AS THE VIOLENCE SOARS, MEXICO SIGNALS IT'S HAD ENOUGH OF AMERICA'S
STUPID WAR ON DRUGS

Even on his most homicidal of days, Al Pacino's character in Scarface
couldn't even approach the level of drug trafficking-related brutality
bleeding down Mexico's streets.

It is no longer unusual for the Mexican news media to report on yet
another, freshly decapitated head stuck atop a fencepost or a metal
spike, or a garbage bag filled with body parts, usually with a
hand-scrawled note or placard attached.

That amounts to a cartel's calling card, and it's usually delivered in
the form of a warning to a rival cartel, or for the Mexican
authorities to stay away and stop seizing their drugs.

Other times, it's just a chilling placard intended to strike terror
into the hearts of the people who come across the gory scene and the
text: "Ha Ha Ha." To be sure that their message is heard, cartels are
known to send regular text messages to newspaper reporters, place
newspaper advertisements, or to even upload their own killing videos
(sometimes accompanied by narco-corridos as background music) to YouTube.

Mexican drug cartels are, rather effectively, fighting the
government's War on Drugs with their own War of Terror, often swelling
their ranks (and combat/terror tactics) with former members of law
enforcement. The Zetas, for instance, are members of former Mexican
counter-narcotics squads (some with U.S.-assisted training under their
belts), who have become the self-proclaimed and much-feared hit men of
the Gulf cartel.

So far this year, roughly 3,500 murders have been directly attributed
to the drug war in Mexico, surpassing last year's estimate of 2,500.
(These numbers include the murders of at least 500 soldiers, cops,
judges, politicians -- and their family members -- in nearly two years.

The drug war rages across Mexico's urban and (mostly) rural terrain,
and murders are usually targeted toward pronounced rivals, but
increasing numbers of victims are innocent bystanders, including women
and children who were previously considered off-limits where acts of
drug war-related retaliation were concerned.

Reports of attacks are rolling in daily, sometimes several times a
day. This Sunday, unidentified gunmen shot up the United States
consulate in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. While no injuries
were reported there because the consulate was closed, six young adults
attending a private celebration were killed on Saturday in the
violence-and-drug-plagued Mexican border state of Chihuahua, in Ciudad
Juarez. Those murders, as yet unsolved, followed on the heels of 11
homicides in a Chihuahua bar, when a gunman opened fire on
unsuspecting patrons, including a prominent journalist who may or may
not have been a specific target.

It should be of note that much of the worst drug war violence is
happening right at the border: Tijuana, adjacent to San Diego, saw
nearly 40 people murdered in the last week of September alone, in
addition to nearly 25 deaths of male and female prisoners the previous
week due to two major riots at the vastly overcrowded Tijuana State
Prison. (Prisoners alleged frequent incidents of torture and sexual
violence, sometimes leading to death, at the hands of guards.)

American newspapers located in border cities and states tend to report
some of the more gruesome events and mass killings, but the rest of
this country seems remarkably in the dark about what's happening to
our Mexican neighbors, much less the fact that the violence has
increased dramatically since U.S. drug war dollars have increased in
the form of support for Mexican President Felipe Calderon's
militarily-minded crackdown on trafficking, with the goal of
dismantling the cartels' leadership apparatus, as well as breaking
apart close alliances between local authorities, cops, and drug
traffickers. (Corruption in Mexican law enforcement and military is
epidemic; consider that many police officers in Mexico make no more
than $5,000 per year.)

Since President Calderon took office in December 2006, he has
authorized large-scale troop deployments (roughly 30,000 troops), in
an attempt to diminish the power lorded over Mexico and its citizens
by rival Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, as well as affiliates like La
Familia, which has earned a reputation for particularly memorable and
gruesome acts, including the night that five decapitated heads were
thrown onto a dance floor packed with people.

Seizures of illicit drugs, particularly cocaine, have indeed
increased. But so has the bloodshed and the level of fear: a national
poll published on October 4th indicated that more than 40% of Mexicans
felt less secure since Calderon's drug war offensive began.

Another poll published by the Mexico City daily, Reforma, showed that
more than half of Mexicans believed that the cartels, not the
government, were winning the drug war.

Still, as one would imagine, the Bush Administration has responded
favorably to Calderon's crackdown on drug cartels, ushering in the
three-year "Merida Initiative" to support counter-narcotics efforts in
Mexico and Central America: "The Merida Initiative complements U.S.
domestic efforts to reduce drug demand, stop the flow of arms and
weapons, and confront gangs and criminal organizations," as the State
Department explained in April 2008.

This past June, Bush struck a deal with Calderon to approve $400
million toward additional drug war assistance (representing a 20%
increase in the Mexican anti-narcotics budget) -- for still more
helicopters, military training, ion scanners, canine units, and
surveillance technology.

