Global Drugs - Legalization of Drugs

Rev: January 23, 2012  

If you keep doing it the same way you keep getting the same results. For 41 years U.S. drug laws make the U.S. President and U.S. Attorney General keepers of illegal drug classifications of the Controlled Substance Act (of 1970) “Schedules”; resulting is too many drugs are improperly medically classified as to individual harms while solutions to criminal drug use are ignored. Illegal drugs are another situation where self serving politicians and lawyers control the Judaical, legal, and medical industry in response to the needs of criminal industry and needs of self serving politicians. Reform of illegal drugs and the illegal drug industry involves medical determinations (no longer criminal determinations) as to how to legalize, regulate, and educate regarding the use of drugs of potential abuse.  

“U.S. Should Legalize Marijuana to Curtail Mexican Drug War and Curb Illegal Immigration”

By Melissa Freemanin

Global, Latin America

What does the United States have to do with the Mexican drug war? More than you think. Over 22 million Americans age 12 and older use illegal drugs, and most don’t know or care where they come from. In many cases, U.S. drug addictions are fueling the drug cartels in Mexico, and contributing to the almost 50,000 people killed in drug wars over the last five years.

The number of deaths, however, doesn’t include the thousands who have disappeared, or the tens of thousands of children who have been orphaned by the violence. The U.S. needs to stop seeing itself as separate from Mexico’s drug wars and increase its efforts to end them, in part by rethinking its policies on drug legalization and regulation.

The connection of Mexican drug cartels to American drug use has been growing rapidly in a very short amount of time. The presence of Mexican cartels in U.S. cities has grown to more than 1,000 cities in 2010, up from 230 cities in 2008, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Not only that, but the National Drug Intelligence Center assesses with “high confidence” that Mexican-based transnational crime organizations “control distribution of most of the heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine available in the United States.” While the violence has remained mostly in Mexico, there have been investigations of abductions and killings that authorities suspect to be tied to cartels in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and other states.

These factors indicate that the U.S. is closely tied to the drug cartels of Mexico. Not only are we affected by the importing of drugs, but also by the effects on the Mexican population, which in turn affects immigration to the U.S. The more the violence across the border escalates, the more likely it is to increase on American soil, as well.

The cartels are driven by the immense profit of both producing their own drugs and also smuggling them from other parts of Latin America into the U.S. Authorities believe that the top organizations make $39 billion in wholesale profits annually. These profits would not be possible if the U.S. had better policies of regulating drug use in the within our borders.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, recommended that governments consider new policies for legalizing and regulating drugs as a way to deny profits to drug cartels. They urged the Obama administration to end “the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others.”

But the U.S. and Mexico refused to consider the recommendation. The U.S. government unwillingness to even look into a change in its policies is a mistake. The expansion of Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. is clear evidence that the tactics we have been using in recent years aren’t working. While the U.S. has opened new law enforcement and intelligence outposts across Mexico over the last several years, they have made little more than a dent in dismantling the cartels –– killing or capturing only about two dozen high-ranking and mid-level drug traffickers.

As Daniel Robelo, a research associate for the Drug Policy Alliance argues in the Los Angeles Times, the root cause that needs to be addressed by the U.S. is drug prohibition. He writes, “These murders are not drug-related, they are prohibition-related –– committed by cartels that were spawned by drug prohibition, that derive their power from the inflated profits of prohibited but highly demanded commodities, and that operate in an underground economy in which violence is routinely employed to resolve disputes or remove business opponents.”

Legalizing marijuana, which 50% of Americans already support according to a Gallup poll, would sharply cut into cartels’ profits and the amount the U.S. spends in tracking down, prosecuting, and jailing dealers who handle the drug. Regulation would be easier to manage and revenue could be used in education campaigns to prevent hard drug use and in the rehabilitation of addicts.

Instead, current U.S. policies towards drug use encourage the perpetuation of underground drug cartels and indirectly contribute to the unacceptable numbers of people dying just across the border. Ignoring a possible solution to drug wars in favor of ineffective policies that support the status quo should not be an option. Mexican drug wars are, at least in part, our problem, and we will need to make changes if we are going to solve them.

Fin  

Russia proposed a plan to the international community to destroy Afghan drug production. Any attempt to destroy drugs produced in one location just installs a drug cartel government or relocates drugs to another location. The suppressing violence and drugs of a country like Mexico results in drug relocated to other countries (like Africa) caused by too much demand for illegal drugs and too much illegal money to be made from illegal drugs. The only solution for illegal drugs is for politicians to make them legal and medically regulated.        

“War on Drugs declared 100 years ago – and still going”

Mikhail Aristov

Jan 23, 2012 21:27 Moscow Time

Voice of Russia

The first ever international agreement on drug control was concluded one hundred years ago. A conference of 12 countries, including Russia held in The Hague, signed the International Opium Convention on the 23 of January 1912, which formulated its main principles as the use of opium exclusively for medical and scientific purposes and rendering assistance to the countries in their fight against drug abuse.

Later, another three conventions were worked out. The last one, Convention against Illicit Traffic in Drugs and Psychotropic Substances was adopted by the United Nations in 1988. These conventions provide the legal basis for establishing international control over drugs. In fact, last year, the UN Special Commission released a controversial report, which insists that it’s useless fighting against drug trafficking and moreover, it proposes to legalize several kinds of drugs. However, the opinion of the commission is not a UN statement, says head of the Russian Drug Control Service, Viktor Ivanov.

The war on drugs has not started at the global level yet. At present, we must state that it is going on at the regional level. The world drug sale is estimated at about 800 billion U.S. dollars annually.

A recent meeting on the ministerial level in Paris has legally qualified the transatlantic cocaine traffic and transnational heroine traffic from Afghanistan as a world drug crime structure. Such a formulation paves the way for the international community to use additional resources, including armed forces, if the government either cannot or has no desire to fight against drug crimes.

A member of Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, Alexander Mikhailov has this to say concerning the spread of drugs.

Russia has adopted severe measures, including imposition of jail sentences up to 20 years for the sale of drugs. On the other hand, a primary drug preventive system is being actively implemented in Russia. It’s aimed at lowering the demand for drugs.

Afghanistan is the main supplier of drugs in the Eurasian region. The organized criminal groups across the world get one hundred billion U.S. dollar revenue annually. Afghan heroin is feeding international terrorism and organized crimes. Consequently, without destroying Afghan drug cartels, the fight against drug trafficking will be ineffective.

The Afghan economy is not growing and as a result, production and the sale of drugs is the only way for the survival of the country’s residents. Americans are not fighting against Afghan drug dealers. They directly say that the Afghan problem is a problem for Russia, while their problem is Bolivia and Colombia.

Two years ago, Russia put forward a concrete plan to the international community to destroy Afghan drug production. The plan provides for upgrading the Afghan drug production problem up to the level of threat to international peace and security by adopting a UN Security Council resolution. Unfortunately, so far, there is no noticeable progress in implementing the plan.

