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Mexican 'Peace Caravan' Demands End to Drug War
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Hundreds of Mexicans taking part in a "peace caravan" to protest against the violent drugs war have arrived at their destination of Ciudad Juarez.
A protester holds up a sign during a demonstration in front of the Angel of Independence monument in Mexico City February 13, 2011. At least 200 people from civil organizations participated in the march to demand increased security and a stop to violence in Mexico, according to local media. The sign reads: "No more blood". (REUTERS / Henry Romero) The week-long journey was led by poet Javier Sicilia, whose son was killed by suspected drug-gang hit-men in March.
Mr Sicilia wants Mexico's army pulled off the streets and more done to prosecute drug cartel members and seize their assets.
President Felipe Calderon has said withdrawing the army is not an option.
Nearly 35,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since Mr Calderon deployed the army in the fight against the cartels in 2006.
Ciudad Juarez, on the border with the United States, has become the front-line of Mexico's drug war.
About 3,100 people were killed there in 2010, more than a fifth of the total in Mexico's bloodiest year yet in the government's campaign against the drug trafficking gangs.
Mr Sicilia and his convoy of about 20 coaches began their 2,500km (1,550 miles) journey in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, and criss-crossed the country.
"Do your jobs, stop humiliating the citizens of Juarez, and do justice to so many who have died," Mr Sicilia said after the convoy arrived in Ciudad Juarez.
"This is the beginning of a civil resistance movement to transform consciousness, to start a dialogue in the absence of government policies."
Mr Sicilia and about 500 others signed a pact calling on the government to do more to stop the violence rocking Mexico by fighting corruption, improving the justice system and weakening the cartels by seizing their assets and blocking money-laundering.
He said he would organise more such rallies if Mexico's politicians do not show more commitment to changing their strategy.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllWho do you think provides all that juicy money to install their puppets into office? Uh, the money laundering banks of the US and the illicit-drug lords. They are the problem, so Mr Sicilia calling on office holders to respond to the citizenry's suffering is rhetorical. Good on him, its a first step to awaken the sleepers. But the only reason those politicos are in place is to facilitate this carnage in service to Empire's profits. When enough of the people here, there and everywhere in the world wake up and demand better for themselves, then it will happen.
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/.../citibankaffair.html -
www.fromthewilderness.com/.../ciadrugs/052401_slatkin_story.html
www.dosenation.com/listing.php?id=8399
The latest? www.loansafe.org/dea-wachovia-bank-agrees-to-pay-160-million-drug-money-laundering-fine
Even establishment types can't deny it anymore. The War on Drugs is a war on the people. www.csmonitor.com/.../Kofi-Annan-George-Shultz-say-drug-war-a-failure.
Granted I'm not a big fan of either; it makes me wonder about their agenda, but I'll take the 500 typewriting monkeys scenario for right now, as long as it moves in the right direction to legalize currently illicit drugs.
Another elegant reply from the lit major.
Hi, readbetween
The cartels make billions of dollars selling drugs to the US market. If the US would simply end drug prohibition, their cash flow would dry up. There's no way the cartels and street gangs could compete with Pfizer and Rite Aid.
Mexico's drug problems and the bullshit "illegals" problem can both be laid at the feet of US of A imperialism; consistent US policy has been to interference so as to get right wingers in power; who then screw the people just as the assholes do here. All about money. Tony
"Mexico's drug problems and the bullshit "illegals" problem...."
As if they're two separate issues.
You guys need to lose the image of illegal immigrants as poor dirt farmers
Dangerous and potentially lethal thinking.
You might also lose the idea that the US is the exclusive drug user market. Here's a little tidbit:
"A 2009 United Nations report estimated 1.7 million Mexicans, or about 2.4 percent of the population, use cocaine. In comparison with the US, where an estimated 88 tons of cocaine are consumed annually, Mexico, with about one-third of the population as its northern neighbor, consumes an estimated 27.65 tons of the drug every year. If the UN's numbers are fairly accurate, Mexico is rapidly catching up to the US as a leading consumer of cocaine.
In other annual indices of hard drug use, Mexicans reportedly consume 3.9 tons of heroin and 4.2 tons of amphetamines and Ecstasy. At the same time, more than three million Mexicans, or about 4.2 percent of the population, are users of marijuana."
Drug Bust
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: June 10, 2011
Friday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest, most expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American history: The war on drugs.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Charles M. Blow
On the morning of June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon, speaking from the Briefing Room of the White House, declared: “America’s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of supply, as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad, wherever they are in the world.”
So began a war that has waxed and waned, sputtered and sprinted, until it became an unmitigated disaster, an abomination of justice and a self-perpetuating, trillion-dollar economy of wasted human capital, ruined lives and decimated communities.
(Since 1971, more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for drug-related offenses.)
And no group has been more targeted and suffered more damage than the black community. As the A.C.L.U. pointed out last week, “The racial disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.”
An effort meant to save us from a form of moral decay became its own insidious brand of moral perversion — turning people who should have been patients into prisoners, criminalizing victimless behavior, targeting those whose first offense was entering the world wrapped in the wrong skin. It feeds our achingly contradictory tendency toward prudery and our overwhelming thirst for punishment.
Last week, the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a 19-member commission that included Kofi Annan, a former U.N. secretary general; George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state; and Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, declared that: “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.”
The White House immediately shot back: no dice. The Obama administration presented a collection of statistics that compared current drug use and demand with the peak of the late 1970s, although a direct correlation between those declines and the drug war are highly debatable. In doing so, it completely sidestepped the human, economic and societal toll of the mass incarceration of millions of Americans, many for simple possession.
No need to put a human face on 40 years of folly when you can swaddle its inefficacy in a patchwork quilt of self-serving statistics.
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
Charles BLOW? That's funny.
Mexico decriminalized heroin, cocaine, amphetamine, marijuana and LSD for personal use several years ago.
That hasn't worked out too well. They've seen alarming increases in addiction and , of course, violence.
Weed for personal use is probably OK but I would agree we need a different approach to the other substances.
Legalization of narcotics would probably result in an even bigger government bureaucracy with it's attendant intrusion into everyone's lives.
Also consider, the legal drug trade -prescription drugs- is competing with illegal substances. Go to the doc, get high, stay outta jail.
It's a mess not matter which way you look at it.
If the US puts pressure on Calderon to stop fighting the cartels and have a "pact" with the enemy (remember Montezuma's truce with Cortes), not only it will not last but it will lead to an all-out war involving US troops directly, as even the ex mayor of Tijuana, long suspect of deals with the TJ cartel, has just been arrested last week. At his home there were found 89 military weapons (AK-47s, M-16s, a gas granade etc);
Behold another day in a border town and a narco attack in broad daylight, no police or soldiers around
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2RxKbaa7Ww&feature=related
and here is one with soldiers, "federales", it lasted hours; imagine going to McDonalds like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRzYFDX0ZpQ&feature=related