Symptoms of Discomfort

Today, the man who came to power in Guatemala with the slogan “Vote with an iron fist” proposes poor solutions to drug trafficking. “I want to have a round-table discussion,” said Pérez Molina, referring to possible drug legalization.

Hence, Pérez Molina joins Santos, Calderón and Mauricio Funes of El Salvador as presidents that deviate from Washington’s guidelines in their approach to fighting drug trafficking.

Reconsidering the prohibition of drugs is no longer only a matter for dope heads, academics and ex-presidents — which have already been a great step forward — but also, as Andrés Oppenheimer pointed out in the Miami Herald, it is a debate that is reaching into the spheres of governments.

Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador have adopted Washington’s measures; nevertheless, they have not been able to curb the power of drug traffickers. They have assumed the costs of defense spending without considering the benefits in terms of security. The negative consequences in terms of state corruption, public health and prison overcrowding are dramatic.

The deaths of more than 350 inmates in a prison fire in Comayagua and almost 50 murders in a fight in the Apodaca prison in Mexico are closely related to the war on drugs. The governments are putting more people than they can handle behind bars. Solely in Colombia, according to a study by “DeJusticia” (the Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society in Colombia) conducted in 2009, over 17 percent of Colombian inmates were imprisoned for committing a non-violent crime related to drugs — and we are referring to a country where drugs were legalized.

But the “gringos” do not want to know anything about the subject. Although questions about the legalization are the most popular in Obama’s Online Forum, the president has openly opted to ignore them, as happened last week in a chat on Google+. I have recently asked an Obama senior official in charge of Latin America what he thought of the fact that the issue of legalization is considerably relevant at the Summit of the Americas; he replied with apathy, as if it were not an important matter, that the U.S. would never legalize drugs.

That stance is not new. The other day Nicolás Uribe, a hard-line anti-drug-legalization Colombian politician, advised me of the following on Twitter: “You should spend less time justifying your addiction and do more productive things. Your obsession is a symptom of your discomfort.”

I will take only the last part of his advice (as far as I know, Uribe is not a doctor to give a diagnosis): The obsession with a change in the drug policies in Latin America is a symptom of the discomfort they are causing. And that is something that the U.S. will find increasingly difficult to ignore.