Fin

It would be simpler to legalize drugs if Congress removed congressional barriers to discussion about drug reform. There is one officially recognized congressional caucus -- the ‘Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control,’ established by law in 1985. Senate International Narcotics Control is a 26-year obstacle to illegal drug reform. U.S. politicians are the ones who want to retain a high level of global criminal drug activity with increasing U.S. illegal drug trafficking and increasing money laundering. U.S. Congressional politicians promote the corruptions of illegal drug industries. Come November 2012, voters need to indicate their displeasure with Washington DC politicians.

Illegal Drugs/Immigration - Southeastern Europe vs U.S.

18 Jan 2012

The U.S. mostly has one nation (Mexico) to deal with regarding global drug trafficking of cocaine, heroin, foreign-produced marijuana, and methamphetamine. Europe has many nations to deal with to counter the global illegal drug industry. According to research, two primary routes are used to smuggle heroin into Europe: the Balkan Route, which runs through South Eastern Europe, and the Silk Route, which runs through Central Asia. Additionally, illegal drug trafficking from Latin America via Africa is becoming an increasing problem.   

Narcotics contraband is also related to illegal immigration and weapons smuggling, therefore making illegal drugs a multilevel illegal industry, one that is high in revenue with relatively low risk and also linked to corrupted officials in these illicit sectors. It is not an issue that can be singled out from the rest of organized global crime activities.

There is a web of illicit monetary transactions aimed to control specific sectors of the local economy and penetrating stratum of the society so as to gain clear political influence. In short, the illegal drugs and illegal immigration industries in Southeastern Europe and the U.S. are primarily based on an extensive web of interpersonal relations between individuals involved in transport, logistics and real estate, along with prominent smugglers of narcotics, weapons, prostitution and who are also involved in the mass immigration of undocumented aliens.

(Note: Most important opiates are opium, heroin, and codeine.  These drugs belong to the class called narcotics, but there are also nonopiate, synthetic narcotics. Marijuana is not a narcotic.)    

Approximately 400,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants from Asian and African states are in Greece currently, and most of them want to move to Northern Europe. The U.S. has few deterrents to illegal immigration. Close to a million Mexicans each year have entered the U.S., which now has about 22 million resident illegal immigrants. Illegal drug trafficking has 1,000s of routes into the U.S. and is unhindered by law enforcement, but is supported by politicians.    

“Heroin Trade and Illegal Immigration in Southeastern Europe”

By Ioannis Michaletos

Worldpress.org

January 17, 2012

The Heroin Balkan Route

Interpol is quite specific in identifying the real importance of Southeastern Europe in the present day European narcotics market. According its research, two primary routes are used to smuggle heroin: the Balkan Route, which runs through South Eastern Europe, and the Silk Route, which runs through Central Asia.

The Balkan Route is divided into three sub-routes: The southern route runs through Turkey, Greece, Albania and Italy. Further, there is the central route that runs through Turkey, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and into either Italy or Austria. Lastly there is the northern route that runs from Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania to Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland or Germany. Large quantities of heroin are destined for either the Netherlands or the United Kingdom and from there they are distributed in neighboring markets such as Ireland or Scandinavia. The anchor point for the Balkan Route is Turkey, which remains a major staging area and transportation route for heroin destined for European markets, mainly due to geographical reasons.

Historically, the Balkan route is the main overland connection between Asia and Europe. Every year this route is taken by about 2 million lorries, 300,000 coaches and 6 million cars, without counting the domestic motorway traffic. The most common way to transport heroin is in relatively small quantities of 10 to 150 kilos hidden in a lorry. Considering the scale of legitimate commercial trade on the Balkan route, combined with the fact that it takes some hours to a whole day to search a lorry, it is virtually impossible to counteract these activities through ordinary police and customs methods. For example, it is estimated that roughly only one out of 50 lorries is actually checked in the borders of most Southeastern European countries.

Hot spots of action

The customs post of Gurbulak in the province of Agri, the first Turkish village after crossing the border with Iran, is the main passage used by traffickers, as it lies on the AH1 highway, the huge thoroughfare linking the Far East to Turkey, and then, through the E80 highway, from Turkey to Bulgaria and to Europe. According to the Italian-based security researchers of the FLARE Network, the Gurbulak pass is crossed daily by thousands of vehicles, including about 20,000 trucks, the vehicles used most in heroin transportation. Moreover, the semi-autonomous Kurdish tribes residing in the tri-border region of Turkey-Iran-Iraq tend to collect dues for all illicit shipments being made there—either narcotics, fuel or people's smuggling—by facilitating such transport. In addition, local corrupt public officials work their way through the system to ensure a steady flow of heroin and collect commissions as an exchange.

Once the large shipments enter the Turkish territory coming mostly from Afghanistan, via Iran, they head towards the metropolitan region of Istanbul, an immense urban sprawl of more than 15 million people and the historical junction between Europe and Asia and between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

The illegal product is unloaded in secret in warehouses, and then it is routed towards Europe. It is estimated that 37 percent of all Afghan heroin, or 140 metric tons (mt), departs Afghanistan along the so-called Balkan route, to meet demand of around 85 mt per year. Most of the heroin interdicted in the world is seized along this route. Between them, Iran and Turkey were responsible for more than half of all heroin seized globally in 2008.

Once the shipments are stored in the Istanbul region, they are then re-exported either towards Ukraine and the port of Odessa, with the crucial assistance of mostly Ukrainian and Georgian criminal gangs, or towards Greece and/or Bulgaria via land routes using as a transport hub the city of Edirne and the help of local criminals. Smaller quantities travel via tourist boats to the Greek Aegean islands and lastly by air, from Atatürk International Airport, connected with the main European airports.

The persons responsible for the journey from Iranian borders up to the Balkans are the Turkish organized kingpins, known locally as "Babas," which means father, similar to "El Padron" figures in Latin America. The Babas are mostly based in the Anatolian high plains of Turkey and have access to a vast number of subordinates who work full time with them, either as drivers, logistics suppliers, warehouse owners, money laundering facilitators or other professions. News reports have estimated that about 25,000 people are full-time occupied in this illicit trade in the country and have a network reaching hundreds of cities and villages along the "heroin route."

Iran and Turkey do not have a visa regime between them, and border controls are in many cases lax, thus enabling a rather steady flow of heroin without probabilities of strategic interruptions. Other factors that play a crucial role are the Kurdish populations in the tri-border area between Turkey-Iraq-Iran that facilitate narcotics contraband in order to raise capital, and the widespread public-sector corruption in the Balkan countries that permits heroin smugglers to penetrate to an extent local security institutions. Furthermore, the presence of strong and trans nationally connected criminal networks, such as the Italian Ndrangheta; the Montenegro clans; Turkish drug kingpins; Russian, Ukrainian and Caucasian criminal cells; and Serbian narcotics groups, should not be overlooked.

Wider implications

Narcotics contraband is also indirectly related to illegal immigration and weapons smuggling, therefore making it a multilevel illegal industry, one that is high in revenue and also linked to corrupted officials in these illicit sectors. It is not an issue that can be singled out by the rest of organized crime activities. Also it is important to note that illegal organized prostitution rings in the Balkans are directly related to narcotics, since police investigation in several countries have revealed over the years that the drug dealers first raise capital by illegal prostitution before venturing into narcotics trade, which is even more profitable. Rarely does a group of people become drug dealers (in a systematic, significant and organized manner) without being involved in either prostitution or goods smuggling previously.

