Drugs, Law and Conflict

Photo courtesy of Boston.com Bringas

It seems that the 2009 UN World Drug Report, available here, has inspired The Boston Globe to come up with a compelling photo essay chronicling the War on Drugs and its effects throughout the world – definitely worth a look.

**A wall pierced by bullet holes in a botched drug raid in Sinaloa, Mexico, via TIME.

Thanks to WOLA for alerting us to Rep. Eliot Engel’s bill H.R. 2134, which would create a commission to evaluate US drug policy in the Western Hemisphere. I’m pleased to see the commission plans to focus not just on (much-needed) assessment of Plan Colombia and Merida Initiative aid, but also explicitly on demand in the US, including existing prevention and treatment programs. Also quite welcome is an exploration of current cooperation mechanisms with foreign governments, NGOs and regional bodies.

See the full text of the legislation here, and testimony from WOLA’s John Walsh before the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere here.

Update 10/23: See testimony from Crisis Group’s Mark Schneider before the subcommittee here.

**Opium sap drying during processing in Afghanistan.

TIME has a great photoessay on heroin, drug trafficking, and drug use available on its website.

Part 3 of a 4-part weeklong series

**Peruvian children walk on dried coca leaves spread over a soccer field in the Vizcatán region of Peru. Photo courtesy of Moises Saman for the NYTimes.

• A resurgence of the Shining Path in Peru? Thank the cocaine trade. The revival of what was considered a basically defunct guerrilla group, however limited, highlights the essential issue of rural poverty in the Andes and the need for viable alternative crops. The New York Times reports,

The front lines lie in the drizzle-shrouded jungle of Vizcatán, a 250-square-mile region in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley. The region is Peru’s largest producer of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine…

“There are those who say, ‘Why worry about a few hundred fighters in the jungle?’ ” said Alberto Bolívar, a counterinsurgency expert. “But they easily forget the Shining Path began their armed struggle in 1980 with just a few hundred guys. Two decades later, 70,000 people were dead.”

But the Shining Path appears to have learned lessons, too. Coca farmers here describe today’s Maoists as a disciplined, well-armed force, entering villages in groups of 20 in crisp black uniforms. Little is known about their leaders, aside from the belief that two brothers, Victor Quispe Palomino, known as José, and Jorge Quispe Palomino, alias Raúl, are at the helm.

The photo slide show by Peruvian photographer Moises Saman is beautifully mind-blowing, and an absolute must-see.

• Mexican government claims drug-related violence down 26% in the first quarter of 2009. Milenio cites President Calderón saying that narco-executions have decreased in two of the country’s most violent cities–Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez–by a dramatic 78% and 82% respectively since October-December 2008. See the graph provided:

The Washington Post points out that claims of human rights abuses by the military in these entities have increased, with the exceptional nature of Calderón’s strategy:

The military occupation of Juarez, an industrial city of 1.3 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso, is the most extreme example of Calderón’s high-risk strategy of using the army to confront Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. Besieged city officials signed an agreement surrendering responsibility for civilian law enforcement to the military.

The Juarez police department is now under the command of a retired three-star general and a dozen top military officers handpicked by Mexico’s defense secretary. Soldiers are the cops — they write traffic tickets, investigate domestic disputes, arrest drunks and run every department, including the jail, the training academy and the emergency call center.

More than 10,000 soldiers and federal agents patrol Juarez’s gritty streets. Dressed in green camouflage and carrying automatic weapons, they stage raids, detain suspects, and search travelers at the airport and border crossings, assuming unprecedented law enforcement duties.

• Obama in Mexico last week. The White House released a press release citing advances in the bilateral relationship following Obama’s visit to Mexico City. Most interesting, perhaps, is the designation of the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas (not the Gulf Cartel), and La Familia Michoacana as “Significant Foreign Narcotics Traffickers,” thereby “exposing them and their associates to financial sanctions under the U.S. Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act.” The LA Times explains that Alan Bersin, an “aggressive former federal prosecutor credited with taming a once-lawless area of the region,” is to be named Obama’s border czar. Also, the Mexican government has approved Carlos Pascual as the new US ambassador; he now awaits Senate confirmation.

• El Chapo Guzmán: the world’s most controversial billionaire? Forbes named Mexico’s most wanted drug trafficker on its annual billionaires list, to much chagrin. (A Slate blogger questions how much money El Chapo and other traffickers could actually be raking in.) In what has become a major scandal, Durango-based Roman Catholic Archbishop Hector Gonzalez claimed over the weekend that “everyone knows” where El Chapo lives in this state and yet the government does nothing. (Does this lend power to the claims of La Reina del Pacífico?)

• The capture of Don Mario: “One capo goes down, another takes his place.” TIME reports on the potentially violent fall-out from the Colombian government’s successful capture of Medellín-based narco-paramilitary Don Mario. The Center for International Policy’s Plan Colombia and Beyond blog has links to media coverage and a profile of Don Mario.

