As the 35-nation Summit of the Americas gets underway in Cartagena, Colombia the United States faces a long overdue reckoning on its War on Drugs. Ever since President Nixon insisted on a military strategy instead of treating drug use as a medical, cultural and societal problem, drug trafficking has become an extraordinarily deadly and lucrative business. Yet despite huge subsidies to countries that adopted America’s heavy-handed approach, the War on Drugs has done little more than introduce catastrophic violence and widespread political corruption. The Summit’s host knows the costs better than most, having suffered more than 450,000 homicides since 1990 and with defence spending in excess of US$10 billion (5.3% of GDP, compared to the regional average of 1.7%).
The latest high-profile critic of the US approach is Otto Pérez Molina, Guatemala’s new president, who recently conceded that: “all the technology and resources and millions of dollars the United States have contributed have not managed to diminish the drug problem.” Pérez Molina is hardly a wide-eyed idealist. He served as a director of military intelligence during Guatemala’s civil war and has a raft of alleged human rights abuses hanging over his military record. This pedigree makes him a difficult critic to dismiss. In large part the President’s doubts stem from his disillusionment with the fate of Mexican cartel boss Joaquín Guzmán – in whose 1993 capture and extradition Pérez Molina played a leading role. Despite spending nearly a decade in a Mexican jail, Guzmán is generally believed to be the most powerful drugs lord in the world, controlling up to half of the wholesale drugs market in the US – estimated between $18 and $39 billion in 2008. Incarceration barely disrupted his influence over the Sinaloa cartel, and despite bloody rivalries, nearly all of Mexico’s cartels have prospered during the years in which violent and expensive law-enforcement campaigns tried to dismantle them.
Reflecting on President Pérez Molina’s change of heart the journalist Alma Guillermoprieto writes: “In a poor and stratified country further devastated by a decade-long war, Pérez Molina watched social structures and institutions crumble under the impact of the drug trade. The homicide rate raced upwards from an already high 24 per 100,000 in 1999 to a staggering 41 in 2010… The optimism [which greeted the end of Guatemala’s civil war] was shattered as the country’s immigration, security, justice and social services felt the subversive impact of drug money.”
Civil society groups in Colombia, Mexico and elsewhere have drawn similar conclusions. Many now insist that the true costs of the conflict go well beyond death tolls. Human rights groups in Mexico – which has lost more than 45,000 Mexicans to President Calderón’s drugs war – are quick to point out that the long-term damage to the criminal justice system, to political life may take generations to overcome. In fact the drugs cartels are better understood as transnational criminal entities that will engage in any illegal activity once the profits are attractive. As Guillermoprieto observes, “Candidates to every elected post in Mexico … are ruthlessly wooed by traffickers offering financing. Trafficking organizations not only grow and increase their connections to global mafias and terrorist networks, they have branched out into ever more sordid sidelines, including human trafficking. It’s a sorry record.”
America’s failure to rethink its overreach in the war on drugs has long been a regional problem. The US has pressured several countries to adopt draconian drug laws even though local criminal justice systems are often ill-suited to mandatory minimum sentences and other inflexible measures. Guyana’s Narcotic and Psychotropic Substances Act, for instance, sets out a death penalty for supplying drugs if this results in the death of a minor: “even though [the dealer] did not intend that death should, or knew that death was likely to result from the consumption, or introduction otherwise into the body, or administration of the narcotic.” The latitude of those provisions is remarkably broad, whatever your feelings about drug use and capital punishment.
Last October, former Mexican President Vicente Fox told the BBC that the time had come to fight the War on Drugs with new ideas instead of more weapons. He called for the removal of the army from the current conflict and suggested his successor seriously consider “legalizing the production, distribution and consumption of drugs.” Fox’s ideas echo the findings of the Global Commission on Drug Policy report released last June, which boldly concluded that: “Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.” If the current Summit can articulate this hard truth, despite American pressure, it will have achieved far more than its much-publicised and largely inconsequential predecessor. It is time for new thinking in the struggle against criminal drug networks and this needs to be discussed honestly and practically sooner rather than later.