On a wider level, it should be noted that narcotics contraband has international implications. For instance, in December 2009 the U.N. drugs and crime tsar Antonio Maria Costa claimed that illegal drug money saved the banking industry from collapse. He claimed he had seen evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse. Thus, the Balkan heroin route, apart from a multi-billion-dollar illicit trade path, is also one generating profits indirectly to corporations thriving in the legal market, such as banks, making the whole issue of combating drug trade an extremely complicated problem that cannot be addressed by conventional measures.

The prospects don't look especially optimistic. The current financial crisis and the widespread corruption in the Balkans will ensure that there is going to be plenty of "human capital" readily available to "invest" into narcotics smuggling. Narcotics are a lure for criminals because they are fast moving objects with extremely high yield and return on investment.

Illegal immigration

The basic human trafficking principle in Southeastern Europe is, you enter from Iran, you exit from Greece. Trafficking people to Europe via Turkey is based on a Ford-type assembly line, says the Turkish security specialist and academic Professor Icduygu, and it involves small groups of traffickers (the so-called kacakcilar), each of whom ensures the passage of migrants from one border to the other, from one city to the next. In addition, the Greek police and its organized crime analysis directory have in the recent past analyzed the multitude of human trafficking networks operating in the country and regionally and concluded that all of them are interrelated through several persons or small groups that operate as information hubs and facilitate trafficking. In turn, those people are related to prominent figures in several countries, and thus they are able to influence political or economic spheres and in many cases evade the law.

In 2011 the Greek press leaked a secret report by the Greek intelligence service that identified a network of people connected to the illegal immigration industry who even financed pro-immigration NGOs in order to manipulate public opinion into accepting the mass introduction of illegal immigrants in the country. The report mentioned a web of illicit monetary transactions aimed to control specific sectors of the local economy and penetrating stratum of the society so as to gain clear political influence. In short, the illegal immigration industry in Southeastern Europe is primarily based on an extensive web of interpersonal relations between individuals involved in transport, logistics and real estate, along with prominent smugglers of narcotics and weapons who are also involved in the mass immigration of undocumented aliens.

Since 2008, Greece has been the main entrance point for illegal immigrants from Asia into the European Union. The human traffickers have also a division of labor and pay special attention to two sectors: document forging and housing. The first sector is a booming illicit market in Southeastern Europe whereby fake passports and IDs change hands on an hourly basis for significant amounts of money. Routinely tourists are snatched not for the value of their possessions, but mostly for the passports they carry, who are then forged and sold to bidders.

The housing market is also a hugely profitable one, since hundreds of thousands of immigrants are stashed in decaying building in several Balkans countries and pay their accommodation per head on a per diem case to the persons renting the apartments, who mostly belong to the traffickers groups or are related to them as acquaintances. A 40 square-meter apartment in a 50-year-old decaying building in the center of Athens, whose rent would not be more than 100 to 150 euros per month—if rented to one person—generates 100 euros per day when rented by traffickers to a group of 20 immigrants each paying 5 euros per day. One billion dollars is the estimated income for illegal immigrant trafficking just in the Greek-Turkish borders for 2010 alone by calculating the capital they paid for their "journey." More income is generated by the exploitation of immigrants after their entry in the target country. That includes their housing needs and most importantly their use as a conduit of illegal actions, such as narcotics dealers, undocumented street vendors and similar activities.

Greece as a regional epicenter

Approximately 400,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants from Asian and African states are in Greece currently, and most of them want to move to Northern Europe. If Bulgaria and Romania enter the Schengen free movement in the E.U. agreement, huge traffic of these people is expected in the Greek-Bulgarian borders. Already attempts by traffickers to test the border control system in these two countries has been made. In Serbia the local authorities unofficially estimate that 20,000 people, mostly of Afghani and Pakistani origin, have been "trapped" in the territory, not allowed to move towards Western Europe and unwilling to repatriate back. The issue is steadily becoming a societal one for the whole of the Balkans.

Over the past three years, Greece, especially Athens, has become the coordinating center for the transporting of Asian illegal immigrants from the Balkans to Europe. Sophisticated methods of operations are used by the criminal networks. Central European nationals, such as Slovakians or Hungarians, act as "intermediates" for criminal groups, rent houses in Athens or shops, and then proceed to recruit Asians who want to be transferred with the collaboration mostly of Greek and Albanian criminals.

The Central Europeans belong to Schengen countries, which is a crucial point. Also, since they are not at the moment well known to the authorities of the Southeastern European countries, they have more room to move and cross borders without fearing surveillance. In many cases young women from those countries marry (white marriages) in order to create legal papers for Nigerians, Iranians and Pakistanis especially, who pay 4,000 to 8,000 euros each.

Since 2010, diplomatic missions by Central European countries have alerted the Greek authorities of the aforementioned and pointed out well-coordinated criminal networks that have even taken control of local "missionary churches" that, although they seem to have no followers, are able to issue hundreds of marital documents per year to persons of specific nationalities and for the reasons explained previously. It can be safely assumed that the vast majority of marriages being made in Greece and other Balkan countries over the past few years between Asian and African immigrants and European citizens have been for the purposes of illegal immigration to Europe.

Countermeasures

The issues of heroin trade and illegal immigration in Southeastern Europe have alarmed both local and international authorities, such as Interpol and Europol but also the U.S. DEA, U.K. SOCA and various other security agencies. Because of the complicated nature of the issues and the difficulty of cooperation between so many countries, no authority has been able to contain effectively the problems at hand. Several initiatives include the creation of joint police teams for analysis work and the establishment of periodic international security forums. Little, though, has been done on a political level, and little attention has been paid from a holistic perspective, understanding that narcotics, weapons, prostitution and illegal immigration markets are all related. Judicial, security, intelligence, police, military and social agencies have to combine efforts.

Fin  

The President of the United Sates must now task the U.S. Secretary of Defense to provide timely global warming solutions.

It is increasingly difficult to correct illegal immigration growth.  With global population now at 7 billion and growing to 9 billion before 2050 CE, global population size is outstripping available Earth resources and economic systems. With increased populations it is becoming increasingly more difficult to survive within under developed counties; national GDPs will increase supported by increased (hydrocarbon) energy use.  As population grows and Earth’s temperature increases, illegal immigration becomes more difficult. In 2030-2040 CE, Earth’s +2 oC temperature limit is exceeded, many temperature regulating tripping points are exceeded. Around 2050 CE Earth’s resources and economies will have long passed the ability to support the equivalent of about another population the size of combined China and India (2010 CE population of China is about 1.338 billion and India population 1.171 billion). Due to long-term excessive hydrocarbon energy use, 2050 CE human races are in rapid decline. Global warming temperature-increase results in termination of human races 2050-2099 CE.  

Europe has to solve its illegal drug problems the same way the U.S. has to solve its illegal drug problems. Politicians are to legalize all drugs of potential abuse and define production, distribution, and sales.  Drugs are no longer to be under counterproductive criminal control.  Rather, drugs are to be medically regulated with flexible regulators funded to deal with addiction issues.   

