US President Donald Trump (right) and Mexican counterpart Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador at the White House July 2020. Credit: Toa Dufour/White House

By Falko Ernst
MEXICO CITY, Oct 9 2020 (IPS)

Sporadic but spectacular acts of violence remind the global public of how deeply parts of Mexico have slid into lethal conflict over recent years.

The criminal groups that are the public face of this violence are hardly circumspect about their power. In a video dated 17 July, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation – one of the “five most dangerous transnational criminal organizations” worldwide, according to the U.S. Justice Department – showed off some of its better-equipped and trained foot soldiers and their state-of-the-art weaponry.

If the video seemed intended to broadcast the group’s paramilitary capabilities, that’s because it was. The display of force was a message to the government, a Jalisco Cartel operator told Crisis Group, “to take it easy” after the Mexican courts extradited the group’s leader’s son to the U.S. while freezing a number of its bank accounts. It was a way for the group to remind the authorities that “damage can be inflicted when arrangements aren’t being respected”, he said.

The failure of the “war on drugs” – now a welter of spreading conflicts – is a U.S.-Mexican co-production. Washington should stop pushing Mexico City to throw ever more military force at organised crime. Instead, it should help its southern neighbour find solutions tailored to each locale

Whether or not because of the video, tensions did in fact ease in the aftermath of its release, with the threat of further escalation receding and conditions returning to “normal”. In Mexico, however, normal has come to mean a state of perpetual conflict, which accounts for a large portion of the country’s steady death toll of more than 35,000 homicides per year.

Criminal Predation in a Pandemic

Unfortunately, north of the border, there is little public discussion of what is driving these levels of violence in Mexico. Instead, U.S. political dialogue tends to focus on one consequence of the violence – immigration.

President Donald Trump, who is now standing for re-election, first ran for office in 2016 on a mix of fearmongering about ostensible criminals, drug dealers and rapists coming over the Mexican border and promises that he would build a wall to keep them out.

Yet that campaign featured no meaningful discussion about how Mexico’s stubborn rates of lethal conflict are in reality a U.S.-Mexican co-production, fuelled by the very tactics that the U.S. has exported to fight the “war on drugs”. Nor, to date, has the 2020 presidential contest between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.

Nothing is likely to change for the balance of the election season, but once it is over it will be past time for whoever occupies the Oval Office to face these questions squarely – if nothing else out of self-interest. Having a neighbour affected by conflict and instability entails major consequences for the U.S, with the biggest being Mexico’s growing displacement crisis.

Mexican authorities are simply unable to protect citizens from criminal predation in an increasing number of regions, leading an estimated 1.7 million to abandon their homes due to insecurity in 2018 alone, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Geography and Statistics. Most of those forced to flee resettle within Mexico’s borders, but already in 2020 Mexican nationals have replaced Central Americans as the largest group apprehended while aiming to cross into the U.S.

The COVID-19 pandemic is only making the situation worse. Having killed approximately 80,000 Mexicans (a figure that could represent significant underreporting), the coronavirus has exacerbated the humanitarian situation and plunged the country into the worst economic crisis ever recorded, with GDP expected to fall by at least 8 per cent in 2020.

It has also seen armed groups try to consolidate their hold on communities, where they have taken on self-appointed roles from quarantine enforcement to distribution of goods and services. As desperation mounts, so will the drive of highly vulnerable people to seek a safer and more prosperous life elsewhere.

Washington and Mexico City can try to manage the flow of people by locking the border down even more tightly, but that is hardly an acceptable solution from a humanitarian perspective. It could also be difficult for both governments to sustain as the scale of the crisis grows and public pressure to address it increases.

Policymaking Inertia

Nevertheless, U.S. policymakers have thus far met the prospect of deepening disquiet in Mexico with inertia. They continue to support the militarised “war on drugs” that has been the anchor of bilateral security cooperation.

Recurrent threats by President Trump and other high-level U.S. government officials to sanction Mexico economically if it does not “demonstrate its commitment to dismantle the cartels” push Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to further increase the country’s dependence on the armed forces in public security matters, in spite of campaign promises to do just the opposite.

The problem is that, for the most part, militarisation has proven to be anything but a remedy. Since 2006, when the Mexican government – urged on by Washington – unleashed the military to deliver what it promised would be a swift, definitive blow to organised crime, the situation has by many measures only gotten worse: more than 80,000 Mexicans have been disappeared and annual murders have quadrupled.

The overall number of those who have met a violent death in this period, which is north of 330,000, is more than twice the number of conflict-related fatalities recorded in Afghanistan since the U.S. invaded in 2001.

Compounding the problem is pervasive impunity. Fewer than one in ten murders get resolved in the justice system – and the line between state officials and the criminals they are supposed to rein in is not only thin but occasionally non-existent.

To offer just one prominent example, a chief architect of the latest iteration of the war on drugs, former federal Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, is being tried in a U.S. court for alleged collusion with the Sinaloa Cartel. (He denies the charges.)

A Series of “Stupid Wars”

The lack of accountability has allowed the armed groups to expand their businesses far beyond the illicit drugs that were once their primary domain. With their predatory “thiefdoms” spreading out over Mexico, groups use territorial control as a means of squeezing revenue out of whatever commodity is locally available, chiefly through extortion.

The story repeats itself across the country. In Guerrero, gold mining has come to supplement heroin smuggling. In Michoacán, limes and avocados are add-ons to methamphetamine. In Chihuahua, illegal logging has come to accompany marijuana cultivation. The expansion of their business portfolio into licit commodities and crops increases the criminals’ power over people and politics – and bolsters their ability to fend off crackdowns.

Blame for this deteriorating situation falls at least in part on the war on drugs’ flawed kingpin strategy, which is based on the belief that arresting or killing criminal leaders makes criminal organisations implode. These groups do indeed die, but their parts live on, very often pitted against one another in countless feuds over parcels of land.

Michoacán is emblematic. This state was dominated by a single criminal organisation until, in 2014, the federal government sent in its troops. With help from other illegal armed groups, the army succeeded in breaking up the once dominant organisation, arresting one of its top leaders and killing the other.

But after authorities failed to follow through with sustained institution- and peacebuilding measures – for example, to free law enforcement from corruption, provide youngsters with ways out of criminal groups and offer local populations licit economic alternatives – armed conflict bounced back.

Today, the number of armed groups operating in the state has risen from one to twenty. Most are splinters of the once dominant group, and none has been able to impose itself fully on the others. The fighting has become perpetual.

Moreover, Michoacán mirrors the nationwide trend. In 2006, there were six criminal conglomerates fighting it out in a handful of regions. In 2019, the number reached 198, according to a Crisis Group analysis of online citizen journalists’ websites called “narco-blogs”.

The result of this hyper-fragmentation of armed conflict has been the birth of a series of “stupid wars that nobody has control over and that don’t end”, as one criminal lieutenant allied with the Jalisco Cartel said. Yet he – and hundreds of others – keep at it, killing, disappearing and displacing enemy operatives and those perceived to have ties to them.

Children and women are no longer excluded as targets. In Guerrero’s highlands, for instance, as part of a string of forced displacements, one armed group has driven hundreds of civilians out of their communities out of suspicion that they could in some fashion be tied socially or economically to its competitor.

A former cocaine trafficker, active until the mid-1990s, reflected upon the changing logic of violence by saying “today’s narcos aren’t even narcos anymore”. He suggested that today’s criminal actors no longer adhere to the informal norms of conduct that his contemporaries once followed.

While trying to gain the upper hand in fights over territories and markets, criminal groups also try to draw state actors onto their side. All too often they are successful, with devastating effects on law enforcement. “Whoever is supported by the state grows”, as the Jalisco Cartel lieutenant summed up the situation.

The alleged collusion between top narco-warrior García Luna and the Sinaloa Cartel is but the tip of the iceberg; similarly troubling arrangements can be found in the government’s lower echelons.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Given the overlap between the state and the criminals it is fighting, there are no meaningful enemies or front lines in this war. The war is not winnable. There are, however, clear and feasible steps Mexico can take to mitigate and eventually end its armed conflicts, with support from its partners in Washington.

Most critically, the government should pivot away from a one-size-fits-all approach that treats the use of force as the primary solution to every crisis and ignores who and what drives lethal violence at the local level. In what has become a mosaic of regional conflicts, circumstances matter and have to form the basis for effective policy.

Officials will thus need to understand not just the armed groups that are fighting but also the politicians and businesspeople who are aligned with them and the resources they are all fighting over. They will also need to get a handle on how to make control of these resources less profitable by alerting consumers about goods that come from criminally tainted supply chains, whether gold being purchased in Canada or avocados in the U.S.

Mexico’s government also has to invest more, with the support of the U.S. and other international partners, in social and economic programs that can divert vulnerable young people who might be drawn into the armed groups.

Likewise, it should step up efforts to provide youngsters with ways out of armed groups through demobilisation programs. Transitional justice mechanisms could also help communities come to terms with their fraught pasts and interrupt years-long cycles of revenge killings.

The focus for these efforts should be those regions where conflict is most intense, and that account for the bulk of Mexico’s violent deaths and displacement. Bold policies introduced by past and current administrations have often foundered as a result of indiscriminate application of one reform model to many different settings.

Concentrating resources and efforts on regional intervention plans that have been devised on the basis of close study of local conflict dynamics would be a better way to make progress, even if the gains appear on the surface more limited.

Even with these changes, there will still be a role for the use of force in managing these conflicts, but that role will be different than it is today. Security forces might be used to support the foregoing initiatives and their beneficiaries, who would likely be targets of violent attacks and criminal co-optation.

They might also be deployed to deter brazen criminal aggression against those local populations whom data show to be most vulnerable to displacement and other abuses. But while the state would continue to employ force where needed, it would no longer be the primary and only tool for rooting out insecurity.

Finally, key to the success of any new initiative to staunch lethal violence in Mexico will be a push to clean up the institutions charged with protecting the public from crime, and that for decades have been riddled with collusion and corruption. Various criminal operators have told Crisis Group that “reaching agreements” with police and armed forces commanders is routine.

These understandings depend on security institutions such as the armed forces remaining largely self-governing and impervious to oversight. To develop a more reliable group of officials to carry out the policies described above, the government will need to introduce transparency and accountability mechanisms throughout the security forces and to give them teeth through external watchdogs.

Which brings us back to Washington. To be successful, any solution to Mexico’s conflicts will require backing from the U.S., which would be well advised to rethink, and ultimately overhaul, the militarised approach to law enforcement it has exported to Mexico.

The U.S. government, in championing, designing, financing and, in effect, imposing the war on drugs on its neighbour, hoped it could purge the country of the corrosive social, political and economic impact of the narcotics trade and bring greater stability to the region.

Since the late 1960s, it has invested in this vision, pouring wave after wave of U.S. taxpayer dollars – billions all told – into the effort. But while U.S. resolve was enough to persuade Mexican leaders to go along with this scheme, reliance on iron-fist militarisation has proven a failure.  It is time for Washington to grasp this hard truth and change its course. If it wants to see peace across its southern border, it must support Mexico in moving away from the war footing that has spawned so much conflict.

This story was originally published by International Crisis Group, You can find the full report here.

Eight-year-old Juan de Dios Torres, whose five-year-old sister Zoe Zuleica Torres went missing in December 2016 on the outskirts of the northeastern city of San Luis Potosí, participates along with his mother in the brigade searching for the remains of missing people in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Credit: Marcos Vizcarra/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
NAVOLATO, Mexico, Feb 1 2017 (IPS)

Juan de Dios is eight years old and is looking for his younger sister, Zoe Zuleica Torres Gómez, who went missing in December 2015, when she was only five years old, in the northeastern state of San Luis Potosí. He is the youngest searcher for clandestine graves in Mexico.

With pick and shovel, in the last week of January he joined the Third National Brigade for the Search for Disappeared Persons, which on Monday Jan. 30 found the remains of a body in a grave hidden in a corn and sorghum field on the communal land in Potrero de Sataya, in the municipality of Navolato, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

It is the second body found by this brigade, made up of a handful of women and men who search in the ground for signs of their children, siblings and parents gone missing during the years of the so-called war against drug trafficking, together with human right defenders and Catholic priests.

“A problem that has not been recognised cannot be solved, nor can it heal,” said Juan Carlos Trujillo Herrera, who is behind the creation of the brigades, told IPS during the brigade’s work in Sinaloa.

“All the public prosecutor offices in the country are saturated with this issue, there is no structure in place that would allow us to think that the institutions are going to work. That is why we have had to go out to look ourselves for our family members,” insisted Trujillo, who is searching for four disappeared siblings.

On taking office in December 2006, right-wing president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) militarised the security of the country to combat the drug mafias and threw Mexico into a spiral of violence from which it has not escaped.
One aspect reflects the seriousness of the problem: before that year, the Mexican government identified seven major drug cartels. Ten years later, there are nearly 200 organised crime groups operating in the country, according to information published this month by the Drug Policy Programme of the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching (Cide).

The data from Cide, one of the country’s most prestigious educational institutions, also registers at least 68 massacres in that period of time.

In 10 years, the so-called war on drugs launched by Calderón has left more than 177,000 murder victims, 73,500 of them during the administration of his successor, the also conservative Enrique Peña Nieto.

It has also left at least 30,000 missing people, although registers on disappearances vary greatly among the different authorities and civil society organisations.

In 2011, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity headed by the poet Javier Sicilia brought to the forefront the issue of forced disappearance, reporting hundreds of cases in this country of 122 million people.

But it was in October 2014, with the forced disappearance of 43 rural student teachers in Ayotzinapa, in the southwestern state of Guerrero, and in January 2016, when five young people were detained and “disappeared” by state police in Tierra Blanca, in the state of Veracruz, that the country discovered that many of the disappearances attributed to organised crime were actually carried out by the authorities.

“That is why they did not look for them,” said Miguel Trujillo, Juan Carlos´ younger brother.

Since then, groups of family members who, desperate because of the absence of the state, started their own searches, have mushroomed around the country.

To do this, they train: they take courses in forensic anthropology, archeology, law; and they gear up: they buy caving equipment, they get trays to find small bones; they form crews and have become experts in identifying graves and bones.

The first brigades were organised in March 2016 in Veracruz, a state in eastern Mexico where several clandestine graveyards have been discovered, where the remains of160 people have been found so far.

There are now at least 13 brigades in the country. And since Jan. 24, different groups have gone out into the field in Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Sinaloa, where people belonging to brigades from five states arrived for a 12-day collective search.

“There are two different kinds of searches, for people who are alive or for people who are dead. I think this is where we’re failing, because we also have to look for people who are alive, but the thing is that nobody was doing this,” said Juan Carlos Trujillo.

The groups are supported by civil society organisations, such as the Marabunta Peace brigade, a group of young people from Mexico City who provide security for the families.

“It is very hard for young people to deal with these realities, for them to not get disillusioned with humanity, but escorting the groups gives them hope. Because when they realize that they are able to help, they find hope and they reaffirm themselves as builders of peace,” Miguel Barrera, the head of Marabunta, told IPS.

Sinaloa is the land of the cartel created by the powerful drug lord Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán, who was extradited to the United States on Jan. 19.

The brigade has made two findings: the one in Potrero Sataya and another in the municipality El Quelite, 10 km from port Mazatlán. The little boy from San Luis Potosí came with his mother, to help search for human remains.

“This is something we have to do because the government is not doing it and it was never going to,” said Mario Vergara, who founded the group The Other Disappeared from Iguala, the municipality where the students from Ayotzinapa disappeared, and now helps brigades all over the country.

“We are making progress in terms of organisation and we are going to continue. The people that remain in each state are going to learn how to coordinate to carry out better searches; we need to replicate the model in each state and engage the governments to help the search groups,” said Miguel Trujillo.

By Tenu Avafia and Rebecca Schleifer
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 21 2016 (IPS)

In many countries, a criminal record, even for a minor offense can have serious implications. Being convicted of a criminal offence renders one ineligible for certain jobs, social grants or benefits or from even being able to exercise one’s right to vote. It can also severely limit the ability to travel to certain countries and can result in the loss of custody of minor children. As prison conditions are often poor and health care services limited, a custodial sentence can have implications on the health outcomes of individuals.

Laws criminalizing drug possession for personal use and other non-violent, low-level drug offences drive people away from harm reduction services, placing them at increased risk of HIV, Hepatitis C, Tuberculosis and death by overdose. Prison sentences for women may result in the incarceration of their infants and young children, who stay with them for all or part of their sentence.

Another area where the shortcoming of many drug control policies is evident is that of controlled medicines. Overly restrictive drug control regulations and practices, have effectively excluded 5.5 billion people – or approximately 75 percent of the world’s population – from access to essential medicines like morphine to treat pain.

Many countries are exploring or initiating law and policy reforms with the aim of giving greater prominence to the Sustainable Development Goals as adopted by UN Members States in September 2015 or as enshrined in numerous human rights treaties. Some of these reforms will address the social harms of traditional drug policies on the poor and most marginalized. These include providing alternatives to arrest and incarceration for minor drug offences, harm reduction programmes, decriminalization of drug users and small farmers and increased access to pain medication.

One such example is the case of Jamaica, which decriminalized the possession and use of small amounts of cannabis and legalized its cultivation and consumption for religious, medicinal and research purposes. Jamaica also reformed its legislation to permit expungement of convictions for the personal possession or use of small quantities of cannabis. These decisions were prompted, in part, by concerns about the serious harmful consequences of criminalization on the long term prospects of young men who otherwise would be ensnared in a legal system that could undermine access to for example decent employment and economic growth as envisioned by Sustainable Development Goal Eight.

Jamaica’s reforms recognize that the connection between drugs and crime is not so straightforward. They put people first and in turn promote its citizens human development. The implications of this measure, together with others described in a recent discussion paper released by UNDP will be important as more countries look to make evidence informed, development sensitive changes to drug policy.

