Mexicoblog Editorial: Storylines in the War on Drugs

We have been maintaining this blog - and a preceding version, An American Kinship - for nearly a year-and-a-half. Our predominate focus continues to be on the pernicious effects of the U.S. prohibition-based war on drugs and U.S. immigration law on Mexico and its people. We see our work as compiling a diary of these two, ever-emerging tradegies. As we watch these sad stories develop, we ask: What are the central themes? What are the core threads around which these histories are being woven?

In the war on drugs, we have come to see four themes and now label stories accordingly:

1. Whack-a-mole: This metaphor, taken from a carnival game, was recently used - independently - by Mexico's ambassador to the U.S, and a deputy director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), to describe the (acknowledged or denied) futility of the strategy of the U.S. and Mexican governments in "fighting" the "drug war." The strategy is based on U.S. drug prohibition laws (and subsequent international conventions of the U.N.) and the resulting "unforeseen and unintended" creation of a criminal market run by "drug cartels." The strategy then aims at reducing -  if not eliminating -  those cartels through police and military "take-downs" (whacks) of the drug "capos" (moles) and "busts" of their drug supplies. By all objective evaluations, Whack-a-mole, like the attempt to eliminate real moles, is a failure. As in the carnival game, when one "mole" is whacked, another pops up to replace it. Thus, we are categorizing all stories about this strategy - its continued endorsement by the Mexican and U.S. governments, related "mole" take-downs and drug "busts," and analyses of its failure - under the heading, "Whack-a-mole".

2. Collateral Damage: This is the military euphemism for unintended civilian deaths that occur in a war. We are adopting it to include every form of damage done by the war on drugs to Mexican society and its people: destruction of cities, small pueblos, every-day lives, their youth, their humanity. At its broadest and most appalling reach, "collateral damage" is the destruction of Mexican society by this war. This is, we believe, the most pernicious and deplorable consequence of the Whack-a-mole war and, thus, the most important story to attend to.

3. Legalization: The alternative to a Whack-a-mole war and it's collateral damage is the end of prohibition of drug sales and use. Regulated sale through legal markets, such as is done with alcohol, is the only way to eliminate the destructive insanity of waging an endless war. President Calderon opened up a debate on legalization in Mexico - even though he holds fast to Whack-a-mole. Proposition 19 in California opened up the debate in the U.S. As a result, there have been many articles in the press - from a widening number of publications in the U.S. and around the world - actively joining this debate.

4. Weapons traffic: A direct result of the Whack-a-mole, war-waging strategy is the ever-accelerating use of weapons, an "arms race," by both sides. The U.S., through the Merida Initiative, seeks to give the Mexican government better armaments. (See: Boys, Toys, and the War on Drugs) However, the cartels, with their billions of dollars in profits (a budget far greater than Merida or that of the Mexican military or police) readily arm themselves with increasingly powerful weaponry. Some significant amount of this is purchased in the poorly regulated gun market just north of the border, in Texas and Arizona. The politicians in these states now holler about the dangers the well-armed cartels pose to their security, and they are increasingly arming themselves. Meanwhile, the AFT (Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco) agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, in Operation Gunrunner, tries, but - through bureaucratic ineptitude and lack of adequate gun trafficking laws (the NRA says it's Mexico's problem) - fails to stop the "iron river" flowing south.

So we track these four storylines as our organizing Topics. And our readers can more readily follow these evolving themes in the drug war story.