In December 2006, newly elected Mexican President Felipe Calderón announced a bold escalation in that county's decades-long struggle with wealthy, powerful, and violent drug trafficking organizati

According to Mexican press reports this week, Mexico's Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD -- Democratic Revolution Party) is preparing to consider legalization of the drug trade as a respo

Reuters offers a dismal assessment of the Mexican drug war entitled "ANALYSIS-Mexico's Calderon bogged down in bloody drugs war". I'm left wondering, of course, why it is that one is said to be "analyzing" when pointing out that the drug war is failing. Must we place Mexico under the microscope in order to observe that there's a "bloody drugs war" going on there? Isn't that just a fact?

Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a bold $7 billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.

His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.

But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads and tortured bodies in public.

The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.

Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive began, and the turf wars intensified this year.

Perhaps one technically engages in analysis when suggesting that the odds of winning are stacked against Calderon, but we don't really need some credentialed academic to tell us that, do we? Has anyone ever won a drug war?

Just last week, the NY Times delivered a dismal assessment of drug war progress in Mexico. Now its editorial board proposes that we spend billions in U.S. tax dollars funding the proven failure that is Mexico's war on drugs:

The timid assistance package proposed by the Bush administration and pared down by Congress suggests that Washington doesn’t grasp either the scale of the danger or its own responsibilities.
…

The Bush administration is right to acknowledge the shared threat and the common responsibility. But the three-year, $1.4 billion aid package it proposed doesn’t do the job. It is too small, notably so when compared with the billions the cartels earn in the United States.

The whole editorial all but refutes itself, observing that nothing is working, then calling for substantial investments in the same tactics that have produced only dramatic violence.

It really is amazing to think that the editors of one of our top newspapers have no concept of the social, economic, and historical dimensions of the war on drugs. What examples could they possibly be relying upon to conclude that larger investments are the key to drug war victory?

If the NYT thinks $1.4 billion isn't enough, then they should tell us how much they'd like to spend. Seriously. How much will it cost to win? How would you define success? If we buy a whole entire drug war for the Mexican government, will it be modeled after ours? If so, are you insane?

I'm so damned tired of being told that the drug war would work if we spent more and fought harder. How much are we really willing to sacrifice in order to prove how false that is?

It seems Mexican President Felipe Calderon's aggressive drug war tactics are impressing American politicians more than his own people:

A majority of Mexicans believe violent drug gangs are winning a war with President Felipe Calderon's government after one of the worst months on record for killings, Reforma newspaper reported on Sunday.

According to a poll by the newspaper, 53 percent of Mexicans think that drug traffickers hold the upper hand against government forces which are trying to clamp down on cartels that ship drugs to the United States.

Only 24 percent said they believed the government was winning the battle. The remaining 23 percent gave no opinion. [Reuters]

Since Calderon took office and promised a crackdown on drug trafficking, there have been over 4,000 drug war killings in Mexico. Mexicans must live amidst horrific and growing violence, with no end in sight, just so Calderon can stand proudly atop the drug war podium. Of course, he can only do so figuratively, for fear of being gunned down like his highest-ranking police officials.

Really, the question of who's winning the drug war shouldn't even have to be asked. Of course the cartels are winning, because there wouldn’t be cartels without the drug war. Every dollar they make, every bride they pay, every assassin's bullet is a product of drug prohibition's bloodstained legacy. The problem with the drug war isn’t that we aren’t trying hard enough, it's that trying hard is actually where all the worst violence and disorder comes from.

Nowhere is the failure of drug prohibition more obvious than in Mexico, where President Calderon's crackdown has already produced over 4,000 deaths, without making a dent in the drug trade.

Yet Obama now joins John McCain in praising Mexico's brutal and ineffective anti-drug efforts:

Mexican drug cartels are terrorizing cities and towns. President Calderon was right to say that enough is enough. We must support Mexico’s effort to crack down. [suntimes.com]

I don't know how anyone can look at the dismal state of the Mexican drug war and find anything to be proud of. Still, I agree with Pete Guither who responded to Obama's comments by pointing out that we just can't expect a realistic drug policy platform from the major party candidates. They're not there yet.

