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Leahy Blocks Release of Some Mexican Drug War Aid

Submitted by Phillip Smith on (Issue #796)
Consequences of Prohibition
Drug War Issues
Politics & Advocacy

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, last week blocked the release of $95 million in funds destined to help Mexico prosecute its war on drugs, saying neither the US nor the Mexican governments had shown they had a clear strategy for moving forward.

Sen. Patrick Leahy
The money was appropriated as part of the Merida Initiative, a Bush-era plan to support the Mexican government's crackdown on the country's violent and powerful drug cartels. The Merida Initiative was a $1.4 billion, multi-year foreign assistance program, but it has had no appreciable impact on either the violence or the drug trade there.

"The whole things looks like coughing up money with no accountability," a Leahy aide told CQ Roll Call.

Leahy had originally blocked a $229 million State Department request for Plan Merida funding last fall, but the committee released $134 million in April after receiving a 2 ½ page explanation from State. The committee held up the remaining $95 million pending further information from the US and Mexican governments, but neither government had responded by last week, so last Thursday, Leahy reconfirmed the hold on the funds and called on both governments to define a joint strategy that could succeed.

"We received less than three pages of explanation," said the Leahy aide. "Senator Leahy does not sign away a quarter of a billion dollars just like that."

In addition to concerns over the lack of strategic vision, Leahy also has raised alarms about increasing human rights violations as the Mexican government handed a larger role to the military and about the issue of coordination and consultation. His aide said that lack of a clear difference in vision under new Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto also contributed.

Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.

Comments

For as much as the remaining Congressional support for Medical Marijuana being another tool of the American Congress and the nations involved in a border dispute, it does not capitalistically involve the use and safety of using the grown herb, marijuana.  The laws regarding personal recreational use have become more harsh as I remember the country's National Comprehensive Drug Act of the late 70's almost winning over the majority of nonusers voting for a policy that included no illegality at all. No , this War has become just this- a War for someone or others just to collect the BOOTY OF WAR.  We today have never ever seen the dispondancies to ferver a United States Cold and Foreign War on the land regarding division of races and thusly reinstill Confederate Practices after the Civil Rights had all but represented an EEOC procurement of employments and rights for women like Negroes earning equal pay.  This war is waged by the same ones who relegated a look to Civil War answers to a Blackwoman's personal wealth that had been finagled by the USGovernment when chopped into individual state security programs.  Does anyone know the depth to which the everyday housing of inmates, state and federal expenses are that are not listed on the budgets?

The unspecified entities that are not funded by US Sociopolitical are just that.  In order to h ave an encounter of the third kind, there must have been busy "labs" conducting studies on biochemical altercations of the norm.  These subjects are now taking the highest paid positions on Wall Street, and corporate policies runaway with morphing entities that online, are named one minute and changed the next. It is the byproduct or hybrid person, not car, that is establishing itself as a GROUP OF IMMIGRANTS  HOMEMADE TERRORIST FROM DRUG CHARGES ON INMATES.   Scifi channel itself is enough to discourage the promotions of UNKNOWN SUBSTANCES...ALL IF THAT WERE REAL.  NOW WE KNOW THAT MUCH OF THE TERRORISTIC ACTIVITIES CAN BE A DUPLICATE POLICY IE. MAMMY MADE MOSLEMS, THAT ARE ACTUALLY CLINICALLY CLONED FOR WHAT NEXT, TERRORISTIC ACTS???LIKE 911 AND ALL OTHER INTERNAL SECURITY MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS,

yET BLAME IT ON THE DRUG LORDS.. I SAY STOP T HE MADNESS AND INVESTIGATE THE CRIMINAL INTENT WHEN QUANTIFYING THE PENALTIES AND JUST SEE WHAT GETS DRAWN ONTO THE TABLE, WHEN IT IS JUST SMOKE THAT IS BEING REGULATED...NO IT IS ANOTHER BEAST IN THIS FARCE.

Thu, 08/15/2013 - 10:55pm Permalink

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