Government Corruption

I have an invited comment online at JURIST, explaining why the resignation of Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora won't change much. (Hint: It's Prohibition.) JURIST, which is published at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is "the world's only law school-based comprehensive legal news and research service," according to its FAQ. It's also free, archives included. I've already added it to my Google Reader.

This is the kind of crap we’re subsidizing with our massive financial support of Mexico’s war on drugs:

MEXICO CITY (AP) - A major drug cartel has infiltrated the Mexican attorney general's office, and one cartel worker says he even spied on DEA operations from inside U.S. Embassy, Mexican prosecutors said Monday.
…
The revelations of corruption inside the control centers of the U.S.-Mexican anti-drug effort were a major blow to President Felipe Calderon's anti-drug campaign, in which he has sent tens of thousands of troops and federal police across Mexico to combat violent cartels.
…
Assistant Attorney General Marisela Morales said two top employees of her organized-crime unit and at least three federal police agents assigned to it may have been passing information on surveillance targets and potential raids for at least four years. [Guardian]

If the Mexican drug war were a Fortune 500 company, would you invest in it? Seriously, can anyone prevent our drug war donations from ending up in the hands of the cartels? This is an extraordinary mess, a complete mockery of everything we’re trying to accomplish and we have no clue how deep it goes.

There isn’t a single thing happening in Mexico right now that could be construed as progress in the war on drugs. To the contrary, every day that goes by brings new evidence of the fundamental failure of our strategy on every conceivable level.

Terrorism blogger Douglas Farah doesn’t understand why South American nations aren’t more excited about cooperating with the U.S. war on drugs:

So, after 30 years, on a political level there is no consensus that combatting drug trafficking is in the interest of most nations. Given the level of corruption, violence and social disintegration the criminal activities inevitably bring, such a conclusion by national leaders (backed, it seems, by the large majority of the population) is not easily understood.

Really? I know a lot of people have trouble with this, but it’s not that complicated. Widespread "corruption, violence and social disintegration" are caused by the war on drugs. Nothing could be more obvious to those living on the front lines of the drug war battlefield. There was no problem until we showed up. They probably assume there will be no problem once we leave. I don’t blame them.

Reuters offers a dismal assessment of the Mexican drug war entitled "ANALYSIS-Mexico's Calderon bogged down in bloody drugs war". I'm left wondering, of course, why it is that one is said to be "analyzing" when pointing out that the drug war is failing. Must we place Mexico under the microscope in order to observe that there's a "bloody drugs war" going on there? Isn't that just a fact?

Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a bold $7 billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.

His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.

But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads and tortured bodies in public.

The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.

Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive began, and the turf wars intensified this year.

Perhaps one technically engages in analysis when suggesting that the odds of winning are stacked against Calderon, but we don't really need some credentialed academic to tell us that, do we? Has anyone ever won a drug war?

Just last week, the NY Times delivered a dismal assessment of drug war progress in Mexico. Now its editorial board proposes that we spend billions in U.S. tax dollars funding the proven failure that is Mexico's war on drugs:

The timid assistance package proposed by the Bush administration and pared down by Congress suggests that Washington doesn’t grasp either the scale of the danger or its own responsibilities.
…

The Bush administration is right to acknowledge the shared threat and the common responsibility. But the three-year, $1.4 billion aid package it proposed doesn’t do the job. It is too small, notably so when compared with the billions the cartels earn in the United States.

The whole editorial all but refutes itself, observing that nothing is working, then calling for substantial investments in the same tactics that have produced only dramatic violence.

It really is amazing to think that the editors of one of our top newspapers have no concept of the social, economic, and historical dimensions of the war on drugs. What examples could they possibly be relying upon to conclude that larger investments are the key to drug war victory?

If the NYT thinks $1.4 billion isn't enough, then they should tell us how much they'd like to spend. Seriously. How much will it cost to win? How would you define success? If we buy a whole entire drug war for the Mexican government, will it be modeled after ours? If so, are you insane?

