Militarization

Hoping to put a human face on the drug war's toll, a cross-border Caravan for Peace has begun its weeks-long, 27-city journey across the US.

Mexico's next president has joined the ever growing chorus of Latin American leaders calling for a serious discussion of drug legalization, even as he announced he would continue to fight the drug war in Mexico.

Mexico's president-elect is going to rejigger the way the country prosecutes its war on the drug cartels, but no radical changes are apparent.

A Caravan of Peace calling for an end to failed prohibitionist drug policies in the US and Mexico will leave San Diego in August and arrive in Washington, DC, in September. It's hoping to educate some people along the way and have a lasting impact.

History is about to be made at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena this weekend. Hemispheric heads of state will discuss alternatives to the drug war and challenge the US prohibitionist model. This could be the beginning of the end.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential pre-candidate for Mexico's left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party, says he will end the drug war if elected. Meanwhile, the rightist PAN's nominee takes a drug test.

2011 is wrapping up as slightly less bloody than 2010 in Mexico's plague of prohibition-related violence, but the death toll this year is still well above 10,000.

Facing prohibition-generated violence, the Honduran government has given the military full domestic policing powers.

A panel at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference last week called on Americans to take action to help end the drug war in Mexico, even as Human Rights Watch releases as a damning report on government killings, tortures, and disappearances in the drug war.

Weak Central American states are hard-pressed to go up against the Mexican cartels, and now, Guatemala's president wants to build a NATO-style regional military force to go up against them. And for the US to pay for it.