government, were winning
the drug war.
Still, as one would imagine, the Bush Administration has responded
favorably to Calderón's crackdown on drug cartels, ushering in the
three-year "Merida Initiative" to support counter-narcotics efforts in
Mexico and Central America: "The Merida Initiative complements U.S.
domestic efforts to reduce drug demand, stop the flow of arms and
weapons, and confront gangs and criminal organizations," as the State
Department explained in April 2008.
This past June, Bush struck a deal with Calderón to approve $400
million toward additional drug war assistance (representing a 20%
increase in the Mexican anti-narcotics budget) -- for still more
helicopters, military training, ion scanners, canine units, and
surveillance technology.
Considering their close ties, President Calderón's announcement earlier
this month must have come as a bit of an unwanted surprise to the Bush
Administration. On October 2, Calderón proposed legislation that would
decriminalize drug possession, ostensibly for personal use. Not just
for marijuana, as one might have expected in a country where pot smoke
has not been demonized to the same degree as in the U.S., but for
cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, as well.
To be more specific, Calderón's proposed legislation, supported by the
Mexican attorney general's office, is intended to address a different
kind of drug crisis on Mexican soil: a growing number of addicts.
Cocaine once solely destined from Colombia and other Andean nations
toward the U.S. is still flowing in such great supply that it has ended
up attracting more users -- and abusers. In addition, meth lab
crackdowns in the U.S. have allowed narco-cartels to step in and fill
the void, so that speed is now more readily available in Mexico, as
well. The impact has been dramatic: according to the government's own
statistics, the number of drug addicts in Mexico is estimated to have
doubled in just six years to 307,000, while the number of people who
have tried drugs at some point rose from 3.5 million to 4.5 million.
If passed, Calderón's legislation would decriminalize up to 2 grams of
marijuana, 500 milligrams of cocaine, 40 milligrams of meth, and 50
milligrams of heroin. To qualify, any individual arrested with those
drugs would have to agree to a drug treatment program to address
admitted addiction or enter a prevention program designed for
recreational users. Those who refused to attend one of these kinds of
programs would be subject to a fine.
This proposal isn't the first of its kind in Mexican political history.
In fact, former President Vicente Fox also supported limited
decriminalization just over two years ago, but his efforts were quashed
in the wake of unrelenting pressure from the White House and the Office
of National Drug Control Policy. It's a safe bet that pressure of this
kind has already started up where Calderón's proposal is concerned.
"President Calderón's proposal to decriminalize personal possession of
illicit drugs is consistent with the broader trend throughout Western
Europe, Canada, and other parts of Latin America to stop treating drug
use and possession as a criminal problem," says Ethan Nadelmann,
executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national drug policy
reform organization. But it contrasts sharply with [the approach taken
in] the United States [the U.S. government] should think twice before
criticizing a foreign government for its drug policy, much less holding
out the U.S. as a model. Looking to the U.S. as a role model for drug
control is like looking to apartheid South Africa for how to deal with
race."
Or, for that matter, looking toward U.S. intervention in Colombia as a
model for how to deal with Mexican drug cartels. In effect, the U.S.
government waded into a long-running civil war when it started to throw
money toward anti-narcotics military training, aviation training,
weaponry, surveillance technology, and the availability of Monsanto's
coca-killing herbicide, Round-Up. Ostensibly, all of this assistance
was for the "good guys." American taxpayers, as always, were expected
to overlook the death squad part of the equation, the part about the
right-wing paramilitary leaders who took their U.S.-supplied training
and weapons and turned them into family and local economy-displacing
attacks akin to, or worse, than that of their sworn enemies, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The end result: Colombia's cities, towns, jungles, and streets were
turned into even more militarized, more deadly versions of themselves.
The U.S. government still declared victory when the leadership of the
cocaine-producing Medellín Cartel was dismantled (or killed) from the
1980s to the early 1990s.
That particular cartel was brought down, and city streets are safer
today than they were in the 80s and 90s, but Colombia's problems have
hardly gone away. Blood still flows as a result of territorial battles
between FARC and right-wing militias, often over the control over land
suitable for growing plentiful coca crops. At this very moment, there
are some 300,000 displaced Colombians, meaning the country has the
second-worst internal refugee crisis in the world, right behind Sudan.
Since 2000, in fact, the U.S. has continued to pour huge sums of money
into Colombia: over $5 billion since 2000, making it the biggest
recipient of drug war funding (from the U.S. to a foreign country) in
the 21st century. Has it paid off? Consider that in June, the United
Nations released data indicated that coca cultivation actually
increased nearly 30% in 2007 to 244,634 acres.
Colombia not only remains the world's largest coca producer, but its
farmers have apparently succeeded in creating herbicide-resistant
hybrid coca plants that defy Monsanto's poisons. Ninety percent of the
cocaine consumed by Americans (half the cocaine consumed in the world
goes up American noses) is now flowing this way from Colombia. And much
of that cocaine is, indeed, passing through Mexico. (It is estimated
that 80% of methamphetamine reaching the U.S. is coming from Mexico
directly.)