I'm so damned tired of being told that the drug war would work if we spent more and fought harder. How much are we really willing to sacrifice in order to prove how false that is?

It seems Mexican President Felipe Calderon's aggressive drug war tactics are impressing American politicians more than his own people:

A majority of Mexicans believe violent drug gangs are winning a war with President Felipe Calderon's government after one of the worst months on record for killings, Reforma newspaper reported on Sunday.

According to a poll by the newspaper, 53 percent of Mexicans think that drug traffickers hold the upper hand against government forces which are trying to clamp down on cartels that ship drugs to the United States.

Only 24 percent said they believed the government was winning the battle. The remaining 23 percent gave no opinion. [Reuters]

Since Calderon took office and promised a crackdown on drug trafficking, there have been over 4,000 drug war killings in Mexico. Mexicans must live amidst horrific and growing violence, with no end in sight, just so Calderon can stand proudly atop the drug war podium. Of course, he can only do so figuratively, for fear of being gunned down like his highest-ranking police officials.

Really, the question of who's winning the drug war shouldn't even have to be asked. Of course the cartels are winning, because there wouldn’t be cartels without the drug war. Every dollar they make, every bride they pay, every assassin's bullet is a product of drug prohibition's bloodstained legacy. The problem with the drug war isn’t that we aren’t trying hard enough, it's that trying hard is actually where all the worst violence and disorder comes from.

Nowhere is the failure of drug prohibition more obvious than in Mexico, where President Calderon's crackdown has already produced over 4,000 deaths, without making a dent in the drug trade.

Yet Obama now joins John McCain in praising Mexico's brutal and ineffective anti-drug efforts:

Mexican drug cartels are terrorizing cities and towns. President Calderon was right to say that enough is enough. We must support Mexico’s effort to crack down. [suntimes.com]

I don't know how anyone can look at the dismal state of the Mexican drug war and find anything to be proud of. Still, I agree with Pete Guither who responded to Obama's comments by pointing out that we just can't expect a realistic drug policy platform from the major party candidates. They're not there yet.

Obama's good positions on needle exchange, medical marijuana, and sentencing have drawn interest from reformers, but there's simply no way to paint his praise of Mexico's bloody drug war crusade as anything other than typical prohibitionist "troop surge" rhetoric. It's the opposite of what's needed and it should give us pause before endorsing the popular perception among reformers that Obama "gets" the drug war issue.

When describing his plans to fund drug war activity in Central and South America, Obama says "we'll tie our support to clear benchmarks for drug seizures, corruption prosecutions, crime reduction, and kingpins busted," demonstrating a fundamental failure to grasp how those activities complement one another. Crime and violence will simply increase if enforcement increases, so any set of benchmarks will ultimately have to ignore one category or the other.

In regards to both Obama and McCain, however, we've got to recognize that ending violence in the international drug trade is the final stage of drug policy reform. It's the very last issue we'll have to confront and the last one about which we're likely to hear interesting or forward-thinking proposals from prominent politicians. There's no middle ground here. When we're ready to end violence and corruption in the drug trade, we'll stop waging the drug war.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has drawn praise from U.S. drug warriors for his commitment to fighting back against the drug cartels. Unfortunately, current strategies for reducing drug trade violence tend to have the opposite of their intended effect. Via New York Times, this is what you get when you really crack down on the drug traffickers:

"a hand-scrawled list of 22 officers, 5 of whom had already been gunned down in the street."

"A turf war among drug cartels has claimed more than 210 lives in the first three months of this year."

"The number of homicides this year is more than twice the total number of homicides for the same period last year."

"Several mass graves hiding 36 bodies in all have been discovered in the backyards of two houses owned by drug dealers."

"At the height of the violence, around Easter, bodies were turning up every morning, at a rate of almost 12 a week."

"'Neither the municipal government, nor the state government, is capable of taking on organized crime,' Mayor José Reyes Ferriz said in an interview."