(End)

Excerpt:

A youth smokes diamba (marijuana) at a gang base in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 20 2016 (IPS)

International drug conventions ultimately aim to ensure the health and welfare of humankind, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said here Tuesday at the opening of a special three-day session on drugs known as UNGASS.

Convened by the 193-member UN General Assembly, the meeting brought together government officials, UN agencies and civil society organisations to review the current international drug control regime.

In his address, Eliasson noted the sensitivity of the subject but urged for collaboration and action.

“It is…important that we listen to each other and learn from each others’ experiences, not least of how the well-being of people is affected,” he stated.

“We must base our decisions on research, data and scientific evidence. And we must not shy away from new ideas and approaches – even if these sometimes may challenge traditional assumptions,” Eliasson added.

However, the ongoing discussions reflect a deep discord regarding drug policy within the international community. UNGASS, which was due to be held in 2019, was advanced to 2016 at the request of the leaders of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, countries that have been at the frontline of drug-related violence.

Ahead of UNGASS, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos remarked on the failure of war on drugs in an opinion editorial for the Guardian.

“Vested with the moral authority of leading the nation that has carried the heaviest burden in the global war on drugs, I can tell you without hesitation that the time has come for the world to transit into a different approach in its drug policy,” he wrote.

“This is not a call for legalisation of drugs. It is a call for recognition that between total war and legalisation there exists a broad range of options worth exploring,” President Santos added.

Since the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs, states have focused on the criminalisation and eradication of drugs. However, evidence has shown that this approach has not only failed to reduce the production and consumption of drugs, but it has also negatively impacted human rights, health and development around the world.

In Colombia, production of the world’s supply of coca leaves stood at less than 10 percent up to the 1980s. However, following the United States-led war on drugs in Peru and Bolivia, which funded crop eradication programs and anti-narcotics policing, cocaine production was pushed northward into Colombia. By 2000, the country cultivated an estimated 90 percent of the world’s coca leaves.

Despite US-funded anti-narcotics operations in Colombia in the 1990s, drug-fuelled violence spiked and contributed to the Western hemisphere’s longest war. Approximately 220,000 civilians were killed and more than five million were displaced during the Colombian armed conflict.

Meanwhile, Colombia continues to be a major coca and cocaine producing country.

Public health concerns also arose from the use of glyphosate in aerial spraying campaigns which were conducted for over two decades to eradicate coca crops. In 2015, the World Health Organisation warned that the herbicide could cause cancer.

In the U.S. itself, the criminalisation of drugs has led to unprecedented levels of incarceration. The north American nation currently has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, many of whom have been imprisoned for drug offences.

Mass incarceration and drug-policing disproportionately impacts African American communities.

Though Whites use drugs five times more than African Americans, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offences at 10 times the rate of White drug users, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

This has produced social costs that do not stop until long after prison sentences end, if at all.

A nation-wide study found that the majority of formerly incarcerated individuals were unable to access employment, education and housing. Approximately 67 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals in the study were still unemployed or underemployed five years after their release.

Many families also lose income and struggle to meet basic needs when a family member is incarcerated and unable to earn wages. In the same study, nearly 2 in 3 families with an incarcerated member were unable to meet their family’s basic needs, and 70 percent of those families include children. This perpetuates a vicious cycle of poverty and further incarceration with little if any change in drug consumption and production nationally.

The U.S. has begun to address the issue, implementing changes in its criminal justice system. During the National Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta in March 2016, President Barrack Obama highlighted the need to change drug approaches.

“For too long we’ve viewed drug addiction through the lens of criminal justice,” Obama said at the conference.

“The most important thing to do is reduce demand. And the only way to do that is to provide treatment – to see it as a public health problem and not a criminal problem,” he continued.

In the last two years, Obama has commuted 248 sentences of non-violent drug offenders who were harshly sentenced as a result of the war on drugs. The U.S. Justice Department also plans to release 6000 drug offenders following a drug law reform which reduced punishment for federal drug offences.

The UNGASS has incorporated some of these perspectives, experiences and evidence in its newly and unanimously adopted outcome document which aims to more effectively address the world drug problem.

In the document, the General Assembly has called for alternative measures to conviction and proportionate sentencing for drug-related offences. It also highlights the need to increase access to health services and treatment and address root causes including poverty.

However, many have already criticised the session and outcome document as being insufficient to effectively address the global drug issue.

Global Drug Policy Observatory’s (GDPO) Senior Research Officer Julia Buxton told IPS of her disappointment stating: “The outcome document is shameful – a hapless fudge…it goes against science, reason, evidence, best practice and lessons learned in decades of failed efforts,” she concluded.

She added that the outcome of meeting would move towards not only evidence-based approaches, but also harm reduction based approaches.

Harm reduction includes a set of strategies utilising a social justice lens to reduce negative health consequences associated with drug use.

“It demonstrates how fundamentally out of touch many national bureaucracies and governments are with the urgency of change and tragically, will condemn another generation to violence, disease, overdose, stigmatisation and rights abuses,” she concluded.

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), approximately 27 million people are problem drug users. As of 2015, there has been little change in the production, use, and health consequences of illicit drugs.

A Bolivian cocalero shows his leaf-picking technique. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 26 2014 (IPS)

This week, the U.N. reported that coca cultivation in Bolivia fell nine percent last year, and a massive 26 percent in the past three years.

Two mid-altitude regions – Yungas de La Paz and the Cochabamba Tropics – account for nearly all cultivation in Bolivia and both areas saw significant reductions in 2013. Remarkably, illegal cultivation in Bolivia’s national parks was cut in half, to only one thousand hectares.“A very small country challenged the basic premises of U.S. domination and policy implications, and it succeeded." -- Kathryn Ledebur

The nationwide decrease, to an area of only 23,00 hectares, or 12 miles, is widely regarded as a laudable achievement, but overlooked is the fact that Bolivia’s success has come on its own terms – not Washington’s – and with vital cooperation from many of the country’s small coca farmers.

“Bolivia reduced the crop through eradication efforts, but also with the participation of coca growers and farmers,”Antonino de Leo, U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime’s representative in Bolivia, told IPS.

“They are doing this in a climate of participation and dialogue – they call it social control,” he added. “Not only does the government have a target for illicit cultivation, but it’s the very same as what farmers and the union of farmers have.”

After his election in 2005, President Evo Morales, himself the former head of the country’s Cocalero union, began negotiating with farmers and their unions, working to convince them that mutually agreed upon cultivation totals would mean higher prices and a sustainable income for tens of thousands of subsistence growers.

Indeed, last year, the price of coca in Bolivia, already higher than in neighbouring Colombia and Peru, rose a further seven percent, from 7.40 dollars to 7.80 dollars per kg.

While the total value of Bolivia’s coca crop fell from 318 million dollars to 283 million dollars, farmers for the most part no longer live in fear of having their livelihoods destroyed by the severe eradication efforts that were funded by the U.S. and characterised drug policy in the Andean nation for decades.

A militarised response favours criminal gangs and armed factions and leads to a concentration of illicit wealth among those groups. In Bolivia, the annual coca allowance of one cato – usually 1600 square metres – is seen as a sort of minimum wage, rather than a bonanza for a small elite.

Unlike in Peru and especially in Colombia, where forced eradication, fumigation and seizures are still the preferred method of handling illegal coca production, farmers in Bolivia allow officials to visit and measure their mountainside fields – measurements that are then verified by satellite data.

Because of this, data reported by the government closely match U.S. figures (they were identical in 2012), while the two sets of numbers can vary wildly in neighbouring countries.

“Nothing is done entirely without friction, but it has done away with cycles of protest and violence and the deaths of coca growers,” Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, told IPS. “There continue to be human rights violations, but in the past they would rip out all their coca and there was no plan for how they should eat in the meantime.”

In Colombia, the government destroys roughly 100,000 hectares every year. Because small farmers often have no economic alternative, they replant coca, and the cycle begins again.

Bolivia’s programme does have strict limits and well-defined geographic allotments for growing. Any plants found to be in excess of the cato or in areas not approved for cultivation are destroyed.

“Good practices show that in order to reduce illicit crops in a sustainable way and avoid the balloon effect, there is a need to combine eradication efforts with long-term participatory development programmes that create real opportunities for the farmers, and they need to be comprehensive,” said de Leo.

In 2008, Morales expelled U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg; the following year the Bolivian government kicked the DEA out the country, and drug funding from the U.S. ceased.

The moves were a precursor to a carefully planned re-working of Bolivia’s obligations under the U.N. convention system that governs global drug policy. In 2011, the country took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the 1961 convention on Narcotics Drugs, but the following year re-acceded – with the stipulation that Bolivia be allowed to maintain a legal domestic market for coca leaves.

The decision was accepted by the overwhelming majority of member states, who accepted that coca was a traditional plant used, without abuse, by millions of Bolivians.

Like various other efforts, including marijuana legalisation in several U.S. states, the decision served to chip away at a uniform and prohibitionist legal interpretation of the conventions. But unlike Uruguay, Washington and Colorado, Bolivia has official approval from the international community.

“If 15 years ago someone asked what would happen to an Andean country that loses all U.S. funding, we’d be talking about Marines coming in and things falling apart, but none of those things have happened,” said Ledebur.

“A very small country challenged the basic premises of U.S. domination and policy implications, and it succeeded,” she added.

Last year, the U.S.government cited Bolivia’s withdrawal from the conventions when it decertified it for failing “demonstrably to make sufficient efforts to meet its obligations under international counternarcotics agreements.” But in the same memorandum, authorities acknowledged the “pure potential cocaine production” of the country had decreased 18 percent in 2012.

While Bolivia may have made peace with its coca growers, it’s still the third largest producer of cocaine in the world. In 2013, the government destroyed over 5,000 cocaine production facilities and maceration pits and seized 20,400 kilogrammes of cocaine paste.

Fueling production in the Andes is the growth in demand in Brazil, today the second largest cocaine market in the world behind the U.S.

“As long as there is a solid demand for cocaine, it’s going to be very difficult to compete with coca – it will always be a very attractive crop,” said de Leo.

Though users are generally not criminalised for use to the extent in other countries, law 1008, a draconian, U.S.-influenced legislation signed in 1988 still underpins drug policy in the Bolivia. A lack of clarity in the law means a worker labouring inside a cocaine factory can be treated the same as a powerful “narcotraficante”.

Law enforcement efforts still tend to target the poorest members of Bolivia’s society. One survey found 60 percent of prisoners were earning less than 300 dollars every month before they were arrested.

“They pursue interdiction in a very traditional way,” said Ledebur.

Buoyed by his successes, Morales has announced a goal of further reductions in the coca crop, down to 14,700 hectares. To this point, curtailment has been sufficiently absorbed by growers, but greater cuts could run up against opposition. If farmers feel squeezed, Morales, the former coca grower, could find he’s bit off more than he can chew.

Unmarked graves of victims of Colombia’s half-century civil war, like this one in La Macarena in central Colombia, are scattered across the country. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Adam Schaffer and Gimena Sanchez
WASHINGTON , Jun 3 2014 (IPS)

After half a century, Colombia may put an end to its conflict—if the U.S. will allow it.

Colombia has been the host of some of the most extreme and brutal violence in Latin America’s history. The country’s half-century long conflict has taken the lives of almost a quarter million women, men, and children, and displaced nearly six million more.

The United States has financed much of the conflict in recent years, investing nine billion dollars since 2000 – much of it to bolster Colombia’s security forces.

Yet peace may be near. On May 16, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest guerrilla group, signed a preliminary accord on the third of five negotiating points in their ongoing peace talks in Havana, Cuba: illicit drugs.

The agreement offers a viable plan for the FARC to end its involvement in the Colombian drug trade, alternatives for small-scale cultivators of crops destined for illicit drug markets, and meaningful policy reforms at the national level for addressing issues of drug consumption and public health.

Hope too lies with an announcement that came earlier the same day. Following national and international pressure – including an inter-parliamentary letter signed by 245 representatives from the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland – the FARC announced a unilateral ceasefire.

While the government maintains that it will not end military operations until an agreement is signed, and though the FARC’s temporary ceasefire ended on May 28, this act is encouraging because it significantly decreased violence and will likely increase confidence at the negotiating table.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, hundreds of thousands of Colombians continue to be affected by the conflict every year. Ensuring that all parties respect international humanitarian law is essential and will likely help to advance the peace talks.

Domestic political shake-ups, though, threaten to disrupt this progress. In the first round of Colombia’s presidential elections on May 25, sitting President Juan Manuel Santos, who began the talks to the dismay of many former political allies, came in second to conservative hardliner Oscar Ivan Zuluaga.

Zuluaga, who is allied with former president (and current senator-elect) Alvaro Uribe, has made clear his scepticism towards the talks.

While he has now softened his stance in advance of the runoff election, his long-time opposition to the process remains concerning. Santos and Zuluaga will face off in a second-round vote on Jun. 15.

A step closer toward meaningful drug policy reform

The accord on the drug issue – declared a “partial agreement,” as no individual agreements are final until all points on the agenda have been agreed upon – is little short of historic.

The language, which was agreed upon by both parties, reflects a significant shift away from the prohibitionist approach to drug policy.

Adopting some of the proposals of the growing community calling for drug policy reform, the accord acknowledges that “evidence-based alternatives” to current policies are needed to address problems that may be associated with drug consumption, and distinguishes between the cultivation of crops for the illicit market and drug trafficking.

Furthermore, it calls for the expansion of crop substitution programmes, recognising that many rural communities rely on coca and opium poppy cultivation for their economic livelihoods.

However, it stipulates that “supportive measures…will be conditioned to…agreements on substitution and no-replanting,” implying that cultivators would be required to cede their earnings from crop cultivation before they see the benefits of alternative crops.

Experience in Latin America has shown that conditioning assistance on total eradication harms the chance of developing lasting alternatives, as cultivators lack a successful bridge between when the cultivation of crops for the illicit market ends and alternative livelihoods become sustainable.

Not surprisingly in these circumstances, many growers return to the cultivation of coca and poppy crops. A more effective model would be to offer a phasing out period and/or subsidies to cultivators until meaningful alternative livelihoods are actually in place.

Yet while proper sequencing on reducing crops for the illicit market will need to be reviewed, the parties get it right on local involvement. Opting for what one Colombian analyst described as “building the state from below,” the development programme would rely heavily on, and actively engage with, local communities to ensure their participation – and hence the programme’s sustainability.

The most monumental point came with the government’s concession to de-prioritise -though not entirely retire – the destructive and ineffective aerial herbicide spraying of coca crops, opting first for alternative development and manual eradication before spraying crops.

In more than a decade of its use in Colombia, aerial spraying has served only to disperse coca crops, destroy poor farmers’ livelihoods, and engender local distrust for government authorities, as the only contact many communities have had with the state has been the occasional visit of a plane spraying crops.

The agreement also addresses drug consumption, an issue generally thought to be outside the purview of the peace talks. While details here are scant, linking this issue to the peace talks will help continue regional debates on drug policy reform. Recognising that drug policy should be based on respect for human rights and public health is a valuable contribution.

But a full agreement, if eventually signed, will not be a panacea. Taking the FARC out of the cultivation and trafficking business will not independently solve the drug issue or the associated violence.

As long as there is worldwide – and particularly U.S. – demand for drugs, criminal organisations will find a way to supply them. Furthermore, an accord will likely leave a power vacuum in rural regions of the country as the FARC demobilises and cedes those territories.

There is a good chance that right-wing paramilitary successor groups and criminal gangs will try to fill it. Establishing a positive state presence and providing basic services will be a major challenge, especially in regions where the armed forces have been the primary face of the state.

Supporting peace from Washington

Because of these continued challenges, the United States has an important role to play in the implementation phase, both in supporting Colombia financially and in granting the Colombian government political space to implement the accords – even when they contradict U.S. policy priorities.

A State Department communiqué on the drug policy agreement, which highlights the continuation of forced eradication, raises questions about whether the United States will help or hinder the advancement of the peace process.
Nearly two of every three aid dollars destined for Colombia goes to the public security forces. Will the U.S. government be willing to shift aid to build peace rather than continue war?

Achieving durable reductions in poppy and coca crop cultivation for illicit drug production will require implementing alternative livelihoods and connecting long-forgotten rural areas with the national infrastructure.

After decades of waging a largely ineffective “war on drugs” in Colombia, will the United States allow its long-time ally to break with the prohibition-focused model and explore alternatives to the current militarised approach? Some of the most revolutionary agreements in the accord, such as all but ending aerial spraying, would challenge the existing U.S. approach.

These questions, and the many more that will be raised as the talks progress, will likely dismay hardliners in the U.S. government who are not ready to shift drug control tactics.

But with little progress to show after decades of violence and billions of dollars spent, the Colombian and FARC negotiators have made an important step toward ending decades of violence. The United States should stand ready to support Colombia, both financially and politically, in the coming months and years – and it should know when to stand down.

Adam Schaffer is an analyst with the Drug Policy and Colombia programme at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which promotes human rights, democracy, and social justice by working with partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to shape policies in the United States and abroad.  Gimena Sanchez is a Senior Associate for the Andes at WOLA. This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.

“We are making history: Uruguay approves the regulation of marijuana” reads this poster by an advocacy group that lobbied for state regulation and control of marijuana. Credit: Courtesy Proderechos.

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 12 2014 (IPS)

Uruguay, about to become the first country in the world where the state will fully regulate production, sale and distribution of marijuana, will spend the next few months selecting a good quality strain of the crop that can be sold at a price similar to current illegal prices.

Uruguayan President José Mujica signed law 19.172 on the regulation of marijuana on Dec. 23. But it won’t go into effect until April, 120 days after it was approved by Congress on Dec. 10, and once the government has established specific regulations for the new legislation.

