End the war on drugs for pity's sake
by David Atkins
I've angered many in the progressive community by making common cause with benign interventionists over the years. The arguments against intervention are powerful and familiar, but I still can't square myself with watching brutal genocides and horrific oppression without feeling that international organizations should be equipped to step in put a stop to the worst cases. It's a problem, of course, since more often than not the perpetrators of crimes against humanity don't respond to shame or peaceful action. That in turns leads to the difficult choice of opening the Pandora's Box of war, or sitting back in silence as horrors proceed unhindered right under our noses. Some say war is always the worse option. Some disagree. It's not an easy call.
But there are some cases where stopping evil doesn't require a single gun to fire or bomb to drop. The ongoing drug cartel nightmare in Mexico is one of those. The Investigative Fund at The Nation has a chilling story about drug violence along a cartel corridor in Mexico. The war between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels has left tens of thousands dead. The police and the military are entirely bought off by one cartel or the other, serving as intimidation, enforcement and torturers on behalf of the cartels. Anyone who speaks up is silenced by hit squads that operate in broad daylight under the eye of corrupted law enforcement. In some towns there is nothing left of the government or police forces: city councilors and cops are killed one by one until the few that remain flee for their lives, leaving literally no government infrastructure in place beyond the cartels and their partners in the military. Families that protest their treatment under the regime are eliminated as police first detain and frisk households to get information, then cartel gunmen show up to slaughter the entire household mere hours later:
We moved to the next devastated home, where I found a collection of melted family albums of a wedding party. We tried to make out their faces, but the plastic crumbled in our fingers. Behind the house, I noticed a one-room structure that hadn't been torched. I gingerly made my way toward it through broken glass and blackened rubble. Along the perimeter of the house someone had raked little pyramids of desiccated dog turds into tidy piles. Inside the one-room structure, birth certificates, land titles and other personal documents were strewn across the floor beneath a layer of sand. Scattered among the papers were glossy campaign leaflets with a photo of Apolonio Amaya, a former Guadalupe mayor for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI. I would later find out that gunmen had killed Polo in 2006, and his son Omar, also a former mayor, in 2007. Polo's daughter, a schoolteacher, was shot dead in 2008 while driving her car on the outskirts of town. Polo's wife was also killed. The documents in the small wood-paneled room were all that remained of the family...
Little remains of the town's government. Anybody who worked for the town of Guadalupe prior to 2008 has either been killed or fled. There was once a police force of 10 officers, but by the end of 2010 none remained. More than half of them had been killed, some of their heads placed on the gazebo and park benches of Guadalupe's town plaza as a warning. The remaining officers fled. The mayor and city council left town after two city council members were gunned down in 2009. Gunmen caught up with Mayor Jesus Manuel Lara in 2010, killing him outside the home he'd fled to in Juarez. After Lara's death, Tomás Archuleta, an accountant, became Guadalupe's new mayor. Upon assuming office, he asked Erika Gandara, his 28-year-old niece and a former security guard, to be the town's lone police officer.
At the same time, in the neighboring county seat of Praxedis G. Guerrero, population 2,200, Marisol Valles, a 20-year-old criminology student in black-rimmed glasses, was appointed police chief after the entire police force was killed and city hall strafed by machine gun fire. Newspapers called Valles the "bravest woman in Mexico." Archuleta and other mayors were desperate to assemble some sort of civilian law enforcement in their towns. They hoped gunmen would not target young, unarmed women who served mostly administrative roles. Two days before Christmas 2010, armed men kidnapped Erika Gandara. Her body was found several months later in the desert. After Gandara disappeared, Marisol Valles and her family began to receive death threats and fled to the United States.
The fact that these horrors are occurring every day in a nation that borders our own should shake the conscience of every American. But fortunately, we don't need to drop a single bomb or fire a single gun to put an end to it. All we need do is end the failed war on drugs.
The drug trade is a $39 billion industry in Mexico. Beyond the lawlessness, intimidation and murder, there is no way to achieve a thriving Mexican economy without bringing much of this underground economic activity out of the shadows and into less harmful and more open industries. But none of that will happen as long as American black market demand continues to drive cartel profits. Decriminalizing most drugs and localizing production in the United States will dry up the revenue these cartels need to operate, reduce the nightmarish violence occurring south of the border, and give Mexico and other Central and South American nations room to grow their economies in a productive way. It will also do a wealth of good here at home in reducing needless incarceration and in bringing addicts out of the shadows and into a regulated environment where they can get the treatment they need.
This one is an easy call.
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