Drugs, Law and Conflict

Cocaine capsules are prepared for human smugglers who will ingest them and transport them to Europe. Photo courtesy Marco Vernaschi.

Hat tip to my friend Alexis for finding this haunting photoessay of the damage caused by drugs and violence in Guinea Bissau, courtesy of über-talented photographer Marco Vernaschi. The full set of photos is available here, and is very much worth seeing, even if hard to stomach.

The UNODC reported on West Africa’s increasing importance in the global drug trade last month in a 102-page report entitled “Transnational Trafficking and the Rule of Law in West Africa: A Threat Assessment.” The pdf is available here.

Photo of Guinea-Bissau soldiers with intercepted cocaine, courtesy of Semana.

Although the violence pre-dates the surge of organised drug trafficking in the region, the possibility of huge illicit riches has increased the stakes in the power struggle, leading to a vicious cycle of criminality and political instability, the beginnings of which are visible not only in Guinea-Bissau but also in neighbouring Guinea.

This from the International Crisis Group briefing released today on the challenges facing the West African drug transit country of Guinea-Bissau. The report highlights the importance of thoughtful and coordinated security sector reform efforts to strengthen institutions broken by civil war and, now, drugs. Download and read the full report here.

**Soldiers in Sierra Leone; photo courtesy of Reuters.

• The “biggest drugs trial in West African history” starts in Sierra Leone after the seizure of more than $40 million of cocaine. According to the UK-based Telegraph,

The twin-engined Cessna 441, carrying Venezuela’s national flag beneath fake Red Cross insignia, landed at Lungi airport last July with 703kg of cocaine. To extend its range, 34 containers filled with aviation fuel were in the rear of the plane. By pumping the vital liquid into the engines, the crew had kept the Cessna airborne for the trans-Atlantic flight…

Senior politicians have been mentioned during the trial, notably Ibrahim Kemoh Sesay, the transport minister. His brother, Ahmed, is among the accused.

• California State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano presents legislation to legalize and regulate the cultivation and sale of marijuana in the state, with the Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act (text here). The plan would prohibit the sale of marijuana to anyone under 21, while bringing the state an estimated $1.3 billion a year (in tax revenue and a $50 fee to be imposed on registered retail outlets per ounce). According to the San Francisco Chronicle, an analysis from California’s tax collecting agency found that “legalizing marijuana would drop its street value by 50 percent and increase consumption of the substance by 40 percent.” As for the federal prohibition on marijuana, Ammiano said recently, “It’s not my nature and it’s not in California’s history to wait around for the feds.”

• The Department of Justice claims success against the Sinaloa cartel upon completion of “Operation Xcellerator.” See DOJ press release here. The DOJ will also end raids on medical marijuana dispensaries, Attorney General Eric Holder says.

• In the coming weeks, the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold hearings on Mexico’s drug violence, reports Reuter. According to Committee Chair Sen. Joseph Lieberman, “The recent escalation of violence along the southern border demands our immediate attention… We must assess border security programs and plans in place and we must review the readiness of federal, state, and local law enforcement.” The first hearing will occur in Washington DC on March 25; the second will be in Arizona in April.

• The LA Times reports that 5,000 more Mexican troops will be sent to Ciudad Juárez, to support the 1,600 local police, 2,000 soldiers and 425 federal police officers already there. This just a few days after Roberto Orduña Cruz, the city’s police chief, quit “after several officers were slain and someone posted threats saying more would be killed unless he stepped down.”

• In Foreign Policy, Robert Haddick from Small Wars Journal asks if Mexico is dealing with a crime problem, or war. Using the US Defense Department’s definition of irregular warfare (”a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations”), Haddick argues that “Mexico’s struggle against the drug cartels seems more like a counterinsurgency campaign than a fight against crime.”

• Ex-president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso, one of the co-chairs of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, answers questions about the Commission’s recommendations in Foreign Policy.

• Quote of the week: “I confess I feel somewhat frustrated.”–Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime

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)

**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.”

**Photo of poppies in Afghanistan, courtesy of Goran Tomasevic/Reuters.

• The New York Times reports that some NATO members are objecting to counter-narcotics missions in Afghanistan, citing conflicts with domestic laws. The US officially convinced NATO members in October to include attacks on narcotics “facilities and facilitators supporting the insurgency” in their missions. Nevertheless, according to the Times, some NATO members are concerned “that domestic lawsuits could be filed if their soldiers carried out attacks to kill noncombatants, even if the victims were involved in the drug industry in Afghanistan.” According to General David McKiernan, the senior American commander in Afghanistan:

[S]ome of the precise language still needs to be worked out… [Specifically, rules of engagement that] give us greater freedom of action to treat narco-figures and facilities as military objectives.

• Juan Cole, meanwhile, helps us follow the movement of Afghanistan’s heroin from Iran to Iraq.

• How could the coup in Guinea affect the global drug trade? Chris Blattman is worried about the region, pointing to a UN study on Guinea’s use as a transit point of drugs from Latin America to Europe. Indeed, as the UNODC representative for the region told TIME recently, “What we fear is a replica of the Mexico situation.”

• Prosecutors and police raise questions as the Massachusetts marijuana decriminalization law goes into effect, the Boston Globe reports.

• The Los Angeles city council approved a strict set of gun control laws last week, while the AP reports that Houston is the top source for firearms reaching Mexico.

• Governing Through Crime dissects the popular obsession with the super-narco.

• An El Paso reporter likens violence in Juarez to a war-zone in “Baghdad, Mexico.”

• From Reuters: Conflict between the Shining Path and the state has increased since August, when the Peruvian government began sending soldiers into coca-growing regions.

• The Dallas Monthly News reviews the “increasingly sophisticated propaganda” of Mexican drug cartels, highlighting the narcomantas.

• The Guardian produces an excellent series on Afghanistan’s heroin trade. See here and here.

Photo courtesy of The Telegraph (UK)

Several big US media outlets have reported on Mexico’s drug war in the last few weeks. A rundown:

• “Letter from Mexico: Days of the Dead” by Alma Guillermoprieto, in The New Yorker

• A five-part series from NPR, “The US-Mexican Border: A Changing Frontier”, deals with drugs, migration and other pressing binational issues

• “The War Next Door” by Guy Lawson, in Rolling Stone

• The LA Times has created a spectacular special section on Mexico’s drug war, with a multimedia section, interactive maps and timelines, and links to all related articles from the Times. With work this good, how can they go bankrupt?

Also, two interesting pieces on drugs in Africa:
• Chris Blattman picks up on this story from the BBC about teenagers in South Africa smoking anti-retrovirals, designed to control HIV/AIDS, as recreational drugs.

• The Telegraph reports on the presence of drug traffickers from Latin America in West Africa.