By Conn Hallinan – June 6, 2010
So what does being stranded in the middle of the high
Mexican desert have to do with Chrysler and cocaine? Well, it was a Chrysler
that got Anne and me into the mess—a model aptly named Attitude (“all
attitude,” as one of my kids would say). But there was no cocaine or other
assorted drugs in the tiny town of Bondojito Huichapan Hidalgo, just a hardware
store, a minuscule tienda, and, of course, a church.
For most Americans, however, Mexico is all about drugs and
violence, and it is hard not to think about our southern neighbor without
conjuring up the vocabulary of the Apocalypse: “With deadly Persistence,
Mexican Drug Cartels Get Their Way” screams the New York Times; “Mexico’s drug
war stirs fear in the U.S.” warns the San Francisco Chronicle; “Obama eyes
troops for Mexico drug war,” headlines the Financial Times. Since 2006,
according to Aljazeera, 22,743 people have been victims of the conflict, vastly
more than the U.S. and its allies have lost in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
So if you are a couple of Gringos dead in the water in the
middle of nowhere these things come into your mind, particularly when the tow
truck has not arrived and it’s starting to get dark.
But as I said, we didn’t encounter any drugs or gangs, just
helpful locals (I think somewhat bemused by our situation), a friendly tow
truck driver, a solicitous guy from Hertz, a difficult taxi driver, and a very
sympathetic hotel staff. In fact, the whole time we were in Mexico we didn’t
see a shoot out or any bodies, although the journalist we were staying
with—Martha Mendoza, one of Associated Press’s aces—told us about a
recent gunfight in Monterrey.
Martha has just finished writing a blockbuster series about
the status of the “war on drugs” that Richard Nixon declared back in 1971, and
that governments all over Latin America are starting to abandon. As wars go, it
has been an unmitigated calamity.
“How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged
as a failure and reversed? The U.S. ‘war on drugs’ suggests there is no upper
limit,” writes Financial Times columnist Clive Crook. “The country’s implacable
blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong headed in every
way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in
practice a disaster of remarkable proportions.”
A recent report by the 17-member Latin American Commission
on Drugs and Democracy, lead by three former heads of state, concluded,
according to Wall Street Journal columnist Jose de Cordoba, that “US-style
anti-drug strategy was putting the region’s fragile democratic institutions at
risk and corrupting ‘judicial systems, governments, the political system and
especially the police force.”
It has also had virtually no effect on the movement of
drugs. According to a Guardian (UK) investigation, more than 750 tons of
cocaine is shipped from the Andes, a traffic that “has forced peasants off
land, trigged gang wars and perverted state institutions.” As Col. Rene Sanabria, the head of
Bolivia’s anti-narcotic police force, told the British newspaper, “The strategy
of the U.S. here, in Colombia and Peru was to attack the raw material and it
has not worked.”
In the case of Colombia, the U.S. has poured $6 billion in
mostly military aid into the country, plus poisoning almost 2.5 million acres
of coca plants. Coco production is up by 16 percent.
Member of the commission and former Brazilian President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso said, “The available evidence indicates that the war
on drugs is a failed war. We have to move from this approach to another,” and
urged a rejection of the “U.S. prohibitionist policies.”
Mexico, for instance, has deployed an estimated 35,000
soldiers in 14 states, only to see drug-related deaths increase, and more and
more municipalities fall under the influence of drug cartels.
There is also growing anger that the body count in Mexico is
a direct result of U.S. weapons dealers selling everything from automatic
weapons and 50-caliber sniper rifles, to grenades and rocket launchers to south
of the border gangs. According to a Congressional study, more than 90 percent
of the guns used by Mexican drug gangs come from dealers in Arizona, New Mexico
and Texas.
In Arizona last year, the state appellate court dismissed a
case against a gun dealer who had sold some 700 weapons to intermediaries for
Mexican drug gang smugglers. Several of the guns were used to kill eight police
officers in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state. It is estimated that this
southbound flow of firepower generates about $25 billion a year for U.S. gun
dealers.
The “collateral” damage from the “war on drugs” is not just
to Mexico and the rest of Latin America. According to Miron’s study, more than
500,000 people are in prison for drug crimes in the U.S.—the overwhelming
percentage of them for possession—more than the total number of prisoners
for all crimes in Great Britain, Germany, Spain, France and Italy combined.
According to Associated Press, the U.S. war on drugs has
cost $1 billion, and as U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske says, “It has not been
successful. “ Indeed. In 2010, some 25 million Americans will use illegal
drugs, 10 million more than in 1970. We will spend $121 billion to arrest 37
million nonviolent drug users, 10 million of them for smoking grass. Studies
show that imprisonment increased drug addiction.
As Mendoza writes, “Harvard University economist Jeffrey
Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and
soldiers is more homicides.
Changing the drug laws, however, will require coming up
against a powerful coalition of law enforcement agencies and the prison
industry that cost taxpayers about $100 billion a year.
A number of Latin American countries have begun pulling away
from the U.S. approach. Last summer, Mexico eliminated jail time for small
amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD and methamphetamine. Brazil,
Colombia and Uruguay have also decriminalized possession of drugs for personal
use, and Argentina’s Supreme Court ruled that criminalization of marijuana
possession was unconstitutional.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa pardoned some 2000
small-time drug couriers last year, telling the parliament, “They are single
mothers or unemployed people who are desperate to feed their families.”
The model everyone seems to be looking at these days is
Portugal, which eliminated jail time for personal drug possession. A recent
study on the decriminalization of drugs in that county found “While many drug
addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many
European Union states, those problems—in virtually every relevant
category—have been either contained or measurable improved with Portugal
since 2001.”
The Netherlands and Switzerland have also decriminalized
possession.
The Obama administration has taken a few tentative steps in
the direction of redirecting the “war on drugs,” including lifting the ban on
federal funding of needle exchange programs, and shifting some Latin American
aid from the military to civilian law enforcement. But criminalization is still
at the heart of the U.S. approach. Almost two-thirds of Obama’s $15.5 billion
drug budget is aimed at onterdiction and law enforcement.
A decade ago, the U.S. pressed the United Nations to adopt a
“drug-free world” strategy, rather than focusing on addiction and treatment.
The results have been a disaster. A European commission on the UN strategy
concluded last year that this is “no evidence that the global drug problem was
reduced” in the past 10 years, and “while the situation has improved in some of
the richer countries…for others it has worsened, and for some it worsened
sharply and substantially.”
Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the global drug
policy program at the Open Society Institute in Warsaw told the Guardian,
“Thanks to the global ‘war on drugs’ over the past decade, close to two million
people living in the former Soviet Union are infected with HIV, half a million
U.S. citizens languish in prison for non-violent, drug related crimes, and
billions of dollars are spent on destructive military actions in Colombia while
the production of cocaine continues to rise.”
There is no question that the war on drugs makes parts of
Mexico and Latin America dangerous. But the majority of people in those
countries go through their lives having nothing to do with drug gangs or
shootouts. Indeed, the thing that strikes one most about Mexicans—besides
their politeness and sense of humor—is their common sense. No, you don’t
have to take off your shoes to get on an airplane, and when your artificial hip
sets off the alarm bells, they don’t take 20 minutes to go over every inch of your
body with metal detectors.
So while being marooned in the desert with a badly designed
Chrysler is not a lot of fun, it eventually sorts itself out. Our misguided
“war on drugs” will be a steeper hill to climb.