OBAMA PERPETUATES THE WRONG APPROACH TO DRUG WAR

President Barack Obama traveled to Mexico this week, rounding off
nearly a month traveling in Europe and the Middle East. On March 24,
he announced his plan to send $700 million to aid the Mexican
government and tighten security along the U.S.-Mexico border.

While the Obama administration acknowledged the role that the United
States plays in providing a market for narcotics, as well as providing
the AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons preferred by the cartel
assassins, he promised only more of the same to address the violence:
guns, surveillance equipment, cash and more police on the beat.

Thus the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge the failure of
the so-called "war on drugs" or to initiate a real change in U.S. drug
policy. It has always preferred to export the perception of violence,
corruption and chaos to other countries: In the 1980s and 1990s it was
Colombia, now it is Mexico.

The plan is to give hundreds of millions of dollars to weapons
contractors to militarize the border and aid the Mexican military and
police forces, which have been found time and time again to support
one or the other of the various cartels battling over territory and
trafficking routes in Mexico. The untouchable policy continues to be
that of legalization and regulation.

In 2006, the Mexican Congress tried to regulate small possession of
many drugs in order to stop the explosion of drug killings, but
then-President Vicente Fox quashed the bill after Bush administration
condemnation. Soon thereafter, Felipe Calderon took the presidency and
sent 20,000 federal troops into the streets to fight the cartels. Has
that policy worked? Since Calderon took office, over 10,000 people
have been slain in the streets.

When former President Bill Clinton militarized the U.S.-Mexico border
between San Diego and Tijuana, did he stop the flow of illegal drugs
and undocumented immigrants? No, instead he pushed them both into the
desert, subjecting the immigrants to the territorial control of the
drug traffickers. The recent explosion of kidnappings in Phoenix is
the result: human traffickers working for the cartels began to kidnap
and hold for ransom their own customers.

Now even the Economist magazine and a coalition of former presidents
from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, grouped together in the Latin
American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, have called for various
legalization proposals.

The issue is not one of violence "spilling over" from Mexico to the
U.S., but of the transnational violence that will always accompany a
multibillion dollar illegal industry. And yet the U.S. government
continues only to blame others. At least in Mexico, the national media
keep count of the annual number of drug executions. Do we even know
how many people were executed on the streets in the United States last
year in drug-related homicides? Here the government and the major
media have failed to develop a national consciousness of slayings that
are a product of the underground drug war, not just the bad luck of
"rough" neighborhoods.

If the current administration advertises change one can believe in, it
should address the economic reality of the drug war - Forbes just
included Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman in its list
of billionaires and listed his industry as: "shipping" - and attack
its social roots through regulation, decriminalization, treatment and
community development.

Obama campaigned on his promise to end the war in Iraq; it is time to
end that other failed and wrong war, the war on drugs.