We are represented by self serving politicians and indulgent self serving news media. It is unlikely Europe or the U.S. political systems will become responsive soon enough to save humans from the world of self destruction.  

War on Drugs - Cocaine

Rev 16 Jan 2012

Once concentrated in Colombia, a close U.S. ally in combating drugs, the cocaine business is migrating to nations such as Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, where populist leaders are either ambivalent about cooperating with U.S. anti drug efforts or openly hostile to them.

It costs $2,000 to produce a kilo of cocaine from leaf to lab in South America. In the U.S., a kilo's street value ranges from $34,000 to $120,000, depending on the ZIP code where sold. A 2009 Justice Department report identified that Mexican traffickers control the flow of most of the cocaine, heroin, foreign-produced marijuana, and methamphetamine within the United States. The cost to Mexico for the five year War on Drugs is about 48,000 drug trafficking related deaths for a $39 billion Mexican annual income from U.S. drug trafficking. U.S. criminal and political annual income from multinational illegal drug industries are much greater than that of Mexico.  

For decades drug laws have make cocaine illegal; the question is what medical harm results from individuals cocaine use and is there an unacceptable dependency associated with (pure) cocaine use?  

A search of the medical literature has turned up little data to indicate that chewing of South American coca leaves or the imbibing of beverages containing small amounts of coca is more damaging to the mind or body than the drinking of coffee or tea.  Nor are the physiological and physiological effects notably different; both coca and caffeine are primarily stimulants of the central nervous system. Found in the Pacific area, the effect of chewing Areca nut (aka, "betel nut") and betel leaf is also relatively mild and could be compared to drinking a cup of coffee. However, many chewers also add small pieces of tobacco leaf to the nut and leaf mixture, thereby adding the effect of the nicotine, which causes addiction.   

Cocaine, is a drug extracted from the leaves of the South American coca plant, is a stimulant that produces euphoria.  Cocaine is a part of the large synthetic drug group amphetamines.  Tolerance to the effects of both cocaine and amphetamines sometimes sets in; hence there is a tendency among those who use the drugs non medically to escalate dosage. These drugs are sometimes injected intravenously by “speed freaks.” Both cocaine and amphetamines are addicting to some people under some circumstances. Cocaine withdrawal is characterized by a profound psychological manifestation--depression--for which cocaine itself appears to be the only remedy; cocaine addition itself appears to resembles tobacco addiction more closely than it resembles opiate or alcoholism. The compulsion to resume cocaine is very strong.            

How to “regulate” cocaine in a scheme of “illegal drug” legalization remains perplexing. The harms caused by illegal drug laws are very costly to society, yet over the decades the War on Cocaine has been counter productive. In spite of the War, illegal use and supplies of cocaine increased.  If there is temporary success in reducing the inflow of cocaine, users just turn to other illegal and legal drugs until cocaine supplies return to normal. However, there are acceptable solutions to the problems of legalizing cocaine production, distribution, and sales.  To legalize cocaine those medical solutions for a drug have to be identified and become publicly acceptable.  Legal and illegal drugs will always have a small sector of drug uses who abuse drugs, those drug users become lost. Regulating drugs of potential abuse is a matter of choosing a path that minimizes losses and also minimizes adverse societal impacts.           

Meanwhile, the War on Cocaine continues.  

“Cocaine: The New Front Lines”

Colombia's success in curbing the drug trade has created more opportunities for countries hostile to the United States. What happens when coca farmers and their allies are in charge?

By JOHN LYONS

The Wall Street Journal

JANUARY 14, 2012  

In the dusty town of Villa Tunari in Bolivia's tropical coca-growing region, farmers used to barricade their roads against U.S.-backed drug police sent to prevent their leafy crop from becoming cocaine. These days, the police are gone, the coca is plentiful and locals close off roads for multiday block parties—not rumbles with law enforcement.

"Today, we don't have these conflicts, not one death, not one wounded, not one jailed," said Leonilda Zurita, a longtime coca-grower leader who is now a Bolivian senator, a day after a 13-piece Latin band wrapped up a boozy festival in town.

The cause for celebration is a fundamental shift in the cocaine trade that is complicating U.S. efforts to fight it. Once concentrated in Colombia, a close U.S. ally in combating drugs, the cocaine business is migrating to nations such as Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, where populist leaders are either ambivalent about cooperating with U.S. anti drug efforts or openly hostile to them.

Since 2000, cultivation of coca leaves—cocaine's raw material—plunged 65% in Colombia, to 141,000 acres in 2010, according to United Nations figures. In the same period, cultivation surged more than 40% in Peru, to 151,000 acres, and more than doubled in Bolivia, to 77,000 acres.

More important, Bolivia and Peru are now making street-ready cocaine, whereas they once mostly supplied raw ingredients for processing in Colombia. In 2010, Peru may have passed Colombia as the world's biggest producer, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Between 2009 and 2010, Peru's potential to produce cocaine grew 44%, to 325 metric tons. In 2010, Colombia's potential production was 270 metric tons.

Meanwhile, Venezuela and Ecuador are rising as smuggling hubs.

Colombia and the US bust a cocaine ring, arresting 26 suspected drug traffickers. Video Courtesy of Reuters.

The Mexican navy recently caught four alleged drug smugglers who set their boat on fire after dumping drugs overboard into the Pacific Ocean. The arrest is part of increased efforts by Mexican and Colombian officials to stem drug trafficking. Video courtesy of Reuters.

The trend underscores the ability of drug cartels to search out friendlier operating environments amid changes in Latin American politics. In recent years, Venezuela's stridently anti-U.S. leader Hugo Chavez shrank the U.S. DEA's presence there, while Bolivian President Evo Morales, himself a longtime coca grower, expelled the agency altogether. With Myanmar, they are the only countries currently "de certified" by the U.S. as failing to combat illegal drugs.

Ironically, the shift is partly a by-product of a drug-war success story, Plan Colombia. In a little over a decade, the U.S. spent nearly $8 billion to back Colombia's efforts to eradicate coca fields, arrest traffickers and battle drug-funded guerrilla armies such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Colombian cocaine production declined, the murder rate plunged and the FARC is on the run.

But traffickers adjusted. Cartels moved south across the Ecuadorean border to set up new storage facilities and pioneer new smuggling routes from Ecuador's Pacific coast. Colombia's neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is now the departure point for half of the cocaine going to Europe by sea.

"Colombia is leaving behind its old image of the failed state in the hands of drug traffickers," Gen. Oscar Naranjo, Colombia's top police official, said at a Bogota news conference last year. "But evidently…that has produced a balloon effect."

The "balloon effect" is the idea that drug activity squeezed out of one neighborhood or region will simply bulge into another, like air in a balloon. For example, Mexico's bolder efforts to confront drug gangs—which ship cocaine made in South America to the U.S.—are pushing gangs to the weaker states of Central America.

In South America, the balloon effect has coincided with another phenomenon: The rise of a generation of populist leaders who view U.S. anti drug efforts as a version of the "Yankee imperialism" they disdain.

