> Mexican President Felipe Calderon will become a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government after he leaves office on Saturday, the leading US University says. Calderon will be the first participant in a specially endowed fellowship for outgoing government leaders. He will lecture, write and develop case studies based on his six-year term in office. The Kennedy School has praised Calderon for free-market policies that boosted Mexico’s economy. His presidency was also marked by a crackdown on drug cartels, which unleashed waves of violence that left over 47,500 Mexicans dead.
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> From Russia Times.
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> Joanna
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And yet:
In August 2011, five years into an exhausting term as president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón arrived at a Monterrey casino in the aftermath of yet another unfathomably brutal attack. The casino’s owner had reportedly refused to pay bribes to members of the Zetas cartel, and so they sent gunmen to douse the entrance of the casino with gasoline and set the building on fire. Fifty-two people died, 42 of them women. Calderón, addressing the horror, spoke at length, eventually turning to the consumers north of the border. “[If Americans] are determined and resigned to consume drugs, then they should seek market alternatives in order to cancel the criminals’ stratospheric profits,” he said. By “market alternatives,” he meant using regulation and taxation to control the flow of drugs. Though Calderón had previously scoffed at American efforts to legalize marijuana, he now seemed to be suggesting some form of decriminalization. The stresses of the moment were so intense that no one knew if he really meant it, but a month later he repeated the case and then, this September, he made it again at the United Nations. By then he was joined by the presidents of Colombia and Guatemala, both staunch drug warriors, and eventually several more Latin heads of state. “What is the saying you have in the United States?” says Daniel Mejía Londoño, the director of the Institute for Drugs and Security at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. “Only Nixon could go to China.”
The political momentum south of the border has moved well past the American consensus. Here, we are beginning to talk about legalizing marijuana; there, politicians are speculating about altering the prohibition of much more toxic drugs—cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine. But even if such a broad legalization were to occur in Mexico and South America, there would likely be no substantial reduction in violence. It’s the price of hard drugs in the United States—not Mexico—that drives the profits of the drug trade. Which may be why the Organization of American States’ comprehensive report on drug policy in the hemisphere seems unlikely to give much prominence to legalization, according to several people involved in the study, focusing instead on important but incremental measures such as improving criminal-justice systems in Central America and developing programs to divert young people from gangs. One expert brought in to consult on the project says, “There’s no there there.”
Another reason legalization may not do much to diminish the violence is that some of the largest Mexican cartels, as they have moved more deeply into extortion and kidnapping, may be evolving out of the reach of drug policy. The problem is that some of the largest Mexican groups have moved deeper into extortion and kidnapping and have become less dependent on narcotics. “My fear is that if you legalize drugs tomorrow, I don’t think you’re going to reduce the number of cartels or the amount of homicide or the flow of illicit goods,” says Adam Blackwell, a Canadian diplomat who is the secretary for multidimensional security at the Organization for American States. “Focusing too much on drugs takes us away from the real issues, which are”—he searches for the right word. “Structures. Cartel structures. Gang structures.”
http://nymag.com/news/features/war-on-drugs-2012-12/index6.html