Legalization Alters 'Rules of the Game'

Review of Washington-Backed Drug War Is Likely

MEXICO CITY - The decision by voters in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana has left Mexican President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto and his team scrambling to reformulate their antidrug strategies in light of what one senior aide said was a referendum that "changes the rules of the game."

It is too early to know what Mexico's response to the successful ballot measures will be, but a top aide said Pena Nieto and members of his incoming administration will discuss the issue with President Obama and congressional leaders in Washington this month. The legalization votes, however, are expected to spark a broad debate in Mexico about the direction and costs of the U.S.-backed drug war here.

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MEXICO CITY - The main adviser to Mexico's president-elect said Wednesday that votes legalizing recreational marijuana in the U.S. states of Washington and Colorado will force Mexico and the United States to rethink their efforts to halt marijuana smuggling across the border.

Luis Videgaray, head of incoming President Enrique Pena Nieto's transition team, told Radio Formula that the Mexican administration taking power in three weeks remains opposed to drug legalization. But he said the votes in the two states complicate his country's commitment to quashing the growing and smuggling of a plant now seen by many as legal in part of the United States.

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Countries Moving Toward Legalization

Will Have to Reconcile to Global-Treaty Laws

MEXICO CITY - Voters in Colorado and Washington state who approved the recreational use of marijuana Tuesday sent a salvo from the ballot box that will ricochet around Latin America, a region that's faced decades of bloodshed from the U.S.-led war on drugs.

Experts said the moves were likely to give momentum to countries such as Uruguay that are marching toward legalization, to undercut Mexican criminal gangs and to embolden those who demand greater debate about how to combat illegal substances.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) - A study released Wednesday by a respected Mexican think tank contends that proposals to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington could cut Mexican drug cartels' earnings from traffic to the United States by as much as 30 percent.

Opponents questioned some of the study's assumptions, saying the proposals could also offer new opportunities for cartels to operate inside the United States.

The ballot measures to be decided Nov. 6 would allow adults to possess small amounts of marijuana under a regimen of state regulation and taxation. Polls have shown tight races in Washington and Colorado, with Washington's measure appearing to have the best chance of passing. Oregon's measure, which would impose the fewest regulations, does not appear likely to pass.

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WHENEVER I've interviewed Mexican cartel killers, the aspect that I've found most disturbing about them is that they appear to be sane.

Even though they have described to me such unfathomable actions as hacking off the heads of still-living victims, it is something other than mental illness that drives their violence. Their sanity is disconcerting because, if they were simply mad, it would be easier to accept horrific actions like leaving piles of headless corpses in town squares.

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Washington Ballot Measure

Report Says States Could Grow and Sell Marijuana More Cheaply Than International Smugglers

MEXICO CITY A study released Wednesday by a respected Mexican think tank asserts that proposals to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Colorado, Oregon and Washington could cut Mexican drug cartels' earnings from traffic to the U.S. by as much as 30 percent.

Opponents questioned some of the study's assumptions, saying the proposals could offer new opportunities for cartels to operate inside the United States and replace any profit lost to a drop in international smuggling.

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UNITED NATIONS -- Latin American leaders at ground zero of the war on drugs called for a new approach Wednesday, saying the current drive to crush powerful cartels has failed to reduce consumption. The presidents of Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia all spoke at the U.N. General Assembly of the need to find a new approach to the global war drugs.

"The premise of our fight against drugs has proven to have serious flaws," said President Otto Perez of Guatemala, who in the past has advocated legalizing drugs to wipe out the profit motive for traffickers.

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Mexico Has Chosen the Design and Site, but Conflict Remains Over Who Should Be Honored and How.

MEXICO CITY - It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: a memorial to the thousands of victims of the drug violence that has convulsed Mexico for most of the last decade.

Washington, after all, has its Vietnam War memorial. New York has its monument at the site of the World Trade Center.

But even as the winning design was being announced, Mexico's tribute was stricken by the conflicting visions and bitter disputes that have driven wedges into Mexican society.

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Karina Gidi stars in "Estado de Gracia," the series about drug legalization, seen in the U.S. exclusively on Cinelatino. (Adrian Ibanez, (c)Once TV Mexico 2012 / August 5, 2012) Related photos)

By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times August 5, 2012, 8:00 a.m. Mexican federal legislator Julieta Toscano isn't afraid to say what some Mexicans have long been thinking: After six years of turmoil and 55,000 people killed in narcotics-related violence, it's time to stem the bloodshed by legalizing drugs.

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Mexico's incoming president said he's in favor of a debate over the legalization of drugs as the current U.S.-led crackdown fuels violence in his country without stemming the flow of narcotics across the border.

Enrique Pena Nieto, in an interview with the PBS "Newshour" program broadcast Tuesday, insisted he's not personally in favor of legalizing drugs. Still, he joined a growing chorus of leaders in Latin America who have called on the U.S. to rethink its strategy.