Both Venezuela's Mr. Chavez and Bolivia's Mr. Morales built support among mostly poor populations as staunchly anti-U.S. leaders. They describe the drug war as a facade for a strategy to control the region's politics and natural resources, especially oil.

Mr. Chavez and other leaders say they are fighting drug trafficking. But in Venezuela, thwarting U.S. drug efforts appears to be a cause for promotion. In 2008, the U.S. declared Venezuelan Gen. Henry Rangel Silva a drug "kingpin." This month, Mr. Chavez named Gen. Rangel defense minister.

In Bolivia, Mr. Morales, a 52-year-old Aymara Indian who took office in 2006, has spent a lifetime opposing the U.S. drug war. As the head of his country's coca growers, he built a political movement by demonstrating against the drug police. The marches he led on the capital La Paz brought down a pro-U.S. president and paved the way for his election.

Once in office, Mr. Morales named coca growers to key law-enforcement posts, including drug czar, and has asked the legislature to expand the area for legal coca growing to almost 50,000 acres—five times the amount needed to supply Indians with chewable coca for traditional purposes.

Mr. Morales describes his policy as "Coca yes, Cocaine no," a nod to the central role the leaves have played for centuries in Indian culture. Coca is traditionally chewed by Andean Indians as a mild stimulant. To mark the change, Mr. Morales took office in a mountaintop ceremony conducted by an Aymara Indian shaman in flowing robes.

But "Coca yes, cocaine no" turns out to be a hard ideal to follow. Valentin Mejillones, the shaman who swore Mr. Morales into office and acted as his personal spiritual guide, was arrested in 2010 with more than 500 pounds of liquid cocaine in his home. He denies wrongdoing.

Then there's Margarita Terán, a coca grower and one-time Morales girlfriend picked to produce a section protecting coca growing for a new Bolivian constitution. In 2008, two of Ms. Terán's sisters were caught with 300 pounds of coca paste, which is semi refined cocaine, at a police roadblock. They deny wrongdoing.

Last year in Panama, agents of the U.S. DEA nabbed Gen. Rene Sanabria, who headed a Morales anti-narcotics agency, as he was preparing to ship 317 pounds of cocaine to the U.S. Mr. Sanabria pleaded guilty and is now serving a 15-year prison sentence in the U.S.

Mr. Morales's fiercest critics say the high-profile arrests suggest his government condones drug trafficking. Others say that his ambivalence toward anti drug enforcement has generated a level of corruption that is now out of control.

"What's happening is that drug trafficking, amid a lack of clear policy, amid weak institutions, amid weak parties, is finding its way in," says Juan del Granado, a former La Paz mayor and former Morales supporter who broke ranks with the president over drug policy and other differences.

The leaders blame the crime and violence in Latin America on the U.S. demand for drugs. Take Ecuador's President Rafael Correa. When he was a child, his father, a small-time drug courier, spent time in a U.S. prison after police arrested him coming off an airplane in the U.S. with a package of cocaine.

"I lived through this, and these people are not delinquents," Mr. Correa said in a radio address in 2007. "I do not justify what he did, but he was unemployed."

As president, Mr. Correa ended a U.S. lease on what was then the only U.S. air base in South America, a critical post for monitoring airborne drug smuggling. He also reduced cooperation with Colombia—a move that has led to an increase in smuggling, drug analysts say—after the Colombian air force bombed a FARC encampment hidden just across the border in Ecuador in March 2008.

Even with cocaine activity expanding in other Latin nations, U.S. officials describe Plan Colombia as a success. Stable for the first time in decades, Colombia is thriving economically. Its elite, battle-tested national police now seek to spread their success by training police forces around the globe.

U.S. officials also note that Colombian coca cultivation plunged so much that total cultivation across the region is still 35% less than it was a decade ago. Still, coca plantations in Bolivia and Peru are yielding more these days, and new techniques for extracting the leaf's active ingredients make cocaine production more efficient.

The U.S. is adjusting. In the case of the lost Ecuadorean air base, the U.S. simply leased new ones in Colombia. The DEA has stayed engaged where national politics makes it difficult, nurturing long relationships with local police commanders to produce arrests. And in a major rhetorical shift in the nearly four-decade-old Latin American drug war, American diplomats now acknowledge that U.S. demand drives the illegal drug trade. The aim is to win over leaders who are skeptical of U.S. motives.

"It's been very good to get beyond this finger pointing, and the U.S. saying, 'You should keep those horrible drugs out of the hands of all of our above-average children,' " said Gil Kerlikowske, head of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy.

The cocaine industry has migrated before. Peru and Bolivia, where coca is legal and Indians have chewed it for centuries, were the primary source of coca leaves for a cocaine boom in the early 1980s that spawned kingpins like Colombia's Pablo Escobar.

Then the U.S. made Bolivia and Peru the front lines of efforts to squelch drug supply. U.S. military helicopters ferried Bolivian drug police—trained, outfitted and fed by the U.S.—on coca raids. In Peru, the air force shot down airplanes suspected of carrying coca paste to Colombia in a controversial venture with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, [photo] holding coca leaves in 2009, built a political movement by demonstrating against the drug police. He has named coca growers to law-enforcement posts -- including drug czar.

To adjust, Colombian cartels planted coca at home. By 2000, 75% of global coca cultivation had moved to Colombia, where the power of left-wing guerrillas and traffickers kept huge swaths of territory out of the state's reach.

Today, Plan Colombia is pushing coca cultivation back to Peru and Bolivia, a round-trip journey that analysts say illustrates the difficulties of drug interdiction.

"You have the balloon effect for shifting coca production, what I call the cockroach effect for how the cartels jump from one region to the next, and then there's the whack-a-mole policy to try to deal with all of it," says Bruce Bagley, a political scientist at the University of Miami and an expert on the global drug trade.

For traffickers, the timing of coca's return to Peru couldn't be better. The country's shoot-down policy effectively ended in 2001 after a CIA and Peruvian Air Force team mistakenly downed a plane carrying a family of U.S. missionaries misidentified as drug traffickers.

Last year, Ollanta Humala, a fervent nationalist who gets support from traditional coca-growing regions, became president of Peru. Shortly after taking office, he surprised U.S. officials by ceasing coca eradication and naming a coca-grower advocate as drug czar. Peru has restarted some eradication, but commitment to the U.S.-backed policy is widely seen as questionable.

In October, Mr. Humala's then-cabinet chief, Salomon Lerner, said that "military" and "eradication" are "dirty words for us," during an event at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, D.C. (Mr. Lerner resigned recently amid a mining scandal.)

In Bolivia, the biggest challenge today may be the growing presence of international drug cartels from Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, intelligence experts say. In October, Bolivian soldiers happened upon a huge cocaine processing lab on a remote coca-growing frontier. One trafficker was killed and another was captured in a fire fight—and both were Colombian.

An internal Bolivian intelligence report obtained by The Wall Street Journal detailed the presence of Mexican, Colombian and Brazilian traffickers in the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Meanwhile, Brazilian police say 80% of that country's cocaine supply comes from Bolivia.

