US Signals Shift in International Drug Policy

Insight Crime: In a press conference that received little media attention, US drug czar William Brownfield laid the groundwork for a new US approach to international drug policy, pointing to the changing political landscape on drug regulation in the Americas.

In a meeting with reporters at the United Nations in New York on October 9, Brownfield set out the United States' position on international drug policy, including to "accept flexible interpretation" of the UN Drug Control conventions, which were first drafted in the 1960s. He stated that:

Things have changed since 1961. We must have enough flexibility to allow us to incorporate those changes into our policies ... to tolerate different national drug policies, to accept the fact that some countries will have very strict drug approaches; other countries will legalize entire categories of drugs.  Read more.

Mexico Kidnappings Top 105,000 In 2012, But Few Reported

Huffington Post
October 3, 2013

The most frequently cited statistic to illustrate the extent of Mexico’s problem with organized crime is the 70,000 people killed since ex-President Felipe Calderón launched his frontal assault on the country’s drug cartels. Here comes a new one.

Mexico saw 105,628 kidnappings last year, according to a survey by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, a government agency. The statistics didn’t show much faith in law enforcement to address the problem -- only 1,317 cases were reported to police.  Read more. 

OAS proposes decriminalizing marijuana use in the region

La Jornada

September 28, 2013 

Original Americas Program Translation 

The secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, said yesterday in the Senate that the strategy to combat drug trafficking in the region has been wrong because it has focused solely on the repression of the supply of narcotics and not on attacking the economic power of the drug cartels, which has become increasingly violent.

He called for decriminalization of marijuana, and warned that focusing efforts only on the sale of drugs, without taking institutional actions aimed at tackling the financial structures and money laundering will lead to “a war without end”.

In the forum “From Prohibition to Regulation: New Approaches to Drug Policy” Insulza said that according to a report by experts from the OAS, the drug trade generates 154 billion dollars a year, of which 77 billion is laundered in the global financial system.

Also in the Senate but in another forum, Undersecretary of Prevention and Citizen Participation of the Ministry of the Interior, Roberto Campa said that despite the intense debate in the U.S. on the decriminalization of drugs like marijuana, the violence that the drug trade generates will not change radically in the region in the coming years.

Mexico's new drug war strategy: More of the same

USA Today 
August 18, 2013

Mexico City - With the capture of two top drug lords in little more than a month, the new government of President Enrique Pena Nieto is following an old strategy it openly criticized for causing more violence and crime.

Mario Armando Ramirez Trevino, a top leader of Mexico's Gulf Cartel, was detained Saturday in a military operation near the Texas border, just weeks after the arrest of the leader of the brutal Zetas cartel near another border city, Nuevo Laredo.

Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong took his post in December saying the strategy of former President Felipe Calderon to take out cartel leaders only made drug gangs more dangerous and violent. The new administration would focus less on leaders and more on reducing violence, he said.  Read more. 

Mexico's Drug War Strategy Remains Unchanged With New Government

Huffington Post
By Katherine Corcoran

Mexico City - With the capture of two top drug lords in little more than a month, the new government of President Enrique Pena Nieto is following an old strategy it openly criticized for causing more violence and crime.

Mario Armando Ramirez Trevino, a top leader of Mexico's Gulf Cartel, was detained Saturday in a military operation near the Texas border, just weeks after the arrest of the leader of the brutal Zetas cartel near another border city, Nuevo Laredo.

Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong took his post in December saying the strategy of former President Felipe Calderon to take out cartel leaders only made drug gangs more dangerous and violent. The new administration would focus less on leaders and more on reducing violence, he said.

Yet the new strategy appears almost identical to the old. The captures of Ramirez and top Zeta Miguel Angel Trevino Morales could cause a new spike in violence with battles over leadership of Mexico's two major cartels.  Read more. 

Former Mexican President Fox Urges Marijuana Legalization

NY Times
By  Reauters
July 8, 2013

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox took his crusade to legalize marijuana to San Francisco on Monday, joining pot advocates to urge the United States and his own country to decriminalize the sale and recreational use of cannabis.

Fox met for three hours with the advocates, including Steve DeAngelo, the Oakland-based executive director of California's largest marijuana dispensary, and former Microsoft executive Jamen Shively, who hopes to create a Seattle-based pot brand now that Washington state has legalized recreational use.  Read more.

US marijuana legalisation fuels Mexico drugs war debate

BBC  November 20, 2012

Earlier this month, two US states voted to legalise, regulate and tax marijuana. The BBC's Will Grant in Mexico City looks at what this shift in stance could mean for Mexico and its fight against the drug gangs.

Every year, pro-marijuana campaigners in Seattle hold their annual Hempfest, a two-day festival along the city's shoreline.