Since the 1970s, consumption and possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use have not been penalised in this South American country of 3.3 million people sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil. But cultivation, sale and distribution of the drug have been illegal up to now.

When the 44-article law enters into force, the entire sector will be under the regulation and oversight of the Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis, a new government institution created by the law.

But there is much to do before April. Among the most important steps are to decide the type of marijuana to be planted, who will grow it and at what cost, and what price it will fetch in the pharmacies.

The registries of users and others involved in the different marijuana-related activities also have to be created, as well as the so-called cannabis clubs, to ensure the traceability of the legal strain of marijuana.

Social organisations and activists are studying the best way to produce competitively-priced high-quality marijuana while involving small and medium Uruguayan producers and preventing foreign companies from taking over the activity.

The aim of the law is to “put the availability of marijuana for users in the hands of, or under the control of, the state,” Senator Roberto Conde of the left-wing governing Broad Front told IPS.

“A free market of marijuana or other drugs is not being created here,” Conde explained. “People will have access to marijuana by planting it themselves, in cannabis clubs, or from pharmacies, by presenting their ID card.”

Legal marijuana – up to 40 grams a month (around 40 joints) – will only be available to residents of Uruguay who have signed up for a federal registry.

Individuals will be allowed to grow up to six plants or 480 grams a year.

“That is what is technically estimated as reasonable, to keep someone from falling into problematic use of the drug,” the senator said.

Martín Collazo, with the Proderechos human rights group, said public health will be the area that most benefits from the law. “Eighty-five percent of users of illegal drugs in Uruguay only consume marijuana,” which means the illegal market could shrink by a similar percentage, he argued.

“Contact with the clandestine market facilitates access to other substances, like cocaine or ‘pasta base’ [a cheap cocaine derivative], which are sold in the same places,” said Collazo, who also belongs to the Responsible Regulation coalition, made up of organisations and personalities in favour of the regulation of marijuana.

The price of marijuana to be sold in authorised pharmacies has not yet been set. Collazo estimates that the price per gram should be between 1.00 and 1.50 dollars – the current cost of illegal cannabis.

“There is a big comparative advantage in terms of quality, because illegal marijuana is very bad,” the activist said. But he warned that it can’t be more expensive than on the illegal market, “because there would be a segment of the population that would continue to buy it on the black market.”

Proderechos has been working with agronomists and economists since November, and has formulated production models that confirm that marijuana could be produced in Uruguay at that price.

The Drug Policy Research Centre based in Santa Monica, California says illegal production and sale of drugs is more expensive because of the high costs of security, transport and protection of merchandise.

Collazo believes practice will show to what extent that is true. If marijuana has to be cheap, he said, the quality is likely to be inferior to what is sold in the Netherlands, where the drug is legally sold in special coffee shops.

“But we don’t have to reach that level of quality in the first year,” he said. “This has to be seen as a gradual process of developing the chain of production.”

He explained that the production of one ton of good-quality marijuana could cost around 250,000 dollars – between 0.25 and 0.30 cents per gram – “in a low-tech setting, with one or two harvests a year.”

The expert said that in the current clandestine market, the marijuana comes from Paraguay, and includes “leaves, stems, really bad quality flowers, and additives like ammonia, which are put on the compact bricks to keep them from drying out in transportation.

“Now we’re talking about selling buds,” without leaves or stems, which, “even if they are not big and beautiful are an excellent quality flower,” he said.

“We are generating our own information, with the support of different professionals, and we are coming up with proposals that we will formally present later,” Collazo said.

The aim, he said, “is to generate production schemes that can easily be followed by small and medium producers at a reasonable cost, and that will put marijuana on the market at a price similar to those on the black market.”

There are already people planting marijuana in Uruguay, producing supposedly standardised varieties.

Regarding the possibility of guaranteeing traceability of the drugs circulating in the new regulated market, Collazo suggested “trying to get growers who produce for the pharmacies to always plant the same strains.

“If the growers take the authorised strains and use cuttings from the mother plant, they’ll always have the same crop, genetically,” he said.

That traceability would only be lost when producers introduce new varieties, he added.

Collazo said it would be easy to maintain traceability in sales through pharmacies in the tightly regulated and controlled new market.

But “other solutions would have to be studied for people who grow their own pot, and for the cannabis clubs, because those are much more difficult to control,” he added.

Senator Conde, on the other hand, said it would be easy “because from a scientific point of view, the advances made today are so huge that molecular traceability of the substance is possible, and in Uruguay we have sufficiently developed technology, and whatever we don’t have, we can ask for.

“Instead of setting a price, a fee will be set for users to pay for the public service of making a product that is chemically controlled from every point of view available to users,” he said.

Conde added that whether or not the state will subsidise marijuana in any form “is being debated” in the government.

“This will be decided within the 120 days we have for creating the regulations for the law. I don’t know if a subsidy will be necessary to implement it. If it is, it wouldn’t be an isolated subsidy, but just one more cost in our overall health policy,” he said.

There are between 18,000 and 20,000 habitual consumers of marijuana in Uruguay, and between 79,000 and 100,000 people who use it a few times a month.

A group of drug users in a Dhaka suburb. Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron, Map/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 7 2013 (IPS)

An internal United Nations draft document leaked last weekend has offered outsiders a rare look at longstanding disagreements between member states over the course of U.N. drug policy.

The document, first publicised by the Guardian and obtained by IPS, contains over 100 specific policy recommendations and proposals from member states, many at odds with the status quo on illicit drug eradication and prohibition.“Countries feel real pain. But they are being told they should strengthen interdiction.” -- Guatemala's U.N. Ambassador Gert Rosenthal

It confirms a widespread belief that discontent is growing among national governments and in the corridors of New York and Vienna, where the leak originated from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

In a candid proposal, Norway calls for “questions relating to decriminalization and a critical assessment of the approach represented by the so-called War on Drugs.”

“It’s not particularly news to me,” said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Programme. “What’s news is that we are talking about it.

“I think there is this sort of façade put up by the U.N. as a whole, which is ‘we are one big happy family’, but that hasn’t been true for years,” she told IPS.

As early as 1993, Mexico told the U.N. General Assembly in a letter that because “consumption is the driving force that generates drug production and trafficking, the reduction in demand becomes the radical – albeit long-term– solution of the problem.”

But despite recent moves in Latin America and Europe towards policies of harm reduction, U.N. reforms remain mired in mid-20^th-century dogmas and perennial horse-trading between member states.

As prices drop for drugs that are purer by the year, governments continue to spend 100 billion dollars annually on enforcement measures. The U.N. estimates the illicit drug trade has grown to over 350 billion dollars per year. And by 2050, the number of illicit drug users is set to rise by 25 percent.

In the document, Switzerland notes “with concern that repressive drug law enforcement practices can force drug users away from public health services and into hidden environments where the risk of overdose, infection with hepatitis C, HIV and other blood-borne diseases become markedly elevated.”

Switzerland elsewhere voices support for the Organisation of American States (OAS), which this year proposed alternative forums for discussions of international drug policy. The OAS has been outspoken on the damage that drug traffickers – attracted by voracious North American consumption and potentially huge profits – have wrought on large swaths of Latin America.

In September, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina told the U.N. General Assembly “we have clearly affirmed that the war against drugs has not borne the desired results, and that we cannot continue doing the same waiting for different results.”

Among the recommendations, Ecuador asks that “special efforts are made in order to achieve significant reduction of demand” and that enforcement measures are completed “with full respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states and human rights.”

“Countries feel real pain,” Gert Rosenthal, Guatemala’s U.N. representative, told IPS. “But they are being told they should strengthen interdiction.”

Such documents are whittled down, behind closed doors, into unified policy recommendations. In this case, a consensus statement will be presented at the High-Level Review by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs next March in Vienna. That meeting will set the stage for a Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly in 2016, when member states are expected to outline an updated drug policy for the next decade.

The consensus process, which can give outsized control to already powerful pro-interdiction countries like Russia and the U.S., has come under criticism, says Tom Blickman, a research at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.

“If one country is blocking reform, they can be successful,” Blickman told IPS. “Countries are tired – it shouldn’t be this way.”

In negotiations, the EU speaks on behalf of all its members, further homogenising opinion, says Malinowska-Sempruch. “The voice of Portugal and other more progressive countries get drowned out because they are part of a bigger block.”

A spokesperson for UNODC told IPS it had a policy of not commenting on draft documents and would not speak about the consensus process.

Since the heavily U.S.-influenced 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics laid the groundwork for the modern “war on drugs,” countries have struggled to navigate its legal obligations. Much as later conventions led to the normalising of individual drug testing, the agreements in effect required countries to practice virtual total prohibition in order to gain acceptance internationally.

Today, most countries still schedule drugs based on guidelines set in 1961 and in the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

Under the 1961 convention, certain plants and their derivatives are considered prima-facie illegal. But under the 1971 convention, which applied to psychoactive and pharmaceutical drugs mostly produced in Western countries, prohibition only follows proof of a drug’s danger. The disparity means that in the eyes of international law, chewers of cocoa leaves in the Andes are considered as aberrant as Oxycontin or methamphetamine abusers in the United States.

“Certain drugs have been demonised and it’s hard to turn the clock back,” said Blickman.

In the U.S., the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 had introduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, assuring a nascent private prison industry with a steady flow of inmates. And a final 1988 U.N. convention required signatories to criminalise the possession of drugs included in the previous conventions, overnight creating a global criminal class of drug users.

In its draft recommendations from the leak, the U.S. reasserts the three conventions “remain the cornerstone of the international drug system.”

How far, how quick?

For countries like Uruguay, where marijuana decriminalisation awaits only a procedural Senate vote, skirting the agreements can be a delicate game of geopolitical chicken.

The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), a quasi-judicial organisation charged with keeping tags on countries’ compliance with the three agreements, threatening the proposed law “would be in contravention of the 1961 Convention on Narcotic Drugs.”

“Looking at Switzerland, or Germany that has heroin injection sites, or Netherlands with coffee shops, or Portugal or Uruguay, it is clear there are countries that think there should be different policies,” said Malinowska-Sempruch.

But while these countries may make headlines – Portugal removed all penalties for drug users in 2000 – smaller states fear offending the likes of the U.S. and Russia, perennial aid sources and holders of Security Council veto power.

Under U.S. law, the Department of State must every year publish a report that includes evaluating whether foreign aid recipients meet the “goals and objectives” of the 1988 agreement.

“Not that many care about drugs enough to fight so hard and make enemies, because they know they will need those votes for what they really care about,” said Malinowska-Sempruch.

Most UNODC funding comes from member states, which can attach strings to “special-purpose funds.”

This means countries can maintain both private and public stances on drug policy. Switzerland, which began offering heroin-assisted treatment for addicts in 2008, backtracked this week in a press statement that stressed the leaked document was part of a “brainstorming” session and that it “does in no way support any efforts or attempts of changing the three U.N. Drug Conventions as they are today.”

As for 2016, Blickman says it’s important the special session be organised not just by UNODC but also by the U.N.’s human rights and development arms.

But while the session could prove a pivotal turning point, activists also say reform will likely first come out of piecemeal efforts to disentangle the conventions’ cascading legal web. Because the agreements exist in so far as countries enforce them, simply ignoring their mandate could as effective as anything else.

“There is leeway in the convention,” says Blikman. If countries start flouting them, the “INCB couldn’t do anything except maybe not allow certain (pharmaceutical) drugs into the country.”

If that trend continues, an ignored INCB could eventually be relegated to the scholarly study of an historical document.

Cocalero shows leaf-picking technique. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Dec 4 2013 (IPS)

Despite looming differences over Colombia’s drug policy, President Barack Obama renewed his support for a peaceful settlement to the civil war that has plagued the country for over half a century in a meeting with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos Tuesday.

The White House visit came as the Colombian government is engaged in the third stage of negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest guerrilla organisation. Analysts say it will be a difficult one, particularly because of how the U.S. might react to some of its components.“The end of fumigation is one of the principal demands of the FARC, and the Santos government has shown greater openness to discussing alternatives to the practice." -- Cynthia J. Arnson

“Many officials in the Obama administration … including Obama himself, have had very positive and supporting things to say about the peace process, and I think that at a political level there has been unequivocal support,” Cynthia J. Arnson, the director of the Latin American Programme at the Wilson Center, a think tank here, told IPS.

“But this round is going to focus on counter-narcotics and drugs, and the Santos government has been one of the governments at the forefront in the region calling for a rethinking of the way counter-narcotics policy is conceived of and implemented,” she said.

Arnson was referring to Santos’ openness to discussing alternatives with the FARC that would not be particularly popular with Washington, which has long funded aerial fumigation of coca crops – the widespread spraying of tens of thousands of coca hectares.

“The end of fumigation is one of the principal demands of the FARC, and the Santos government has shown greater openness to discussing alternatives to the practice,” she said.

At the same time, other analysts, while recognising the delicacy of the issue and the disagreements of some members of the U.S. government over alternative options, believe that in the end, the Obama administration will support any settlement that will enhance the chances of a peaceful solution.

“There are certain sectors within the U.S. government that will not be happy with some of the options that Santos is considering, but I think that most of the weight of the government will back him,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a leading think tank on Western Hemisphere affairs here, told IPS.

“If that [considering alternative options] is what needs to be done, Obama and the State Department will do whatever Santos needs to achieve an agreement.”

With regard to his recent openings to the FARC and how they might be perceived from the outside, the Colombian president told reporters Tuesday that, although “some people say we’re giving in to FARC, this is nonsense, absolute nonsense. I decided to open a peace process with them because every war must end with some kind of negotiation. I am very conscious that we will have enemies, but I am also conscious that this is the correct step.”

In a break with tradition, Santos’ predecessor, Alvaro Uribe has strongly and repeatedly criticised Santos for negotiating with the FARC and another guerrilla group, the ELN (National Liberation Army), from his current perch at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank.

His denunciations have themselves drawn criticism here, particularly from Democrats who note that Santos was hand-picked by Uribe as his defence minister and that the former president himself often displayed great leniency toward right-wing paramilitary groups accused of human-rights atrocities.

Labour rights

The two heads of state also discussed progress on the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, a bilateral agreement that came into effect in May 2012 with the goal of strengthening commercial ties and creating jobs in both countries.

At the core of the agreement is the Labor Action Plan. Announced on Apr. 7, 2011, the Plan contains a series of provisions aimed at protecting Colombian workers, an issue the U.S. government had particularly emphasised as a precondition to signing the trade deal.

On Tuesday, the White House noted progress on the Plan and acknowledged its continued commitment to its implementation. According to critics, however, the Plan hasn’t shown any results yet.

“Any claim that there’s been progress is not correct,” Gimena Sanchez, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights watchdog here, told IPS.

“Colombia has made advances only on paper and they are not based on real results,” she noted, urging the U.S. government to seek a more active role in ensuring the Plan’s implementation on the ground.

“The U.S. needs to find ways to go there, and move beyond just looking at the veneer of what Colombia is representing,” she said.

Colombian officials, however, argue that the country is moving forward. “What we care about the most today is everything that is related to equality and reducing poverty,” Juan Carlos Pinzon Bueno, Colombia’s minister of national defence, said at a gathering at the Brookings Institution here Monday.

To that end, he noted that the government has managed to reduce the country’s double-digit unemployment to about nine percent, an achievement he labeled as a “substantial improvement.”

High unemployment is critical, he said, “because money helps solve social problems. [To that end], we’re creating more formal employment and social security.”

The 17th round of peace talks, representing the third step in the negotiation process, began Nov. 28 in Havana, Cuba behind closed doors. Only a few days before the round’s beginning, Santos announced his intention to run for re-election in next May’s presidential elections.

An eventual victory would provide him with four more years to continue peace negotiations with the FARC.

Marijuana grown for medicinal purposes. Credit: Coleen Danger/CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday issued surprise guidance directing its attorneys not to sue states that have moved to decriminalise the recreational use of marijuana, so long as those states implement strict regulatory regimes.

The announcement marks a turnaround for the administration of President Barack Obama, who in January refused to explicitly support cannabis legalisation. Yet analysts are also suggesting that the new policy stance will have significant repercussions for countries that have been at the receiving end of the U.S. “war on drugs”.

“This action is of enormous significance, especially in Latin America, where the United States has for decades been the chief cheerleader for and major exporter of its own punitive drug policy,” John Walsh, a senior associate for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a rights group, told IPS.

“Latin American and other countries have felt bound by various treaties not to experiment with regulatory approaches that they think could do a better job, so the significance here is in providing space in the knowledge that the U.S., at least, is not in a position to pressure them anymore.”

Indeed, the United States is seen as the major architect of three United Nations treaties that codify four decades’ worth of “prohibitionist” anti-drugs policies. While these policies today constitute the global norm, some analysts suggest it is currently breaking down."As the so-called 'war on drugs' enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it, and the approaches that comprise it, have been truly effective."
-- Eric Holder

In the United States, strict “mandatory minimum” jail sentences have brought the federal prison population to record numbers in recent years. Of the country’s 219,000 inmates – called “historically unprecedented” numbers – half are locked up on drug-related and overwhelmingly non-violent charges.

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder rescinded mandatory minimum sentence guidelines for a range of crimes, including non-violent drug offences.

“As the so-called ‘war on drugs’ enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it, and the approaches that comprise it, have been truly effective,” Holder stated on Aug. 12, “and … to usher in a new approach.”

“Affirmatively addressing” priorities

Thursday’s announcement will remove several significant hurdles for lawmakers and entrepreneurs in the states of Washington and Colorado, where in November voters approved the legalisation of the production, distribution and use of non-medical marijuana. Such policies would be among the most permissive anywhere in the world, but they also directly contradict federal law.