Signs of expansion are easy to find in El Chapare, a coca-growing center in Bolivia's tropical flatland, where 90% of the harvest ends up as cocaine, by many estimates. On a recent visit, plumes of smoke and the scent of burnt wood in the muggy air signaled that locals were burning new plots for coca planting.

Workers at a local hotel warned guests not to stray from the grounds lest they happen upon a coca-processing lab nearby and startle its owners. Motorists complain that local filling stations are occasionally sold out of gasoline, which is used as a precursor in processing cocaine.

But the biggest change around El Chapare may be, ironically, the peace. For years, towns like Villa Tunari saw tense and sometimes deadly skirmishes between growers and police.

Under a new policy, coca union leaders, rather than police, enforce limits on growing. Each family member can plant one basketball-court sized "cato" of coca. U.N. figures show that Bolivia eradicated more than 20,000 acres in 2010, though the total area under cultivation remained the same.

One reason locals trim back coca farms is to maintain prices, says Ms. Zurita, the coca-grower leader. "We tell everybody you have to be smart," she says. “If everyone grows as much as they want, then it won't be worth anything."

Critics say that the eradication numbers are misleading. For one, older fields that have lost their productivity are being cut down to make way for new farms in pristine jungle.

That process is visible a short distance away, on the edge of one of Bolivia's biggest Amazon reserves, where some 15,000 coca growers have cut plots into the protected land. More are expected to pour into the reserve if a major road ordered by Mr. Morales is completed. Amazon Indians who live in the park, fearing that the coca growers will damage their land and overrun their culture, have launched a movement to keep them out.

Their odds aren't good. The president's "loyalty is to the cocaleros [coca growers], and in reality, the cocaleros are the drug traffickers, producing coca for cocaine," says Fernando Vargas, a leader of the Indians who is seeking to block the road. "As a result, our culture could be destroyed."

—Martin Arostegui contributed to this article.

Fin

Currently U.S. drug laws make the U.S. President and Attorney General keepers of illegal drug classifications of the Controlled Substance Act (of 1970) “Schedules”; resulting is too many drugs are improperly medically classified and solutions to criminal drug use are ignored. It is a another situation where self serving politicians and lawyers control the medical industry in response to the criminal industry and self serving needs. Reform of illegal drugs and the illegal drug industry involves medical determinations (no longer criminal determinations) as to how legalize, regulate, and educate regarding the use of drugs of potential abuse.  

If you keep doing it the same way you keep getting the same results.  

U.S. Politicians Continue to Ignore Their Illegal Drug Chaos

Rev 16 Jan 2011

U.S. is the major world consumer of illegal drugs and provocateur of drug violence providing huge transfer of wealth profits.  

"The Mexico drug war: Bodies for billions"

By Ashley Fantz, CNN

Sun January 15, 2012

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

⇛ Since December 2006, nearly 48,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico

⇛ Mexican cartels make billions of dollars a year, much of their profits in the U.S.

⇛ The bloodbath could threaten the survival of the Mexican state, and American national security

Editor's note: This article begins an occasional series looking at the violence tied to Mexican drug cartels, their expanding global connections and how they affect people's daily lives.

(CNN) -- There are kingpins with names like the Engineer, head-chopping hit men, dirty cops and double-dealing politicians. And, of course, there are users -- millions of them.

But the Mexican drug war, at its core, is about two numbers: 48,000 and 39 billion.

Over the past five years, nearly 48,000 people have been killed in suspected drug-related violence in Mexico, the country's federal attorney general announced this month. In the first three quarters of 2011, almost 13,000 people died.

Cold and incomprehensible zeros, the death toll doesn't include the more than 5,000 people who have disappeared, according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission. It doesn't account for the tens of thousands of children orphaned by the violence.

The guilty live on both sides of the border.

Street gangs with cartel ties are not only in Los Angeles and Dallas, but also in many smaller cities across the United States and much farther north of the Mexican border. Mexican cartels had a presence in 230 cities in the United States in 2008, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Its 2011 report shows that presence has grown to more than 1,000 U.S. cities. While the violence has remained mostly in Mexico, authorities in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Alabama and other states have reportedly investigated abductions and killings suspected to be tied to cartels.

Mexican black tar heroin (so called because it's dark and sticky), is cheaper than Colombian heroin, and used to be a rarity in the United States. Now it is available in dozens of cities and small towns, experts say. Customers phone in their orders, the Los Angeles Times reports, and small-time dealers deliver the drug, almost like pizza deliverymen.

Traffickers are recruiting in the United States, and prefer to hire young. Texas high schools say cartel members have been on their campuses. Most notoriously, a 14-year-old from San Diego became a head-chopping cartel assassin.

"I slit their throats," he testified at his trial, held near Cuernavaca. The teenager, called "El Ponchis" - the Cloak - was found guilty of torturing and beheading and sentenced to three years in a Mexican prison.

For more than a decade, the United States' focus has been terrorism, an exhausting battle reliant on covert operatives in societies where the rule of law has collapsed or widespread violence is the norm. The situation in Mexico is beginning to show similarities. In many border areas, the authority of the Mexican state seems either entirely absent or extremely weak. In September 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said cartel violence might be "morphing into or making common cause with what we would call an insurgency."

If cartel violence is not contained in Mexico, which shares a nearly 2,000 mile border with the United States, the drug war could threaten U.S. national security and even survival of the Mexican state.

How much is enough?

For most of us, Mexico is reduced several times a week to a sickening barrage of horror flick headlines. Thirty-five bodies left on the freeway during rush-hour in a major tourist city. A person's face sewn onto a soccer ball. Bodies found stuffed in barrels of acid. Heads sent rolling onto busy nightclub dance floors.

What could explain such savagery?

Traffickers don't have a political or religious ideology like al Qaeda.

The answer, some experts say, is a number. Something like $39 billion annually.

That's the top estimated amount Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking organizations make in wholesale profits annually, according to a 2009 Justice Department report, the latest year for which that calculation was available. The department's 2011 reported that Mexican traffickers control the flow of most of the cocaine, heroin, foreign-produced marijuana and methamphetamine in the United States.

There are seven cartels in Mexico vying for control of smuggling routes into the United States, a bountiful sellers' paradise. South of the border it costs $2,000 to produce a kilo of cocaine from leaf to lab, the DEA said. In the U.S., a kilo's street value ranges from $34,000 to $120,000, depending on the ZIP code where it's pushed.

"How much is enough to the cartels? How many billions justify how many deaths to them?" said DEA special agent and spokesman Jeffrey Scott. "Mexico is their home, too. Their families live there. At what point does the violence cripple their ability to conduct business?"

Scott has been with the DEA for 16 years. Between 2006 and 2011, he led a Tucson, Arizona, strike force that fought smugglers bringing tons of methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin and cocaine across the border. By the time the drugs reach the low-level street dealer, they have been through many middle managers in the cartels' purposely confusing web of workers.

"The people who are arrested will sometimes say, 'Sinaloa who?'" he said, referring to the cartel that originated in the Mexican Pacific Coast state and has the strongest presence in the United States.

