Anti-Drug Policy Down the Drain

The International Drug Enforcement Conference held in Cancun has exposed the absence of clear criteria, coherent proposals and even specific perceptions by the Mexican and United States governments regarding the drug trafficking problem. From the delirious statements of Michele Leonhart, the director of the anti-drug agency in Washington (the DEA), to the effect that, in her country, it is the Mexican cartels that control the distribution of illegal narcotics and that the violence levels within the country are a symptom of the official strategy’s “success,” up to the “please pardon us” created by Assistant Secretary of State William R. Brownfield — to the effect that three decades ago, when the anti-drug strategy now in process was conceived and imposed upon the Latin American countries, the United States government “made a mistake” by assuming that the drug trafficking problem “could be resolved quickly with an aggressive campaign” based on the mere pursuit of drug traffickers by law enforcement. He wasn’t able to see that the problem “has to do with economic, political, security, diplomatic, social, health and educational issues and cultural aspects, and if we don’t integrate all these elements into our solution, we are condemned to failure.”*

On the other hand, the maneuverings of Felipe Calderón, the chief of the Mexican federal executive branch, are also meaningful. In the same conference, with total naturalness, he expressed his own ideas those that multiple social sectors, academics and politicians had formulated against his “war” with the drug trafficking since this was declared: The lack of comprehensive perception and interdisciplinary action, an emphasis on actions that merely repress the movement of drugs and the absence of parallel measures — educational, health, fiscal, economic and administrative — in order to deal with, confront and resolve the phenomenon taking into account its complexity and multiple facets. In addition, it is worrisome that the leader puts the dilemma between maintaining the prohibition of psychotropic substances or legalizing them on the table, after more than four years of negative discussions concerning the second possibility and when strictly maintaining a prohibitionist stance has cost his country close to 40,000 deaths. After declaring himself “open to criticism,” nevertheless, the Michoacan politician renewed, in the name of protecting the youth, the method of political and military persecution against drugs, their production, movement and trade.

Within the frame of the debate about the possible ways to confront drug trafficking, the conclusions from a document presented to the participants of the Cancun conference shouldn’t be omitted: The cartels have increased their utility margins thanks to an increase in the price of cocaine in the United States since 2007. The paradox that the DEA director holds that price increase of the illicit substance as a sign of the “results” that the Calderonist “war” in spite of the fact that it translates to higher economic power — and, therefore, increased firepower capacity and capacity to penetrate institutions — by the criminal organizations.

In this fair of half-truths, Brownfield compared the current tragic situation in Juarez City with that which went on in Chicago during the 1920s and with the circumstances that the Colombian city of Medellín went through 50 years later. Nevertheless, the government official didn’t mention that the only way his country’s government found to end the mafia violence was to legalize the consumption and sale of alcohol, which was a prohibited substance in the United States whose underground trafficking gave the criminal organizations their power. Nor did he say that in Colombia, the violence of the cartels “was resolved” with the arrival of the presidency of Álvarro Uribe, a politician connected to drug traffickers and paramilitaries, as a department of the very United States government had documented.

Over the course of the conference held in the Mexican Caribbean it was possible to verify, in all, two exasperating and alarming things: On one hand, the Mexican government keeps its course of halfheartedly combining demands to Washington while maintaining a submissive attitude incompatible with basic constitutional guidelines. On the other hand, neither of the parties has, at the present time, a coherent idea of the drug trafficking phenomenon, much less a complete and specific idea of how to confront it. Meanwhile, our country suffers new deaths day after day and hour after hour, and continues falling into new pits of institutional decomposition, social disintegration and human degradation.

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.