Wikileaks cables: US Mexico drugs war fears revealed

The US is concerned that the Mexican army is failing in its fight against drug cartels, according to diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks.

A cable sent by the US embassy in Mexico City in January 2010 described the army as "slow and risk averse."

It said troops were not trained to patrol the streets or gather evidence to convict those detained.

However, the cables praise the Mexican government for its "unprecedented commitment" to take on the drugs gangs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11906758

Odd how the last para seemingly contradicts the ones above it. :shrug:

It was perfectly clear where this was going to go as soon as he stole the election and bought into the "War on Drugs" prattle. And here we are. And if the OP is correct (admittedly a risky bet) they are going to stick with this "strategy" for another year or two, at least.

--a blood-drenched, gun-drenched, war profiteering, chaotic, epic disaster tearing into the lives of the poor with vicious precision.

I don't think I know of anything so cynical and so appalling as this deliberate repetition of a known disaster. But then our government thinks that Colombia is a "success." Thousands murdered, most of them innocent, most of them by the government and military itself. FIVE MILLION people displaced, by state terror--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth. A quarter of a million of them fled into Venezuela and Ecuador. The worst rich/poor ratio in the western hemisphere. A lawless government--rife with spying, bribery, and connections to death squads and drug trafficking--larded with $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid. The countryside laid waste with toxic pesticides and mass graves.

A "success."

And now they're doing it to Mexico.

War will NEVER solve this problem. It is a SOCIAL problem. The answer is drug legalization. We learned this long ago, with "Prohibition." Now we have the horrors of "Prohibition" all over again, only writ much, much larger, with consequences that our society and our neighboring societies will never recover from.

You just want to weep.

That might solve some problems but it will create others. Sure you could pull some of the fangs of criminals - and the cash crop of the poor farmers growing the damn stuff. That would calm down the situation in the growing and shipping areas - no cash flow no reason to fight. Unfortunately legalization will also mean the prices will drop through the floor, the basement floor and a bit down into the bedrock. Making something cheaper and more accessible is hardly going to reduce use, quite the contrary. Just beacuse something is legal wont mean it wont ruin and kill people.

And guess what? None of the scare stuff happened. In fact, Portugal is a wonderful, peaceful place.

Portugal only partially decriminalized drugs. The Portugal example means absolutely nothing in the context of this thread since all the supply steps are still outlawed and that is what is feeding cash to the criminal organizations in the drug producing areas.

Legalisation as a mean to stabilize countries suffering from narco-guerillas would mean making production, shipping and sale legal. That would remove the vast illegal market for drugs and kill the profits for the cartells. Legalization for users would have no effect on those structures.

Of course, given what you just said I don't see why you would possible be against total legalization.

I think that dumping prices and vastly improving availability of drugs far more powerful than tobaco and alcohol is a very bad idea.

that a situation where cheap drugs are available will be worse than the slaughter going on in mexico, colombia, and our inner cities?

Next question.

I wonder, before all this stuff was made illegal, the whole world must have been this terrible place then dominanted by drug use, right?

The more refined and dangerous substances are relatively modern compounds. The less refined variants are considerably less dangerous but nasty non the less.

Here in Sweden we once had no restrictions on alcohol manufacturing, with predictable consequences. It took a long massive popular campaign and a goverment monopoly as well as rationing to bring drinking under control. Availability of cheap drugs is bad, be they alcohol, opiates (as in the Chinese case) or tobaco.

Legalization will a.) crash the price but still b.) feed lots of money to the drug gangs.

Where is this money going to come from if not the sale of the product? Do you expect the market to explode under those conditions? It is pretty clear that that does not happen.

The proper solution is legalization, while forbidding commercial exploitation, and treating abuse as a medical/psychological condition. The criminal justice system is both expensive and ineffective when it comes to dealing with drug use and abuse, and it has been badly damaged by attempting the job. There are several other drug problems that could benefit from this sort of rationalization. Mind you, I am not in favor of legalizing everything, but lets not be paranoid about it either.

Legalization of use will do absolutely nothing to remedy the point debated here.
Legalization of supply will wreck the illegal market, provided you dont artificially keep the prices high.

"Unfortunately legalization will also mean the prices will drop through the floor, the basement floor and a bit down into the bedrock."

And:

"The Portugal example means absolutely nothing in the context of this thread since all the supply steps are still outlawed and that is what is feeding cash to the criminal organizations in the drug producing areas."

So, if the price drops through the floor, how is it going to feed cash to criminal organizations? That's the question.

If you legalize production and distribution for the purpose of solving problems in the producing countries you will remove the risk premium added to the street price - so the prices will drop. Are you claiming that they will not?

Portugal didn't legalize production and distribution, so the illegal market still exist feeding the drug cartells. Portugal only legalized the final step in the drug chain so that the user with a few days of personal supply isn't guilty of narcotics possession.


I really can explain this any simpler, I am talking about two different forms of legalization.

So do you disapprove of what Portugal did?

Sure where is the simple bit, but you don't seem to understand what I wrote.

Do you understand the fundamental difference between legalizing use and legalizing supply of narcotics? If you do what is the point of asking about approval or dissapproval regarding Portugal's drug policy?

But never mind.

As long as the market for illegal drugs remain it is a problem without solution, you can't beat the market.

What has Portugal to do with this topic?Drugs are not legal in Portugal and there are no wars on drugs in western europe in any way similar to the wars in Latin America countries.

Multi millions were spent in the USA to chemically eradicate the wild growing weed, marijuana. I'm sure you are aware of the Reefer Madness (conspiracies and corruption) that illustrate the creation of the so called drug war in the US, by the US gov.

There's more money for crooks (gov't and private) in the status quo.

the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses.

-- Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer"

Never was. Never will be.

What has happened with alcoholism in the U.S., since "Prohibition" was ended some 80 years ago? What has happened with legal smoking of tobacco, since its health hazards have become known and taxes on it have gone up?

Education, health information, medical care and private efforts like AA work. They IN FACT reduce addiction, while treating the problem as a WAR greatly exacerbates addiction and ALL RELATED SOCIAL PROBLEMS, including funding of the "war," militarization and violence, imprisonment of addicts (the rich have their clinics, the poor have a prison cell) , imprisonment of millions of small-time dealers--poor people merely trying to make a living in our uncaring society--egregious violations of civil and human rights and bad, fascist attitudes all around, in the cop world and the political world.

There is no evidence whatsoever that legalization of banned recreational substances increases addiction or social problems, and it clearly alleviates them. But I think we need to stress that this is NOT A THEORETICAL discussion. We are LOOKING AT a great evil--an utterly failed program that has cost us BILLIONS and BILLIONS of dollars in direct costs and TRILLIONS in indirect costs, has resulted in a massive number of murders, LARGELY OF INNOCENTS, largely by POLICE/MILITARY forces, has been used to SMASH social movements and human rights work and trade unions in Colombia and other countries, to displace 5 MILLION peasant farmers in Colombia alone--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth--has been politicized into a Bushwhack war on Leftist governments in Latin America, has been used to justify U.S. military bases and U.S. military maneuvers throughout Latin America, costing us BILLIONS more, and creating the temptation to U.S. fascists of Oil War II, it has put millions of people in prison who shouldn't be there, and this is just a bare outline of the PURE EVIL of this 'war.'

Maybe we need to go down to Colombia and SMELL IT--smell the rotting corpses of innocents in anonymous graves in La Macarena, Colombia--corpses that poisoned the local water supply and sickened local children. That's what our $7 BILLION in U.S. military funding to Colombia has been used for--to KILL innocent people and dress up their bodies like FARC guerrillas, to up the Colombian military's "body count," to get MORE U.S. money!

The U.S. "war on drugs" has been used to support fascist politicians, to support spying (on judges, prosecutors, political opponents, trade unionists and others), bribery, political death squads and drug trafficking itself. It has been used to support white separatist rioters and murderers in Bolivia, and rightwing coup groups in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, until those countries had the good sense to throw the DEA and all its evil works out of the country. It is beyond the beyond corrupt, and I guarantee you that, if it isn't stopped, it will be the "Waterloo" of the USA.

The "war on drugs" is a PRESCRIPTION for social chaos, vast suffering and multinational corporate/war profiteer rule. It is not just a MISTAKE. It is a deliberate policy of destruction. It started because of the threat posed by "the hippies" to our war establishment in the late 1960s. "Peace and love" were not to be permitted. The Forever War that began in Vietnam and has become our permanent condition, now, is intimately connected to the "war on drugs" that Nixon initiated, then. Now we are stuck in this "Alice in Wonderland" insanity and have nearly entirely lost our democracy because of it.

We are NOT talking about having a rational, democratic CHOICE, of this policy or that policy. We are talking about being STUCK in hellish madness, with no "rabbit hole" to crawl back up out of. Concerns about "addiction," if drugs were legalized, seem to me to arise from a complete mis-reading of reality--and, indeed, from a near total lack of reality. "Addiction" and the U.S. "war on drugs" have NOTHING to do with each other. Nothing! The "war on drugs" does not, cannot and will NEVER stop addiction, and it WAS NEVER MEANT TO. It was meant to provide booty and political cache for WAR PROFITEERS in the wake of the American's public's disgust with unjust war, in Vietnam, and to tide the war profiteers over until our rulers had solved "the Vietnam Syndrome"(which they are still struggling to do, despite Bush's wars). And it also provided a means for keeping fascists in control of "our "backyard"--Latin America.

We need to put concern about "addiction" entirely aside. Whether we are struggling with that HEALTH problem ourselves, or with our children, or in a larger context, the militarization of this problem IS NOT HELPING. Prison IS NOT HELPING. Fear IS NOT HELPING. More gun battles, more "SWAT teams," more drug busts, more prison rapes, more entrapments, more confiscation of people's property and ruination of entire families, more surveillance, more denials of colllege scholarships to students, more loss of jobs, more urine testing, more invasions of privacy, more subterfuge, more goddamn lies out of politicians' mouths, more sanctimony and more delusion about war profiteers' motives, ARE NOT HELPING.

"Addiction" is a personal health problem that our society is doing NOTHING to help people with. It is doing the OPPOSITE. The banksters have taken all the money, and even the pathetic efforts at rehab without our so-called "justice system" are vanishing. We need to understand this. Our government IS NOT ON OUR SIDE in dealing with addiction problems, and, to the contrary, it is USING addiction to MILITARIZE ours and other societies, with the weight of that militarization falling on the poor. The money is going to gunsters and banksters and NOT where it should be going. We could have eliminated poverty long ago with the TRILLIONS of dollars WASTED on the FAILED, corrupt and corrosive "war on drugs"! We could have health care for all, drug clinics for all, and hope and a positive, progressive outlook, and a decent life, available to all.

Such a tragic waste! Anyone who thinks that "addiction" or even the price of recreational drugs--whether it falls or rises with legalization--has anything to do with this INSANE policy and those who perpetuate it--needs to spend some time watching that awesome TV series "The Wire."

HOW to get our war establishment to give up ITS addiction--its dependence on "war on drugs" booty--is the question. That's a tough one. As with all of our many political problems, I say: Start with the "TRADE SECRET' voting machines--the ultimate mechanism of control over where our money goes, recently locked into place all over our country. But that's another discussion.