Thick pungent clouds of pot smoke waft over the crowd who are sitting out with a joint in their hand, listening to the live music, or pottering among the dozens of stalls selling bongs, pipes and other smoking paraphernalia.

The police are on hand to ensure there is no open buying or selling of the drug. But at the next 'Hempfest', they may not even need to do that.

On the day voters in Washington state chose to re-elect President Barack Obama, they also chose to legalise the recreational use of marijuana. Over the Rockies in Colorado, it was a similar story. Read more. 

Mexico Lambasts US Drug Policy at Ibero-Am Summit

Cadiz, Spain, Nov 17 (Prensa Latina) Mexico President Felipe Calderon highlighted today the paradox of the Federal license on the sale of marihuana in some US states.

Calderon called crucial settling problems like violence and organized crime he defined as an international pest and reminded that Latin America is in the death route of drugs, immigrants and human trafficking.

It also gets a southwards flow of illegal money and weapon trafficking that turns Latin America into a dangerous war zone, he told the plenary session of the 22nd Ibero-American Summit in this city.  Read more. 

Mexico's Calderon proposes UN lead debate on drug policy

Reuters Sep 26, 2012

By Brian Winter

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 26 (Reuters) - The United Nations should lead a global debate over a less "prohibitionist" approach to drug policy, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said on Wednesday in the latest attempt by a Latin American leader to float possible changes to international narcotics laws.

Calderon, who leaves office on Dec. 1 after spending much of his presidency locked in a bloody battle with drug-smuggling gangs, told the U.N. General Assembly that organized crime was "one of the most serious threats of our time."

"Today, I am proposing formally that (the United Nations) ... carry out a far-reaching assessment of the progress and the limits of the current prohibitionist approach to drugs," Calderon said.

Calderon did not specifically say what an alternative approach to drug policy might look like. However, he and some other Latin American leaders including Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos have suggested they might be open to legalization of some narcotics if that helped reduce violence. Read more. 

Mothers Bond to Heal as Baltimore's Drug War Meets Mexico's

Kimberly Armstrong of Baltimore shares a hug with a caravan mother

As the peace caravan arrived in Baltimore yesterday morning, many of the 100-some people on board still slept, hunched over their seats or slumped on the shoulders of their bus mates. With a light summer rain falling, we began to pass row after row of abandoned houses. A member of a Baltimore host organization explained the background of a city that has been bombed out--not by aerial strikes, but by economic crisis. The results were strikingly similar.

Along North Avenue and Fulton Avenue, entire blocks of houses were boarded up and abandoned. Some have been gutted by time or rehab speculators. Others stand as they have for more than a hundred years, ready to house families behind their strong brick walls. Except that money, racism and the perversion of the financial system have blocked their doors. Families are on the street while houses remain empty.

We drove up to Irvington Park where a coalition of Baltimore groups hosted a picnic with the theme "Keep Them Home". Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), a community organization that works with imprisoned and recently released youth, greeted the caravan, along with the NAACP, Casa Maryland and others.

Two women rappers/singers performed works protesting the construction of yet another prison in a community that lacks basic services. Local groups like LBS have managed to block the prison so far and are working to have the multi-million dollar project cancelled altogether.

Kimberly Armstrong, a community organizer, took the stage.

"I don't know Spanish," she told the caravan. "But I know a lot about losing a loved one."

On Sept. 27, 2004, Armstrong's sixteen year old son Eric was shot and killed. Just this February, she said, she heard a knock on the door. "It was the police. They told me they found my son's murderer. he was shot with a 9mm rifle by a 14-year old."

"I thought to myself, 'why do we have 9mm rifles on the ground?  how can it be that we live in a neighborhood where it's easier for a 14-year old to get a gun, than it is to get a tomato.'"

Among the crowd, the many mothers and other relatives of the murdered and disappeared nodded. One woman's lost son became the brother of the other's.

"Now they are all my angels," said Araceli Rodriguez, displaying the photo of Armstrong's son alongside that of her own, kidnapped and disappeared in the state of Michoacan.

Laura Carlsen

Top Colombian cop advising Mexico’s president-elect suggests elite counterdrug units

AP: BOGOTA, Colombia — The top security adviser for Mexico’s next president said Friday that he is recommending the creation of elite units of police and troops who will target not just major drug traffickers but also lower-level cartel hitmen as a way of swiftly reducing violence.

The proposal newly retired Colombian police director Gen. Oscar Naranjo explained in an interview with The Associated Press offers a glimpse of how President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto might fulfill his promise to slash the number of murders and kidnappings by 50 percent during his six years in office.

Similar to the approach that Naranjo employed against Colombian traffickers, the proposal raises the question of whether the widely respected general can reproduce his success in a very different country. Read more. 