In the context of this discrepancy, in recent years the Justice Department has continued to carry out irregular raids and harassment of growers and distributors of medical marijuana even in the 21 states that have formally authorised the physician-prescribed use of the drug. (Sixteen states have also decriminalised first-time offences for small amounts of cannabis.)

The new guidelines now direct federal attorneys not to pursue litigation so long as marijuana is not being sold to minors or funnelled into states that have not legalised its recreational use.

While the Justice Department memorandum will provide increased legal certainty for those involved in these new experiments in regulation, it goes much further than offering mere grudging promises not to interfere. Rather, officials suggest that de-criminalisation of marijuana could ultimately be more successful than criminalisation in achieving a menu of stated federal policy aims.

“A robust system may affirmatively address those priorities,” the memo states, “by, for example, implementing effective measures to prevent diversion of marijuana outside of the regulated system and to other states, prohibiting access to marijuana by minors, and replacing an illicit marijuana trade that funds criminal enterprises with a tightly regulated market in which revenues are tracked and accounted for.”

Long-time critics of the United States’ punitive approach to drugs interdiction have lauded the move, noting the heavy toll that communities in and out of the country have been forced to pay for drugs policies originating in Washington.

“Existing policies that rely heavily on criminalising drug use undermine human rights and have entailed serious costs in terms of violence and abuse,” Maria McFarland, deputy U.S. programme director at Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, said Friday.

“It’s encouraging that the Justice Department memo recognises that a regulated drug distribution system may be helpful in reducing the power and wealth of criminal groups. Violent organised crime, well financed by revenues from illicit drug markets, poses a real threat to human rights and the rule of law globally. It’s crucial that governments look at alternative ways of regulating not only drug use but also the drug trade.”

New paradigm?

Several Latin American countries are already actively looking at such alternatives. Most notable is Uruguay, which earlier this month approved draft legislation that would both legalise and nationalise the production and distribution of marijuana.

Several possible regulatory approaches are also being discussed in the Mexican Congress, while leaders in several other countries, from Colombia to Guatemala, are also increasingly exploring alternatives.

“Other governments have been less outspoken than Uruguay but they are nevertheless watching what happens there very closely, hoping to learn from Uruguay’s experience and see how similar approaches may work in their own countries,” WOLA’s Walsh says.

“As a result of the new U.S. decision, these countries will now enjoy greater political space to pursue similar legalisation proposals of their own.”

Such moves have been bolstered by a recent landmark series of reports by the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS). Those reports (available here and here) were notable in appearing to explicitly advocate for alternatives to the longstanding U.S.-led model of criminalisation.

“Decriminalisation of drug use needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy,” one of the reports states, noting in particular that “it would be worthwhile to assess existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalisation or legalisation of the production, sale, and use of marijuana.”

At a summit in Guatemala in June, the OAS member states approved the reports’ policy vision of drug use as a health rather than criminal issue. Over initial U.S. resistance, they also agreed to devote a General Assembly next year to coming up with a new drugs-related action plan.

“We are potentially on the cusp of the collapse of the existing international counter-narcotics regime,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, told IPS when the OAS reports came out. “And it looks like the Latin Americans could be the ones to pull the plug.”

Alfredo Corchado. Credit: Samuel Lopez

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jul 16 2013 (IPS)

The violent drug war in Mexico’s borderlands has changed the face of the country, injecting fear into both average citizens and the journalists trying to tell their stories.

Alfredo Corchado, Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, reported from the sidelines, and received death threats while bearing witness to the upheaval in his country. He chronicles these stories in his new book, “Midnight in Mexico”, which will be published in Spanish this fall.

For journalists in Mexico, the situation is dire. Often cited as one of the worst places in the world for the press, a 2011 joint U.N. and Organisation of American States report ranked Mexico as the fifth most dangerous country in the world for reporters.

There are currently 12 journalists missing in Mexico, more than anywhere else in the world; Russia ranks second, with eight missing, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Offices of newspapers have been attacked with a car bomb, arson and gunfire.

IPS correspondent Lucy Westcott spoke to Corchado, who was born in Mexico but grew up in El Paso, Texas, about belonging to two cultures and the situation on the ground for journalists south of the border. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What has the reaction been to your book, particularly from those who belong to two cultures? How do they feel about you bringing border issues to light?

A: I usually find people who want to connect with Mexico, or those who want to reconnect. There are many Americans who used to travel there, but have grown afraid and now stay away. They want to hear that Mexico is getting better, that there is hope and life there will return to “normal”, whatever that means.

People are also seeking to reconnect to the land of their parents and ancestors, and questioning whether it’s okay to embrace Mexico and its culture and language.

While some are genuinely curious about what went wrong with Mexico, others are annoyed that I picked a title like “Midnight in Mexico” for my book. All I ever wanted to do was speak to the possibility of the country. The reaction, though, has been overwhelmingly positive.

Q: What was your experience like covering the border? Did the death threats you received make you think twice about what you were reporting on?

A: As I grew up in El Paso, covering the border was always like sidestepping in two worlds; it was the best laboratory for someone who dreamt of becoming a foreign correspondent. But it became a nightmare and a place of anguish and pain.

Sometimes as a journalist, you work in these places and don’t quite understand what the rules of engagement are, which makes it much more dangerous for those trying to tell stories and investigate murders. There are several times I have thought about not setting foot on the border again.

But I can’t turn my back because to honour my profession, we have to find ways to tell those stories. They need to be told, or more than a generation will be wiped totally from our memory.

Q: What is the state of journalism like in Mexico due to the drug war?

A: You have two Mexicos: one is more prosperous, with a more vigorous press trying to hold government accountable, seeking answers and doing hard-hitting stories.

Then you have regions where the press has generally been silenced and forced to censor what they write, and where reporters live in fear for their families and for themselves. In these regions, there is no such thing as investigative journalism; democracy is just a term because readers aren’t informed to make the right decisions.

Being a reporter in these regions is being in a state of constant fear. Imagine working in a newsroom surrounded by suspicion and mistrust of your own colleagues. That happens in many parts of Mexico today.

Q: What steps can Mexico take to regain its footing? Can anything be done to solve the drug problem?

A: I think in some ways Mexico had to go through this painful awakening. Did 100,000 people have to die, or disappear? Of course not, but I think the violence has brought some Mexicans closer together.

There’s also a real effort to strengthen judicial institutions and to try and make rule of law work in real life. Yes, the U.S. can try to do a lot more to curtail drug demand, the flow of guns heading south and corruption seeping into U.S. agencies. But powerful organised criminals will continually find a way to challenge government, societies and undermine the potential of any country, particularly Mexico.

Q: As a journalist and someone who is used to reporting, what was the experience like of writing a book?

A: It was the most painful, difficult process I have ever experienced, to go from a reporter, comfortable on the sidelines, watching and recording events, to suddenly searching within myself.

I was a reporter by day and a writer in-between. It took a lot of music, deep reflections and opening up my soul, often with the help of some tequila, to get in touch with myself. In the end I poured every bit of me into those pages. I now have to get used to both sides, living simultaneously.

Excerpt:

Women and children from the village where the Esparza family was murdered by soldiers in Mexico's "drug war" demand justice outside the schoolhouse.Mónica González /IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Following the release of a major draft report on drug policy in the Americas, the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza, called for the beginning of debate aimed at reforming those policies throughout the region.

“Delivering this report today,” Insulza said Wednesday, “we are encouraged by the sincere aspiration, which I now have the privilege of presenting to the entire hemisphere, that this is not a conclusion but only the beginning of a long-awaited discussion.”"A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways.” -- John Walsh of WOLA

The draft report was shared with the 35 member countries of the OAS and is now scheduled to be discussed in depth at the upcoming organisation’s general assembly, on Jun. 4 in Guatemala.

The call for a new debate comes in light of a strengthened resolve on the issue throughout the region. This relates to the violence associated with drug trafficking as seen along the U.S.- Mexico border, as well as an increased prevalence of drug use and growing demand for health care services to treat addictions.

While acknowledging shortcomings in the implementation of current policies, some countries are continuing to defend the overall approach, and are encouraging a plan of action adopted by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) branch of the Washington-based OAS. This approach calls for the continued concentration of efforts to reduce both supply and demand, as well as measures in line with United Nations conventions on drug law.

The new OAS discussion will inevitably be energised by the recent surprise legalisation of marijuana in two U.S. states in November.

“A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways,” John Walsh, a senior associate with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“The report points to the need for flexibility to pursue options that may imply national and international reforms, including legal and regulated cannabis markets. And it emphasises that this more open debate is really just now beginning.”

Many of the region’s leaders have expressed frustration with the limits and exorbitant costs of current policies and their desire for a fuller and more creative debate.

But according to Walsh, who participated in writing the OAS report, there is a lot of scepticism over whether the OAS will be up to the task, especially given U.S. domination of the issue. But he also emphasises that the new report represents a good first step in the direction of a more constructive and nuanced debate.

“Drug policy is an international issue as well as a domestic issue and it can be hard to separate them, especially when you’re talking about drugs trafficking across borders – if it’s an issue in Colorado, chances are it is related to the issue in Mexico,” Walsh, who released a paper on this issue earlier this week, told IPS.

“In the case of cannabis in particular, the U.S. has been the chief advocate for international drug conventions that place strict controls on cannabis. However, as the U.S. begins to revisit and alter its cannabis laws, this will certainly have an effect on how the drug conventions are seen within the U.S. – and, and in turn, in Latin America, because all countries in the Americas are signatories of the same treaties.”

The OAS draft report even explores the potential creation of legal and regulated markets that would reflect these changes taking place in the United States.

“Changing U.S. public opinion towards cannabis is being reflected in changes in state policy, which has already placed the U.S. at odds with the drug conventions,” Walsh notes. “And while some of the Latin American states might be feeling a bit puzzled by the U.S.’s new approach to drug policy, others are seeing an opportunity to have similar proposals.”

Yet significant differences remain in public attitudes on this issue outside the United States. Walsh suggests that while public opinion has led government policy in this county, governments would need to lead public opinion towards legalisation in many Latin American countries.

Cannabis disconnect

Following the November elections here, a looming disconnect has opened up between where the United States seems to be going on cannabis policy and how the U.S. is asking other countries in the region to act. This is most evident in the case of Mexico, with Washington continuing to push the Mexican government to use its security institutions to forcefully crack down on the illicit cross-border drug trade.

For the moment, it appears unlikely that this policy will change. Yet some analysts say they are already seeing a fundamental shift in this dynamic, with Latin American governments taking the lead for the first time, in trying to define drug policies in the region.

Depending on how it proceeds at the meeting on Jun. 4, the new OAS report could be a central component of this shift. Beyond the cannabis issue, for instance, the OAS report offers a range of proposals and alternatives to be considered which, if adopted, would dramatically change the way drug policies are implemented.

This is happening after years in which the U.S. government was able to largely dictate such policy. Very recently, however, Latin American countries have been examining the drugs problems they’re dealing with on an individual level – and to decide on the most appropriate policy responses.

“Most of the considerations of new cannabis policy involve examining the potential to separate the cannabis market from the wider black market for illicit drugs,” Colletta Youngers, a long-time Latin American drugs expert with WOLA, told IPS.

“This is both to protect the people who want to obtain cannabis from having to go into criminal markets, and also to the extent that cannabis is a big part of illicit drug revenues that are for now entirely in criminal hands and to put those revenues into the hands and control of the state.”

Still, she admits that for the time being the issue of legal, regulated cannabis markets is a priority for some U.S. states, but not yet for the national government. But Youngers also points to countries such as Uruguay – where such a law is currently pending – and others that are currently exploring such issues.

UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov on a visit to the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 10 2013 (IPS)

Tuchinha was once a drug lord in Rio de Janeiro’s Mangueira favela. But today he is helping youngsters in this Brazilian city turn their lives around and leave behind crime, prison and the likelihood of an early death.

Franciso Paulo Testas Monteiro, better known as Tuchinha, climbed to the heights of the criminal world. Because he could read and write – he went to school through the fifth grade – and was good with numbers, he was put in charge of the accounts of one of Rio de Janeiro’s main criminal bands.

He became an almost mythical figure in the world of organised crime as the drug baron of Morro da Mangueira, a violent shantytown where drug traffickers held sway. Half of his life – 25 years – was dedicated to the drug trade.

He had plenty of ready cash, women and other perks. But in his ascent, he paid a high price. He spent a total of 21 years in prison, serving two different sentences, and both he and his family lived with death threats.

Today, at 49, he says he is repentant. “I grew up in Mangueira, I was a leader,” he told IPS. “I had money, women, jewels, but I didn’t have freedom. When I ventured outside my neighbourhood, I had to hide, or else I had to actually leave Rio. If I had had an opportunity to do so, I would have changed my life earlier.”

It was Aug. 5, 2011 when he left drug trafficking behind forever, after he was invited by the local NGO AfroReggae to give workshops to help young people leave behind a life of crime.

“I did many bad things, and gave orders for many others to be committed,” he said. “I paid heavily for it, with my freedom. Today my role is to rescue those who want to leave crime behind, and I am the living proof that a life lived in peace is worth it.”

Tuchinha visits prisons to talk to young inmates, and he helps mediate in conflicts in violent neighbourhoods.

“We want to give the same opportunity I had to people who want to get back on track, abandon crime, and live in peace with their families. Many of them feel hopeless, but I tell them there is hope.”

The former drug boss is an advocate of amnesties for prisoners, so they can have a chance to begin a new life.

He is confident that he will be able to finish school, and hopes to live in a safer city, for the sake of his children.

Tuchinha works to convince young drug dealers and traffickers to join AfroReggae’s “employability” programme. Created in 2008, the programme has so far managed to find jobs for more than 3,100 people.

Daniela Pereira da Silva, 35, spent three years in prison and is now one of the programme coordinators.

“I form part of the statistics on women, which show that most women in prison are there because they had a boyfriend or husband who was a drug trafficker,” she told IPS.

The aim of the programme, she said, is to help ex-convicts enter the labour market. “Demand has been strong, and we’re also open to residents of communities where drug trafficking groups operate, and to relatives of ex-convicts, to boost family incomes and keep them from falling back into crime,” she said.

Tuchinha and Silva formed part of the group of former drug traffickers supported by AfroReggae who met with the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Yury Fedotov, on his first official visit to Brazil, May 7-9.

The meeting, which was attended by IPS, took place in AfroReggae’s main offices in the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela or shantytown, situated behind the world-famous Ipanema beach.

Pavão-Pavãozinho is one of the favelas “pacified” by the authorities under Rio’s strategy of regaining state control over areas ruled by armed drug gangs, by means of a heavy, permanent police presence combined with increased spending in the areas of health, education, sports and income-generating activities.

Fedotov visited the city to learn first-hand about the social and public security programmes underway in Rio’s favelas. “I came to Brazil to see how successful experiences of combating crime in Rio de Janeiro could be adapted to other places with similar security issues,” he said.

He added that the favela pacification project was apparently working, and said it was the first time he had seen anything like it and he was “very impressed”

“Such initiatives are enormously instructive for UNODC as they can provide a roadmap on how to reintegrate ex-traffickers in an effective and creative way as part of overall crime prevention interventions,” he said.

The Russian diplomat said he could see the changes since he visited Rio 10 years ago. He also expressed his admiration for the people who had the courage to leave behind a life of crime.

Mangueira and Pavão-Pavãozinho are two of the 32 favelas in Rio de Janeiro pacified by the police. The authorities’ goal is to set up a total of 40 police pacification units (UPPs) in the city’s poor neighbourhoods by 2014.

At least one million of the six million people in Rio proper (Greater Rio has a population of 11 million) live in some 750 favelas, a number of which are still ruled by drug gangs.

“Our policy used to be focused on repression, which generated more conflicts and deaths,” the commander of the local UPP, Major Felipe Magalhães dos Reis, said at the meeting in Pavão-Pavãozinho. “The police didn’t tackle the causes of violence, but its effects. Meanwhile, criminals had increasingly powerful weapons.”

The cost of the “war on drugs” was high in terms of loss of life, he acknowledged.

The police say more than 2,000 police were killed between 1991 and 2008, another 10,000 people died in confrontations with the security forces, and 170,000 guns were seized.

“There was no solution in sight, until the idea of creating the UPPs emerged,” Magalhães dos Reis said.

“Social inclusion and community development are essential components in preventing crime,” Fedotov said, adding that the experience could be adapted to other countries, especially the elements of social integration, pacification and alternative means of life.

Brazil is a transport point for the international drug trade. In addition, internal consumption has spiralled and it is now a major market for drugs.

During his visit this week, Fedotov met with government officials to discuss future cooperation, in regional and global associations.

In Brasilia, he told reporters that Brazil was a global actor, and that UNODC was interested in its support and participation in global issues like the fight against transnational organised crime and illegal drugs.

Ahead of President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, experts here are expecting that security will take a back seat to issues of economic cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Credit: cc by 2.0

But some Washington advocacy groups are sounding alarms about shifting away too soon from critical security and rights concerns.

“A lot of the focus is going to be on economics,” President Obama told reporters Tuesday. “We’ve spent so much time on security issues between the United States and Mexico that sometimes I think we forget this is a massive trading partner responsible for huge amounts of commerce and huge numbers of jobs on both sides of the border.

“We want to see how we can deepen that, how we can improve that and maintain that economic dialogue over a long period of time,” he continued.

This shift is notable, as issues of security, law enforcement and combating crime formed the backbone of U.S.-Mexican relations during the previous Mexican administration.

“Even before [former Mexican President Felipe] Calderon took office, it was part of the discussion with the U.S., and the U.S. and Mexican administrations went on to develop a close and complex relationship on security matters,” Eric Olson, associate director of the Latin America programme at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

President Obama is slated to meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto later this week before meeting with Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

“President Obama having a visit [early in his second term] symbolises the importance of Mexico to the U.S.,” Chris Wilson, an associate at the Mexico Institute, a think tank here, told IPS.

The United States is Mexico’s largest trading partner, and the two countries engaged in nearly 500 billion dollars worth of trade in 2012. Much of that trade is in what are known as intermediate inputs, referring to semi-finished U.S. goods that are finalised with Mexican resources, a process seen as increasing the competitiveness of both countries.

Remittances sent home from Mexican immigrants living in the United States are also a substantial factor in the countries’ economic ties, totalling more than 20 billion dollars last year.

The upcoming summit’s focus on economics squares with a narrative gaining traction in media coverage and academic circles in recent years that paints a picture of an economically booming Mexico.

“During the administration of Calderon, the perception of Mexico in the media was largely one of drugs and violence – the headlines about Mexico were about drugs and trafficking, organised crime, gruesome violence,” Wilson recalls.

“But the new [Mexican] administration has come in at a time when economic growth is pretty robust. They are trying their best to shift the narrative of Mexico by talking more about these economic issues: the reforms that are happening in Mexico that will promote growth, new investments coming into Mexico that will promote growth.”

Development’s Achilles heel

Still, for a country like Mexico that is still struggling with issues of citizen security and rampant crime, many suggest that economic growth would have to start from the bottom, with more robust social programmes and safety nets, before the international community becomes too optimistic about economic and trade booms.

Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America programme at the Wilson Center, calls Latin America “far behind” in developing policies that might leverage inclusive growth.

“There is not a sense of shared responsibility … when your social policy is remittance, when your lack of social policy is permitted,” she told reporters on Friday. The region, she said, needs “a widespread recognition of the role the private sector needs to play in paying taxes, improving government … [and] institutions.”

In a telephone interview with IPS, she noted that the U.S. relationship with Central America is likely to remain more focused on security concerns.

“There is a growing consensus in the development community that sustainable growth can’t and will not happen unless levels of violence are brought under control,” she told IPS.

The World Bank recently called citizen insecurity the “Achilles’ heel of development” in Latin America.

Members of the U.S. Congress and advocacy groups here are also wary of turning a blind eye to human rights concerns in Mexico.

“The dire human rights situation in Mexico is not going to solve itself,” Maureen Meyer, a senior associate for Mexico and Central America with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group, said in a statement.

“As the bilateral agenda evolves, it is critical that the U.S. and Mexican governments continue to focus on how best to support and defend human rights in Mexico.”

In a press release issued last week, WOLA expressed agreement with a letter from 23 members of Congress to Secretary of State John Kerry that stressed that “[t]he human rights crisis will not improve until there are stronger legal protections, increased human rights training for Mexico’s security forces, and more government agents held responsible for the human rights violations they commit.”

Even as the focus of U.S.-Mexico relations turns to economics, there is no broad agreement on how exactly a shift toward trade relations will strengthen the “economic competitiveness” of both countries.

“Part of the challenge is that we have this term, but we have a laundry list of issues that could fit into that term,” the Mexico Institute’s Chris Wilson said.

“What we still don’t have is a coherent agenda or a way in which the leadership from the top level can engage the public or business community or civil society … and create something more [meaningful],” he told IPS.

Abdulhakim Belhasi (r), the spokesperson for the Libyan special police unit set up in 2012 under the crime squad to fight drug and alcohol trafficking, with two men from the sqaud. Credit: Maryline Dumas/IPS

By Maryline Dumas
TRIPOLI, Apr 4 2013 (IPS)

In Libya, a dose of LSD or the painkiller tramadol costs 78 cents, and a joint of cannabis is 7.80 dollars. Here, drugs are affordable to the poor for a simple reason. “Slashing prices is a way to create demand and open up a market,” a Western diplomat tells IPS in Tripoli, the capital.

“Prices will go up when enough people are hooked,” the diplomat, who works on defence and security, adds.

There is currently no data on the number of addicts in Libya, but the drug trade is thriving. Dr. Abdullah Fannar, the deputy director at a psychiatric hospital in Gargaresh, a wealthy suburb in east Tripoli, has noticed a change in the number of drug addicts they see there.

“The number of people suffering from addiction to illegal substances has increased. We used to have a special department for drug addiction 10 years ago, and are thinking of reopening it.”

Fannar says he receives patients from prison referred by the police, or people referred by their families, when they are suffering from withdrawal.

According to Fannar, the drug epidemic has hit “the youth and rebel soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder from the war.” Other vulnerable groups — those with little education and military veterans — are easily drawn to drugs and alcohol, both of which are illegal in Libya. In early March, several dozen people died as a result of poisoning from methanol contained in locally adulterated alcohol.

Drug and alcohol trafficking are not new to Libya. Under former President Muammar Gaddafi (1969-2011), a number of United Nations reports made reference to the illegal trade between Africa and Europe via Libya. But with limited border controls under the new Libyan government, the drug trade has grown.

“We know we have a problem of alcohol and drug smuggling, especially on our southern borders,” Colonel Adel Barasi, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence, admits to IPS. “We are working on a surveillance strategy, training and equipping the army. God willing, the Libyan army will be able to protect our borders.”

Céline Bardet, an expert on war crimes and transnational crime, tells IPS that drug routes are drawn up at a global level, targeting unstable countries where security is weak.

“This is how things stand in Libya. There is a great deal of trafficking, and it’s likely to get worse,” she says.

Bardet, a consultant with the European Commission, believes that drug processing laboratories may exist in Libya, even if none have been found yet. Still, she points out: “The police are starting to tackle the problem with the support of international aid.”

In an eastern district of Tripoli, a special police unit set up in 2012 under the crime squad is proud to demonstrate the results of its fight against drug and alcohol trafficking.

Abdulhakim Belhasi, the spokesperson for the unit, showed IPS the seizures – seven kilogrammes of heroin and cocaine, unknown amounts of cannabis, 1,400 tablets of tramadol, unknown quantities of whiskey and vodka, and 1,400 litres of adulterated alcohol. The seizures are stored in a hangar, to be destroyed.

In the last drug seizure, which was announced on Feb. 23 by the spokesperson of the Libyan Navy, Colonel Ayoub Gacem, 30 tonnes of drugs were seized and three people were detained on a boat intercepted by Libyan coast guards the day before. The type of drugs found was not specified.

“A war is being waged through the drug trade. They want to destroy the moral fabric of our youth. It can only be Gaddafists in neighbouring countries driving this trade. They are the only ones with this kind of money,” Belhasi tells IPS, appealing for international assistance.

A young drug user who wishes to remain anonymous laughs off this statement. “Having a drink and smoking a joint has never hurt anyone! The ‘beards’ (Islamists) are hounding us so that they can impose Sharia law.”

Khaled Kara, a member of an anti-drug organisation, and former mayor of Souq-al-Juma, a district in Tripoli, denies this. “I wear a beard, I look like an Islamist but I am a moderate,” he tells IPS.

Kara is worried. “The drug traffickers are very violent. They will do anything to protect their business. They are better armed than the special unit. They have rocket launchers, while the police only have handguns.”

The men of the special unit say they would like to be better armed, and add that they also face other kinds of pressures. “My 18-month-old son was kidnapped,” says an officer who goes by the single name of Kamal for security reasons. “He was only taken for a few hours, but when I found him, there was a message for me. ‘If you don’t resign, next time it will be your wife.’”

Asked by IPS if he is afraid, Kamal, who is admired by his comrades for his acts of bravery during the revolution, simply replies: “I am here, I am working.”

One of his colleagues adds: “We fought the revolution for our country, we are fighting the drug dealers for our country.”

But most members of the special unit go out in the field wearing balaclavas.

The lights of El Paso, Texas, seen from Ciudad Juárez. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

A group of business executives, civil society leaders, policy experts and former government officials from Mexico and the United States are recommending that the two countries expand cooperative law-enforcement efforts along the border.

They also assert that both countries need to develop a joint plan to address the negative effects that the current immigration system is having on individuals, families and communities.

Established in 2009, the Pacific Council on International Policy and the Mexican Council on Foreign Affairs (COMEXI), a Mexico-based non-profit association, convened for the fourth time on Wednesday here in Washington in order to evaluate bilateral progress in managing the U.S.-Mexico border.There are drug demand issues on the U.S. side, but there are weapons demand issues on the Mexican side.

“The concerns of the report address issues related to both border security and immigration reform,” Rob Bonner, the task force co-chair and a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Wednesday.

“Migration remains one of the most important features of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, but beyond political rhetoric it has played a smaller part of the policy agenda between our two countries. Now, both domestically and bilaterally, implementing comprehensive immigration reform is within our grasp.”

When it was created, the principle objective of the task force was to introduce a set of policy recommendations for both governments on how to strengthen border security and cooperation, focusing on public safety, migration, facilitation of legal transit and commerce, economic development and border institutions.

The COMEXI report, initially published in 2009, was widely welcomed by government officials in both countries.

“The task force outline posed a specific set of approaches in looking at border management,” Christopher Wilson, an associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a think tank here, told IPS.

“Many of them fell under the category of shared responsibility, looking at trans-national challenges, taking responsibility for them and then finding ways to work together for a common solution.”

Wilson says the new set-up replaced an older model of bilateral relationship in which one party would typically blame the other for challenges in dealing with the border.

“Look at the example of drugs and weapons smuggling,” Wilson says. “There are drug demand issues on the U.S. side, but there are weapons demand issues on the Mexican side, where there are also rule-of-law issues and violence. The task force sought ways to share responsibility and work together to confront these interconnected problems.”

Since that time, many of the recommendations have been implemented. For instance, the U.S. and Mexican federal governments have made large investments in staffing, infrastructure and technology and have refocused cooperation on security efforts.

Task force members say that several issues remain outstanding, however, including better law enforcement against illegal migration and weapons smuggling, as well as environmental issues like illicit dumpsites, pollution and the reintroduction of native trees.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the task force emphasised the current opportune timing for implementation of these remaining responsibilities, given new administrations in both capitals.

Dealing responsibly with the migration issue is particularly pressing, the task force says, noting that of the hundreds of thousands of people who cross the border illegally each year, the vast majority are economic migrants from Mexico seeking work.

They propose that Mexico and the United States establish a joint commission of economists, demographers, business and labour leaders to analyse the labour market effects of these long-term demographic trends and economic integration.

21st century border

Wilson says this process is about “changing the concept of the 21st century border”, a concept he notes was adopted by Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama in 2010 and was largely envisioned by the task force report.

“The idea is that you can have security gains without sacrificing the efficiency of moving people and commerce and still have joint economic prosperity,” Wilson says.

“There is a new Mexico today, one that is in many ways different from the Mexico of 20 years ago. It’s a richer country, largely middle class, with fewer children per family – and thus fewer young people entering the labour force.”

These lower fertility rates have translated into a dramatic reduction in the pressure put on Mexicans to migrate, legally or illegally. Apprehensions at the border are currently at their lowest point in 40 years, for instance – a reflection of both the recent decline in the U.S. economy as well as changes on the Mexican side.

In line with these changes, the U.S. government has instituted a new programme that expedites travel for pre-approved travellers deemed “low risk”.

However, the task force says more needs to be done to fully realise the potential economic partnership. Its members suggest, for instance, that the two countries jointly develop a plan for better managing the relaxation of U.S. federally imposed restrictions on legitimate commerce between border communities.

“The border should be as thin as technologically and politically possible for those engaged in legitimate travel or commerce while remaining difficult to penetrate for those engaged in criminal activity or unauthorized transit,” Bonner said.

“There has been a lot of focus on security but relatively less focus on ports of entry. There is a lot that can be done to improve economic efficiency.”

With talks in Washington currently under way in a major push towards bipartisan immigration reform, the task force believes today’s realities make their recommendations particularly timely.

In January, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a set of principles for comprehensive immigration legislation that includes a “pathway to citizenship” for the 11 million immigrants already in the country illegally, contingent on first securing the country’s borders.

While the U.S. provides permanent residence to more than a million immigrants a year, critics argue that legal permanent residents often must endure years of separation before they can be united with spouses and children, and prospective immigrant workers with approved petitions also often have to wait years for green cards to become available.

“We will not stop fighting until there is justice for our children,” says Araceli Rodríguez, the mother of a young federal police agent in Mexico who disappeared along with seven other people in the western state of Michoacán on Nov. 16, 2009.

Rally in Ciudad Juárez in June 2011, when the civil society movement decided to promote the Victims’ Law. Credit: Daniela Pastrana /IPS

This woman is one of tens of thousands of relatives of the dead, disappeared and displaced by violence in Mexico, and she hopes to find support for finding her son, Luis Ángel León Rodríguez, in the General Law on Victims, which enters into force on Saturday, Feb. 9.

“If it’s true that he’s dead, I want to find his ashes. If it’s true that they incinerated him, I want to find his teeth. And I won’t rest until all those responsible for his death are in prison and his name is cleared of any suspicion,” she told IPS.

For the last two years, Rodríguez has been participating in the citizens’ Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), created by poet Javier Sicilia.

Twenty months have passed since the MPJD demanded a law to help relatives left behind by violence in Mexico, at a mass rally in the northern city of Ciudad Juárez. The law, backed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was promulgated Jan. 9.

The big challenge is for it to be enforced and produce results, everyone agrees.

“Such a law should not have to exist,” Sicilia said the day it was promulgated. “It’s the consequence of not applying the laws that are made to protect and provide justice to citizens, and of a war that should never have happened.”

Since his son, Juan Francisco, was murdered in March 2011, Sicilia has toured the country and knocked on the doors of government offices, accompanied by hundreds of victims and fellow citizens in solidarity with them, who seek to end the security policy inherited from the government of former president Felipe Calderón.

In December 2006, when Calderón began his presidential term that ended Dec. 1, 2012, he declared war on drug trafficking cartels, militarised public security and conferred extraordinary powers on the federal police, whose personnel increased six-fold while their budget expanded from 800 million to three billion dollars.

As a result of the strategy, 60,000 people have been killed and 25,000 disappeared, according to official figures, although civil society organisations cite much higher statistics. A total of 250,000 people have been displaced and there are countless relatives of victims, many of whom have lost everything in the pursuit of justice or have even been murdered themselves.

In June 2011, in Ciudad Juárez on the border with the United States, after a caravan had driven 3,400 kilometres through the most violent states in the country, the MPJD first proposed a victims’ law.

The victims’ bill had a rough passage, and once the law had been approved in Congress, it was vetoed by Calderón. But his successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, promulgated it in a solemn ceremony at which he said it was urgent to have a legal framework in place to protect victims.

“It is a victory for the Movement, and will benefit many people, but enforcing it is still a distant prospect,” another mother, Margarita López, whose 16-year-old daughter disappeared, and was presumably killed, in the southern state of Oaxaca, told IPS.

On Jan. 19, López was attacked in Mexico City when she was going to meet a team of Argentine forensic scientists to take DNA samples from the skeleton that the authorities say is her daughter.

“I am tired of fighting everyone, because the authorities are part of the problem. Sometimes I think about leaving the country, but if I go, who will look for my daughter?” she said.

The Victims’ Law covers legal and psychological protection, compensation, health services, housing and education, as well as a key element: “declarations of absence”.

These allow, for example, grandparents to have legal custody of their grandchildren, while the state is compelled to continue to look for their disappeared parents, because the declaration is not a death certificate.

The law involves re-engineering the enforcement of justice by means of a National Victims’ Assistance System. It has been harshly criticised by organisations close to former president Calderón, and also by the autonomous National Commission for Human Rights, which would lose some of its powers.

The law’s promotors themselves acknowledge that it contains errors, due to the speed with which it was enacted. The senate will have the opportunity of making corrections this month when it incorporates regulations that will translate it into policies.

“The law needs to be perfected; it was approved very quickly because the priority was getting the state to recognise the tragedy, but we are already amending it,” the recently appointed coordinator of human rights advisers to the attorney-general’s office, Eliana García, a supporter of the law, told IPS.

“It establishes a system of restorative justice in four dimensions: the right of victims to the truth, the right to justice, comprehensive compensation and the guarantee that this will not be repeated. It is an unprecedented law,” said García, a renowned leftwing social and political activist.

Detractors of the law point to the burden on the budget, as the law obliges the state to pay the costs of physical, mental, moral and material harm, as well as healthcare costs for victims of crime and human rights violations, no matter the perpetrator or when the crime occurred.

This means coverage would be extended to victims of the so-called “dirty war” in the 1970s.

Article 71 states that if the perpetrator of the crime cannot pay compensation, because he or she is a fugitive, dead or disappeared, the state will take responsibility for reparations up to the equivalent of 78,600 dollars.

“It was a mistake to make such a broad promise of subsidiary compensation; in the corrections we are working on, we have restricted reparations to serious crimes against life, freedom and physical integrity,” García said.

There will also be modifications to the National Victims’ Assistance System, which under the law includes nearly 4,000 officials in national and states’ ministries, as well as to the chapter on competencies, which only involves the national government.

What is still not clear is how regional and municipal authorities will be made to comply with the law, especially as they are most frequently accused of crimes by victims and their relatives.

The new bodies that will look after victims who are currently helped by the Procuradoría Social (socio-legal office), created in September 2011 and now to be replaced under the new system, have yet to be identified.

The MPJD is already preparing workshops and reading circles to study and promote the law in the country’s 31 states, in accordance with one of the agreements at a meeting held in the Mexican capital Jan. 25-27, at which organisations in the United States and Canada were also represented.

“We know that after this law’s publication, there is still a great deal to be done. We have come away with a long agenda,” activist Ted Lewis, head of the human rights programme for Global Exchange, one of the organisations that financed the caravan that travelled the United States and arrived in Washington in September 2012, told IPS.

