Mexican opinion moves to legalisation after the failure of the drug war

The drug legalisation debate is building momentum in Mexico as an increasing amount of Mexicans and outside observers are coming to the conclusion that President Felipe Calderon’s militant war against the drug cartels has failed. Even the President himself admitted last week that something needed to be done saying “I know that the strategy has been questioned, and my administration is more than willing to revise, strengthen or change it if needed.” Now he has opened the debate on what can be done to stop the violence caused by the illegal drug trade because using the current strategy there seems to be no end in sight. Even though the President is not yet proposing outright legalisation the former President of Mexico and of Coca Cola Latin America Vicente Fox wrote on his blog that he is in favour of the “legalisation of production, distribution and sale of drugs.”

As preparations are being made to celebrate Mexico’s bicentenary reports being published in national and international newspapers are detailing the collapsing of Mexican institutions and the increasing autonomy of different security forces under the huge weight of the billions of dollars of cocaine that passes through Mexico every year on route to the United States.

The increasing criticism came after reports of the drug war death toll passing the 28000 figure. Where as beforehand the President could use drug violence as justification for his hard-line response and by deploying more troops in the name of security his popularity increased. However now the military and Federal Police deployment has stood the test of time and the majority of Mexicans have now come to the conclusion that those who have been sent to protect them are no worse better than the drugs cartels, in some cases worse as their positions give them more opportunity to extort and abuse civilians. Statistics show that the violence has increased since the offensive started in 2006. And in 2010 the death toll has already reached over 7000.
Many citizens also worry that due to the lack of accountability of the Federal Police and Military they often kill innocent citizens and claim that they were cartel hitmen. This happened in the case of two university students shot down outside their university in the northern city of Monterrey. The soldiers tried to claim that they were armed men and planted assault rifles next to their bodies. Even though the news of this attempted cover-up was released to the press one has to wonder how many times they have got a way with it. Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights has received 4000 complaints of abuse perpetrated by the military since 2004 although the number of military personal prosecuted is still negligible.

The corruptibility of local and state police has long been known in Mexico however recently there have been more allegations of Federal Police and military officers on the cartel payroll. This week 300 Municipal police officers in the northern town of Lázaro Cárdenas have been parading through the streets demanding the removal of the Federal Police Officers who have been put in charge of their operation. The Municipal Police claim their superiors are corrupt and the kidnap and severe beating of a 55 year-old policeman sparked the protests after he caught Federal Officers extorting money from a civilian. Similar scenes occurred last week in Ciudad Juarez as Federal Police mutinied and incidents in the past have seen different police forces on the point of firing on each other (see below).

 
 With corruption creeping into the last echelons of the Mexican security forces Calderon has been forced to open the debate, purely because he has nothing left to throw at the cartels.
 
For the last four years the Mexican government has been fighting a media war trying to convince the public that they are dealing a huge blow to the structure and capacity of these criminal organisations. Captured hitmen are paraded in front of the cameras in an expensive show of force in an aircraft hangar in Mexico City in an expensive show of force.

However recently this media farce has been undermined by increasing reports of the inability of the Mexican judiciary and penal system to finish off the work that the security forces have started. Mexican government documents obtained by the Associated Press news agency reveal that only 15 percent of people arrested for drug related crimes are found guilty the rest are let free due to lack of evidence. The statistics are from the period between 2007 and 2010 where 226,667 suspects were detained. Even if they do receive a custodial sentence the prison system is so inneficient that it cannot fulfil its role. Prison officials and guards are usually on the pay roles of the drug cartels and often allow prisoners to escape. Mexican citizens where shocked at revelations last month where inmates in a prison in the northern state of Coahuila were allowed out at night and given weapons to go and commit hits against rival cartels, in one incident inmates from the prison arrived at a party at opened fire indiscriminately killing 17 individuals
 
The idea that if you knock out the leader of an organisation everyone else will blend into normal law-abiding society is fatally flawed, it might work against ideological based armed groups but in the illegal drugs trade the only idea that has importance is money. What is known as the “Hydra effect” is what is fuelling the increase of gruesome executions. When a local cartel leader is taken out of action a power vacuum is created. A brutal fight for his position is then played out which often leaves tortured and decapitated bodies left on the roadside as a warning to any others hoping to try their luck. After cartel boss Arturo Beltran Leyva was killed by a military operation in the formerly peaceful town of Cuernavaca it sparked a series of tit-for-tat killings where victims where left hanging from bridges on the outskirts of the city.

 
 Mexico’s current tragedy can be summed up by words quoted by the dictator Porfirio Diaz over a 100 years ago Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States. These words resonate today as the profit made from the import of drugs into the US pays for the vast quantity of arms being smuggled south. In many cases the cartel hitmen are able to outgun military patrols with their high-powered rifles, armour piercing bullets and grenade launchers. Despite the fact that Mexico has some of the strictest laws on gun ownership in the world the Unite Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recently calculated that there are enough weapons in Mexico for the cartels to arm one in three adults. The cause is the remarkably liberal US gun laws and the long porous border where the United States Border Control seemed to more concerned with stopping immigrants than stopping the flow of high powered weapons leaving the country. According to the same UNODC report 20,000 weapons - valued at about 20 million dollars - cross the border each month. The report also points out that there are about ten million of these weapons already in Mexico. The National Rifle Association is one of the strongest lobbying groups in the US and is not prepared to take any ground on the second amendment and the right to buy semi-automatic high-powered rifles. That decision put the Mexican government in between a rock and a hard place.

The benefits of legalisation might become increasingly hard to ignore after November when California votes to legalise and tax the sale of cannabis to adults. Cannabis for a long time provided the biggest percentage of revenue for cartels and in 2006 more than 60% of cartel revenue came from US marijuana sales. The legalisation of cannabis in California could be the biggest blow to organised crime in the last four years and many critics point out that if California votes for legalisation how could Mexico maintain their stance of criminalisation.