As Mexico goes to the polls, voters express disappointment with ruling party

Washington Post: Mexico City — In meetings, President Felipe Calderon has been telling guests that he and his family are likely to leave Mexico to live abroad after his term expires in December. It will be too dangerous to remain, he warns in private conversation, because powerful drug mafias might come after him.

For the commander in chief of Mexico’s U.S.-backed drug war to suggest he has not provided enough security to live in his country is a stunning revelation — and may be seen as either an admission of failure or evidence of just how hard he has fought and how far Mexico needs to go.

As Mexicans go to the polls Sunday to vote for his successor, Calderon finds his legacy battered, his ruling party unpopular and its standard bearer, the energetic former education secretary Josefina Vazquez Mota, trailing in third place in the preelection surveys. Read more.

Mexico election unlikely to reshape drug war

latimes.com: The top candidates in next week's presidential vote all emphasize plans for reducing the drug cartels' brutal violence, but nobody offers a significant new strategy.
MEXICO CITY — Six years into a ghastly drug war, none of the top candidates in next Sunday's presidential election has offered a significant new strategy to win a conflict that has claimed more than 50,000 lives and terrorized Mexican society.

Instead, the politicians emphasize reducing the increasingly brutal violence, as they seek to address the concern that weighs heavily on the minds of outraged Mexican voters.

The goal of dismantling the cartels was the hallmark of outgoing President Felipe Calderon's administration, and the candidates' cautious approach to the drug war suggests a tacit acknowledgment that, at this point at least, it remains an unrealistic one. Read more.

Violence in Mexico little discussed by presidential candidates

CBS News: President Obama arrived last night in Los Cabos, Mexico, for the G-20 Summit, where he and other world leaders will spend today and tomorrow discussing how to address the European economic crisis.

Outside the security-heavy convention center, a different crisis is raging. In January, the Mexican government announced that 47,515 had been killed in drug-related violence since the start of President Felipe Calderon's term in late 2006. (The data counted deaths only through September; it is widely expected that the figure will hit 60,000 by the end of Calderon's term in December.) In 2011, there was a drug war-related death in Mexico roughly every half hour. Read more.

Mexico Drug Violence Shows Decline

The Wall Street Journal interviews Calderón and gets into veiled references to legalization and a morass of numbers on drug war deaths.  

WSJ: MEXICO CITY—Violence from Mexico's drug war is slowing, the country's president said, after years of steadily growing carnage that has traumatized its society, hurt the economy and damaged the nation's international standing.

Mexico's drug-related murders fell about 12% during the first five months of this year, President Felipe Calderón said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week. That marks the first decline in violence in at least eight years.

The president, whose term ends later this year, said Mexico was making real progress in the fight against organized crime, and that his eventual successor, elected in a July 1 presidential vote, should continue efforts to build honest cops and a working judicial system. Read more.

War on drugs takes center stage as Calderon meets with Obama

LA Times: The unchecked scourge of drug violence in Mexico and that country's campaign to hobble the cartels is expected to overshadow economic discussions when Mexican President Felipe Calderon visits the White House today.

Calderon will be meeting with President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss economic policies, climate change and security issues facing the three North American nations, according to the White House.

U.S. officials have been pushing for Mexico to reform the state-owned oil monopoly, Pemex, to open the country’s oil sector to private investment and develop new oil and gas reserves.

But the war on drugs will likely take center stage. read more

Americas Summit: Path from the Drug War to Peace

Upsidedown World: "The list is growing of sitting heads of state in Latin America who question the failed war on drugs and seek a debate on their legalization.

Besides the voices of presidents Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Felipe Calderón of Mexico, several Central American countries are joining the chorus, lead by Guatemala under the recently inaugurated government of Otto Perez Molina." read more

Drug War: Lopez Obrador vows to end the war on drugs by creating jobs

La Jornada: If I become president, “we’re going to stop the war (against organized crime) and there will be procurement of justice. We are not going to use this strategy, because it has not produced results. There will be employment, we’ll battle corruption and calm down the country, we know how to do it, I’m sure,” affirmed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador yesterday. 

In a press conference at the close of a private forum with security specialists and human rights defenders organized by Bernardo Batiz, who was presented as the future Attorney General if Lopez Obrador wins the elections, the presidential pre-candidate of the coalition Progressive Movement promised to end impunity.

“We’re going to do things differently, calling on everyone without imposing anything, without acting in an authoritarian way. We’re calling for reconciliation. We don’t want vengeance, we want justice,” he added.

Justice that would be applied humanely, Batiz explained, and not used for politics or publicity.

Lopez Obrador said that “politicians that want to resolve everything through the use of the media are responsible for the lack of security and violence, because they have not established justice, employment and wellbeing.”