Border leading into the desert at the Mariposa port-of-entry. Credit: Jeb Sprague/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 6 2013 (IPS)

The electoral and political stars are aligning in ways that offer the United States and Mexico major opportunities to substantially deepen their cooperation, particularly on trade, energy, and immigration, according to a report released here Wednesday by a special commission of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD).

With Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto taking office at virtually the same time as Barack Obama begins his second presidential term, the two leaders have four years to address some of the most difficult and longstanding bilateral challenges, according to the report, entitled “A More Ambitious Agenda”.

Like a longer one on the same subject released two weeks ago by the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars here, the IAD report comes at a particularly auspicious moment, given both the strong performance of the Mexican economy and the apparent willingness of long-resistant Republicans in Congress to make key compromises on immigration reform.

These include finding ways to legalise the status of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., more than half of whom are believed to be Mexican.

“There is an enormous amount of optimism right now in the bilateral relationship, and the reason of that is because there’s an idea that this is a new beginning,” said Duncan Wood, co-author of the Wilson Center report, entitled “New Ideas for a New Era”.

“There’s optimism about the Mexican economy and the real potential for immigration reform in the United States,” he told IPS.

“So you have the opportunity for a much more positive dialogue, particularly when you compare it with what we saw during the (Felipe) Calderon administration, when the primary focus was on security, violence and death. There’s now an opportunity to reframe the relationship, and I would say the economic issues lead that.”

The IAD report highlights Pena Nieto’s proposed reforms of Mexico’s energy sector which, among other things, could result in the exploitation of its huge deposits of shale gas and oil. This would not only assure the country’s status as a major oil producer, but also “bring North America closer than ever to energy independence”.

In addition, the “decisive role” played by the Latino vote in the November elections here has propelled immigration reform to the top of the U.S. political agenda for the first time in a generation, according to the commission which was co-chaired by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills.

Hills also serves as IAD’s co-chair, along with former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

“(T)he prospects are better than they have been in decades for a sensible reform of U.S. immigration policy – which should produce significant economic gains for both nations while easing a long-standing source of bilateral tension and mistrust,” the report concluded.

While opportunities for breakthroughs may be less obvious with respect to their approaches to fighting drug cartels and the violence that has killed an estimated 60,000 people in Mexico over the last six years, the cooperation between their security and police agencies has reached unprecedented levels.

“This is the right time to reassess the (U.S.-backed) Merida Initiative, reinforce efforts to shrink U.S. drug use, and stop the flood of weapons (from the U.S.) into Mexico,” according to the report.

It also noted the Obama administration’s willingness to discuss alternative approaches to the “war on drugs”, as well as recent initiatives, both within the U.S. and Latin America to consider legalising the production, sale and use of marijuana.

Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, bilateral trade has expanded by some 500 percent, making Mexico Washington’s third largest trading partner amid predictions it could overtake Canada for the top position within a decade. At the same time, Mexican-Americans now make up more than 10 percent of the U.S. population and seven percent of its electorate.

The report calls for the two nations to pursue three “high-priority goals. On the economic side, the two countries should work to make their shared labour markets more efficient and equitable; create a more-coherent North American energy market; and co-ordinating with Canada in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with selected South American and East Asian nations.

“There’s a perception that the Pena Nieto government can get things done,” said Wood, who noted that his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country for 71 years, “knows how to reach a consensus” in contrast to Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN), whose 12-year reign ended in December.

On the immigration front, the U.S. should implement an expanded and predictable temporary labour programme for both professional and low-income workers, ensuring a larger flow of legal migrants whose homes would remain in Mexico.

In addition, immigration legislation must include a pathway for undocumented immigrants here to legalise their status. Such a step, according to the report, “could hugely benefit both the U.S. and Mexican economies,” in part by increasing both tax payments to local, state and federal governments and remittances sent to Mexico.

Given the results of the November elections and the pressure on Republicans to ease their opposition to any such “amnesty” scheme, such reforms are considered more likely to pass the Congress than at any time since the last major immigration reform in the mid-1980s.

The challenges posed by public insecurity, organised crime, and drug trafficking and abuse “may be the most harrowing test” for both governments, according to the report, which recommended that they should jointly review Washington’s policies toward illicit drugs and firearms, whose export to Mexico has fuelled the violence there.

Pena Nieto should follow through on campaign pledges to create an elite federal police force that would sharply reduce the role of Mexico’s military in the anti-crime campaign, while Obama should allocate significantly more resources to prevention and treatment programmes that help reduce demand for illicit drugs, it says.

The report’s recommendations to consider U.S. drug policy reform and legalisation of marijuana – as well as reassessing the five-year-old security-assistance programme, the Merida Initiative – were welcomed by Laura Carlson, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Program of the Center for International Policy as “bright spots” in the report.

But she expressed disappointment that the commission “repeats the formulas that have led to increased poverty under NAFTA and made Mexico one of the most unequal nations in the world.”

“That this group would come out with a recommendation of …more free trade, more privatisation, more guest workers, more oil drilling is not surprising,” she told IPS in an email. “But it’s particularly hard to swallow when no mention is made of poverty alleviation, shared environmental crisis, human rights or corruption on both sides of the border.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 4 2013 (IPS)

The research wing of the U.S. Congress is warning that three decades of “historically unprecedented” build-up in the number of prisoners incarcerated in the United States have led to a level of overcrowding that is now “taking a toll on the infrastructure” of the federal prison system.

Over the past 30 years, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the federal prison population has jumped from 25,000 to 219,000 inmates, an increase of nearly 790 percent. Swollen by such figures, for years the United States has incarcerated far more people than any other country, today imprisoning some 716 people out of every 100,000. (Although CRS reports are not made public, a copy can be found here.)

“This is one of the major human rights problems within the United States, as many of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are low income, racial and ethnic minorities, often forgotten by society,” Maria McFarland, deputy director for the U.S. programme at Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“This is one of the major human rights problems within the United States, as many of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are low income, racial and ethnic minorities, often forgotten by society,”
Maria McFarland, deputy director for the U.S. programme at Human Rights Watch
In recent years, as a consequence of the imposition of very harsh sentencing policies, McFarland’s office has seen new patterns emerging of juveniles and very elderly people being put in prison.

“Last year, some 95,000 juveniles under 18 years of age were put in prison, and that doesn’t count those in juvenile facilities,” she noted.

“And between 2007 and 2011, the population of those over 64 grew by 94 times the rate of the regular population. Prisons clearly aren’t equipped to take care of these aging people, and you have to question what threat they pose to society – and the justification for imprisoning them.”

According to the new CRS report, a growing number of these prisoners are being put away for charges related to immigration violations and weapons possession. But the largest number is for relatively paltry drug offences – an approach that report author Nathan James, a CRS analyst in crime policy, warns may not be useful in bringing down crime statistics.

“Research suggests that while incarceration did contribute to lower violent crime rates in the 1990s, there are declining marginal returns associated with ever increasing levels of incarceration,” James notes. He suggests that one potential explanation for this could be that people have been increasingly incarcerated for crimes in which there is a “high level of replacement”.

For instance, he says, if a serial rapist is incarcerated, the judicial system has the power to prevent further sexual assaults by that offender, and it is likely that no one will take the offender’s place. “However, if a drug dealer is incarcerated, it is possible that someone will step in to take that person’s place,” James writes. “Therefore, no further crimes may be averted by incarcerating the individual.”

Smarter on crime

Of course, the U.S. prison population’s blooming needs to be traced back to changes within the federal criminal justice system. Recent decades have seen an expanding “get tough” approach on crime here, under which even nonviolent offenders are facing stiff prison sentences.

In turn, overcrowding has become a massive issue, with the federal prison system as a whole operating at 39 percent over capacity in 2011, according to CRS. The result has also been significant price overruns, with the Bureau of Prisons budget doubling to nearly 6.4 billion dollars even while hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unaddressed infrastructure problems continue to mount.

Yet the problems being experienced by the federal prison system actually stand in contrast to certain trends at the state level. While some states have dealt with even more worrisome problems of prison overcrowding – including California, which in 2011 was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take steps to reduce the pressure – recent years have seen movement at the state level to counter overincarceration.

Some of this action may have come from serious state budget crises. Currently, after all, it costs between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars to house a prisoner in the United States.

According to a new report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group working on prison reform, prisoner populations in the United States overall declined by around 1.5 percent in 2011. Furthermore, last year lawmakers in 24 states adopted policies that “may contribute to downscaling prison populations”.

“There has been a marked change in the amount of activity at the state level to end our addiction to incarceration,” Vineeta Gupta, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS.

“Some states are currently having many discussions they would not have had 10 years ago – getting smarter on crime rather than tougher on crime. None of these moves are comprehensive enough to address the large scope of the problem, but they’re very important starting points.”

She continued: “Unfortunately, the federal government has been going in the opposite direction.”

Mandatory minimum

Arguably, the single most important element in explaining the record incarceration numbers both at the federal and state levels could be “mandatory minimum” sentencing requirements, under which federal and state law over the past two decades has automatically required certain prison sentences for certain crimes, particularly for drug offences.

Such polices have eliminated the ability of judges to tailor judicial responses to individual circumstance. Over the years, sitting judges have resigned over mandatory minimum policies, while others have waged high-visibility campaigns for their rollback.

“Particular attention should be given to reforming mandatory minimums and parole release mechanisms as policies that can work to reduce state prison populations,” the Sentencing Project suggests, noting also that “Mandatory minimums do not reduce crime but result in lengthy prison terms that contribute to overcrowding.”

Such analysis echoes parts of the CRS conclusions while also undergirding growing momentum on the issue. According to the Sentencing Project, seven states last year weakened or repealed certain mandatory minimum regulations.

More dramatically, in mid-January, Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, told a Washington audience that he would support doing away entirely with federal mandatory minimums, which he called “a great mistake”.

“Senator Leahy’s comments are a very big step towards starting a conversation to address a major driver of the federal growth,” the ACLU’s Gupta says. “The hope is that some of the stuff that’s brewing in the states, where crime in some places is still at an all-time low, can now serve as an example for the federal system.”

Various strains of medical marijuana. Credit: scpr.kpcc/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jan 30 2013 (IPS)

Since the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington fully legalised marijuana via ballot initiatives in the November 2012 elections, efforts to medicalise, decriminalise, or legalise marijuana at the state level are sprouting up like so many hemp stalks on a sunny day.

Eighteen out of 50 U.S. states now allow medical marijuana, used to help cancer patients and others, and 15 others have decriminalised it, meaning that possession is a civil offence that carries no jail time.

“In terms of getting federal law change, we need to get maybe half of the states before we get congress to take some action,” Keith Stroup, founder and legal counsel of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), told IPS.

“We tend to focus primarily on full legalisation, regardless of why one smokes,” he added. “The primary reason people smoke, 99 percent of them, is because they enjoy getting high. We’re not going to eliminate the high number of arrests until we completely legalise marijuana.”

In 2006, the group notes, more than 829,000 people were arrested in the United States for marijuana-related offences alone.

National organisations like the Marijuana Policy Project and NORML have both short and long-term strategies to press for continued policy change at the state level.

In the short term, MPP seeks to make New Hampshire the 19th medical marijuana state in the U.S., and to make Vermont the 16th state to decriminalise it.

Illinois is also believed to be on the verge of enacting medical marijuana legislation this year.

In the longer-term, MPP is eyeing ballot initiatives where citizens will have the opportunity to vote on whether to legalise marijuana like alcohol in 2016, including in such states as California and Oregon, two states which have declined to legalise marijuana in previous years.

MPP and NORML believe that it is better to wait until 2016 to attempt to pass these full legalisation initiatives because marijuana-related initiatives tend to do better in presidential election years, which also drive more young voters – who tend to support marijuana legalisation – to the polls.

In the meantime, bills to allow medical use of marijuana have already been introduced in 10 U.S. states, including Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, according to a list provided to IPS by MPP.

Legislators have already announced their intent to introduce medical marijuana bills in another six states, including Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.

In the last Congressional Session, US Reps. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, introduced legislation to legalise marijuana at the federal level – meaning that states will get to decide their own policies altogether – but it only received 19 additional co-sponsors.

Frank and Paul both retired from the U.S. House at the end of last year. Numerous bills dealing with marijuana policy at the federal level have been introduced over the years.

“We’ve never had a hearing, or got them out of committee. This year we may get some hearings,” Stroup said.

“Every time a state supports medical use, it puts pressure on Congress to legalise it federally,” he said.

Stroup predicts that medical marijuana will be legal federally within three to four years, by the end of the Barack Obama presidency.

NORML expects to see between eight and 10 full legalisation bills in state legislatures this year as well, although it is not clear whether they will pass as soon as this year.

States where full legalisation is expected to easily pass include Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Rhode Island. In California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Oregon, the plan is to seek ballot initiatives for 2016.

“We’re waiting to see whether a bill will be introduced in Alaska, but if not we’re going to do a ballot initiative there,” Morgan Fox, communications director for MPP, told IPS.

In Hawaii, legislation to completely legalise marijuana at the state level has already been introduced in the State House by the House Speaker Joseph Souki.

In Rhode Island, MPP is lobbying the State Legislature to legalise marijuana, which it believes could happen as soon as 2014 or 2015.

A federal court ruling on Jan. 22 against Americans for Safe Access (ASA) presents a minor setback on the issue of federal policy and medical marijuana, but will have no impact on the various state and federal legalisation initiatives from going forward.

ASA had appealed the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s refusal to grant its petition to recognise marijuana’s medical value and federally reclassify it from a “Schedule 1 substance” – which includes drugs like heroin and LSD – to a Schedule 3, 4, or 5 substance.

ASA can still appeal to a full appellate court panel and then to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The DEA also has the discretion to reschedule voluntarily at any time, even without congressional action or court order.

And if the U.S. congress passes legislation to legalise marijuana for medical purposes, removing it from the Controlled Substances Act altogether, it would make the ASA case and the other rescheduling petitions moot.

Artists and activists embroidering for peace in Coyoacán square. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

Each scarf represents a life cut short. Each stitch, a tear. Each thread, a cry of frustration about death and impunity.

The Mexican hands embroidering for peace belong to mothers searching for missing sons and daughters, people demanding justice for their brothers and sisters, and students, teachers, activists and artists showing their solidarity.

Conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who hands over power on Saturday Dec. 1 to Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is facing criticism from activists regarding his human rights record.

But one protest stands out for its moral force: a string of thousands of white scarves embroidered with the names and stories of people who have been killed or have gone missing in Mexico since Calderón began to wage his war on drugs after taking office in December 2006.

“We want to send off Calderón with the pain that he has caused thousands of families,” one of the organisers of the embroidery project, Leticia Hidalgo from the northern city of Monterrey, told IPS. “Because (the measures taken by his government) totally destroyed my family, and changed our lives, and only the love for my son has kept us going.”

Her son Roy Rivera, a philosophy student at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, was kidnapped on Jan. 11, 2011. His family paid the ransom, but he never returned. He was just about to turn 19.

Hidalgo embroidered on her scarf: “My boy, I put you in the hands of God. We’re waiting for you to come back soon, very soon. Stay strong. Your mama and Richi.”

The white scarves memorial will be set up in the Alameda Central, a park in Mexico City, with the scarves embroidered by hundreds of hands over the past 15 months in dozens of towns and cities around the country and abroad.

Some carry painful messages from parents and other family members. Others tell stories salvaged from oblivion by anonymous hands.

“15th of January. NL. Two women lose their lives in a shootout in Balcones Altavista. Embroidered by: Another woman”, reads one scarf hanging in Coyoacán square in the capital.

The idea of embroidering scarves as an act of protest came from Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains), a group of artists who have dyed the water in fountains red to protest the blood shed by the government’s militarised security strategy.

The activists first began to embroider scarves in their meetings. In August 2011, during a day of artistic and cultural activities organised by the Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity, they held their first collective embroidering session in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square.

After that, they held such gatherings every Sunday in Coyoacán square, in the south of the capital, and next to the Torre Latinoamericana in central Mexico City.

“We wanted to raise public awareness about this enormous tragedy, using the symbolic gesture of stitching up these broken stories that have been caused by the violence,” Elia Andrade, an artist, told IPS.

“We embroider for everyone, and what we put on the scarves is basically the information that we manage to find: the name, how and when they died, and who made the scarf. But it’s completely different when it’s stitched by a family member,” she said.

“That’s why every group started to do things a little differently, when the idea caught on and began to spread.”

For example, the women in Nuevo León, one of the Mexican states with the largest number of victims of forced disappearance, switched from red thread representing people who were killed, to green thread, to represent their missing sons and daughters.

“Green is the colour of hope, that we are going to find them,” said Hidalgo, who has been meeting with a group of women since March to embroider outside the Monterrey city hall. They now have 200 scarves embroidered, because every week, new people show up, who are searching for a missing loved one.

One of the biggest and most active groups is in Guadalajara, the capital of the western state of Jalisco.

“Embroidering a scarf is an act of love, of acknowledgement,” Teresa Sordo, one of the organisers of the group that meets every Sunday in Guadalajara’s Rojo park, wrote in the blog “Bordamos por la paz” (Embroidering for peace).

Many of the names and stories embroidered on their scarves are taken from a list titled
“Menos días aquí” (Fewer Days Here), an initiative of the group Nuestra Aparente Rendición (Our Apparent Surrender) which, based on newspaper reports, has started counting the number of people killed in the country every day.

“We embroider, perhaps, because a few hands can transform things and we need to transform them into beautiful things because so many hands are already doing appalling, unmentionable, incomprehensible things,” Sordo wrote.

Indigenous people forced to flee the community of San Juan Copala, in the southern state of Oaxaca, embroidered scarves for 28 of their people who were killed. Several native communities in Michoacán also sewed scarves for their dead.

In Guatemala and Nicaragua, scarves were stitched for the 72 migrants slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August 2010.

