Drugs, Law and Conflict

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 Transnational Institute has released a new report on the drug trade in Southeast Asia, “Withdrawal Symptoms in the Golden Triangle: A Drugs Market in Disarray,” in an effort to better understand how the market is responding to law enforcement interventions in the region.

• The Afghani government doesn’t like Hillary Clinton’s “narcostate” label, but admits they have little control over poppy-rich Helmand Province, in an AP article.

• Denise Dresser argues in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece that Obama and Calderón have a long way to go to deal with drug violence and corruption in Mexico. She writes,

The current strategy — based largely on the increased militarization of Mexico — isn’t doing enough to end government corruption. Drug traffickers finance politicians, and politicians protect drug traffickers. Judges take bribes. Unregulated financial institutions make it easy to launder money. A weak, ill-trained, underpaid police force is easily infiltrated. And most important, Mexico’s economic structure thwarts growth and social mobility, forcing Mexicans to either cross the border for a better life or to join the narco-culture.

Obama, for his part, needs to acknowledge the negative role the U.S. has played by largely ignoring Mexico’s — and his own country’s — failures in fighting the drug trade.

• Vigilantes in Ciudad Juárez? Reuters reports–although without too much to report, considering the dearth of evidence for the group’s existence. (Hence such frequent use of words like “shadow.”) This would be a disturbing phenomenon, though, and the article does cite a case early this year of potential, although unproven, vigilantism.
**Update 1/21– Stratfor adds its voice.

• More on smurfing! In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, a police sergeant in Jefferson County, Missouri (which has, apparently, “led the nation in [meth] lab busts for the past several years”) reveals how smaller US operations are producing more methamphetamine domestically. According to Sergeant Gary Higginbotham, local “smurfers” are paid $50 for purchasing a box of ephedrine or pseudophedrine-containing OTC medicine, and evade federal restrictions on daily and monthly purchases (see the “Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic” Act of 2005) by buying from different retail stores, whose databases aren’t connected.

**The US-Mexican border; photo courtesy of Monica Almeida/The New York Times

• Beltrán Leyva versus the Zetas (again): El Universal reports that the alliance between the Beltrán Levya cartel and the Zetas (cemented May of last year) may be over, after local police detained several heavily armed Beltrán Levya members on their way to run out Zetas from Jalisco. An interesting detail from the article is that the Tonalá police called the Army directly for back-up, instead of other local or federal police.

• Two US Senators (Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-TX) proposed a bill today that would give the Justice Department’s “Project Gunrunner Initiative” some $30 million more to target arms smuggling across the US-Mexico border, including funding to hire and train an additional 80 agents.

• Meanwhile, Obama and Calderón met in Washington today to discuss the bilateral relationship. To the press, they mostly spoke about cooperation in general terms. (No mention of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban!) See coverage in the Dallas News here. Every English-language news source I read included this line, spoken by Calderón to the press in English: “The more secure Mexico is, the more secure the U.S. will be.”

• The IHT guides us to a recently released report from the United States Joint Forces Command, “Joint Operating Environment 2008″, which cites fears of a possible collapse of the Mexican government. According to the Small Wars Journal, the report is designed to discuss “the future operating environment and their implication for the future joint force” and to “spark discussions with the widest set of national security and multinational partners about the nature of the future security environment and its potential military requirements.” Of Mexico, the Joint Force writes:

In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico… [While state failure in Mexico is less likely than in Pakistan,] the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.

The article also states succinctly the big question regarding recent high-level corruption that has emerged as part of Calderón’s “Operation Cleanup”: “Depending on one’s view, the arrests are successes in a publicly declared anticorruption drive or evidence of how deeply criminal mafias have penetrated the organs of the state.”

• The coup in Guinea isn’t making anyone more confident about the drug situation there. Per Reuters,

In recent years, U.N. anti-narcotics experts say Guinea and its neighbours have faced a serious threat to their stability from Colombian drug-trafficking cartels using the West African coast as a transit hub to smuggle cocaine to Europe. “There were reports that drug-traffickers had infiltrated all structures, including law enforcement and the military apparatus,” said Antonio Mazzitelli, the representative in West Africa of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The junta leader has promised a crack down on drugs. But some of the soldiers who support him were among those who ransacked the offices of the counter-narcotics unit in June, destroying all records, when they put down a police mutiny.

• Photo-journalist Alessandro Scotti, a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has created a photo essay about individuals affected by the drug trade in the “Golden Triangle” of Thailand, Laos and Burma.

• Several state prosecutors in the Philippines are facing indefinite leave from their work, after DEA officials received a tip (via text message!) that they were accepting bribes to dismiss drug charges against wealthy Filipinos. According to the AP article, “Senior anti-narcotics agents have repeatedly warned that the Philippine anti-drugs campaign could be compromised because of loopholes in the justice system.”

• The DEA has released new photos of the Tijuana cartel’s “most wanted.”