• Building walls around Rio’s favelas: protecting the environment, or defending against narcos? El Pais reports (in Spanish) on the security wall constructed around the favela of Morro Dona Marta, which appears to serve a dual purpose. Dona Marta is one of the favelas occupied by the military police last year as part of the government’s aggressive new clear-and-hold strategy. The Guardian featured an interesting op-ed on the wall issue a few months back, clearly pointing out the rights issues involved.

• A decade of the drug war in numbers. From Adam Isacson at the Center for International Policy, “a compendium of drug war statistics.”

• New resources: The Citizens’ Institute for the Study of Crime (ICESI; Instituto Ciudadano de Estudios sobre la Inseguridad) has released its 5th annual victimization survey, a well-respected project which serves to help understand the incidence of crime in Mexico and its reporting. Also, Brookings’ Vanda Felbab-Brown published last month a fascinating paper entitled “The Violent Drug Market in Mexico and Lessons from Colombia”–a recommended read.

• Adam Isacson at the Center for International Policy’s “Plan Colombia and Beyond” blog sheds light on the new generation of criminal groups that have risen in Colombia following the official demobilization of the paramilitaries, profiling several known leadership figures. Nevertheless, Isacson warns that,

According to Colombia’s “New Rainbow” think-tank, which has performed extensive research on Colombia’s new paramilitary generation, there are more than 100 new militias, many of whose members and leaders have past relations with old paramilitary groups. They use about 21 different names, are active in 246 of Colombia’s 1,100 municipalities (counties), and have a combined membership estimated at about 10,000. They are cultivating ties with regional economic and political leaders. They often work with the guerrillas on the drug business. They also threaten and kill human-rights defenders, labor leaders, indigenous and afro-Colombian leaders, and independent journalists.

• The US State Department released a new travel advisory for Mexico, with some serious warnings about border violence:

Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades. Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico but most recently in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez… The situation in northern Mexico remains fluid; the location and timing of future armed engagements cannot be predicted.

• The FBI investigates whether billionaire Sir Allen Stanford was involved in money laundering schemes with Mexico’s ultra-violent Gulf cartel.

• What are the effects of enhanced sentences in “drug-free school zones” in the US? In a recent article with the spectacular title “You’re Probably in a Drug-Free School Zone Right Now,” the Boston Phoenix highlights the negative consequences, including the disproportionate jailing of urban minorities. The Phoenix cites a 2001 study by William Brownsberger, former Co-Chair of the Harvard Interdisciplinary Working Group on Drugs and Addictions, which found that, “because of the high density of schools in high-poverty and high-crime areas (almost all of Boston falls into enhancement zones), about 80 percent of drug arrests occurred in school zones, though less than one percent of drug cases involved sales to minors.”

• More than 50 members of the US Congress have written a letter to President Obama asking his administration to enforce the ban on imported assault weapons. Regarding the need to enforce the already-existing ban, the letter states,

This ban – first established nearly 20 years ago – was authorized by provisions in the 1968 Gun Control Act allowing ATF to prohibit the importation of firearms and ammunition that are not “particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.” The import restriction is independent of the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, and was not affected by its “sunset” in 2004.

The ban on assault weapon imports was first enforced by the George H.W. Bush Administration in response to growing threats to law enforcement personnel from the increased use of assault weapons by drug traffickers and in mass shootings, like the Stockton schoolyard massacre in 1989. The import restrictions were later strengthened in 1998 by the Clinton Administration to address foreign manufacturers that were evading the ban by making minor cosmetic changes to their weapons. The definition was changed to include any assault rifle with the “ability to accept a detachable large capacity magazine originally designed and produced for a military assault weapon.”

Unfortunately, in recent years, ATF has quietly abandoned enforcement of the import ban. As a result, the civilian firearms market is flooded with imported, inexpensive military-style assault weapons from primarily former Eastern bloc countries including Romania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia. Importers are also able to skirt the restrictions by bringing in assault weapons parts and reassembling them with a small number of US-made parts. Assault weapon “parts kits” for assembly by individuals are also being imported. ATF has further weakened the prohibition by placing certain extremely problematic assault rifles on the “curios or relics” list, making certain firearms automatically eligible for importation.

Congressman Elliot Engel (D-NY) — who wrote the letter along with Michael Castle (R-DE) and Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) — specifically cites the violence in Mexico as a reason to return to enforcement of this ban.

• A Canadian study finds no link between distribution of medical heroin and crime at the neighborhood level.

A number of important reports on international drug control have been released recently.

• Today, the UN released the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) Annual Report. The report highlights new supply routes through the Balkans and West Africa into Europe, and the falling price of cocaine. Check out related articles here and here.