And in Mexico City, scarves were embroidered for the 49 children who died in a June 2009 fire in a day care centre in Sonora.

Other hands have started to embroider in Coahuila, another one of the states with the highest numbers of missing persons, and in Morelos, Puebla, Chihuahua, the state of Mexico, as well as countries like France, Germany and Japan.

The white scarves will form a memorial – a request that the victims expressed to Calderón during public talks s he held with representatives of the peace movement in June 2011.

But the only result of the talks was the construction of a mausoleum for soldiers killed, and a controversial construction that the government calls the “Memorial for Victims”, built in the Campo Militar, a military installation in Mexico City.

With skilled hands, María Herrera from Michoacán sews in red thread the name of one of the thousands of people killed during the six-year term of Calderón, who belongs to the National Action Party, which 12 years ago put an end to seven decades of government by the PRI, the party that is now returning to power.

When the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which advocates an end to what it says has been a failed ‘war on drugs’, held its latest working meeting in Warsaw last month, the choice of venue was apt.

Eastern Europe, with the notable exception of the Czech Republic where possession of some drugs was decriminalised in 2010, has some of Europe’s strictest drugs legislation. It also has some of the world’s worst drugs-related problems.

And the two are inexorably linked, according to the Global Commission.

“We wanted to highlight the problems Eastern Europe faces with repressive drugs policy and its links to very serious problems in the region,” Ruth Dreifuss, former Swiss president and a member of the Commission, told IPS.

Under communism, Eastern bloc countries’ legislation on drugs was typically repressive. But since the communist regimes fell, policy has been slow to change in the region and, in some countries, remains as repressive as it was just over 20 years ago.

Stiff jail sentences are not uncommon for possession of even small amounts of cannabis, and prosecutions are often fervently pursued with the full force of local legal systems.

In Russia, widely seen as having the most repressive drug laws in Europe, possession of any amount of drugs – even the residue in a used syringe – is likely to result in a lengthy jail sentence, sometimes up to eight years.

Drug users’ access to harm reduction programmes, including opiate substitution therapy (OST) – a treatment for drug users in which methadone or buprenorphine are provided to heroin users and which is standard practice in much of the rest of the world – and needle exchanges, is often officially, or unofficially, absent or restricted.

The result of these laws has been, campaigners for more liberal drugs laws say, not just the development of deadly epidemics, but a failure to reduce the numbers of drug users.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) have the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic. Injection drug use has been identified as fuelling the epidemic – accounting for up to 70 percent of new infections, according to the WHO.

Addicts admit to being afraid to get treatment for fear of criminal prosecution, and some say they would rather risk getting HIV than going to a needle exchange centre.

Hepatitis C is another chronic problem in the region, where, like HIV, it is largely spread through injection drug use. According to the Open Society Foundation, in some cities in Poland, Hepatitis C infection rates among injection drug users are above 80 percent.

Another lethal disease, tuberculosis, is also a major health concern, particularly in former Soviet countries. It is rife in overcrowded prisons, where many drug users end up as a result of local punitive drug policies.

UNAIDS officials have said that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the region could be effectively eradicated through the use of harm prevention programmes. And according to published medical studies by western experts, harm reduction programmes have been shown to reduce the risk of Hepatitis C infections in injection drug users by up to 75 percent.

Campaigners also claim that incarcerating people found in possession of tiny amounts of drugs in overcrowded, underfunded prisons which are hotbeds of disease only encourages the further spread of tuberculosis and underlines the flawed philosophy behind punitive drug laws as a means of tackling drug abuse.

Dasha Ocheret of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, who has spent years working with drug addicts in Eastern Europe, told IPS: “I’ve lost several friends because they were jailed for drug possession and then died soon after their release because of a tuberculosis infection.

“And out of hundreds of drug users from Russia that I know, not one of them stopped using drugs because they were sent to prison or because of the threat of a prison sentence.”

Governments in Eastern Europe defend their countries’ strict drugs laws by saying they act as a deterrent to drug users and reduce demand for narcotics while at the same time helping bring about the arrest of drug dealers.

But the Global Commission and other similar organisations argue that evidence from decades of trying to tackle drugs problems with repressive measures shows that such policies are costly and completely ineffective.

Alexander Kwasniewski was president of Poland in 2000 when he signed into law some of the harshest anti-drugs legislation in Europe, including three-year prison sentences for possession of even the tiniest amount of drugs.

Now a member of the Global Commission, Kwasniewski says the law was a mistake and is vigorously encouraging governments to rethink their drugs policies.

At its meeting in Warsaw, the Global Commission repeated its calls for governments to abandon their failed ‘war on drugs’ based on prohibition and criminalisation. It said that billions of dollars had been wasted and lives and societies destroyed with no tangible results.

Instead, it has urged governments to focus on prevention and treatment programmes and looking at drug addicts as people in need of help, not criminals in need of incarceration.

It also called on governments to experiment with legal regulation of drugs as had been done for alcohol and tobacco.

Supporters say that similar moves in other countries do not bear out fears that they would automatically lead to greater drugs problems.

“On the contrary,” Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Foundation’s global drug policy programme, told IPS, “looking at countries that have experimented with alternative approaches to drug policy we see that, in the Netherlands, for example, there is a lower rate of drug use by the Dutch than in all neighbouring countries.

“In Portugal, there has been a slight reduction in use among young people, while in Switzerland, people on drug substitution treatment reduce their use of heroin over time.”

Global Commission member Dreifuss told IPS: “Making a change on drugs laws requires public debate and debate on this in Eastern Europe needs to be encouraged. As we have seen in other states, such as my own country Switzerland, making this change may be a long process, but it will only come after debate.” (ends)

Conservative outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderón is to face a ballot again – not to compete for public office but to receive the verdict of a citizens’ trial that is accusing him of violating the constitution.

The citizens’ tribunal, set up by a platform of Mexicans discontented with the Calderón administration, which has less than a month to go, has collected individual and collective complaints and is preparing a list of charges to put to the popular vote from next Sunday Nov. 18.

The list is made up of 11 headings, such as violation of individual rights, establishment and promotion of a state of generalised violence, job elimination and reduction of workers’ rights, impoverishment and lack of attention to social problems, as well as permissiveness towards and fostering of corruption.

Since Oct. 18, when it was launched, the movement has received 78 complaints, 27 of them from Mexico City, nine from the neighbouring state of Mexico and eight from the southeastern state of Veracruz – the last two afflicted by escalating violence involving drug cartels fighting to supply the lucrative U.S. market.

One of the plaintiffs, and an applicant to be a juror in the trial, is artist Carlos Vigueras, the head of the Casasola Museum in Ciudad Juárez on the border with the United States, which is one of the most violent cities in Latin America.

“Calderón’s complicity in this bloody and warlike ruse to control Mexico’s resources is the payment he had to make to govern a vulnerable and occupied country,” Vigueras told IPS, alluding to the war against drugs launched by the president shortly after taking office in December 2006.

The campaign has left over 90,000 dead, at least 14,000 disappeared and some 250,000 people displaced from their homes, according to human rights organisations, journalists’ estimates and the offices of state attorney generals.

These appalling statistics, blamed by the government on the cartels, are the main basis of people’s discontent with Calderón, who will hand over the presidency on Dec. 1 to Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000.

A total of 309 people have signed up on the tribunal’s web page to take part in the jury.

The tribunal argues that “there are known and sufficient reasons to doubt the fulfilment of the oath sworn by Mr. Calderón on Dec. 1, 2006,” referring to his promise to respect and enforce the constitution.

The charges, presented under any of the 11 categories, will form the basis of a legal action to be put to the popular vote.

Citizens will be able to register their vote individually on the web page, or collectively at polling stations set up in public squares on Sunday Nov. 18, or at neighbourhood, family, workplace, sporting or cultural meetings held to attract voters.

Spanish teacher David Porcayo filed a complaint.

“Now I’m just another unemployed person, thanks to Calderón, who has performed poorly as president and has not worked for the good of the country, as the law demands,” Porcayo, a bilingual teacher with a master’s degree in literature from the University of Georgia in the U.S., told IPS.

In Temixco, 95 kilometres south of Mexico City, Porcayo has a school to teach Spanish to foreign visitors since 2006, and runs a tour company with his brothers.

“But because of the ‘war on drugs’ and the violence it unleashed, university students from the United States have stopped coming. The universities no longer allow their students and professors to take my courses in Spanish, literature and history because of the violence and insecurity that is rife in our state (Morelos),” he said.

“Due to the impunity that prevails in Mexico, we know it will be very difficult to bring criminal charges against Calderón and those who are really responsible, beginning with our neighbours and their globalised barons,” said Vigueras, co-author of the book “Mexico: País de las maravillas” (Mexican Wonderland).

Calderón has already faced international charges. In November 2011 a group of activists presented a petition to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to investigate the Mexican president and his ministers of public security, Genaro García, and national defence, Guillermo Galván, as well as the head of the navy, Mariano Saynez, to determine their degree of responsibility for the violence that is devastating the country.

The petition also includes Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa cartel, the most powerful drug trafficking organisation in Mexico.

The plaintiffs argue that the ICC should investigate rights violations committed by soldiers, including killings of civilians in military detention, forced disappearances and torture, as well as attacks by drug traffickers on hospitals and rehabilitation centres, and mass murders of migrants.

“We know he is not the first president to have behaved in this way, but we are determined to establish, de facto, the right and the obligation provided in the constitution to sue the president when, as a society, we think the commitment he made has not been properly fulfilled,” the Citizen’s Tribunal says.

Calderón is reaching the end of his six-year term with a 49 percent approval rating, lower than that of his predecessors, according to a poll whose results were released Monday Nov. 12 by the BGC consultancy and the newspaper Excelsior.

Coca bushes in the Los Yungas region of Bolivia. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Nov 5 2012 (IPS)

Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala face the need to modify their approach to the fight against drug trafficking and are urging the world to do the same. But Mexico and Colombia’s willingness to make the necessary changes is unclear.

The three countries are connected by a powerful circuit of trafficking of drugs – whose main market is the United States – weapons and money from illegal activities. But the extent of the problem and the way drug organisations operate in each one of these countries vary.

Mexico is urgently in need of a new strategy. The militarisation of the drug war since President Felipe Calderón took office in late 2006 has resulted in more than 90,000 people killed, some 10,000 missing and at least 250,000 forced to flee their homes, according to human rights groups and press reports.

And the power of the drug cartels, over society, the government and the economy, has remained intact.

Colombia, for decades the world’s number one producer of cocaine, should look at how the mafia works in Italy to understand its own drug cartels, while Mexico should look at Colombia, said one of the most knowledgeable analysts of the drug trade in Colombia, sociologist Ricardo Vargas, a researcher associated with the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute.

His summary of the situation puts one in mind of the descriptions by Italian journalist Roberto Saviano in his book “Gomorra” of how organised crime works in Naples, where few economic activities are really what they appear to be, and most leave no tracks.

The situation in Colombia “can be likened to the case of Italy, in terms of the effort to reduce violence and create much more sophisticated mechanisms of managing illegal activities, relations with the world of politics, and taking advantage of the economic growth experienced by some countries in Latin America,” Vargas told IPS.

Drug traffickers “are also investors, and launderers of huge amounts of dollars. For that reason they don’t need a lot of violence; they need a more organised and subtle, a more business-oriented, structure,” just like the mafia has in Italy today, he said.

The analyst said he saw Colombia as “moving in that direction,” while “Mexico is still in a phase of outright violence.”

Guatemala, meanwhile, a small Central American country that has become a storehouse and transit point for drugs, has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. But its president, right-wing Otto Pérez Molina, has publicly suggested that drugs be decriminalised as part of a regional agreement that would include the United States.

In a joint statement to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October, the presidents of the three countries urged U.N. nations “to undertake very soon a consultation process to take stock of the strengths and limitations of the current policy, and of the violence generated by the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs in the world.”

Colombian analyst Luis Garay says that what is needed is close cooperation in intelligence, and oversight of financial flows.

“Intelligence has to operate transnationally, the way criminal organisations do,” Garay told IPS. “It must be highly interactive and must operate in real time. Regional cooperation is not the best, but it is the second-best option, because any cooperation must include the United States.”

Garay is the academic director of Scientific Vortex, a non-profit research group that describes itself as providing “methodologies and inputs for policy-making, under integrative science principles.”

He studied case files from Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala and social interactions between drug traffickers, paramilitaries, businesspersons, legislators and government officials in legitimate and clandestine activities, with which organised crime has effectively co-opted the state, he said.

The result of that work is the book “”Narcotráfico, corrupción y Estados. Cómo las redes ilícitas han reconfigurado las instituciones en Colombia, Guatemala y México” (Drug trafficking, corruption and states; how illicit networks have reconfigured the institutions in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico”), co-authored by Scientific Vortex director Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and released in Mexico City in late October.

The book suggests using financial intelligence information, creating a trilateral investigation agency, reaching agreements for technical and logistical cooperation between Mexico and Colombia, and signing agreements for investigations between institutions in the three countries.

Luis Astorga, a professor at the political science faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says “a fundamental element is being ignored: the United States, which must be taken into account in the internal, bilateral and international debate,” he told IPS.

In Mexico, president-elect Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who takes office Dec. 1, announced a shift in the country’s anti-drug strategy, to expand beyond the hunt for drug traffickers. He proposed creating an elite body to fight the cartels, and promised to cut the number of murders in half in his first year in office.

But he has not announced detailed measures. And his track record does not shed much light on the question. In his 2005-2011 term as governor of the state of Mexico – which surrounds the Federal District of Mexico City – he replaced the state’s chief prosecutor three times, and the murder rate climbed from nine per 100,000 population in 2007 to 14 per 100,000 in 2010, according to official figures.

Vargas believes that in Mexico, the violence “will tend towards reaching a point of equilibrium, and will improve, although not with an end to the drug trade but through a process of stabilisation in which Mexican drug traffickers will consolidate structures along the lines of what exists in Colombia.”

This will be seen as “a great political achievement by Mexico. But it will not mean the disappearance, but the consolidation through other channels, of these criminal organisations,” Vargas said.

That is the big issue ignored in the October declaration by the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico calling for changes in the global fight against drugs. “No country has fully acknowledged that the problem lies in the presence of solid organised crime structures, which also have a strong capacity to influence states,” Vargas said.

“That dimension of the problem has not been put on the table, although it must be the cornerstone of any real change in strategy,” he said.

Mexico’s criminal organisations are involved in nearly two dozen different kinds of illegal economic activities, from drug and people trafficking to kidnapping, extortion, contraband and counterfeit goods, which gives them the ability to quickly mutate.

Nevertheless, Vargas believes that Mexico and Colombia should lead a process of influencing multilateral institutions where Latin America has an important presence, to spearhead reforms in international conventions on drugs.

Mexico’s president-elect announced that he chose General Óscar Naranjo, a former Colombian police chief, as his future security adviser.

According to Vargas, Naranjo “advocates differentiated treatment of marijuana and other substances. If his actions are consistent with what he has proposed up to now, Mexico and Colombia could drive a process of experimentation with the decriminalisation of marijuana use.”

That would be an “extremely interesting approach,” because there is no evidence available yet of the effects that this would have in the region, said the analyst.

He also mentioned the case of Uruguay, where the government presented a bill that would essentially create the world’s first government-run marijuana market. But he said that the South American country’s experience was “a bit isolated from the Latin American context.”

* With reporting by Constanza Vieira in Bogotá.

“Where are they?” ask mothers looking for their missing sons and daughters, after driving 2,000 km to Mexico City. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 16 2012 (IPS)

Following two groundbreaking rulings in recent days by the Supreme Court of Mexico, rights campaigners here on Thursday expressed optimism that widely criticised military legal jurisdiction over cases of human rights violations in Mexico’s anti-drugs fight could soon be overturned.

“In the past few days, the Supreme Court has adopted two important decisions and is now debating a third one … ruling that two specific cases of alleged violations of human rights perpetrated by the armed forces have to be taken to the ordinary system of criminal justice,” Alejandro Anaya, a noted rights campaigner and academic coordinator for the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Augacalientes, Mexico, said at a discussion here on Thursday.

“This is an important breakthrough. Reform now seems more likely than it did just two or three months ago.”

Under Mexican law, the Supreme Court must rule on five cases to set legal precedent. On Aug. 10 and 14, the court ruled on two cases related to the jurisdiction of military courts, while a third was slated for Thursday.

“The effectiveness of the government, of a state, cannot be at odds with human rights. The authorities have an obligation to be effective with full respect for human rights,” Justice Arturo Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea told CNN this week.

While the court made an initial stand on the issue in mid-2011, prompting President Felipe Calderon to promise that all current cases of alleged military abuse against civilians would be transferred to civilian courts, the government has yet to move on the issue.

Now, with some two and a half dozen cases currently pending before the court on the issue of military jurisdiction in cases of human rights violations, and with the judges apparently inclined to continue the recent trend, the definitive number of decisions could be reached in the coming days.

“It’s going in that direction and we all hope that, maybe this week or maybe next week, that amount of cases will be decided to make it a rule to prohibit military jurisdiction in human rights violations,” Santiago A. Canton, former executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (OAS) and currently director of RFK Partners for Human Rights, based here in Washington, said Thursday.

The issue has enraged Mexicans and international activists since 2006, when President Calderon made fighting the country’s organised crime – primarily drug cartels – a top priority of his new administration. Calderon’s plan relied on sending tens of thousands of soldiers into battle throughout the country, including around 50,000 at the end of 2011.

That year, the Mexican army had the largest number of public allegations of abuse of any institution in the country.

Tens of thousands have been killed in the fighting between the government military and drugs cartels, with an unknown number of civilians having been caught in the crossfire. According to Human Rights Watch, Mexico saw a 260 percent spike in its homicide rate between 2007 and 2010 alone, after a falling trend over the previous two decades.

