Pubdate: Fri, 02 Nov 2012
Source: International Herald-Tribune (International)
Copyright: International Herald Tribune 2012
Contact:  http://global.nytimes.com/?iht
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/212
Author: Ioan Grillo
Note: Ioan Grillo is a journalist and author of "El Narco: Inside 
Mexico's Criminal Insurgency."

HIT MEXICO'S CARTELS WITH LEGALIZATION

WHENEVER I've interviewed Mexican cartel killers, the aspect that 
I've found most disturbing about them is that they appear to be sane.

Even though they have described to me such unfathomable actions as 
hacking off the heads of still-living victims, it is something other 
than mental illness that drives their violence. Their sanity is 
disconcerting because, if they were simply mad, it would be easier to 
accept horrific actions like leaving piles of headless corpses in town squares.

Instead, we have to face up to the hard reasons why thousands of 
young men (and some women) with full mental faculties have become 
serial killers. These reasons should be taken into account by 
residents of Colorado, Washington state and Oregon when they vote on 
referendums to legalize marijuana next Tuesday.

The painful truth is that the monster of Mexican cartels has been 
pumped up by decades of Americans buying illegal drugs under the 
policies of prohibition. No one knows exactly how much money Mexican 
traffickers make, but reasonable estimates find they pocket $30 
billion every year selling cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal 
meth to American users. Since 1980, the cumulative jackpot could be 
close to $1 trillion. Under the law of the jungle, this money goes to 
the most violent and sadistic players, so the cartels have spent 
their dollars on building increasingly ferocious death squads.

There have been a tragic 60,000 killings under President Felipe 
Calderon that are described as drug-related. But even this 
description can be misleading. Most cartel assassins do not carry out 
these brutal acts because they are high on drugs. Their motive is to 
capture the profits that are so high because in the black market you 
can buy drugs for a nickel and sell them for a dollar. How many 
others would love to be in a business with a markup of more than 2,000 percent?

Marijuana is just one of the drugs that the cartels traffic. 
Chemicals such as crystal meth may be too venomous to ever be 
legalized. But cannabis is a cash crop that provides huge profits to 
criminal armies, paying for assassins and guns south of the Rio 
Grande. The scale of the Mexican marijuana business was illustrated 
by a mammoth 120-hectare plantation busted last year in Baja 
California. It had a sophisticated irrigation system, sleeping 
quarters for 60 workers and could produce 120 metric tons of cannabis 
per harvest.

Again, nobody knows exactly how much the whole Mexico-U.S. marijuana 
trade is worth, with estimates ranging from $2 billion to $20 billion 
annually. But even if you believe the lowest numbers, legal marijuana 
would take billions of dollars a year away from organized crime. This 
would inflict more financial damage than soldiers or drug agents have 
managed in years and substantially weaken cartels.

It is also argued that Mexican gangsters have expanded to a portfolio 
of crimes that includes kidnapping, extortion, human smuggling and 
theft from oil pipelines. This is a terrifying truth. But this does 
not take away from the fact that the marijuana trade provides the 
crime groups with major resources. That they are committing crimes 
such as kidnapping, which have a horrific effect on innocent people, 
makes cutting off their financing all the more urgent.

The cartels will not disappear overnight. U.S. agents and the Mexican 
police need to continue battling hit squads that wield 
rocket-propelled grenades and belt-driven machine guns. Killers who 
hack off heads still have to be locked away. Mexico needs to clean up 
corruption among the police and build a valid justice system. And 
young men in the barrios have to be given a better option than 
signing up as killers.

All these tasks will be easier if the flow of money to the cartels is 
dramatically slowed down. Do we really want to hand them another 
trillion dollars over the next three decades?

It is always hard to deal with these global issues in a world where 
all politics is local. Mexico was not even featured in the 
presidential debate on foreign policy, despite that fact that the 
United States has supported Calderon's war on drugs with more than 
$1.3 billion worth of hardware, including Black Hawk helicopters, and 
that cartels have attacked and killed U.S. agents.

Of course, residents of Colorado and Washington will have many valid 
local reasons to make their choices. But on the issue of organized 
crime, the underlying fact should be clear: Legal marijuana will take 
away dollars that pay for assassins and redirect them to small 
businesses and government coffers.

If voters do choose to legalize marijuana it would be a historic 
decision, but it would also open up a can of worms. The U.S. federal 
government and even the United Nations would be forced to react to a 
state's resolution to break from the path. This could be a good thing.

Many Latin American leaders and others have been questioning the 
current prohibitionist doctrine. Even Calderon, who staked his 
presidency on fighting cartels and suffered assassination threats, 
spoke at the United Nations in September demanding an international 
debate on drug policy. Perhaps the time for this debate has come.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom