Militarization

The US is employing a new tactic in Afghanistan: Killing or capturing drug traffickers linked to the Taliban (though not those linked to the Karzai government). Is that even legal under international law? The US military says it is, but not everyone agrees.

Hardly a day goes by without another body being found in Mexico's prohibition-related violence, and the Mexican government is under increasing fire as the death toll rises. Now, thanks to upcoming journalist Bernd Debusmann Jr., the Chronicle will be watching and summarizing events on a weekly basis.

As part of the Merida Initiative to provide Mexico with more than a billion dollars in anti-drug aid, Congress imposed human rights conditions on Mexico. Now, Human Rights Watch is urging the Obama administration to withhold some of that aid until Mexico deals with human rights abuses by its military.

America's drug war in Latin America is a bipartisan affair. The Obama administration is negotiating with the Colombian government to create a major anti-drug base there to replace the one in Manta, Ecuador. Oh, and it also has nice force projection capabilities.

Mexico's prohibition-related violence is very ugly, and it's not just the narcos committing atrocities. The Mexican military has been accused of more than 2,000 human rights abuses, ranging from theft and robbery to rape, torture, and murder as it wages war on the so-called cartels.

Here comes the National Guard! The Obama administration is planning to send 1,500 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to support drug war law enforcement there.

The Obama administration used an Albuquerque press conference to unveil and tout its latest proposals for dealing with Mexico's drug trafficking organizations and the prohibition-related violence around them, but is it anything other than more of the same old same old?

The Mexican Congress has passed a bill that would decriminalize the possession of "personal use" amounts of illegal drugs. Some of the other provisions in the measure are not so nice.

Last August, the Peruvian government embarked on a campaign to regain control of one of the country's key coca-growing areas. It's not working out very well so far.

Police say that aggressive drug raids are good at protecting police, but two dramatic officer deaths that were caused by those tactics suggest the opposite. So do the statistics -- only three law enforcement officers died conducting drug raids last year. At least that many citizens were killed, and who knows how many dogs.