I have been reading more and more about the 40 year old War on Drugs and the failed policies that even the US has recognized is useless. There was a recent Summit meeting in Central America where the nations have banded together to see if they can come up with better solutions. This task will be Herculean. The problem lies in the consumption, not the supply chain and that means that the US needs to focus on its laws not burning coco fields in Peru. Here in Panama, we are fortunate to have a pretty good organization charged with catching and confiscating as much as possible but it is but a drop in the bucket. Same story different day, drugs head north, cash heads south.
Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore narcotics cop sums it up this way.
“When President Nixon declared the ‘drug war’ in 1971, we arrested fewer than half a million people for drug offenses that year,” he added. “Today, the number has skyrocketed to almost two million drug arrests a year. We jail more of our own citizens than any other country in world does, including those run by the worst dictators and totalitarian regimes. Is this is how President Obama thinks we can ‘win the future’?”
A Post report covering the recent conference continues the retoric.
As we have noted, Mexico’s five-year war on drugs has pushed the traffickers – and violence – across the country’s southern border into the Central American isthmus.
The cartels have moved easily into Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, taking advantage of minimal border security and local gangs that provide a ready-made criminal infrastructure. More than two-thirds of U.S.-bound cocaine shipments traveled through the region last year, up from just one quarter in 2006, according to U.S. data.
The region is now among the world’s deadliest, with an average homicide rate of 33 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to UN figures. The Central American Integration System – which is hosting this week’s summit – reports that drug violence has been responsible for 79,000 homicides over the past six years.
The problem is particularly acute in Guatemala, where last month authorities found 27 bodies decapitated and brutalized by Mexico’s Los Zetas cartel. The prosecutor investigating the crime was also murdered. Last week, Guatemala’s President Alvaro Colom extended the state of emergency in the northern border province Peten, which is now almost completely controlled by Los Zetas.
The Washington Post gives this account of the situation along the Mexico-Guatemala border:
“Two reporters traveled 500 miles over the border’s roads and rivers last week. To call this boundary “porous” would be to suggest that parts of it are not. For the indigenous peoples, ranch hands and smugglers who traverse it freely, there is no border at all. It is a line on a map.
On the Suchiate River near the Pacific Coast, boatmen pole makeshift rafts through the currents like gondoliers, ferrying beans, gasoline, beer and diapers into Mexico or Guatemala in plain view of authorities. The trafficking is so well established that ferrymen from Mexico and Guatemala alternate work days on the river.”
At the security summit this week, Colom and his fellow Central American presidents are expected to ask the U.S. for $1 billion to help push back the cartels, in addition to the $200 million in aid President Barack Obama promised earlier this year.
U.S. officials told the AP Monday that more aid is unlikely. Instead, the U.S. is focused on coming up with an approach that avoids simply repeating the hard line military strategy that has been the pillar of the U.S. drug wars in Colombia and Mexico. This time, they said, the discussion will also look at economic and institutional development issues, as well as ways the Central American governments can help themselves