Dealers usually don't know or care where their product comes from, Scott said. He said he doubts the tens of millions of Americans who use illegal drugs do, either.

Get Shorty

From foot to head he is short/But he is the biggest of the big

If you respect him, he'll respect you

If you offend him, it will get worse

-- Lyrics to narco-corrido "El Chapo" by Los Canelos de Durango

"El Chapo" (Shorty) is the boss of the Sinaloa cartel. In his last-known photo, the 5 foot 6 inch son of a poor rural family wears a schoolboy haircut and a plain-colored puff-coat. Despite having virtually no formal education, Forbes estimates Joaquin Guzman Loera is worth $1 billion. This month the U.S. Treasury declared him the most influential trafficker in the world. He has eluded capture for more than a decade, is known for coming up with original ways to smuggle, like putting cocaine in fire extinguishers, and is suspected of helping Mexicans and Colombians launder as much as $20 billion in drug profits.

The legend of "El Chapo" began to grow when he escaped, reportedly on a laundry cart, from a Mexican prison in 2001. He seemed even more untouchable last summer when his 20-something beauty queen wife (who has dual nationality) crossed into California to give birth to twins. The birth certificates leave blank the space for the father's name, and she apparently hustled back across the border.

It's any one's guess where El Chapo is. Mexican President Felipe Calderon wondered last year if he was hiding out in the United States.

Guzman is the drug war. Perpetuating the image of the bulletproof bad guy keeps it alive.

YouTube is full of narco snuff. Those with weak stomachs should avoid the wildly popular El Blog del Narco, which posts gory photos of killings and confessions by drug lords. Cartels make their own movies, glorifying the business. The films are sold in street markets in Mexico and the United States.

Some say it's no coincidence that the first beheading of Mexican police officers occurred in 2006, when videotapes of al Qaeda beheading were shown on Mexican television.

Since then, headless corpses have become a cartel calling card. In a single week in September, a sack of heads was left near an Acapulco elementary school and a blogging reporter's headless corpse was dumped in front of a major thoroughfare in the Texas border town of Nuevo Laredo. Her head, along with headphones and computer equipment, was found in a street planter.

A note left at the scene, one of dozens of journalist killings in the past five years, read: "OK Nuevo Laredo live on the social networks, I am La Nena de Laredo and I am here because of my reports and yours ..."

The message was signed with several Z's, indicating the slaying was the work of another major cartel, the Zetas.

One of the first cartels to use the internet, the Zetas are perhaps the savviest propagandists in the drug war. They're known for effective recruitment tactics.

A few years ago, they appealed to the destitute in a nation where the minimum wage is $5 an hour, but millions have no work.

Banners were dropped from bridges in major cities.

"Why be poor?" the signs said. "Come work for us."

The good old bad days

Desde que yo era chiquillo tenia fintas de cabron (Ever since I was a kid, I had the fame of a bad-ass)

ya le pegaba al perico, y a la mota (already hitting the parrot [cocaine] and doing dope [marijuana])

-- El Cabron, a legendary narco-corrido, or narco ballad, released in 2005.

Feeding addiction has long been a part of Mexico's relationship with the United States, first becoming a well-oiled operation during Prohibition when Americans crossed over to drink and get high and Mexicans sent marijuana and alcohol to speakeasies in the States.

During this era, narco-corridos, or drug pop ballads glorifying kingpins, became popular. The accordion-based anthems were danceable, fun. Today the songs are no longer so amusing.

Between 2006 and 2008, more than a dozen performers have been murdered. Cartels have held some balladeers hostage for days, forcing them to entertain partying crews. The Mexican government has tried to ban the music, but the effort has only made the songs sexier. They shake butts from Cancun to Culiacan, and across the United States from Los Angeles to New York. Slain narco singers have been nominated for posthumous Grammys. (Watch narco singer Valentín Elizalde's music video "A Mis Enemigos" which some speculate was an attack on the Gulf cartel and led to his murder.)

Narco-corridos have become death impersonating art, a symbol of just how unexpectedly dark the Mexican drug business has become.

The definition of a cartel is an agreement among competing firms. That was the old way for the Mexicans. Pay the cops and the politicians. Don't kill anyone unless absolutely necessary and don't make a mess of it.

Two scenarios made their thieves' agreement possible.

For decades, Mexicans mainly transported cocaine for the Colombians or the Colombians sent the cocaine directly into the United States on planes or speedboats.

That changed in the 1990s when the United States tightened its choke on Colombia's main smuggling point in the Caribbean and Florida and worked with the Colombian government to combat cartels and eliminate kingpins like Pablo Escobar.

The neutered Colombian cartels were then forced to rely on the Mexicans, who smuggled across much more vast and impossible to monitor areas like the border and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Suddenly indispensable in their industry, the cartels in Mexico reacted like any ambitious corporation. They bought out every last possible competitor, increasing bribes across the ranks of law enforcement and politicians. They advertised themselves to struggling working class people and the poor as a panacea amid all the government's failures: Cartels were the private-sector alternative.

Within a few years, they gained unrivaled dominance in the global illicit drug trade.

The second scenario helping the cartels, some experts say, is rampant corruption within the PRI, or the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran Mexico for 72 years.

There were far fewer deaths and the cartels' bottom line wasn't threatened.

The PRI lost power in 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox, who led the opposition National Action Party.

Known for his cowboy hats, Fox made little of the cartels during his election campaign. But after meeting with American officials in the early days of his administration, he announced he wanted the traffickers gone.

The arrests of kingpins and key players followed, which prompted chaos within cartel ranks as commands were shaken. Cartel members fought amongst themselves and each other. The good old bad days ended.

A real war starts

La traicion y el contrabando (The treason and the contraband)

Son cosas incompartidas" (They are the same thing)

- Lyrics to "Contrabando y traicion" by Tigres del Norte

To understand the drug war, accept that it's impossible to keep track of all its players. Accept that there are no white hats or black hats. There's only grey. Fog.

There is, however, agreement among experts about when war was declared: In late 2004 in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, 10 minutes from Laredo, Texas.

The Sinaloa wanted this golden smuggling route.

Every year, more than 5 million cars, 1.5 million commercial trucks and 3.8 million pedestrians cross northbound from Mexico into the United States here, bringing with them a ton of hidden narcotics.

In 2004, Nuevo Laredo was controlled by the Gulf cartel, which was just as old and Corleone-esque as Sinaloa.

For help defending their turf, the Gulf hired a group of former Mexican special forces soldiers who called themselves Zetas after the federal police code for high-ranking officers, "Z1."

The Sinaloa clan hired their own protection, a gang named Los Negros led by a blond-haired, blue-eyed American from Laredo. The man's cohorts called him La Barbie.

The Zetas battled Los Negros with tactics befitting an elite military. They fired automatic weapons, launched RPGs and grenades. They shot at each other for more than a year. Local gangs jumped in. Civilians dropped.

Emboldened by their Nuevo Laredo victory, the Zetas formed their own cartel. As they went after other cartels throughout Mexico, the Zetas honed a reputation for sickening brutality, seeming to kill just because they can. They have been blamed for setting fire to a casino killing 52 people, shooting dead 72 migrants on a Tamaulipas farm in 2010, murdering and tossing into mass graves women and children and killing bloggers. In April 2011, the bodies of 190 people, some of them migrant workers, were found in a mass grave in the desert of Tamaulipas.