• The South East Asia Opium Survey, issued by the UNODC, “shows that the region, once notorious as heroin’s Golden Triangle, has a limited opium problem that is concentrated in just one region of Myanmar.” According to UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa, “This is a drug control success story.”

• The UNODC’s Opium Winter Assessment finds “a likely reduction in the amount of opium grown in Afghanistan in 2009.”

• The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, headed by the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, released its main findings in a much talked-about statement entitled, “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift.” The report is worth a read in its entirety, but essentially calls for an end to the “failed war” against drugs and a re-framing of international efforts–toward consumption reduction, alternative development, decriminalization of marijuana, and public health, plus a redirection of repressive strategies toward high-level traffickers.

**The Mexican Federal Police present detainees and seized contraband from an operation against hitmen for the the Beltrán Leyva cartel in the state of Mexico.

• The Wall Street Journal reports on the detention of 10 hitmen for the Beltrán Levya cartel near Mexico City. The group, which includes two minors, were supposedly sent to deal with rivals from “La Familia Michoacana” in the state of Mexico, and took orders from the infamous Edgar Valdez Villarreal, aka “La Barbie.” El Economista adds that the police are investigating the possibility of collusion between the cartel and the municipal police in Tultitlán and Cuautitlán. Several interesting profiles of “La Barbie” — in English, from the New York Times and Dallas News, and Spanish — highlight his ruthlessness and role as Beltrán Levya’s chief muscle.

• Mexican gunmen tragically kill a state police officer and 10 of his family members in Tabasco, reports the LA Times.

• The UK Home Office announces that the price of cocaine and heroin has fallen dramatically. As far as press coverage goes, the Metro newspaper wins for most alarmist headline: “Line of cocaine costs less than coffee.”

• Ecstasy use in Brazil up among wealthy youth, as the upper and middle classes import from Europe, and the police respond with… corruption? According to the New York Times piece,

Ecstasy’s emergence as the drug of Brazil’s wealthy has opened the door even wider for corrupt police officers to seize upon users and their families. Now that Brazil has eliminated prison sentences for drug users, sending them to treatment or community service instead, the police are extracting sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for not charging those caught with Ecstasy as drug dealers, according to defense lawyers and three convicted drug dealers now out of prison…

[T]he image of machine gun-wielding drug bandits is the furthest thing from the minds of users who have found themselves in handcuffs for selling Ecstasy, or sometimes for sharing a few pills with friends. “They refer to drug dealers as ‘them,’ the guys in the slums,” [Sao Paolo Police] Superintendent Magno said.

Drug laws in Brazil protect those who have completed a university degree, placing them in special prisons. But even one credit short of graduation means being dumped in with the general prison population.

Meanwhile, Argentina debates decriminalizing possession of illicit drugs, amid rising domestic ecstasy and cocaine consumption.

• West African police are being trained in Colombia in counter-drugs tactics, in a program sponsored by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the European Commission. The LA Times article notes that police from seven countries (Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa and Togo) are to receive two weeks of training from Latin American, British, US and Spanish counter-drug agents in Bogotá.

• A New York Times profile of Gil Kerlikowse, tapped to be Obama’s drug czar.

• Michael Phelps faces no criminal charges for the marijuana photo, but does lose a sponsorship deal with Kellogg. SNL asks, “Really!?!”.

• New “Above the Influence” anti-marijuana PSA out in the US: (via Videogum)

**Poppies and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of Nicolas Asfouri/Agence France-Presse.

• “Drug money: the other, other liquid investment capital”: Reuters reports on a newspaper interview with UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa. According to Costa,

In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital… In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.

He added that the UNODC has evidence that “interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities,” but declined to give further details.

• Reform of Afghani government necessary to US success there, not just troop surge, according to a NYTimes opinion piece.

• The chief of Colombia’s National Police tells a Colombian daily that the global drug trade’s “center of gravity” is Mexico, as a result of his country’s anti-drug efforts.

• US opinion on the claim that Mexico could become a failed state, from the Wall Street Journal: “[I]f Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state, look no further than the large price premium the cartels get for peddling prohibited substances to Americans.”

• Mexico’s ambassador to the United States responds:

The violence unleashed by trafficking organizations in response to President Calderon’s effort to shut them down cannot be denied. If one considers the criteria that could lead to a “sudden collapse” — loss of territorial control; inability to provide public services; refugees and internally displaced people; criminalization of the state; sharp economic decline; and incapacity to interact as a full number of the international community — it is obvious that Mexico simply doesn’t fit the pattern.

• The BBC reports on the recent capture of Santiago Meza, “El Pozolero” or the “stew maker,” who supposedly earned $600 a week from Tijuana-based trafficker Teodoro Garcia Simental (see LATimes profile here) to dissolve the corpses of his rivals in acid. Meza was presented before the media by the Mexican army, and admitted to dissolving nearly 300 bodies.

