Pubdate: Tue, 13 Nov 2012
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: Mary Anastacia O'Grady

THE REAL VICTIMS OF MEXICO'S DRUG WAR

The Real Victims of Mexico's Drug War Not all who die at the hands of
the cartels are criminals-and not all who work for them do so willingly.

With voters in Colorado and Washington state approving the
legalization of marijuana use on Tuesday, there is hope that the U.S.
may be at the beginning of the end of the long, tortuous and fruitless
federal war on drugs.

If the U.S. Constitution means anything, the federal government was
never granted the power to regulate intrastate drug use. That
prerogative belongs to the states, though Barack Obama's Justice
Department has already announced that it plans to defend the Beltway's
nanny-state view that the feds have to protect individuals across the
country from themselves.

Meanwhile, south of the border, countries seem to be going through
their own paradigm shifts on the subject. As in the U.S., the impetus
for change is bubbling up from civil society, not trickling down from
big government.

During six years of bloody confrontation with Mexican drug-trafficking
cartels, the government of President Felipe Calderon has often tried
to play down the horror by insisting that the overwhelming number of
victims were gangsters killed by other gangsters. But how could
officials know who killed whom? Only about 4% of all crime in the
country is ever solved. No one understands this better than relatives
of the dead, who in many cases have objected to the characterization
of their murdered loved ones as criminals.

Now evidence is surfacing that drug violence is affecting Mexican
society more broadly than government officials want to admit. One
example is that "working" for the mob in Mexico, in many cases, may
not be voluntary. Some cartel employees, particularly individuals with
technical and engineering skills that the mobsters need, seem to have
been recruited at gunpoint.

Telecommunications specialists who know how to install antennas and
transmitters are in particular demand. Underage adolescents are also
targeted for employment. Meanwhile, a Nov. 4 report in the Mexican
daily Reforma said that doctors and nurses in rural areas feel
threatened by an overwhelming sense of insecurity and many want to
quit.

President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI), who takes office Dec. 1, has already subtly signaled a
change of course. In an interview in New York before the July
election, he told me that he intends to make reducing violent
crime-specifically homicide, kidnapping and extortion-a priority. Of
course, when I asked him, he added that he would continue to go after
drug traffickers. But that sounds an awful lot like the U.S. model,
where drugs move easily from, say, San Antonio to Chicago, and
gangsters know what they can and can't do in the process of getting
their product to market.

The new president may get support from his predecessor, a formerly
zealous antidrug warrior who seems to have had an epiphany. In a
speech to the United Nations in September, Mr. Calderon explained the
"fundamental problem" with fighting drug use by "legally combating the
offer" to young people:

"Huge black market gains, led by the ban, have exacerbated the
ambition of criminals and increased massively the flow of resources
toward their organizations. This allows drug traffickers to create
powerful networks and gives them an almost unlimited ability to
corrupt; they are capable of buying governments and entire police
forces, leaving societies and governments defenseless, particularly in
the poorest countries."

We now hear less of the claim that Mexico's drug-war victims are
almost always themselves hoodlums. Even the government has had to
abandon that line of reason as human-rights groups together with
families of those who have died or disappeared have organized to push
for the truth about what has happened to their loved ones. The belief
that criminal organizations-sometimes with help from corrupted law
enforcement-have taken to kidnapping individuals with specialized
training is gaining credibility.

According to an Oct. 29 report posted on the Mexican website Animal
Politico, the pattern in these kidnappings is notable because the
families do not receive ransom demands, and they often take place in
areas dominated by the cartels. Meanwhile, the military has discovered
many sophisticated "clandestine" telecom networks in remote locations
where the cartels operate.

"I don't see how this is going to turn out to be a coincidence,"
Felipe Gonzalez, secretary of the bicameral commission on national
security, told Animal Politico. "For example, none of the systems
engineers who disappeared have been found, but last year armed men
stopped a bus and forced two people who said they worked for a systems
company to get off. The problem was that they weren't technicians;
they were [bill] collectors. They turned up quickly, though murdered."

Americans are beginning to understand that prohibition is not an
effective way to discourage drug use. But if Mr. Pena Nieto wants to
make Mexico a more just society, he had better not wait for the huge
American federal bureaucracy that lives off the "war" to step aside.
They are deaf to the message that Colorado and Washington state voters
sent last week.
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MAP posted-by: Matt