Drugs in the US are more a problem of people and their addiction, not of countries.
Mexico suffers from addiction, that's the fact. Another fact is that most of American people don’t give a fuck about Mexican people—or Latin Americans, whatsoever. They don’t mind that in certain parts of the continent, namely Colombia and Mexico, people are dying because of their addiction. It’s understandable: too much to ask for Americans (or maybe I’m just generalizing: for President Bush) to understand violence that they not directly generate when they cannot understand the one that they do provoke. United States of America is at war, we know it; is at war with most of the Middle East and is at war on drugs, which sounds a little too shitty to me, politically shitty. But that’s nothing but true. It’s a war that you name and we, Mexicans, endure. It’s a war that the US “fights” (please note the ironic quotation marks there), but it’s fought the wrong way. It is something normal in the Bush administration, anyway.
Yet, that’s not the issue.
So why is the war on drugs being wrongly fought? Because it centers its attention in countries, not in addicts. The US perspective is something like this: We have a problem with drugs. Where do they come from? Mostly Latin America. Let’s blame it on them, let’s fight them. But how are you going to control a business so well-crafted, so organized, so corrupting as drug trafficking? Simple: with a war. And this war, although it’s obviously targeted to foreign countries, it’s also waged against American people.
On the online Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, the author cites three areas in which the US would have to succeed in order to win the war on drugs:
1) Stop drug production in other countries.
2) Stop drugs at the border.
3) Stop the sale of drugs within the United States.
Easy, so easy—and please read the sarcasm. Practically, that war is lost, and people are starting to accept it, just as they’re starting to accept that the other war —the one in Middle East— is just as ludicrous and unwinnable as this one. “In their best year, US Drug Enforcement Agents working together with foreign governments seized about one percent of the worldwide drug crop, leaving 99 percent free to supply the US”, says the Schaffer Library. This is the state of things. So the efficiency is almost non-existent. Add the racial bigotry in prosecution, the impact on nature and on the life of local harvesters and the argue of legality, and you have a very serious problem: you’ve got all the evidence needed to corroborate that your way is the wrong way. You, in normal situation, would have to consider another way. Not in the USA, no way.
So Mexico suffers from addiction. From other people’s addiction. If the US has virtually no chance of winning this battle, imagine what Mexico could do. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Mexico is a State recovering from years and years of hegemony, which means corruption, and its institutions are still shaky. Although it’s certainly not a first world country, it’s not quite a third world country either. We have utterly no chance of doing anything at all to stop that violence that causes drug trafficking to the US. Colombia produces, US deals, but Mexico distributes. More than 2000 people were killed last year in Mexico by drug gangs, called cárteles. Acapulco, a former paradise city frequented in the 50’s by such Hollywood stars as Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, John Wayne, Errol Flynn and Rita Hayworth, is now a narco dominated town. Basically all the northern cities, such as Tijuana, Cd. Juárez and Nuevo Laredo, are infested with violence created by the gangs that distribute the drugs in the US. Those gangs are so mighty they, for example, build the so-called narcotúneles, underground tunnels with water and electric power that cross the border, which have amazed Mexican architects for years. This violence is so overwhelming, former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey has warned about the risk of the crime wave unleashed by enemy drug gangs crossing the border and reach American territory.
So Mexico undergo as much as US and its addicts, maybe more. What’s the solution? Unfortunately the US has the key. Without a good—a better— policy, we won’t be able to hold much longer. The United States has always tried to make things better nearly anywhere in the world, most of the times with ill-fated results; but why not do the right thing this time, whatever that might be, especially when its fate also depends on it? But, of course, must Americans must be thinking “Why the fuck do I care about Mexicans?”.