• Cannabis officially upgraded to Class B drug in the UK, after being downgraded just four years ago. According to the BBC, the reclassificiation will include a “three strikes” approach to possession (an £80 fine for the first and second offense, then arrest on the third offense) as well as an increase in the maximum prison term for possession (from two years to five). But not everyone’s happy, as the decision goes against the advice of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The BBC reports,

The advisory council’s report, Cannabis: Classification and Public Health, described the drug as a “significant public health issue”. But it said it should still remain a Class C drug, saying the risks were not as serious as those of Class B substances such as amphetamines and barbiturates.

• More on Mexican vigilantes.

• In this week’s Newsweek, Adam Kushner challenges the effectiveness of Plan Colombia and the logic of counter-drug policies which seek cartel fragmentation:

Meanwhile, the fragmenting drug trade makes crackdowns even tougher. Before Uribe became president, the drug trade was managed by three vertically integrated groups that controlled every aspect of the business, often through violence, intimidation and bribery. After years of intense battle, the government broke them up in the 1990s by arresting or killing their leaders and wrecking infrastructures. That helped stem the violence, and Uribe’s subsequent assault on the FARC terrorist group brought urban crime rates to new lows. But the destruction of the cartels left a vacuum that was filled by more specialized criminal groups…

The article closes with serious doubts as to the endgame for Colombia and the U.S., as Plan Colombia yields diminishing returns on the drug front.

• Mexico, then, is just 20 years behind Colombia, according to a U.S. Senate aide quoted in the Dallas Morning News. “The endgame here is to debilitate [the Mexican cartels] to the point where they cannot function the same way,” the aide is quoted as saying. “We’re trying to reduce it from the existential problem threatening democracy in Mexico and law enforcement.” (More on “existential threats” here.) The problem is so critical in places like Ciudad Juárez, which closed 2008 with 1,600 drug-related murders (a warlike homicide rate of 100 per 100,000), that some officials are referring to them as “failed cities,” according to the News.

• …and two more disturbing pieces of news from the same News article. First, a U.S. intelligence official warns that “all bets are off” with Mexican cartels, and that Americans may be targeted in Mexico via car bombs outside embassies or attacks on “specific individuals,” as the stakes are raised. Second, assistance to Mexico from the Mérida Initiative may take twice as long as scheduled to arrive in Mexico (six years instead of three), as a result of the economic crisis in the U.S.

• Rumors of a truce between Mexican cartels surface as violence affects profits, while the gruesome violence in Tijuana reminds us that such truces are unstable. From the San Diego Tribune:

[Tijuana's killers] belong to a new generation of criminals operating with fewers controls as drug cartels evolve from traditional hierarchies to networks of smaller, semi-independent cells. “In the world of drug traffickers, alliances are always very fragile,” said Victor Clark, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana who has studied cartels for years. “Ambition, large sums of money, all the different interests around make it an unstable activity in terms of alliances.”

• Kidnapping of Mexicans with family in the US causing fear in Zacatecas, leading some to move northward, the New York Times reports.

• The federal guidelines past last year to reduce the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine are leading to some complicated court cases, reports the Washington Post. Since the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s guidelines are being applied retroactively (over Bush administration objections), thousands of inmates are now able to petition judges for shorter sentences.

In weighing the requests, judges must evaluate several factors, including criminal records and the amount of crack the offenders were convicted of possessing or distributing. Then there are the intangibles. Some judges want a strong indication that offenders are remorseful for their conduct…

The biggest legal issue facing the cases is whether judges can reduce sentences below the new guideline ranges. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the guidelines, once mandatory, were only advisory. To appease concerns about sentence reductions being larger than intended under the new rules, the commission said judges could not resentence offenders to terms below the new ranges. But [one assistant federal public defender] has persuaded three judges to do just that, winning immediate release for two inmates.

• A bill before the state legislature in Rio de Janeiro is sparking a debate over the relationship between organized crime and funk music from Brazil’s favelas. The Guardian reports:

A bill due to be voted on early this year in Rio’s state legislature would elevate funk to a sort of protected culture, outlawing “any type of social, racial or cultural discrimination against the funk movement and its followers”. But the proposal has highlighted tensions between Rio’s many funk aficionados and those who say funk lyrics encourage underage sex and organised crime…

Members of Rio’s police force also claim many funk parties are frequented by drug-traffickers who use the events to increase cocaine sales. Last year one of Rio’s most powerful military policemen, Colonel Marcus Jardim, provoked outrage among the city’s funkeiros with his views. “Funk parties in the favelas are meetings for scumbags,” he told reporters, claiming drug traffickers used the parties to sell more drugs. “I do not have the power to prohibit these dances but I can make their realisation more difficult.”