Considering their close ties, President Calderon's announcement
earlier this month must have come as a bit of an unwanted surprise to
the Bush Administration. On October 2, Calderon proposed legislation
that would decriminalize drug possession, ostensibly for personal use.
Not just for marijuana, as one might have expected in a country where
pot smoke has not been demonized to the same degree as in the U.S.,
but for cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, as well.

To be more specific, Calderon's proposed legislation, supported by the
Mexican attorney general's office, is intended to address a different
kind of drug crisis on Mexican soil: a growing number of addicts.
Cocaine once solely destined from Columbia and other Andean nations
toward the U.S. is still flowing in such great supply that it has
ended up attracting more users -- and abusers.

In addition, meth lab crackdowns in the U.S. have allowed
narco-cartels to step in and fill the void, so that speed is now more
readily available in Mexico, as well. The impact has been dramatic:
according to the government's own statistics, the number of drug
addicts in Mexico is estimated to have doubled in just six years to
307,000, while the number of people who have tried drugs at some point
rose from 3.5 million to 4.5 million.

If passed, Calderon's legislation would decriminalize up to 2 grams of
marijuana, 500 milligrams of cocaine, 40 milligrams of meth, and 50
milligrams of heroin.

To qualify, any individual arrested with those drugs would have to
agree to a drug treatment program to address admitted addiction or
enter a prevention program designed for recreational users.

Those who refused to attend one of these kinds of programs would be
subject to a fine.

This proposal isn't the first of its kind in Mexican political
history. In fact, former President Vicente Fox also supported limited
decriminalization just over two years ago, but his efforts were
quashed in the wake of unrelenting pressure from the White House and
the Office of National Drug Control Policy. It's a safe bet that
pressure of this kind has already started up where Calderon's proposal
is concerned.

"President Calderon's proposal to decriminalize personal possession of
illicit drugs is consistent with the broader trend throughout Western
Europe, Canada, and other parts of Latin America to stop treating drug
use and possession as a criminal problem," says Ethan Nadelmann,
executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national drug policy
reform organization. But it contrasts sharply with [the approach taken
in] the United States [the U.S. government] should think twice before
criticizing a foreign government for its drug policy, much less
holding out the U.S. as a model.

Looking to the U.S. as a role model for drug control is like looking
to apartheid South Africa for how to deal with race."

Or, for that matter, looking toward U.S. intervention in Columbia as a
model for how to deal with Mexican drug cartels.

In effect, the U.S. government waded into a long-running civil war
when it started to throw money toward anti-narcotics military
training, aviation training, weaponry, surveillance technology, and
the availability of Monsanto's coca-killing herbicide, Round-Up.
Ostensibly, all of this assistance was for the "good guys." American
taxpayers, as always, were expected to overlook the death squad part
of the equation, the part about the right-wing paramilitary leaders
who took their U.S.-supplied training and weapons and turned them into
family and local economy-displacing attacks akin to, or worse, than
that of their sworn enemies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Columbia (FARC).

The end result: Columbia's cities, towns, jungles, and streets were
turned into even more militarized, more deadly versions of themselves.
The U.S. government still declared victory when the leadership of the
cocaine-producing Medellin Cartel was dismantled (or killed) from the
1980s to the early 1990s.

That particular cartel was brought down, and city streets are safer
today than they were in the 80s and 90s, but Columbia's problems have
hardly gone away. Blood still flows as a result of territorial battles
between FARC and right-wing militias, often over the control over land
suitable for growing plentiful coca crops.

At this very moment, there are some 300,000 displaced Columbians,
meaning the country has the second-worst internal refugee crisis in
the world, right behind Sudan.

Since 2000, in fact, the U.S. has continued to pour huge sums of money
into Columbia: over $5 billion since 2000, making it the biggest
recipient of drug war funding (from the U.S. to a foreign country) in
the 21st century.

Has it paid off? Consider that in June, the United Nations released
data indicated that coca cultivation actually increased nearly 30% in
2007 to 244,634 acres.

Columbia not only remains the world's largest coca producer, but its
farmers have apparently succeeded in creating herbicide-resistant
hybrid coca plants that defy Monsanto's poisons.

Ninety percent of the cocaine consumed by Americans (half the cocaine
consumed in the world goes up American noses) is now flowing this way
from Columbia. And much of that cocaine is, indeed, passing through
Mexico. (It is estimated that 80% of methamphetamine reaching the U.S.
is coming from Mexico directly.)

Last week, the two-day security meeting of the Organization of
American States kicked off with the frank admission that Mexico's
narco-cartels are primarily buying their cocaine from FARC and
right-wing paramilitary groups.