Officials say the Zetas have lobbed grenades into celebrating crowds and blown up a pipeline that sent "rivers of fire" into residential streets. They have terrorized cities that once seemed untouchable by the violence, including the port city of Veracruz and Mexico's richest city, Monterrey, home to many international companies.

As the Zetas enacted their terror, that blond-haired, blue-eyed American leading Los Negros got angrier. La Barbie was Edgar Valdez, a Texas high school football star who worked his way into the Mexican underworld as a pot dealer. In 2005, the Dallas Morning News reported on a video showing four bound and bloody men, suspected to be Zetas, being interrogated off camera by a man believed to be Valdez.

A pistol comes into the frame, goes off and one of the men slumps. The video went viral. People around the globe started asking what was really going on in Mexico.

Journalist Ioan Grillo has been to more murder scenes than he can recall. His new book, "El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency,"includes interviews with hit men, gang members, government and law enforcement officials and people caught in the crossfire.

Grillo repeatedly returns to a single idea. Wars occur because people cannot feed their families. They happen because groups of people feel unimportant, disenfranchised, angry and broke. They want a piece of life. It only takes a few people with particularly hollow morals, capable of shutting off or suppressing guilt, to convince many that killing and dying in spectacular ways is tantamount to glory.

Jihadist groups, kamikaze squadrons, American street gangs, cartels. Their members were all kids at one point. Grillo writes that he has seen teenagers show up at murder scenes showing no grief. It has become routine. They pick up shell casings scattered on the ground and debate whether they've been fired from AK47s or M4s.

There are very few counselors in Mexico to help, and there is very little quality education outside the circles of the comparatively privileged few, he wrote.

Why wouldn't a kid take 50 pesos to be a lookout, or 1,000 pesos to kill someone?

"I would love to see more money spent on these concerns," Grillo said, "than on more military helicopters and soldiers gunning it out with the cartels."

Fighting back

After he was elected president in 2006, the PAN's Felipe Calderon took a page out of his predecessor's playbook and declared war on the cartels. He had the Mexican military fan out across the country and fired hundreds of corrupt police officers. He even disarmed an entire town, saying that most of its police force was working for the cartels.

Plenty of narcos were arrested, and some extradited to the United States, but many thousands of people died. They included cartel members, police and civilians who were caught in the middle of a gruesome war.

Calderon and President George W. Bush reached an unprecedented agreement to fight the cartels. The Merida Initiative (named after the Mexican city where the two met) included a U.S. pledge of $1.5 billion between 2008 and 2010. President Obama requested millions more for 2011 for the program. The program provides aircraft, inspection tools and other sophisticated drug-detecting technology to the Mexicans. It also funds drug counseling and prison rehabilitation programs.

To fight corruption, the United States has also pledged to give money to help train police in Mexico.

For its part, the Mexican government has passed legislation aimed at bolstering its judicial system, and in October 2010, Calderon formally requested a total reshaping of the police force in Mexico. The reform he proposed would create unified state police forces and eliminate municipal police, who federal officials have said are very susceptible to corruption because of their low salaries.

Observers say Calderon underestimated how many police and other law enforcement officers were on the cartels' payroll when he came to power. As of March 2008, 150,000 soldiers had deserted. Traffickers, experts say, spent the Fox administration hunkering down, ingratiating themselves to communities, buying food and paying for medical bills, offering restless young people a sense of identity and hard cash.

And as Grillo has written, many people didn't trust the police and the soldiers as they once did. Authorities were accused of widespread human rights abuses while on anti-cartel missions. Jose Luis Soberanes, president of the Mexican Human Rights Commission, testified in 2008 that his office had received complaints that police and soldiers had entered towns to rape and torture and kill, including shooting dead two women and three children in Sinaloa state.

The cartels had become Robin Hood to many, similar to Colombia kingpin Escobar. In his impoverished Medellin, Escobar built a soccer field and a school. He died in a gunbattle with agents in 1993. At the church Escobar built, some Colombians still come to worship him like a saint.

A Barbie, a fox and some piggies

"La Barbie" was arrested in August 2010 in Mexico, and smiled as he was paraded in front of the press. The green Ralph Lauren polo shirt he wore inspired an international fashion trend.

Calderon's administration trumpets his arrest and others, and vows to keep fighting the cartels. But the president is a lame duck. Term limits prohibit him from running again in 2012.

Many expect the PRI, Mexico's founding party that ruled for seven decades, to return to power in July's elections.

Whoever wins the election will have to answer a critical question: whether to appease the cartels and try to negotiate with them or continue the all-out assault that Calderon launched.

Negotiating with traffickers played a role in Colombia, where religious figures and former guerrillas led the talks, experts said.

But they also stress that Mexico is not Colombia, and this is not the late 1980s. Crime syndicates operate differently. Key players on both sides of the border have considerations unlike those during the Colombian crisis. Mexico, they contend, is far less likely to welcome close foreign involvement than Colombia did.

A solution also cannot come from only one side of the border. Former President Fox and other experienced leaders in Latin America have advocated legalizing the consumption of marijuana, saying it would cut the value of the cartels' product. In 2011, the U.N.'s Global Commission on Drug Policy, which included Fox, recommended that governments experiment with drug legalization, especially marijuana.

Last fall, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a candidate for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, said he thought the drug war violence had become so dire that U.S. troops could be sent into Mexico. Drug trafficking in Mexico, he and others have said, fuels criminal organizations around the globe and feeds human and arms trafficking.

Perry had barely finished his thought before being pounced on by critics, many within his own party and especially his opponents: How would a limping U.S. economy pay for that? The United States was already involved in two wars.

Mexico has historically been highly averse to allowing a foreign force to fight on its soil, experts said. The idea of Team America swooping into its sovereign neighbor is offensive to many Mexicans. Consider the country's national anthem, written after the 1840s Mexican-American War in which Mexico lost half its territory.

If some enemy out lander should dare

to profane your ground with his sole,

think, oh beloved Fatherland, that heaven has given you a soldier in every son

In 2009, the group Los Tigres del Norte were banned from performing a popular song titled "La Granja" at an awards ceremony in Mexico City.

The lyrics blast the Mexican government's strategy against the cartels, a "Fox" who came to break plates on a farm. The animals got out "to create a big mess."

The lyrics also suggest that America, Mexico's No. 1 drug customer, is just as dirty.

The piggies helped out

They feed themselves from the farm

Daily they want more corn

And they lose the profits

And the farmer that works

Does not trust them anymore

Fin

Long ago the U.S. War on Drugs was lost.  The drugs won.  To maintain the multinational illegal drug industry profits, politicians continue the war.

Both the assured ending of human races 2050-2099 CE from global warming temperature increase and illegal drugs can still be corrected, but time is running out.  Nether the less, no changes will occur because Washington DC politicians profit from the existing status and do not want it to change. For politicians, life is cheap compared to immediate political needs.