DRUGS-LATAM: Against Ineffective Penal Approach and Repression

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 14 2003 (IPS) - The penal or police approach towards drug trafficking only punishes the weakest links in the chain: peasant farmers who grow coca – mainly Indians in South America’s Andes mountains – and poor urban drug-users, said participants in a meeting this week in Brazil on drug-related violence.

The ”war on drugs” pushed by the United States is ”a racially-biased war” and ”ethnically-based persecution,” since the main victims are indigenous people and people of African descent in the Andean nations, Brazil and the United States, said Daise Benedito, who is in charge of political coordination and human rights in the Brazilian non-governmental organisation (NGO) Fala Preta.

The only way to curb drug-related violence is to debate the decriminalisation of illicit drugs and move away from the increasingly militarised repression promoted by the United States, said experts meeting Wednesday and Thursday in Rio de Janeiro.

The origin of the scourge of drug trafficking can be traced back to the adoption of the Convention on Psychotropic Substances by the United Nations in 1971, said activist Pedro Santana, president of the Colombian NGO Viva la Ciudadanía.

Since then, efforts to fight drugs moved from the terrain of prevention and medico-social policies to the punitive or police approach, and the production, trade and use of drugs like cocaine, heroin, and marijuana were criminalised, he pointed out.

That fuelled drug-related violence around the world, particularly in large Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Cali and Medellin in Colombia. Meanwhile, the assumptions underlying that focus and the need to revise the legal and policy approaches that arose were never submitted to a broad social debate, he added.

Santana was speaking at this week’s meeting, which was preparatory to the Colombia Thematic Social Forum on ”Democracy, Human Rights, Violence and Drug Trafficking”, scheduled for Jun. 16-20 in the northern Colombian resort town of Cartagena.

Thematic forums are a mechanism adopted by the World Social Forum (WSF) for taking a more in-depth look at pressing issues, explained Cándido Grzybowski, director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis.

Grzybowski was one of the organisers of the first three annual editions of the WSF, which have been held since 2001 in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

The meeting in Cartagena, organised by Viva la Ciudadanía, is expected to draw 3,000 delegates from across the globe to discuss the problems of urban drug-related violence, human security, and displacement of populations caused by armed conflicts, said Santana.

In Colombia alone there are 2.7 million people – of a total population of 42 million – displaced from their villages and towns by violent crime, political violence and turf wars between the armed groups involved in that country’s civil strife, the activist noted.

Another concern are violations of fundamental freedoms and human rights in the name of the fight against terrorism, since counterterrorism laws were made tougher in the wake of the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

But drug trafficking and the violence associated with it were the main focus at this week’s preparatory meeting in Rio de Janeiro.

The ”demonisation” of drugs that have been used for medicinal or food-related purposes in the past, or have formed part of sacred rituals, was questioned by participants as a justification for a purely repressive approach that is becoming increasingly militarised and has been shown to be ineffective.

”Just Say No” or ”Public Enemy Number One” are two of the slogans illustrating the underlying assumptions of the U.S. ”war on drugs.”

That approach amounts to a negation of human history, because ”there has never been a society without drugs,” said Gilberta Acselrad, coordinator of the Rio de Janeiro State University programme on Citizenship and Human Rights.

For his part, Santana argued that police repression only punishes poor farmers and urban drug users.

Leftist guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries, and drug mafias all form part of the complex scenario of armed violence that has plagued Colombia for over 50 years.

The country has not yet finished building its ”national territorial unity,” said Colombian architect Fernando Patiño, an adviser to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) in Rio de Janeiro.

In Patiño’s view, the drug trade and organised crime fill ”vacuums,” or parts of national territories and sectors of the population regarded as ”useless” for today’s economy, which have mushroomed in the context of the globalisation process.

According to Professor Luiz Antonio Machado at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, the high level of urban violence in this city is a product of exacerbated individualism, cultivated over many years, and the collapse of social controls that kept alive prospects for development and economic growth, which have virtually disappeared.

This is a cultural problem, he said, which denotes a shift in today’s human relations and society, since people stop looking at others as their fellow creatures, and begin to see them as ”objects”, and strength and force becomes the chief regulators of interpersonal relations.

In the past, tribes and communities waged wars, but they fought an external enemy, not their own members, said Machado. In today’s fragmented societies, on the other hand, the bonds of solidarity have been replaced by violence.

The meeting also heard voices that are frequently ignored. Simone Correia de Menezes, the president of the Association of Families and Friends of Prisoners, whose husband has served 35 years and is still in jail, complained about the label ”organised crime” used to describe groups of drug traffickers.

The gangs are actually ”disorganised,” because otherwise there would not be so many deaths among their members, she argued.

Correia de Menezes dismissed ”intellectual” attempts at explaining why people are pulled into the drug trade.

Despite the enormous risk of dying young, ”It is a job like any other, only more available, already familiar, and more profitable” for young men who ”have no way to get a job,” she said.