Pubdate: Sun, 08 Apr 2012
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2012 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456
Author: Oakland Ross

WHY LATIN AMERICA IS LOOKING AT LEGALIZING COCAINE

What does celebrated Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa have in
common with the president of Guatemala and the editors of The
Economist magazine, not to mention a century-old U.S. toothache remedy?

Simple: legal cocaine.

The Peruvian is for it, as is Guatemalan leader Otto Perez, as well as
a growing assembly of influential Latin Americans.

I think it is important for us to have other alternatives. ... " Perez
told CNN en Espanol earlier this year. "We have to talk about
decriminalization of the production, the transit and, of course, the
consumption."

As for The Economist, the venerable British publication has long
advocated removing criminal sanctions from cocaine, arguing this is
the only way to reduce the otherwise relentless toll of death,
corruption and social disintegration the drug has engendered on
account of being illegal.

On April 14 and 15, heads of state and government from across the
Americas, including U.S. President Barack Obama, Prime Minister
Stephen Harper and their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts,
will gather for a two-day summit in Cartagena, Colombia, and the
so-called war on drugs will figure near the top of their agenda - for
one overriding reason.

It isn't working.

In Mexico alone, more than 50,000 people have perished in a violent
campaign against narcotics that began five years ago, when President
Felipe Calderon threw down the gauntlet in a do-or-die battle against
Mexico's mighty drug cartels.

Since then, some parts of Mexican territory have degenerated into
lawless, quasi-feudal regions where criminals exert as much influence
as the state. Basic human rights protections have been weakened or
abandoned altogether. Law-abiding folk have fled or now dwell in fear.
Thousands of people have simply disappeared. And the cocaine trade? It
marches on, as insidious and profitable as ever.

In the makeshift republics of Central America, the situation is even
worse, while Colombia, Peru and Bolivia - the main cocaine-producing
nations - are also obliged to suffer the corrosive effects of the
narcotics trade.

"Organized crime is our reality," says Jose Gil Olmos, a reporter for
the Mexican newsmagazine Proceso. "It's a Medusa."

All this, thanks to a leafy and otherwise harmless shrub endemic to
South America, called coca, from which cocaine is refined.

Oh, and that toothache remedy?

Roughly a century ago, the Lloyd Manufacturing Co. in the United
States produced a treatment for oral complaints that promised an
"instantaneous cure," sold for just 15 cents a package, and whose
principal ingredient was none other than cocaine.

Many such products were available back then, for the simple reason
that cocaine used to be legal in the United States and Canada, as were
opium and marijuana. The makers of Bayer pharmaceutical products
marketed a cough remedy derived from heroin.

Coca-Cola owed its trademark kick to the presence of a discreet dash
of cocaine in each and every bottle.

Somehow, civilized society managed to survive these substances, when
they were legal.

Now they are illegal - and witness the result.

The international trade in narcotics has become a massive criminal
enterprise that corrupts police forces, cripples judicial systems and
undermines the integrity of entire states, against a backdrop of
ruthless violence.

"For the first time, there is widespread recognition that present
policies have failed and there need to be new alternatives," says
Coletta Youngers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin
America, a privately funded think-tank. "Latin American countries have
basically forced the U.S. into agreeing to discuss other alternatives,
including legalization."

Nobody expects the Barack Obama administration to turn its back on a
century-old U.S. regimen of strict narcotics prohibition - or
certainly not soon, and especially not in an election year - but Latin
Americans have spent decades paying for that regimen with cash,
criminality and blood, and they have just about run out of patience.

"The administration is well aware that the debate on drug legalization
is roaring like an express train," says Larry Birns, director of the
Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs. "It's not going to be
easily stopped."

For its part, Canada seems to be no more forward-looking on the
narcotics file than is Washington.

"The Canadian approach is simple," says Marcel Martel, a history
professor at York University and an expert on organized crime. "It's
repression. Stephen Harper hasn't indicated he plans to revisit the
way Canada handles illegal drug use."

But leaders in many Latin American capitals have been forced by
circumstance to do precisely that, or else watch their countries
degenerate into narco-republics, governed by fear, payola and hit men,
a slide already well under way in some cases.

Desperate for solutions, many Latin Americans now favour legalizing
cocaine and other drugs, including heroin, ecstasy and marijuana.
That, they argue, would put the drug traffickers out of business.