So, too, are Mexican cartels using what were once considered to be
Columbian narco-terror tactics, including the use of "Columbian
neckties" and the killing of innocent civilians.

In fact, the drug war in Mexico is beginning to look, feel, and sound
like the worst of the drug war in Columbia in the 1980s and 1990s. In
late August, eleven headless, shirtless bodies were found handcuffed
together in the Merda suburb of Chichi Suarez, in Yucatan State. The
nature of the as-yet-unsolved crime is considered to be one drug
cartel's "warning sign" to a rival group.

Mexican civilians have even become the recent victims of explosives
detonated in public spaces, something that had not previously been a
concern. The use of larger-scale explosives as a method of terrorist
attack started just two months after Calderon took office, leading up
to last month's terrifying explosion in a crowded plaza in Morelia,
the capital city of Michoacn. The attack in broad daylight was timed
to coincide with Mexican Independence Day festivities: over 100
people, primarily working-class men and women who had gathered for the
free celebration, were wounded in the attack.

Eight people were killed, including a 13-year-old.

As was the case in Columbia, journalists are being increasingly
targeted for exposing narco-cartels (or links with officials and law
enforcement, as the case may be). The Chihuahua bar shooting last
Thursday claimed the life of David Garcia Monroy, a well-respected
columnist at the daily newspaper, El Diario de Chihuahua. That same
day, the editor of La Noticia de Michoacn, Miguel Angel Villagomez,
was kidnapped as he left work in the port city of Lazaro Cardenas.
And, on September 23, a popular Mexican radio host, Alejandro Zenn
Fonseca Estrada, was shot to death with AR-15 rifles, at close range,
in Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco. According to witnesses, a van
pulled up alongside Fonseca as he was hanging anti-violence posters on
a major street. (According to the Committee to Protect Journalists,
one of the posters read, "No to Kidnappings"). The murder remains unsolved.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Mexico ranks
10th on CPJ's "Impunity Index," a list of countries where journalists
are attacked or slain on a regular basis and those crimes consistently
remain unsolved.

Calderon's call for decriminalization won't put a direct dent in this
kind of violence, but former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, author
of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expos of the Dark Side of American
Policing, says that it's a step in the right direction toward
alleviating the overflow of non-violent drug offenders in Mexican
courtrooms, jails, and prisons -- something that's beginning to resemble
the criminal justice landscape of the United States. Stamper, an active
member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), says that those
comparisons need to be drawn. "Our drug policy, predicated on the
prohibition model, has caused far more harm than good, locally and
globally, " he says. "The results?

The same as Mexico's: higher potency drugs, more readily available,
and at cheaper prices than ever."

Statements like these, particularly coming from prominent members of
law enforcement, would have been almost unheard of in the
not-too-distant past. But these days, American public is sending
strong signs that they, too, are ready for a truly different approach
to drug and sentencing policies, as well as strategies on mental
illness and/or substance abuse treatment. According to a nationwide
Zogby poll released on October 2, three out of four U.S. voters
believe that the war on drugs is failing, while over one-quarter agree
that legalizing at least some drugs is the best alternative to the
current strategy.

While Stamper supports Calderon's call for decriminalization, fellow
LEAP activist and board member Terry Nelson says that he doesn't
believe in "incremental steps," explaining that nothing short of
complete legalization will bring an end to the profit-driven violence
associated with the global drug trade, valued at around $500 billion
per year. "To use a drug is not to abuse a drug," says Nelson.
"Calderon is just trying to take some pressure off the court system
with legalization, [most] of the actual crime and violence would be
taken away, almost overnight."

A 32-year veteran of the military and various branches of law
enforcement, Nelson's career took him on narco-traffic interdiction
training and surveillance missions across Mexico, Central and South
America. Nelson admits that he was involved in the Mexican Aviation
Training Initiative, "designed to improve our counterparts in Mexico's
professionalism in enforcing Mexican drug laws."

Some of the people Nelson helped to train ended up as Zetas, as he
later found out.

Now retired and living in Fort Worth, Texas, Nelson served for five
years as the Field Director of Surveillance Support Branch East (SSB
East). During that time, he says, SSB East successfully seized of over
230,000 pounds of cocaine throughout Latin America. Nelson's biggest,
personal drug trafficking bust happened off the coast of Ecuador,
resulting in the seizure of 30,000 pounds of cocaine.

Much to his dismay, even such a large-scale bust yielded absolutely
nothing by way of a drop in street supply -- or an increase in price.
"If that big a bust doesn't affect the street trade," he muses, "what
chances do you have doing it a gram or a kilo at a time?"

To put it another way, he asks, "if we hadn't called it a war to begin
with, could we admit that we're not winning?"