Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Stop the drugs war

Legalisation is Mexico’s only hope

‘They’re all bad, our politicians, all corrupt,’ said Maria, her cheery face dissolving into distaste. What about the new president, Peña Nieto? I ask. ‘That pretty boy? Ugh!’

It was late afternoon in Oaxaca’s central square, the Zocolo. Clouds were cruising in from the Sierra Madre and the dogs had begun to squabble and hump outside the cathedral. The news kiosk looked like a missing persons bureau, each front page full of mugshots: the latest victims of the drug wars.

What about Calderon, the one before Peña Nieto, I asked Maria, who’s seen ten presidents come and go. Wasn’t he OK? At least he tried to fight the drug cartels. ‘He’s loco! Mad,’ said Maria, with a dismissive shrug. ‘His so-called drug war — pah! Do you know how many have died in the drug war? They say 50,000 dead but it’s more like 100,000. It is more than died in the Vietnam war. And these are not soldiers, they are young boys, babies, mothers, husbands. And for what?’

There’s the question: for what? Felipe Calderon was once convinced he had the answer: to crack down on the kingpins; restore moral order. But Calderon’s war had a pretty clear outcome: the bad guys won. Capos were shot, but their cartels just split and proliferated: more gang warfare, more severed heads dumped on beaches; more corpses carved up and left on busy streets for kids to gawp at; extortion, kidnap, rape. It soon became clear even to Calderon that the ‘war on drugs’ was unwinnable, for the simple reason that the cause of the mayhem is not in Mexico, it’s in the States. For as long as there are American junkies, Mexico will pay the blood price for their addiction.

This has been the status quo for the past few decades, and as far as I could tell on my Mexican adventure last year, Maria was right: no one expected Peña Nieto to change much of anything.

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