The Caravan for Peace and Justice, a pro-peace group of Mexican parents and activists currently travelling through the United States led by poet Javier Sicilia, puts the number of those killed since 2006 at around 60,000, a figure quoted by several groups. The caravan also suggests that 10,000 people have been “disappeared”.

Belated recusal

While the Mexican Human Rights Commission has documented a fivefold increase in complaints against the military and federal police since 2006, throughout that time the Mexican military has maintained the sole right to investigate – and, potentially, prosecute – those allegations.

According to Canton, this is in keeping with a longstanding historical tradition.

“Like many of the norms and institutions in Latin America’s countries, military justice is an inheritance of the Spanish Monarchy of the (18th) century, which sought to protect its army from the consequences of its wars abroad,” Canton wrote in an article published Wednesday.

“Throughout the (20th) century, with the enormous power of the armed forces in Latin America, military justice was strengthened and used to guarantee impunity for human rights violations … the democratization of Military Justice is one of the reforms that has faced the greatest obstacles.”

Perhaps in part because Mexican military judges operate at the discretion of the secretary of defence, of the nearly 5,000 probes into alleged human rights abuses by members of the military against civilians between 2007 and April 2012, the Defence Ministry reports that just 38 personnel have been sentenced.

Further, the Mexican Human Rights Commission recently noted that of those allegations documented in 2010 and 2011, no member of the police or military was sanctioned, an indication of the levels of impunity that, according to many activists, have allowed this trend of increasing violations to continue.

Indeed, according to Maureen Meyer, with the Washington Office on Latin America, a watchdog group based here, Mexico’s organised crime has “served as an excuse by the Mexican government to not investigate cases” of any kind related to the drugs war.

“Some 95 percent of all homicides aren’t effectively investigated, so you’re not even sure who’s involved or who’s responsible for most of these acts,” she said here on Thursday.

New focus

According to repeated statements by President Calderon in recent years, the Mexican state views 90 percent of those killed since 2006 as “criminals”. And following July presidential elections and the victory of Enrique Peña Nieto, it is unclear how the official view will change.

A new report from the Trans-Border Institute, based in California, notes: “After … Enrique Peña Nieto was declared the victor … he affirmed the continued role of the military in domestic security operations.”

However, the report also states that Peña Nieto has promised to uphold the rights of Mexican citizens “first of all, through the real, objective application of (human rights) protocols to agencies that are dedicated to public security.”

Over the past half-decade, the Mexican government has been repeatedly targeted by rights groups, both national and international, for allowing its military to continue to maintain jurisdiction over investigations into human rights violations surrounding the drugs war violence. According to many analysts, government officials have been – and remain – simply too afraid to upset the country’s powerful military.

Alejandro Anaya says that the Supreme Court’s recent actions now need to serve as a learning opportunity for activists whose efforts on this issue may have been slightly misdirected, having typically targeted the executive powers.

“International human rights pressure has pushed President Calderon towards at least pretending to support reform,” he says. “But the more important changes in this respect seem to be coming from the national Supreme Court – not the government that feels the pressure from above.”

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers”, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead “they try to manage the drug trade”.

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico’s most violent states – one which directly borders Texas – going on the record with such accusations is unique.

“It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.”

A spokesman for the CIA in Washington wouldn’t comment on the accusations directly, instead he referred Al Jazeera to an official website.

Accusations are ‘baloney’

Villanueva is not a high-ranking official and his views do not represent Mexico’s foreign policy establishment. Other more senior officials in Chihuahua State, including the mayor of Juarez, dismissed the claims as “baloney”.

“I think the CIA and DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) are on the same side as us in fighting drug gangs,” Hector Murguia, the mayor of Juarez, told Al Jazeera during an interview inside his SUV. “We have excellent collaboration with the U.S.”

Under the Merida Initiative, the U.S. Congress has approved more than 1.4 billion dollars in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico’s political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of U.S. drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage.

Drug war ‘illusions’

“The war on drugs is an illusion,” Hugo Almada Mireles, professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez and author of several books, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a reason to intervene in Latin America.”

“The CIA wants to control the population; they don’t want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at (Operation) Fast and Furious,” he said, referencing a botched U.S. exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in the hope that security forces could trace where the guns ended up.

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.

Blaming the gringos for Mexico’s problems has been a popular sport south of the Rio Grande ever since the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, when the U.S. conquered most of present day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico from its southern neighbour.

But operations such as Fast and Furious show that reality can be stranger than fiction when it comes to the drug war and relations between the U.S. and Mexico. If the case hadn’t been proven, the idea that U.S. agents were actively putting weapons into the hands of Mexican gangsters would sound absurd to many.

‘Conspiracy theories’

“I think it’s easy to become cynical about American and other countries’ involvement in Latin America around drugs,” Kevin Sabet, a former senior adviser to the White House on drug control policy, told Al Jazeera. “Statements (accusing the CIA of managing the drug trade) should be backed up with evidence… I don’t put much stake in it.”

Villanueva’s accusations “might be a way to get some attention to his region, which is understandable but not productive or grounded in reality”, Sabet said. “We have sort of ‘been there done that’ with CIA conspiracy theories.”

In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published Dark Alliance, a series of investigative reports linking CIA missions in Nicaragua with the explosion of crack cocaine consumption in America’s ghettos.

In order to fund Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s socialist government, the CIA partnered with Colombian cartels to move drugs into Los Angeles, sending profits back to Central America, the series alleged.

“There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking,” U.S. Senator John Kerry said at the time, in response to the series.

Other newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, slammed Dark Alliance, and the editor of the Mercury News eventually wrote that the paper had overstated some elements in the story and made mistakes in the journalistic process, but that he stood by many of the key conclusions.

Widespread rumours

“It’s true, they want to control it,” a mid-level official with the Secretariat Gobernacion in Juarez, Mexico’s equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA’s policing of the drug trade. The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he knew the allegations to be correct, based on discussions he had with U.S. officials working in Juarez.

Acceptance of these claims within some elements of Mexico’s government and security services shows the difficulty in pursuing effective international action against the drug trade.

Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution.

“Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of (Jesus Zambada’s) father, Ismael Zambada and ‘Chapo’ Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs… into… the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels,” Zambada’s lawyers wrote as part of his defence. “Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico’s oldest and most powerful trafficking organisation, and some analysts believe security forces in the U.S. and Mexico favour the group over its rivals.

Joaquin “El Chapo”, the cartel’s billionaire leader and one of the world’s most wanted men, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by sneaking into a laundry truck – likely with collaboration from guards – further stoking rumours that leading traffickers have complicit friends in high places.

“It would be easy for the Mexican army to capture El Chapo,” Mireles said. “But this is not the objective.”

He thinks the authorities on both sides of the border are happy to have El Chapo on the loose, as his cartel is easier to manage and his drug money is recycled back into the broader economy. Other analysts consider this viewpoint a conspiracy theory and blame ineptitude and low level corruption for El Chapo’s escape, rather than a broader plan from government agencies.

Political changes

After an election hit by reported irregularities, Enrique Pena Nieto from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is set to be sworn in as Mexico’s president on Dec. 1.

He wants to open a high-level dialogue with the U.S. about the drug war, but has said legalisation of some drugs is not an option. Some hardliners in the U.S. worry that Nieto will make a deal with some cartels, in order to reduce violence.

“I am hopeful that he will not return to the PRI party of the past which was corrupt and had a history of turning a blind eye to the drug cartels,” said Michael McCaul, a Republican Congressman from Texas.

Regardless of what position a new administration takes in order to calm the violence and restore order, it is likely many Mexicans – including government officials such as Chihuahua spokesman Guillermo Villanueva – will believe outside forces want the drug trade to continue.

The widespread view linking the CIA to the drug trade – whether or not the allegations are true – speaks volumes about officials’ mutual mistrust amid ongoing killings and the destruction of civic life in Mexico.

“We have good soldiers and policemen,” Villanueva said. “But you won’t resolve this problem with bullets. We need education and jobs.”

*Follow Chris Arsenault on Twitter: @AJEchris

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

A rise in drug trafficking in Honduras has resulted in a sharp increase in violence, leading some to question the United States’ influence in the country.

Honduras, along with several other Central American countries, has become a transshipment point for U.S.-bound illegal drugs, predominantly cocaine. This has led to wide-scale drug intervention efforts, which has subsequently led to an increasingly bloody effort to stymie the trafficking.

Fueled by the violence surrounding the drug trade, and the failure of security forces in the country, the war on drugs in Honduras has been marred by a rapid increase in homicides. In 2005, there were 2,417 homicides. By 2010, the numbers of homicides jumped up 158 percent from 2005, to a total of 6,239 homicides.

“The escalating war on drugs in Honduras is another legacy of the coup,” Mark Weisbot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said Wednesday, referring to the 2009 ousting of former President Manuel Zelaya after an alleged constitutional overreach.

“The coup has led to the breakdown of many of Honduras’ key institutions,” Weisbrot said, specifically citing abuses by the Honduran police.

Many Honduran security forces in the region have been infiltrated by drug organisations. In the past year, police officers have been implicated in a wide array of criminal activity, such as kidnappings, extortion and robberies, according to the New York Times.

In March, a letter from 94 members of the House of Representative implored the State Department to limit assistance to the Honduran police and military due to the human rights abuses, many times carried out under the influence of the cartels.

According to some activists, there are other interests that render the U.S. military and fiscal interventions moot.

“The increased funding is allegedly to fight the drug war, yet much of the violence in Honduras is politically motivated, unrelated to drugs,” said Tanya Cole, a member of Witness for Peace Southwest, a human rights group.

The U.S. is one of the strongest supporters of Honduras, politically and economically.

Honduras serves as an important smuggling port for Mexican drug cartels, which they then use to expand trafficking networks into Central America. According to U.S. officials, the north coast of Honduras is the origin of a drug pipeline connected to the U.S.

The U.S. has some leeway in this issue as Honduras’ biggest trading partner, having supplied 34 percent of Honduran imports and purchased 41 percent of Honduran exports in 2010, totaling 8.3 billion dollars worth of trade, according to the U.S. State Department.

The war on drugs in Honduras is led by the Joint-Task Force-Bravo, a U.S. military group posted in Comayagua, Honduras, that takes on the cudgels of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Honduras with the help of local authorities.

One of the biggest problems exacerbating the drug wars is the dire poverty in Honduras, which necessitates the drug economy. Nearly 65 percent of Hondurans live in poverty, according to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook.

This allows a few Hondurans to rise while exploiting the situation in the country. Miguel Facusse, a Honduran biofuels industrialist, is a major player in their economy, but has faced criticism after reports linked him to the drug trade.

A WikiLeaks cache described a plane holding 1,000 kilos of cocaine that crashed and burned on Facusse’s estate, said to be “the third time in the last fifteen months that drug traffickers have been linked to this property.”

Drug peddlers are also continuing to flood into Honduras, reportedly to flee from anti-cocaine crackdowns in Mexico and Columbia, two of the biggest exporters of U.S.-bound cocaine. Presently, Central America serves as the crossing point for 84 percent of all U.S.-bound cocaine, according to Joint Task Force-Bravo.

One of the byproducts of the Central American arm of the war on drugs is the high toll of civilian casualties. One example is the May killing of four Honduran civilians, including two pregnant women, in an attack by a U.S. helicopter targeted at drug peddlers, under a programme dubbed Operation Anvil.

That attack triggered angry protests in the isolated northeastern Mosquito Coast area on the Caribbean Sea.

Honduras is notorious for being one of the most violent countries on earth. According to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report, there were 82.1 homicides for every 100,000 citizens in 2010, the highest homicide rate in the world. (In comparison, the United States had five homicides per 100,000.)

The U.S. has historical ties to Honduras, further complicating the situation and cementing its political role there. In the 1980s, Honduras was a strategic partner during the early stages of what would be known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

In 1990, Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) confirmed that there had been a quid pro quo agreement with Honduras during the mid-1980s, with U.S. military and economic aid going to Honduras in exchange for assistance to the Contra rebels in neighbouring Nicaragua.

"Where are they?" ask mothers looking for their missing sons and daughters, after driving 2,000 km to Mexico City. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, May 15 2012 (IPS)

Emma Veleta and Toribio Muñoz were married 40 years ago and had seven children, four boys and three girls. They lived in the town of Anáhuac, 100 km from the capital of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. But on Jun. 19, 2011, as they were celebrating Father’s Day, tragedy struck.

Armed men wearing federal police uniforms stormed into their house and took away Muñoz, a retired railway worker, and all of his sons, a nephew, a son-in-law, and a grandson. Veleta has never seen them again.

“I thought that if I came to Mexico City, I could find some clues about what happened to my family,” she told IPS. “I didn’t find anything, but I did discover that many women are going through the same thing,” she added, explaining that she had had to flee her town after receiving a series of threatening phone calls.

Guadalupe Aguilar, a retired nurse, is also searching for a missing loved one: her son José Luis. The last she knew of him was on Jan. 11, 2011, when the 34-year-old went to meet his brother in the city of Guadalajara, in the western state of Jalisco.

“It was a 12-minute drive, but he never got there. His car turned up later in Colima (a neighbouring state),” said Aguilar, who on Sept. 7 managed to speak to President Felipe Calderón when he visited Guadalajara, and asked him for help finding her son.

Calderón “told me to go to the Procuraduría de Víctimas (Mexico’s new crime victims protection office), which would open a file on the case,” she told IPS. “But all that has been done, and I have nothing concrete to show for it. And I see all these women here, and I ask myself: how many of us do there have to be, for us to get some attention? Why don’t they do anything?”

Veleta, Aguilar and many other women in this country did not celebrate on May 10, which is Mother’s Day in Mexico. They traded flowers and mariachis for a March for National Dignity – a caravan that covered 2,000 km over the last week to demand justice in the disappearance of their loved ones.

“We came (to the capital) to remind Mexico that we don’t have much to celebrate, because part of our heart is dead,” activist Norma Ledezma, head of Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters), a human rights group from Chihuahua, told IPS.

The first group of women set out on Monday May 7 from violence-stricken cities in Chihuahua like Cuauhtémoc, Bocoyna, Gran Morelos and Ciudad Juárez. And as the caravan headed south, it was joined by mothers from the states of Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, Jalisco and México.

After a 2,000-km drive, they reached the capital on Wednesday May 9, where they met with the mothers who have come together in the Committee of Relatives of Dead and Missing Migrants of El Salvador (COFAMIDE), which has documented 319 cases of Salvadoran migrants who have gone missing in Mexico.

On Friday May 11, they met with Attorney General Marisela Morales to express their main demands: federal investigations and an immediate search for all of the missing persons, as well as the creation of a national database on cases of disappearance, a special prosecutor’s office on disappearances, and a federal programme to assist the families of victims.

They also called for the implementation of a protocol on the procedures to be followed in investigations of disappearances, and of United Nations recommendations in cases of forced disappearance.

The interior minister, Alejandro Poiré, cancelled the meeting the mothers had scheduled with him.

“Where are they?” the mothers-turned-activists ask at every door they knock on.

In the caravan, they were accompanied by members of HIJOS, an organisation made up of the sons and daughters of victims of forced disappearance of Mexico’s “dirty war” against dissidents, in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Don’t lose faith,” they were told by Senator Rosario Ibarra, founder of the Committee for the Defence of those Imprisoned, Persecuted, Disappeared and Exiled for Political Reasons (known as the Eureka Committee).

“Don’t ever think that they are dead. Look for them as hard as you can, fight as hard as you can. I have been fighting since 1975, I’m already old now,” said Ibarra, who visited the mothers at the camp they set up on Thursday May 10 at the Ángel de la Independencia monument, a focal point for protest in Mexico City.

Most of the women are indirect victims of the war on drugs and crime launched by President Calderón at the start of his term in December 2006. Since then, the groups that organised the caravan have documented more than 800 disappearances.

There are no official figures. The only indication of the magnitude of the phenomenon has come from the National Human Rights Commission – an independent government body – in April 2010, when it reported that it had received 5,397 reports of people who have gone missing since the start of the Calderón administration, and that nearly 9,000 dead bodies had never been identified.

Nitzia and Mita, 16-year-old twins, are looking for their mother, Nitzia Paola Alvarado, who was detained by members of the military on Dec. 29, 2009 along with their uncle José Ángel and their cousin Rocío in the town of Buenaventura, Chihuahua. None of them were taken to a police or military precinct, and they were never seen again.

Due to harassment and threats, 37 members of the family were forced to flee the state.

The caravan, which returned north over the weekend, received a letter from victims’ relatives who formed the group LUPA (the Spanish acronym for Struggle for Love, Truth and Justice), in Nuevo León, one of the states hit hardest by the spiralling violence, where 49 decapitated and dismembered bodies were found along a highway on Sunday.

“There are no words to describe the pain that mothers feel when a son or daughter disappears…but if we had to try to describe it, if we had to find words, we would tell you it is a terrible ordeal, a via crucis that never ends, unending agony,” says the letter.

“Our pain and our struggle for our missing sons and daughters are heightened when we see that part of society is indifferent, when we see a government that also contains corrupt authorities who are in league with criminal elements,” LUPA adds.

These women who have lost sons and daughters and who don’t know what to tell their grandchildren when they ask what happened to their father or mother have decided to channel their pain into the struggle for justice.

Julia Ramírez has 12 children. Alejandro, the oldest, decided to migrate to the United States when he turned 18, to help support his family. He left his home in San Luis de la Paz, in the central state of Guanajuato, on Mar. 21, 2011, with 16 other campesinos (peasant farmers). None of them were ever seen again.

“My children told me there would be a mother’s day festival. It was really hard for me to leave them, but I have to continue the search; they’re at home, but their brother isn’t,” she said.

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