Mexican Ex-President's Drug Proposal Stirs Debate

MEXICO CITY (Aug. 10) -- A former Mexican president's proposal to legalize drugs to reduce cartel-related violence is stoking an increasingly desperate policy debate within Mexico and in Washington.

Writing on his blog Sunday, Vicente Fox, who was president from 2000 to 2006, criticized the current administration's military-led, U.S.-backed campaign to topple the cartels. The battle against and among the traffickers has left more than 28,000 people dead since December 2006.

"We should consider legalizing the production, distribution and sale of drugs," Fox wrote. "Legalizing in this sense doesn't mean that drugs are good or don't hurt those who consume. Rather, we have to see it as a strategy to strike and break the economic structure that allows the mafias to generate huge profits in their business."

Fox, who belongs to the same conservative National Action Party (PAN) as his successor, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, wrote the post a few days after a security conference held at Los Pinos, the presidential residence. Calderon said at the conference that while he did not support legalization, such a move could "significantly reduce criminals' cash flow" and was worth debating.

The U.S. State Department, for its part, has come out against legalizing drugs in Mexico, through which the bulk of illicit drug imports to the U.S. passes. "While the question of debating legalization is for Mexicans to decide, we don't think the legalization of drugs is the answer," a State Department spokesperson said.

Fox also called for the military to return to its barracks. He advocates dissolving municipal police departments, which have been plagued with corruption, and handing their duties over to a single national police force.

Last Friday, Public Security Minister Genaro Garcia Luna said criminal organizations were supplementing the salaries of 165,500 municipal police officers with $1.2 billion in annual payoffs. The following day hundreds of Mexican federal police officers clashed in Ciudad Juarez after a federal commander was arrested for his alleged involvement in kidnappings, extortions and killings in Juarez.

Calderon has called on Mexican citizens to help weed out corrupt cops and pledged to continue the military campaign to fight the drug cartels, which are increasingly posing an existential threat to rule of law in Mexico.

"The behavior of the criminals has changed and become a defiance to the state, an attempt to replace the state," Calderon said during last week's security conference.

Three former Latin American presidents -- Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil -- have said that marijuana should be legalized and that the U.S.-led war on drugs has failed.

Experts on both sides of the border have pointed out that however deadly the drug battles are in Mexico, little has been done to effectively address their driving force: massive demand in the U.S. for illicit drugs.

"At great cost, in blood and treasure, Mexico is fulfilling its responsibility with a war on supply," wrote Andres Rozental, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, in a February 2009 editorial published in the Dallas Morning News. "It's time the U.S. fulfills its responsibility with a real war on demand."

He and his co-author, Stanley Weiss, suggested that a partial decriminalization of drugs "points the way toward a more rational approach."

In March of last year, President Barack Obama said U.S. drug policy should focus on prevention and treatment, and urged dropping the slogan "the war on drugs," rhetoric that came to define Washington's strategy from Richard Nixon's presidency onward.

Many Latin American countries have already begun liberalizing drug laws. Last August, Argentina's supreme court ruled it was unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption. "Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state," the court said. That same month, Mexico decriminalized the possession of small quantities of drugs: half a gram of cocaine, 5 grams of marijuana, 50 milligrams of heroin and 40 milligrams of methamphetamine.

Because of the scale of marijuana use and distribution in the U.S. and Mexico, a move toward legalization in either country would likely generate changes for both.

For that reason, Calderon suggested at the Los Pinos conference, Mexico is watching carefully whether California voters in November will vote in favor of Proposition 19, which would allow adults to possess up to an ounce of marijuana -- and local governments to slap on a sales tax.

Conversely, greater liberalization in Mexico would probably trigger a response in Washington, says Sylvia Longmire, a drug cartel analyst and border security consultant.

"It's difficult to comprehend how the U.S. government could acknowledge Calderon taking on the legalization debate, knowing full well that U.S. demand and consumption helps fuel the drug war, and not take at least baby steps towards engaging in a similar debate [in the U.S.]," Longmire said.

Some say legalizing marijuana would have only a marginal effect on Mexican drug cartels, which in recent years have diversified into a wide range of moneymaking enterprises, including kidnapping, human trafficking and extortion. The cartels profit from 22 different businesses, according to Edgardo Buscaglia, an organized crime expert and law professor in Mexico.

That diversification might, however, also complicate the cartels' standing in Mexico. "These crimes affect average citizens more than narco-trafficking and could put some pressure on public officials, now on the take, to pursue the culprits," said George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story erroneously referred to security expert Edgardo Buscaglia as Jose Buscaglia.