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InvisibleSimplepowa
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Registered: 03/06/09
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Why Mexico's losing its drug war
    #14055750 - 03/02/11 04:58 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Why Mexico's losing its drug war

As he visits Washington today, here's something for Mexican President Fe lipe Calderon to discuss with Presi dent Obama: Calderon's war on the drug gangs is costing a lot in American money and Mexican blood -- and he's losing.

His goals are admirable: Erasing the huge and criminal underground economy would show Mexicans that their country can become, like the US, a land where the rule of law benefits everyone and therefore deserves respect. We'd gain, too, from the drop in cross-border violence. Calderon, who launched this war shortly after his 2006 inauguration, would become a national hero.

In reality, the Mexican president's poll numbers are in the dumps. And Americans almost universally ignore the bloodbath south of the border, unless the occasional gringo gets killed, as when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata recently got caught in gang-war crossfire. Mexicans, meanwhile, increasingly resent shedding blood because of our insatiable appetite for illegal drugs. (Especially when legal "medical" marijuana is on the rise.)

Nevertheless, Washington continues to pour $1.4 billion a year into this war (mostly to Mexico's federal army), while it's cost 35,000 Mexican deaths so far. With violence escalating, some estimate that, by the time he leaves office next year, Calderon will leave behind up to 50,000 fatalities. Is it worth it?

On a January visit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reminded Mexicans, "There was a time 20 or 30 years ago when people thought New York was going to be lost to gangs and drugs and crime" -- but "through hard work by law enforcement and a lot of support and a lot of reform, we've seen a real change."

Except Calderon's Mexico isn't Giuliani's New York. The entire annual budget of an average Mexican municipality equals one fishing boat filled with drugs -- and in some ports such vessels head north three times a day. The druglords are doing just fine sticking to their infamous credo, "silver or lead" (take our silver, or we'll pump you full of lead -- and get our way anyway.)

No wonder the boss of the infamous Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman, is on the Forbes' billionaires list -- while Hector Melecio, the mayor of Culiacan (the Sinaloa capital city), struggles to cope.

Sinaloa, a rich agricultural state tucked half way between Mexico City and the Arizona border, is also home to druglords like Guzman and his partners, Mayo Zombada and Azul Esparragoza. For decades, such men operated quietly alongside the legitimate local farmers and businessmen. No more. Since the launch of Calderon's war, the crime bosses have been hanging corpses of their enemies from Culiacan's bridges.

Even the government's "successes" cause problems for people like Mayor Melecio. For example, the Feb. 15 killing of the ICE agent triggered a roundup of top druglords, with press coverage on both sides of the border.

But action against drug lords ripples across the whole country: The vacuum at the top leaves underlings battling each other to control newly-open turf. Local crime -- carjacking, extortion, kidnapping, street gunfights -- escalates.

And "the Federales won't lift a finger to help me solve that problem," Melecio told me. (The army, perhaps rightly, assumes Mexico's local police forces are tainted by narcotics money.)

What would he want from America? US "arms, helicopters, training" -- the lot. Funds too, he adds, but those don't top his list. But we're not nearly ready for that kind of commitment. Instead, we simply hand over funds to finance Mexico's losing war of attrition. The druglords get richer, and honest men like Melecio struggle to cope.

The ultimate solution is legalization, which would lower profits and take violence out of the drug trade -- just as the end of Prohibition reduced America's gang problem. But there's no political appetite so far (on either side of the border) for legalizing drugs.

Instead, Washington muddles on with an expensive and extremely deadly conceit -- pretending that all we need to do is pour some money on the problem, and Mexico's federal government will somehow eventually prevail.

http://anonym.to/?http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/why_mexico_losing_its_drug_war_Y941xcXgjCLWBEdE7rQl1M


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