Few signs of progress in bloody war on drugs

IT IS the sort of horror that Americans expect to find in distant wars in Africa or the Middle East, not on their doorstep.

On May 4th, nine bodies were found hanging from a bridge, the severed heads of 14 other people left in picnic coolers outside the town hall in Nuevo Laredo in Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.

Five days later, another 18 mutilated bodies were left in abandoned vehicles on a highway near Guadalajara.

Then, early on Sunday, the headless torsos of 49 men and women, whose limbs had also been amputated, were dumped, some in rubbish bags, others coated in dust and mud, along the highway between Monterrey and Texas.

At least 90 people were massacred in the first two weeks of May alone. Some are believed to have been Central American emigrants bound for the US, innocent bystanders in a conflict that has claimed 50,000 lives in five years.

Yet, despite the surge in atrocities this month, violence in Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs is actually decreasing, says Prof David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

“Improvement” may be too strong a word, but drug-related murders have fallen 20 per cent in the first four months of this year, compared to the same period in 2011, says Shirk.

“Public perception is that the violence got worse, because of the large-scale killings, and because it’s spreading to new places.”

For the time being at least, the blood-letting has returned to the levels of 2010 – a terrible year, nonetheless.

In recent months, Monterrey and the surrounding state of Nuevo León, where the latest atrocity was discovered on Sunday, have displaced Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua state as the epicentre of drug violence.

The shift eastward apparently has more to do with one drug cartel gaining the upper hand over another – a “narco-peace” similar to one reached in Tijuana – than with government success in fighting traffickers.

The US spends billions of dollars a year on the drug war, most of it within the US. Under the 2008 Mérida initiative, Washington commissions helicopters and drones to help Mexican authorities, and trains Mexican police, military and judiciary officials. The largest chunk of money goes towards patrolling what US officials call “a 21st-century border”.

“It is ultimately the great shame of the last decade that we’ve made all this effort, we’ve lost all of these lives and, at the end of the day, we’ve made no real substantive progress in reducing the availability of drugs, and the cost is extraordinary violence,” says Shirk.

Last October, Calderón hinted that the US should consider decriminalising or legalising some drugs, a solution long advocated by many experts. The US is the world’s biggest consumer of illegal drugs.

“The thing that empowers criminal organisations in Mexico most is the fact they have access to an extremely lucrative black market that enables them to buy guns and officials,” says Shirk.

On the US side, marijuana comprises 98 per cent of the bulk tonnage of drugs seized at the border. “This enormous haystack eats up agents’ time and distracts them from fighting terrorism and more harmful drugs,” he adds.

One in six arrests in the US are for possession of marijuana.

Mexican drug cartels have diversified into money laundering, extortion, kidnapping and trafficking in illegal migrants.

Fighting organised crime in Mexico is something of a shell game; if marijuana were legalised in the US, the drug traffickers could be expected to take up new forms of organised crime, albeit having lost a mainstay of their power.

As Shirk notes, “no US official can talk about legalisation and

be taken seriously”.

He says Republican presidential contender Ron Paul, who wants to legalise drugs, “is not taken seriously”.

“Yet, in opinion polls, 50 per cent of Americans support the legalisation of marijuana. It could quickly gain much broader acceptance, like gay marriage.”

Calderón is expected to lose Mexico’s July 1st presidential election, despite the fact that his conservative PAN party has improved the economy in the midst of global recession.

“Millions of Mexicans ask themselves if they feel personally secure, and the answer is no,” Shirk says. “They want to move the clock back to the time of the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]. It was not democratic, but the old ruling party looks like the party of stability.”

In the 41 years since then US president Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, the focus has moved from the French connection to Colombia to Mexico. If Mexico ultimately gains the upper hand over the drug cartels, the problem will shift to the Caribbean and Central America, Shirk predicts.

“Mexicans call it the cucaracha effect,” Shirk says. “You shine a light on the cockroaches and they scatter. That’s what we’re doing: trying to assert control over one area simply moves the problem, at incredible cost.”