Pubdate: Fri, 25 May 2012
Source: Age, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2012 The Age Company Ltd
Contact:  http://www.theage.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5
Author: Nick O'Malley

FUNNEL FOR A DEADLY TRADE IS READY TO BURST

Forensic workers remove one of the decapitated bodies from a morgue in
Guadalajara, Mexico. Police found the dismembered bodies of 15 people
dumped near Mexico's second city earlier this month.

As the killings continue, Mexico and Latin America are pressing the US
for change.

THE bodies were found just north of Monterrey near the town of
Cadereyta Jimenez, some in garbage bags, some strewn on the roadside.
They were mostly men, mostly missing their heads, hands and feet.

There were 49 in all, which was a lot even for Mexico, so the grim
discovery a fortnight ago made news, even in a country where mass
murder is so common as to be banal. Earlier in the month, 15 bodies
were found on the road to Chapasa and another 23 were discovered in
Nuevo Laredo. Of those, nine were hanging from a highway overpass and
14 were decapitated.

More than 50,000 people have been killed in the war on drugs in Mexico
since a crackdown began in December 2006. It took the US nearly 15
years to lose 47,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War.

Mexico's tragedy is that it lies between the US, which has an
apparently insatiable appetite for drugs, and Colombia, where most of
the world's cocaine is produced.

As the US prosecuted its war on drugs, in its own territory and in
that of its southern neighbours, its interdiction became more
sophisticated. The sea routes through the Caribbean into Florida
became more difficult, so the smugglers turned inland, up through
Central America into Mexico with its porous 3000-kilometre-long border
with the US.

The drug war was now largely over border crossings, and rather than
being fought at sea or in remote jungle, it was being fought in towns
and cities. Its victims were not only gang members but also illegal
immigrants being forced to work as mules, civilian witnesses,
politicians and journalists who would not be silent.

And the victims are not just the bloodied and tortured corpses turning
up on freeway verges, in sewers and back allies, but Mexico's
institutions which are being corrupted by the $US15 billion trade.
Some fear gangs will install their own politicians at this year's
federal election.

Adding insult to considerable injury, while the US insisted Mexico
reflected its drug laws, it declined to mirror Mexico's tough gun
laws. So as the drugs move north the guns go south, mainly from US
border states that introduced lax gun laws, backed by the National
Rifle Association.

It is little surprise that Latin American leaders have begun to
challenge the US policy they so reliably complied with for years.
Cracks started to show when the Global Commission on Drug Policy
released its report last year, calling for an end to the
criminalisation of drugs and for governments to experiment with new
forms of regulation.

Among others, it was signed by the former presidents of Mexico,
Colombia and Brazil, as well as George Schultz, US secretary of state
under Ronald Reagan.

Then, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, a former military hard
man trained in the US, and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, a
former defence minister, lobbied for decriminalisation to be debated
at the key regional summit held in March, the Summit of the Americas.

The Obama administration could no longer ignore the position and
dispatched US Vice-President Joe Biden to Colombia for preliminary
talks. He delivered a blunt message in diplomatic terms: yes, the
issue was worth discussion; no, the administration would not change
its policy.

But former Drug Enforcement Agency intelligence agent Sean Dunagan
believes the war on drugs started by Richard Nixon and waged ever
since will inevitably fall.

Dunagan, a veteran of the DEA's outposts in Guatemala and Monterrey,
believes America will eventually come to realise the benefits of
prohibition do not outweigh the costs in blood and treasure.

During his time in Monterrey, Dunagan saw how the drug war came to
destroy the very fabric of Mexican society. ''Once the gangs had
corrupted the police and local governments, everything was on the
table - people smuggling, prostitution, insurance fraud, kidnapping,
extortion,'' he says.

''My middle-class friends who had nothing to do with the drug trade
knew that they could not go to the government or the police for help.''

Instead, those that could packed up their businesses and took them
north to the US, further white-anting the communities they left behind.

Dunagan believes that while based in Monterrey he was witness ''not to
drug-related violence, but to prohibition-related violence''.

He was so disillusioned he quit the agency and joined Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition, a lobby group of former court, military and law
enforcement officers. He told The Age that the cartels battling over
access to the border can trace their history to the Gulf Cartel, which
first appeared as rum runners in the Prohibition era.

Dunagan supports not just decriminalisation, but in the heavily
regulated legalisation of all drugs, not only to kill off the cartels'
business model, but to enhance public health.

''Eighty-five per cent of high school kids say they can buy marijuana
at school. At least in a regulated market you can do a better job of
keeping it out of the hands of minors. Drug dealers don't ask for
ID,'' he says.

''It took us 13 years but we saw that prohibition was not worth
it.''

Perhaps, but there is no sign the current administration is softening
its stance. Quite the opposite. Though US President Barack Obama has
discussed his own cocaine and marijuana use as an adolescent, his
Justice Department has cracked down on medical marijuana centres.

And so far, he appears unmoved by the increasingly loud debate over
drug-related incarceration rates.

In her book, The New Jim Crow, former American Civil Liberties Union
lawyer Michelle Alexander argues that the mass jailing of black people
in the US has become a modern system of disenfranchising black people.

She writes of a man called Jarvious Cotton: ''Cotton's
great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather
was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His
grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father
was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests.

''Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men
in the US, has been labelled a felon and is currently on parole.''

According to ACLU figures, five times as many whites are using drugs
as African-Americans, yet African-Americans are sent to prison for
drug offences at 10 times the rate of whites.

African-Americans represent 12 per cent of the total population of
drug users, but 38 per cent of those arrested for drug offences, and
59 per cent of those in state prison for a drug offence.

Johanna Mendelson Forman, an Americas specialist at the Centre for
Strategic and International Studies, says that as state and county
prisons have been privatised, they have become less transparent and
now have a lobby group behind them as well as a profit incentive.

Forman says despite President Obama's hard line, the Latin American
leaders can claim some success.

''[Law reform] is not going to happen overnight, but they have got it
onto the agenda, they have forced the US to address the problem.''
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