But would it? Even assuming such a measure were politically feasible -
a huge assumption in the case of the United States and Canada - would
legalizing narcotics somehow solve a problem that has so far resisted
all other strategies?

Many experts insist it would not, or not on its own.

"Those who favour legalization say, if you legalize, then the criminals 
will be bankrupt," says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a U.S. expert on the global 
drug trade and author of Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on 
Drugs. "That's a hugely optimistic outlook."

For one thing, the feuding drug cartels would not simply ride off into
a peaceful retirement if their main sources of revenue were to be
stripped from the criminal code.

"Drugs are not the only illegal activity in Mexico," says Carlos
Adolfo Gutierrez Vidal, director of the school of communications at
the University of the Cloister of Sister Juana in Mexico City.

Even now, the narcotraficantes supplement their earnings from drugs
with other revenue streams, including human trafficking, kidnapping,
extortion, auto theft and contract killing, among others. Legalizing
narcotics would not reduce those activities.

In fact, says Felbab-Brown, the measure might well cause increased
violence, because criminal organizations would need to compete that
much harder for control of their remaining businesses or to develop
new sources of income.

Some experts are promoting a third course that would more or less
tolerate drug trafficking without making it legal, a compromise
similar to the so-called Pax Mafiosa that prevails in parts of Italy.

Under such an arrangement, the drug trade would remain formally
illegal but would face little government interference, as long as the
cartels dramatically reduced present levels of violence.

"I think people would prefer this," says Gil Olmos at
Proceso.

Felbab-Brown thinks otherwise.

That sort of accommodation, she says, is effectively the system that
prevailed in Mexico from the 1940s until the 1980s, a time when the
country was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI,
which operated in those days as a sort of corporate dictatorship
headed by an all-powerful presidency.

She believes the arrangement worked then because the criminal
ringleaders genuinely feared the PRI. But times have changed, and
Felbab-Brown doubts the old entente between Mexico's politicians and
its drug lords can or should be restored.

"I do not believe a deal is achievable or even wise. It was precisely
this deal that compromised the police and the judicial system in Mexico."

The situation is even more parlous in Central America, where small
states with frail institutions are largely helpless before the drug
lords, whose activities they barely try to curtail.

Instead, corrupt and incompetent police forces spend their days and
nights rounding up shiftless youths on minor or trumped-up charges and
cramming them into overcrowded prisons, merely worsening an already
grim state of affairs.

"Those prisons are universities for delinquents," says Javier
Martinez, outgoing mayor of the Salvadoran town of Suchitoto. "These
are not criminals. They don't represent a threat to society."

Not now, maybe. But chances are they will.

Clearly, such measures are not working.

Martel at York University says they have never worked. In one form or
another, the war on drugs has been waged for more than a century, he
says, ever since the early 1900s, when U.S. and Canadian authorities
succumbed to pressure from radical Christian groups and declared opium
illegal.

Cocaine was banned a few years later and marijuana in the
1920s.

All these embargoes sprang in part from a racist motivation, says
Martel, because the drugs were depicted as an external menace, foisted
upon God-fearing white North Americans by Chinese or Hispanic "aliens."

Alcohol was prohibited, too. But that ban was suspended in 1933 and
for a simple reason - it didn't work.

The sanctions against narcotics have been no more effective, yet they
have remained in place.

"The U.S. and Canada have enrolled the rest of the world in their
crusade against drugs," says Martel.

At least some Latin American governments have concluded that the
crusade has gone on long enough. It's time to try something else.

But, if criminal penalties have failed, if legalization is not the
answer, and if a Pax Mafiosa won't work either, then what is left?

According to Felbab-Brown, there is no quick fix but only a sustained
and tortuous exercise in state-building - the gradual creation of
effective police forces, judicial systems and other institutions in
countries where those agencies are now so deeply emaciated by fear and
graft that they barely function.

"This will be an enormous project for Mexico and an order of magnitude
greater for Central America," she says. "We really need to think of
organized crime as a competition in state-making."

Unfortunately, it's the drug lords who enjoy the preponderance of
money, guns and savagery. They won't go down soon or without a fight -
if they go down at all.

"The Latin American drug story is not going to have a happy ending,"
predicts a sorrowful Birns at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
"There is no way out."

Here's hoping he's wrong. But what if he's right?
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