"The local police are outgunned, underpaid, prone to corruption and lack the authority to investigate drug dealers…"

"The first batch of 150 new recruits came out of the academy in January, but they entered a force where most officers either feared drug dealers too much to move against them or lived on their payroll."

After decades of full-scale international drug war, the central fronts in this great crusade appear before us today literally smoldering, littered with shell-casings and stained in blood. That is drug prohibition's legacy and it will not change or improve. Violence will fluctuate between frequent and perpetual. Illicit drug markets will fluctuate between high availability and totally saturation. That is just the way it is and the way it will always be so long as the people currently in charge of addressing the drug problem are permitted to continue trying their ideas.

Thus, any realistic debate over our drug laws shouldn't be spiked with fictitious references to future victories or meaningful progress. An honest defense of the drug war, if such a thing could exist, would have to defend our current conditions and claim that it would be best if things stayed this way forever.

Allegations of weird and inappropriate behavior by narcotics officers have become so commonplace that one struggles to feign shock or surprise upon learning of them.

A drug informant's allegations that a Marin narcotics agent offered her leniency in exchange for three-way sex - and then sent a photo of his penis to her cell phone - have left a legal mess at the Hall of Justice that could take months to clean up. [Marin Independent Journal]

This poor woman agreed to cooperate after being arrested for selling an ounce of marijuana, and the next thing she knows, there's a penis in her phone. Prosecutors subsequently dropped the charges against her, so the penis was ultimately the only punishment she received. Not a bad deal by drug war standards, but it does make you wonder…

Will investigators be contacting other female informants this detective worked with? My understanding is that people who like to show other people their penis tend to do so habitually. For all we know, this cop could have been going around for years targeting women for arrest and then texting them pictures of his penis.

The bottom line is that the entire process of turning arrestees into informants is inherently coercive and morally dubious to begin with. When you have undercover cops making shady deals with drug defendants, it's just a matter of time before someone sees a penis.

I'm now down in the Lower Rio Grande Valley on the border between the US and Mexico. I've been staying in a hotel on the US side in McAllen, Texas, because, somewhat surprisingly, a hotel with an internet connection in the room is cheaper on this side. But I've been crossing the river every day to scout out Reynosa, the city of about half a million, on the other side, and to talk to informed observers, as well as common folks, there, about the recent wave of drug prohibtion-related violence and what can or should be done to reduce the toll. One thing I'm finding is that people are very nervous, whether its the man in the street, human rights observers, businessmen, or even the US enforcers on the north side of the river. The human rights advocate I spoke with didn't want his picture taken ("there are several narco families on my block"), the Reynosa businessmen absolutely refuse to say anything on the record (although they complain bitterly of local corruption), people on the street look around nervously when I ask about the drug trade and the violence, and when I tried to take photos of the border crossing here, ICE agents ran up and demanded I stop. While the violence here has subsided from the violent spasms of a few weeks ago, it continues, with my human rights observer reporting that another narco killing had occurred in the city Sunday night. That makes 14 so far this year in Reynosa, out of 23 total homicides. I'll be getting into some more of the numbers in a feature article on the situation here that will appear on Friday. The poverty in Reynosa is striking. There are guys trying to sell calendars on the streets, there are guys quite eager to show me the way to "Boys Town," and there are other guys quite eager to peddle whatever drug I desire. I haven't taken them up on that, though. Meanwhile, my schedule in Mexico City next week appears to be filling nicely. I'm set to meet with Congresswoman Elsa Conde, the author of the marijuana decriminalization bill, early in the week, as well as with a bunch of Mexican reform activists. I'll also be talking to various Mexican academic experts and people working with drug users in the city. And I take advantage of being in Mexico. Yesterday, I stuck my head in the door of one of the numerous dental clinics just across from the bridge in Reynosa that cater mainly to American visitors. Before I knew it, I was in the chair and getting that crown I had long needed but could never afford. It cost $125, no appointment necessary, in and out quickly, and now I can drink cold drinks again. I'll be trying to talk to as many people as possible here between now and Friday, so stay tuned.