Toronto Star: Why decriminalizing drugs is the only fix for Mexico’s ‘Murder City’

[marmar]

Why decriminalizing drugs is the only fix for Mexico’s ‘Murder City’
Published On Sat May 22 2010

By Oakland Ross
Feature Writer


Where else in the world do they have a single noun to denote a man who turns up dead in the trunk of a car?

In northern Mexico, they call the wretch un encajuelado, and the phenomenon has become a sufficiently frequent feature of the local landscape that it merits a word all its own.

Meanwhile, as if killing were not bad enough, beheadings have become a morbidly common feature in battles among the region’s drug gangs, often recorded on video.

In all, more than 20,000 Mexican lives have been sacrificed in drug-related violence since December 2006, in a conflict pitting federal authorities against the drug traders or the drug traders against each other.

Many of the gang leaders have been jailed or killed. But the narcotraficantes are definitely still in business, still sporting garish gold jewelry, still driving around in new SUVs, listening to bouncy, polka-like music called narcorrido, still supplying 90 per cent of the U.S. market for cocaine, with estimated annual revenues of, by one conservative estimate, somewhere between $15 billion and $23 billion.

“This is a war you can’t win,” says Carlos Dade, executive director of an Ottawa-based think tank, the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, or FOCAL. “That’s pretty much the consensus throughout the region.” .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/813051--why-decriminalizing-drugs-is-the-only-fix-for-mexico-s-murder-city

[FreakinDJ]

1. The drug war would just move North of the border.

no thanks

[JohnyCanuck]

2. The article calls for drugs to be legalized in the US too.

“The only way you’re going to reduce the violence and corruption is by legalizing the drugs,” says Teichman. “You can’t conclude anything else if you know what you’re talking about.”

American writer and journalist Charles Bowden agrees. He has recently written a searing account of life and death in Ciudad Juarez. Published last month, Murder City portrays a stricken community of 1.3 million people who witnessed 2,600 mostly drug-related homicides last year alone, a place where killers roam freely and everyone else is afraid.

Bowden calls on Washington to legalize narcotics as the only means of reducing the carnage.

Editors of The Economist have long taken the same view, albeit with heavy hearts, calling legalization “the least bad” of the mainly dismal choices available.

Of course we know that's not likely to happen. For one thing the "war on drugs", like most wars, is immensely profitable for those who supply the war materiel to the combatants and nowadays those who own and run the privatized prisons that need a steady supply of inmates to stay in business on the government dime.

The Merida Initiative is the name given to an agreement signed in 2006 by the Mexican president and George W. Bush, who was then his U.S. counterpart. It was essentially a declaration of war.

Under the plan, Washington committed to supply Mexico with $1.3-billion worth of helicopters, police training and other assistance in what was to be an all-out assault on the drug trade.

[Renew Deal]

3. People in the US need to smoke their joints

What's a beheading here or there?

[Peace Patriot]

4. The U.S. "war on drugs" is HORRIBLE. It is a thousand times worse than Prohibition

for CREATING mayhem and vast carnage. It is costing us BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars--transferred from our pockets to war profiteers' pockets. In Colombia, U.S.-funded narco-thugs are running the government and the military and tens of thousands of union leaders, human rights workers, political leftists, teachers, journalists, community organizers and campesinos have been murdered with U.S. funding, and 3 to 4 million campesinos have been displaced from their farm lands.

And it is a measure of how far gone our democracy actually is, that common sense has been unable to prevail, to stop this horrible "war." We are a country ruled by war profiteers in the service of multinational corporations. When they drive millions of small farmers from their lands, guess who profits? The big protected drug cartels, the super-rich and Monsanto, Chiquita, Occidental Petroleum, Coca-Cola, Drummond, et al. The "war on drugs" is not only a colossally failed program, it is not only extremely murderous and corrupt, it is another name for the vast transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

AP and NPR, who only do investigative reporting when a Democrat is in the White House, recently exposed the "war on drugs" in Juarez as the Mexican military warring against local drug traffickers on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel. BILLIONS of our tax dollars are going to this purpose--to favor the well-connected, biggest criminal gang.

Where the Bush Cartel fits into this picture, and their boy Calderon, is anybody's guess. But when did the Bush Junta fund anything, with our money, that was not corrupt in the extreme and a benefit to Bushwhacks?

So think about THAT. This carnage and mayhem in Mexico, Colombia and wherever the U.S. "war on drugs" has gone, is PURPOSEFUL. It is not incompetence. It is not a failure of common sense. The horrors in Mexico, Colombia and other places are a PROFIT-MAKING enterprise opportunistically built on the destruction of our democracy and our inability to hold our leaders to account.

It took Americans in the early part of the 20th Century only 13 years to conclude that Prohibition created crime, corruption, mayhem and death, and to END it. HOW LONG has the U.S. "war on drugs" been going on? It is the exact same program, writ very large, indeed. And what does it say about us, that we cannot stop it?

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Start with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines. Believe me. They are "manufacturing" our "consent" to these wars. Our common sense, as a practical and peace and justice-minded people, cannot prevail against them. They are the final blow--the coup de grace--to our democracy, a far rightwing, corpo-fascist project that has been in train for some time, and that has culminated in PRIVATE vote counting, with the 'TRADE SECRET' code now owned and controlled largely by ONE far rightwing-connected corporation, ES&S, which just bought out Diebold and gained an 80% monopoly of U.S. voting systems. You want to know why we can't end the "war on drugs" or any of the wars? This is why.