And “when there’s a lack of public safety and violence, the only thing they do is stand in front of the camera with a serious face and say, ‘I will not back down, there will be an iron-fist approach.’ But what good is that if the root causes are not addressed?”

The precandidate of the leftwing coalition questioned the fact that faced with the situation they “look the other way and, continue a policy that produces poverty, resentment, hate, hostility, insecurity and violence; they want to resolve it with wars, threats of a crackdown and PR stunts.

“How are those who have no moral authority, who are dishonest and corrupt, going to guarantee justice? With what moral authority can they ask others to do right if they don’t do it themselves? And furthermore they let established interest groups make decisions just like in the past in this country.”

When asked about the case of Florence Cassez, the French citizen sentenced a 60 years in prison for kidnapping, he said he would make changes that would not allow for such an “embarrassing situation to occur. Batiz would be incapable of staging a show for publicity ends and falsifying evidence to condemn someone or try an alleged delinquent.”

The former city attorney general stated that Lopez Obrador’s platform aims to bring more peace and respect for the human rights of victims, witnesses and alleged delinquents. “We propose to move from a war where there are enemies to a justice system with humane criteria and no michoacanazos.”[ed. Mass arrests of politicians in the state of Michoacan criticized for being politically motivated and later thrown out of the courts for lack of evidence].

Strict law enforcement against those who commit crimes, “taking into account that the constitutional principle of social rehabilitation applies, as well as the presumption of innocence” because the use of arbitrary measures and force “brings bigger problems, at a higher social cost in lives and in the erosion of community,” he added.

Bernardo Batiz promised there would not be harsher laws, or more prisons or more soldiers in the streets. Nor “complicity with anybody”, or special treatment when it comes to certain criminals.

“If one thinks that the justice system is for television, if it’s used for media impact, and goes from being an action that should be strictly based on law to a spectacle, then we are on the wrong track,” he stated." Spanish original  

By Alma E. Muñoz

Translation: Americas Program 

Drug Policy Debate: Santos will Encourage Discussion on Drugs in the Summit of the Americas

El Milenio- After admitting that the fight against drug trafficking “is failing,” President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, host of the sixth Summit of the Americas, announced today that he will encourage a debate about illicit drugs in the upcoming continental forum April 14th and 15th.

According to the President’s comments, after looking at what has transpired over 40 years of combat against drug traffickers, Colombia has spilt the most blood. Santos declared that everyone must be willing to analyze all options to this problem during the meeting which will take place in the Colombian resort town of Cartagena.

“I am open to any option that might be better than what we have today and that the world stands beside. Colombia cannot even think about taking any unilateral actions,” said Santos, pointing out that for his country, the battle against drug trafficking is “an issue of national security.”

Colombia “can’t afford to lower its guard,” affirmed Santos in a television interview with “El Gran Reportaje (Grand Report).” “I believe that we have the moral authority, as a country, to open the discussion” in the upcoming Summit of the Americas where the 34 heads of state from each of the continent’s countries will meet.

After commenting that the war on drugs “is failing,” he referred to the United States’ opposition to the legalization of hallucinogenic drugs. “The United States says that legalization is worse. Well, let’s analyze whether it’s better or worse. For example, if the number of addicts rises, how much will it cost to treat those addicts compared to the cost of having a half-million, or who knows how many, people in prison for using or selling drugs,” he said.

“We cannot do anything if we don’t have concrete data and if we don’t analyze that data with experts,” Santos added while insisting in the necessity of “discussing the topic.” However, he warned that he would not be “the spokesperson for any cause” nor “the flag bearer of any initiative.”

“Simply put, along with many other countries, we are going to bring the conversation to the table. And we are going to participate very actively in the discussion—because, what’s more, we are one of the countries with the most experience in this area and with more moral authority on this issue,” Santos pointed out.

Colombia, which according to the UN is the main producer of cocaine in the world, waged an especially bloody war against the powerful drug cartels of Medellín and Cali in the 1980s. Spanish original

Translation: Mikael Rojas, Americas Program intern 

Drug war: Time for an exit strategy

latimes.com: "The death toll (announced last week by the Mexican government to be 47,515 people as of September) is incomprehensible and unacceptable. And to this toll must be added the thousands of people disappeared, the hundreds of thousands displaced and the hundreds of thousands of children left orphaned during this same five-year period.

This crisis will only continue unless the U.S. works with Mexico to address the root cause: drug prohibition.

These murders are not drug-related, they are prohibition-related -- committed by cartels that were spawned by drug prohibition, that derive their power from the inflated profits of prohibited but highly demanded commodities, and that operate in an underground economy in which violence is routinely employed to resolve disputes or remove business opponents. It's similar to what occurred in the U.S. during alcohol prohibition, but on a far more horrific scale." read more