LATIN AMERICAN LEADERS ASSAIL U.S. DRUG 'MARKET'

MEXICO CITY - Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn
the U.S. government for soaring drug violence in their countries,
blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have
grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.

Alongside official declarations, Latin American governments have
expressed growing disgust for U.S. drug consumers - both the addict
and the weekend recreational user heedless of the misery and
destruction stemming from their pleasures.

"Our region is seriously threatened by organized crime, but there is
very little responsibility taken by the drug-consuming countries,"
Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said at a December meeting of Latin
leaders in Caracas. Colom said the hemisphere was paying the price
for drug consumption in the United States with "our blood, our fear
and our human sacrifice."

With transit countries facing some of the highest homicide rates in
the world, so great is the frustration that the leaders are demanding
that the United States and Europe consider steps toward legalization
if they do not curb their appetite for drugs.

At a regional summit this month in Mexico, attended by the leaders of
11 Latin American and Caribbean countries, officials declared that
"the authorities in consumer countries should explore all possible
alternatives to eliminate exorbitant profits of criminals, including
regulatory or market options."

"Market options" is diplomatic code for decriminalization.

The complaints are not exactly new but are remarkable for being
nearly unanimous. The critique comes from sitting presidents left to
right, from persistent U.S. antagonists such as President Hugo Chavez
of Venezuela, and from close U.S. allies such as President Juan
Manuel Santos of Colombia, which has received almost $9 billion in
aid to fight the cartels.

'Rethinking' the war on drugs

The criticism has been bolstered by opinion leaders in the region,
including the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, who
called for the legalization of marijuana and an overhaul of U.S.
thinking on the 40-year drug war, which has cost a trillion dollars
by some estimates but has done little to reduce supply and demand.

Senior Obama administration officials say the resentment is
understandable, given that the production and transit countries are
shouldering more of the violence, but they say the rhetorical attacks
against the United States are misdirected.

"I refuse to accept that there has not been progress" in the fight
against drug trafficking and consumption, said William R. Brownfield,
assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International
Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, said there has been a sustained reduction in demand
for cocaine in the United States. According to the 2009 National
Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number of Americans aged 12 and
older who are current users of cocaine has dropped by 21 percent
since 2007. The purity of seized cocaine is down; prices are up.

"No one single issue drives this global drug problem," Brownfield
said. "Everybody plays his role, everybody shares responsibility."

Yet while cocaine use may have declined in the United States in the
past few years, it is surging in Europe and Asia. In the United
States, seizures of methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana are
increasing, and the most recent health surveys found that American
10th-graders are more likely to smoke pot than tobacco.

"The biggest challenge faced by many Latin American countries is the
rising threat of organized crime funded by U.S. drug consumption.
That is without a doubt," said Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow
Wilson Center's Mexico Institute.

Lack of political will

"But the cruel irony is that drug violence is down in the United
States, and so it is hard to build a political constituency that
wants to do much more to help Latin America," he said.

Leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean say that the United States
is not only responsible for the cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and
marijuana that moves north, but also - far more dangerous to them -
the bulk cash profits and military-style weapons that flow south.

One of the most outspoken critics of U.S. drug consumption has been
Mexico's center-right President Felipe Calderon, a U.S. ally in a
drug war that has left some 45,000 dead in Mexico.

"We are next to the largest illegal drug market in the world,"
Calderon said in September at a public dinner held in his honor by
the Council of the Americas in Washington. "We are living in the same
building, and our neighbor is the largest consumer of drugs in the
world and everyone wants to sell him drugs through our door and our window."

The United States has provided Mexico with almost $700 million of $2
billion in promised aid, including Black Hawk helicopters, police
trainers, sophisticated eavesdropping technologies and a mountain of
classified drug intelligence, from snitches to drones.

Presidents from Bolivia to Mexico say that the U.S. government is
failing to control the nation's hunger for narcotics, even as U.S.
politicians lecture Latin American nations on how to confront their
problems of criminal impunity, official corruption and failed institutions.

"All the money, regardless how much it is multiplied, and all the
blood, no matter how much is spilled" will not stop the drug trade
"as long as the north continues consuming," said Nicaragua President
Daniel Ortega.

Latin American leaders zeroed in on what they see as glaring
contradictions in U.S. law, which allows for-profit dispensaries to
legally sell "medical marijuana," while at the same time marijuana
growers south of the border are hunted down by the military.

"If all you're doing is sending our citizens to prison while in other
places the market is legalized, then we must ask: Is not it time to
review the global strategy against drugs?" said Colombian President
Juan Manuel Santos.

"I wonder if the world's eighth-largest economy, California, which so
successfully promotes its modern technology, movies and fine wines,
will allow the importation of marijuana into their own market," Santos said.

At the summit in Venezuela's capital this month, Ortega suggested
that the group "monitor and rate" anti-drug efforts by the United
States, just as the U.S. State Department does for the region.

In another forum, Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla proposed
that the United States reimburse the transit countries.

"Our region is victim of the brutal onslaught of organized crime,
which jeopardizes the safety of our population and attacks the
foundations of our democracy," Chinchilla said. "I propose the
creation of a fund that would oblige countries with drug users to pay
a kind of fee for every kilo of cocaine intercepted in the Isthmus.

"We speak of a drug-trafficking route that moves about a hundred
billion dollars a year, culminating in the world's largest market and
biggest consumer of these substances, the United States," said El
Salvador President Mauricio Funes, who added that the United States
had a "moral responsibility" to do more.