Pubdate: Sun, 26 Jan 2014
Source: Day, The (New London,CT)
Copyright: 2014 The Day Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.theday.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/293
Author: Alejandro Hope
Note: Alejandro Hope is a security policy analyst at IMCO, a Mexico
City research organization, and a former intelligence officer. He
wrote this for Bloomberg News.

LEGAL MARIJUANA WON'T BRING PEACE TO MEXICO

Since Jan. 1, Colorado has had a legal marijuana market. The same will
soon be true in Washington State, once retail licenses are issued.
Other states, such as California and Oregon, will likely follow suit
over the next three years.

So does this creeping legalization of marijuana in the United States
spell doom for the Mexican drug cartels? Not quite. The illegal
marijuana trade provides Mexican organized crime with about $1.5
billion to $2 billion a year. That's not chump change, but according
to a number of estimates, it represents no more than a third of gross
drug export revenue. Cocaine is still the cartels' biggest money-maker
and the revenue accruing from heroin and methamphetamine aren't
trivial. Moreover, Mexican gangs also obtain income from extortion,
kidnapping, theft and various other types of illegal
trafficking.

Losing the marijuana trade would be a blow to their finances, but it
certainly wouldn't put them out of business.

But surely Mexico would experience less violence if marijuana was
legal? Yes, to some extent, but the decline wouldn't be sufficient to
radically alter the country's security outlook. In all likelihood,
marijuana production and marijuana-related violence are highly
correlated geographically. Marijuana output is concentrated in five
states (Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Michoacan and Guerrero) that
accounted for approximately a third of all homicides committed in
Mexico in 2012. Assuming improbably that half of all murders in those
areas were marijuana related, we can estimate that the full
elimination of the illegal marijuana trade would reduce Mexico's
homicide rate to 18 per 100,000 inhabitants from 22- still about four
times the U.S. rate.

Well, but couldn't the Mexican government gain a peace dividend by
redirecting some resources from marijuana prohibition to other law
enforcement objectives? Yes, but the effect would probably be modest.
Only 4 percent of all Mexican prison inmates are serving time
exclusively for marijuana related crimes. In 2012, drug offenses
represented less than 2 percent of all crime reports in the country.
When it comes to only federal crimes (7 percent of the total), the
share of drug offenses rises to 20 percent, but that percentage has
been declining since 2007. So the legalization of marijuana won't free
up a huge trove of resources to be redeployed against predatory crime.

Whatever the legal status of marijuana, Mexico needs to tackle its
many institutional malfunctions. Its police forces are underpaid,
undertrained, under motivated and deeply vulnerable to corruption and
intimidation. Its criminal justice system is painfully slow,
notoriously inefficient and deeply unfair. Even with almost universal
impunity, prisons are overflowing and mostly ruled by the inmates themselves.

Changing that reality will take many years. Some reforms are under
way, some are barely off the ground. As a result of a 2008
constitutional reform, criminal courts are being transformed, but
progress across states has been uneven. With a couple of local
exceptions, police reform has yet to find political traction. The
federal Attorney General's Office is set to become an independent
body, but not before 2018.

The reformist zeal that President Enrique Pena Nieto has shown in
other policy areas (education, energy, telecommunications) is absent
in security and justice. Security policy remains reactive, driven more
by political considerations than by strategic design. And results have
been mixed at best: Homicides declined moderately in 2013, but both
kidnapping and extortion reached record levels.

In the final analysis, Mexico doesn't have a drug problem, much less a
marijuana problem: It has a state capacity problem. That is, its
institutions are too weak to protect the life, liberty and property of
its citizens. Even if drug trafficking might very well decline in the
future, in the absence of stronger institutions, something equally
nefarious will replace it.  
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