The Drug Dealer, Between Decriminalization and War

Pragmatism. In the United States, 10 states have had laws allowing the sale of marijuana for medical purposes for some time, and in California the benefit of authorizing the free sale (without a prescription) of the herb is being debated as a way to inject $300 million annually in the form of taxes into the economy. In Mexico, our government persists in a drug war ‘to the death’ as the only strategy to attack the drug phenomenon.

Meanwhile [Mexican] administration officials, as reported in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 28 of last year, cynically recommended that the U.S. manipulate the drug business, facilitating trade from the Caribbean in order to debilitate the Mexican cartels that threaten the U.S.’s southern border. In Chihuahua, President Felipe Calderón tries to disguise his waterloo through the redeployment of the army.

Last Monday, in California, the pragmatic initiative of Legislator Tom Ammiano was blocked by legislative committees, but it advanced within public opinion. It is designed to capture some of the resources of the marijuana industry, which is valued at $14 billion, in order to contribute to covering the fiscal deficit of $21 billion for the rich state.

The project seeks to allow the drug to be sold freely to those above the age of 18, in a regulated manner, as was done with alcoholic beverages. The state treasury would not only obtain resources, but would achieve savings, if one considers that every year the state of California arrests and processes — at a high cost and subsequent saturation of the justice system — an average of 74,000 people for possession of the herb.

In absurd contrast with the internal gringo pragmatism, the Calderón administration stubbornly persists in an all-out war, dictated at the international level by the same gringos, but with the convenient criterion of those who do so at “God’s will” … but on the backs of their neighbors. In just the first 10 days of this year, the war on drugs left 300 people dead and looks as if it will get worse, despite the forcefulness of official data about the failure of joint operations between the army, navy, federal police, as well as state and municipal police, which started three years ago on Dec. 11, 2006.

In Michoacan, the state in which these operations began, shootings have multiplied and the number of deaths has increased, but drugs apparently continue on, unaffected.

In the city of Juarez, operations began a year and a half later, in April of 2008, and the data could not be more disconsolate. While in 2006, according to newspaper records, the executions totaled 130, in 2007 they reached 148. During the first year of joint operations the death toll soared to 1,652 and passed 2,000 the following year.

This has caused outrage in Mexico as the drug war has left a total of 15,000 dead in three years, according to the most conservative counts in the press, and absorbs a large amount of economic resources. At the same time, poverty and extreme poverty — that is, the number of Mexicans who have nothing to eat — have increased. In the realm of drugs, the government accepts what Washington dictates at face value.

Despite what was said in The Wall Street Journal on the Day of the Innocents*, that officials in Mexico and the U.S. propose legalizing drugs as the only real solution to the problem, Calderón and his strategists persist in applying a repressive policy that the U.S. does not even carry out on its own soil.

According to the New York newspaper, U.S. officials recommend — in an example of cynicism, insolence and Manichaeism — that their country facilitate the trafficking of drugs through the Caribbean, with the goal of damaging the Mexican cartels, which became invigorated after the fight against Columbian cartels, and now threaten the southern border.**

The character that formulated such an insulting proposal to continue the cat and mouse game in the middle of a pool of blood did so with a skillful question: “Would you rather destabilize small countries in the Caribbean or Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile border with the U.S., is your third-biggest trading partner and has 100 million people?”

Despite the evidence showing that the last thing that interests the neighbor to the north is to actually solve the phenomenon of drugs, of which trafficking is just one of its many facets, our government maneuvers to hide its failure in this area and the overall war worsens.

These days, in the city of Juarez the army will begin to reduce its role, as was tested in Cuernavaca during the arrest of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, when officers did not act subordinately to Gen. Guillermo Galván, but to Adm. Francisco Sainez Mendoza. The military began to cede control of the operation to the police in a process that will last until March, when the army will be put in charge of fighting drugs only in rural areas.

According to Genaro García Luna, 2,000 more federal police officers will arrive in Juarez, to reinforce the activities of 7,200 soldiers — of a total of 8,500 in the state — in addition to the state and municipal police. Depressurization, referring to sending soldiers to rural areas, then becomes something like widening the street when the potholes no longer fit.

In the 40 years since U.S. President Richard Nixon formally declared a “war on drugs,” said the New York newspaper, the only figures that have increased are those concerning costs to U.S. taxpayers and murders in Mexico (aside from the economic costs, one should say), for which the legalization of drugs would be the first major blow to the drug trade.

Along the same lines as The Wall Street Journal — and of many influential international publications, with The Economist at the lead — runs the thinking of Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, alongside a large group of intellectuals of the most diverse ideologies. The prolific writer who coined the phrase “the perfect dictatorship,” whom no one — even on the left — would now be sympathetic to, reiterated his position in favor of decriminalization and strongly criticized Calderón’s strategy against the drug trafficking.

Some people would say, however, to the author of “The City and the Dogs” that nothing can be done before an autistic government that, when it finally leaves its state of abstraction, enjoys listening to the sound of its own voice. Or that of its minions and media who attack, in the spirit of the Chinese proverb, in which, at the end of the world, there is no option other than war.

aureramos@cronica.com.mx

Editor’s Notes:

*Day of the Innocents is Dec. 28, but this article was published in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 26, 2009.

**The Wall Street Journal reported that Mexican officials, not U.S. officials, said privately, that the U.S. should consider facilitating the trafficking of drugs through the Caribbean.