Last week, the two-day security meeting of the Organization of American
States kicked off with the frank admission that Mexico's narco-cartels
are primarily buying their cocaine from FARC and right-wing
paramilitary groups.
So, too, are Mexican cartels using what were once considered to be
Colombian narco-terror tactics, including the use of "Colombian
neckties" and the killing of innocent civilians. In fact, the drug war
in Mexico is beginning to look, feel, and sound like the worst of the
drug war in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. In late August, eleven
headless, shirtless bodies were found handcuffed together in the Mérida
suburb of Chichi Suarez, in Yucatan State. The nature of the
as-yet-unsolved crime is considered to be one drug cartel's "warning
sign" to a rival group.
Mexican civilians have even become the recent victims of explosives
detonated in public spaces, something that had not previously been a
concern. The use of larger-scale explosives as a method of terrorist
attack started just two months after Calderón took office, leading up
to last month's terrifying explosion in a crowded plaza in Morelia, the
capital city of Michoacán. The attack in broad daylight was timed to
coincide with Mexican Independence Day festivities: over 100 people,
primarily working-class men and women who had gathered for the free
celebration, were wounded in the attack. Eight people were killed,
including a 13-year-old.
As was the case in Colombia, journalists are being increasingly
targeted for exposing narco-cartels (or links with officials and law
anforcement, as the case may be). The Chihuahua bar shooting last
Thursday claimed the life of David Garcia Monroy, a well-respected
columnist at the daily newspaper, El Diario de Chihuahua. That same
day, the editor of La Noticia de Michoacán, Miguel Angel Villagomez,
was kidnapped as he left work in the port city of Lazaro Cardenas. And,
on September 23, a popular Mexican radio host, Alejandro Zenn Fonseca
Estrada, was shot to death with AR-15 rifles, at close range, in
Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco. According to witnesses, a van
pulled up alongside Fonseca as he was hanging anti-violence posters on
a major street. (According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, one
of the posters read, "No to Kidnappings"). The murder remains unsolved.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Mexico ranks
10th on CPJ's "Impunity Index," a list of countries where journalists
are attacked or slain on a regular basis and those crimes consistently
remain unsolved.
Calderón's call for decriminalization won't put a direct dent in this
kind of violence, but former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, author
of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American
Policing, says that it's a step in the right direction toward
alleviating the overflow of non-violent drug offenders in Mexican
courtrooms, jails, and prisons -- something that's beginning to
resemble the criminal justice landscape of the United States. Stamper,
an active member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), says
that those comparisons need to be drawn. "Our drug policy, predicated
on the prohibition model, has caused far more harm than good, locally
and globally, " he says. "The results? The same as Mexico's: higher
potency drugs, more readily available, and at cheaper prices than ever."
Statements like these, particularly coming from prominent members of
law enforcement, would have been almost unheard of in the
not-too-distant past. But these days, American public is sending strong
signs that they, too, are ready for a truly different approach to drug
and sentencing policies, as well as strategies on mental illness and/or
substance abuse treatment. According to a nationwide Zogby poll
released on October 2, three out of four U.S. voters believe that the
war on drugs is failing, while over one-quarter agree that legalizing
at least some drugs is the best alternative to the current strategy.
While Stamper supports Calderón's call for decriminalization, fellow
LEAP activist and board member Terry Nelson says that he doesn't
believe in "incremental steps," explaining that nothing short of
complete legalization will bring an end to the profit-driven violence
associated with the global drug trade, valued at around $500 billion
per year. "To use a drug is not to abuse a drug," says Nelson.
"Calderón is just trying to take some pressure off the court system
with legalization, [most] of the actual crime and violence would be
taken away, almost overnight."
A 32-year veteran of the military and various branches of law
enforcement, Nelson's career took him on narco-traffic interdiction
training and surveillance missions across Mexico, Central and South
America. Nelson admits that he was involved in the Mexican Aviation
Training Initiative, "designed to improve our counterparts in Mexico's
professionalism in enforcing Mexican drug laws."
Some of the people Nelson helped to train ended up as Zetas, as he later found out.
Now retired and living in Fort Worth, Texas, Nelson served for five
years as the Field Director of Surveillance Support Branch East (SSB
East). During that time, he says, SSB East successfully seized of over
230,000 pounds of cocaine throughout Latin America. Nelson's biggest,
personal drug trafficking bust happened off the coast of Ecuador,
resulting in the seizure of 30,000 pounds of cocaine.
Much to his dismay, even such a large-scale bust yielded absolutely
nothing by way of a drop in street supply -- or an increase in price.
"If that big a bust doesn't affect the street trade," he muses, "what
chances do you have doing it a gram or a kilo at a time?"
To put it another way, he asks, "if we hadn't called it a war to begin with, could we admit that we're not winning?"
