Drugs and Public Safety: Two Different Battles

“Legalization is not the answer,” because it could lead to worse problems, as much in the realm of security as in public health, President Barack Obama said at the Cartagena Summit. While addressing economic and drug issues with the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, he admitted his country’s responsibilities, but also maintained that the United States cannot continue to be blamed for all of the region’s problems. On the issue of drugs, he insisted that each country must possess functioning law enforcement and judicial structures. In all of this, the U.S. leader is correct. The problem is that when one admits responsibility, one should take measures responding to that responsibility. On the matter of drugs, the United States has not done so. But this is because it has not arrived at an adequate diagnosis of the situation.

Combating drugs demands global strategies going much further than the exchange of intelligence and information (which could be immensely more efficient than it presently is). Designs for vaccines against different drugs have been worked on for years, some in the experimental stage, which could have extremely important results with better financing and interest from governments. Some years ago, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, who has since died, proposed building a form of blockade in the Atlantic and in the Caribbean off the coast of Columbia, which would hinder cocaine transit (and now also needed to slow the growing traffic of substances used for synthetic drugs arriving from Asia, mostly to Mexico). The United States has three unresolved issues that are key in all of this: First, of course, is its drug consumption and local networks, which are handled with excessive leniency in that country. Second, is the arms traffic feeding the cartels, most of all in Mexico, which the United States does absolutely nothing to slow. It is an uncontested fact that violence has spiraled out of control since the legalization, in 2004, of the sale of assault weapons in the United States, and their Congress has time and again rejected revising this irrational legislation (irrational, but extraordinarily good business for the gun lobby centered around the National Rifle Association). Third, is the money laundering feeding the cartels: 90 percent of their earnings has been invested in the U.S. financial system, about which nothing has been done either.

But there is a point on which Obama is completely right — that of the creation of efficient police forces and justice systems. He is right for many reasons, but most of all for one that is readily apparent: Dealing with combating drugs and the big cartels and global strategies, is one phenomenon. Analyzing the violence and insecurity is another, intimately related to the first, but different.

The big cartels want to bring their large drug shipments to market, chiefly in the United States, and they function as global enterprises. However, it is true that today they are not as powerful as they were in the past, due to blows they have suffered, especially in Mexico and Columbia. What these cartels did, mainly in our country and in Central America, has been to transform this global conflict into a multitude of local hells: distributing guns and drugs for internal consumption. Gang members who once attacked with a revolver or a knife now kidnap, extort and rob with assault weapons and fight in the streets with the army or security forces. These gangs and groups of juvenile delinquents, who are in their thousands, don’t aim (nor are able) to send drugs across the border; they fight for a corner, a neighborhood a school. They claim turf or they kidnap any kind of person. They identify with one or another of the big cartels and they fight and kill amongst themselves, but in many cases they have no significant connection to the real criminal enterprises.

In the same way that the struggle against the big cartels requires a global strategy fighting a globalized business, this struggle for security and territorial control is eminently local, depending on local authorities and on their capacity and willingness to face the challenge of calling, as Obama said, for efficient police and justice systems (and for specific social programs that go beyond strategies for public safety). These are two paths, two struggles, two battles, two distinct and different strategies that should have specific responses geared to each of them, and which still, even at summits like the one in Cartagena, continue to be thought of as one and the same. Because of this, they can’t find, and we can’t find, a way out.