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After 6 Years, 10,000 'Disappearances', 50,000 Deaths and 1.6m Displaced... an Exhausted Nation Is Set to Elect a Leader Willing to Deal With the Cartels and the US Isn't Happy. David Usborne Reports From Mexico City

Julia Fuertes digs into her handbag to retrieve a pair of earrings she has made at home. Simple circles of coloured card, they are adorned with photographs of a dashing man cut from celebrity magazines. He looks like an Mexican soap star, except that one day soon he might be running this country.

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The Country Chooses a President Next Week, but Candidates Aim Only to Limit Violence.

MEXICO CITY - Six years into a ghastly drug war, none of the top candidates in next Sunday's presidential election has offered a significant new strategy to win a conflict that has claimed more than 50,000 lives and terrorized Mexican society.

Instead, the politicians emphasize reducing the increasingly brutal violence, as they seek to address the concern that weighs heavily on the minds of outraged Mexican voters.

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One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses.

The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars.

Coronel's husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for "Father" on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquin Guzman, is the C.E.O. of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world's most powerful drug trafficker. Guzman's organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world.

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As Mexicans prepare to choose a new president one month from today, the election has turned into a referendum of sorts on President Felipe Calderon's war on the drug cartels, an effort that some Mexicans applaud as long overdue and others blame for escalating violence in the country.

The primary question for the three leading candidates seeking to succeed Calderon is whether they would continue to use the military to confront the cartels, as Calderon has since he launched a U.S.-backed crackdown on the drug-trafficking networks in 2006, or pursue a different strategy, experts say.

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Presidential Hopeful to Focus on Reducing Violence

Mexico City (AP) - Shortly after sunrise last month in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, police found 14 butchered bodies in a van outside city hall, a salvo in a seesawing battle of horrors between Mexico's two most-powerful drug cartels.

Soon after, nine people were hanged from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo. Fourteen heads were left in coolers outside city hall. Eighteen mutilated bodies were dumped by a scenic lake in western Mexico. The decapitated bodies of 49 people were dumped outside a small town 75 miles from the U.S. border.

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MEXICO CITY-The arrest of a former deputy defense minister and three other retired and active high-ranking Mexican army officers on suspicion of having been in the pay of a drug cartel is shaping up as the biggest scandal to hit the army in years.

Last week, a judge issued preliminary detention orders for three generals and a lieutenant colonel. The move allows prosecutors from the organized-crime division of the Attorney General's Office to question the men for up to 40 days before formal charges would need to be filed.

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When you're addressing a crowd, there are those not-so-subtle indicators that your message is not getting through. For me, the hint came when, during a recent talk in which I declared my support for the Mexican drug war, a woman in the audience yelled: "Sellout!"

It was startling but also refreshing. As a Mexican-American, I'm often accused by the right wing of being -- as one reader put it the other day -- a "pro-illegal-alien opinion writer." It was a nice change of pace to have someone on the left wing accuse me of not being supportive enough of a liberal cause. It tells me that I'm just where I need to be.

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MEXICO CITY-More than 100 journalists and supporters gathered Friday - - the day after three photographers were found murdered in the eastern port city of Veracruz - to call for more protections for journalists covering Mexico's complex and deadly drug war.

State officials confirmed Thursday that the bodies of photographers Guillermo Luna and Gabriel Huge, who worked for the Notiver local newspaper, were found dismembered, with evidence of torture.

Irasema Becerra, described as Luna's girlfriend, and Esteban Rodriguez, a former journalist working as a welder, were found alongside them, a later statement said.

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Thursday marked World Press Freedom Day, a UN-declared event meant to underscore the connection between journalism and democracy. It also highlights the very real dangers journalists face reporting the news in the world's hot zones.

These days, one of the worst places to be a journalist is Veracruz, Mexico. There, on World Press Freedom Day, the dismembered bodies of three photojournalists -- Gabriel Huge, Guillermo Luna and Esteban Rodriguez -- were found in a shallow waterway in the Mexican port city. The body of Luna's girlfriend, Irasema Becerra, was found not far from them. Mexican prosecutors said the victims showed signs of being tortured and that their bodies had been dismembered. The killings were likely committed by organized drug cartels that have terrorized the region for years.

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SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico - The United States needs to consider legalizing all illegal drugs or risk having the continent become an expanding war zone, argues former President Vicente Fox, insisting that governments are not in the business of legislating morality.

As President Barack Obama and other regional leaders prepared to gather over the weekend in Cartagena, Colombia, for the annual Summit of the Americas, Fox called the war on drugs a failure and said that the U.S. and its partners must look beyond criminalizing drug use and employing military tactics to fight traffickers.

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