Obama's good positions on needle exchange, medical marijuana, and sentencing have drawn interest from reformers, but there's simply no way to paint his praise of Mexico's bloody drug war crusade as anything other than typical prohibitionist "troop surge" rhetoric. It's the opposite of what's needed and it should give us pause before endorsing the popular perception among reformers that Obama "gets" the drug war issue.

When describing his plans to fund drug war activity in Central and South America, Obama says "we'll tie our support to clear benchmarks for drug seizures, corruption prosecutions, crime reduction, and kingpins busted," demonstrating a fundamental failure to grasp how those activities complement one another. Crime and violence will simply increase if enforcement increases, so any set of benchmarks will ultimately have to ignore one category or the other.

In regards to both Obama and McCain, however, we've got to recognize that ending violence in the international drug trade is the final stage of drug policy reform. It's the very last issue we'll have to confront and the last one about which we're likely to hear interesting or forward-thinking proposals from prominent politicians. There's no middle ground here. When we're ready to end violence and corruption in the drug trade, we'll stop waging the drug war.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

The debate should be over now. All you have to do is look south to learn that the drug war is worse than a failure; it causes massive violence, corruption, and death. From The New York Times:

"When the commander, Commissioner Édgar Millán Gómez, the acting chief of the federal police, died with eight bullets in his chest on May 8, it sent chills through a force that had increasingly found itself a target."

"Top security officials who were once thought untouchable have been gunned down in Mexico City, four in the last month alone."

"Drug dealers killed another seven federal agents this year in retaliation for drug busts in border towns."

"Drug traffickers have killed at least 170 local police officers as well, among them at least a score of municipal police commanders, since Mr. Calderón took office."

"The violence between drug cartels that Mr. Calderón has sought to end has only worsened over the past year and a half. The death toll has jumped 47 percent to 1,378 this year, prosecutors say. All told, 4,125 people have been killed in drug violence since Mr. Calderón took office."

"Several terrified local police chiefs have resigned, the most recent being Guillermo Prieto, the chief in Ciudad Juárez, who stepped down last week after his second in command was killed a few days earlier."

So what does Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who instigated the massive increase in drug war violence, have to say about all this?

The president has vowed to stay the course, portraying the violence among gangs and attacks on the police as a sign of success rather than failure.

Wow. Well, I guess you've got it all figured then, Mr. President. That's good to hear, because for a second there, it sounded like everything was going to hell.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has drawn praise from U.S. drug warriors for his commitment to fighting back against the drug cartels. Unfortunately, current strategies for reducing drug trade violence tend to have the opposite of their intended effect. Via New York Times, this is what you get when you really crack down on the drug traffickers:

"a hand-scrawled list of 22 officers, 5 of whom had already been gunned down in the street."

"A turf war among drug cartels has claimed more than 210 lives in the first three months of this year."

"The number of homicides this year is more than twice the total number of homicides for the same period last year."

"Several mass graves hiding 36 bodies in all have been discovered in the backyards of two houses owned by drug dealers."

"At the height of the violence, around Easter, bodies were turning up every morning, at a rate of almost 12 a week."

"'Neither the municipal government, nor the state government, is capable of taking on organized crime,' Mayor José Reyes Ferriz said in an interview."

"The local police are outgunned, underpaid, prone to corruption and lack the authority to investigate drug dealers…"

"The first batch of 150 new recruits came out of the academy in January, but they entered a force where most officers either feared drug dealers too much to move against them or lived on their payroll."

After decades of full-scale international drug war, the central fronts in this great crusade appear before us today literally smoldering, littered with shell-casings and stained in blood. That is drug prohibition's legacy and it will not change or improve. Violence will fluctuate between frequent and perpetual. Illicit drug markets will fluctuate between high availability and totally saturation. That is just the way it is and the way it will always be so long as the people currently in charge of addressing the drug problem are permitted to continue trying their ideas.

Thus, any realistic debate over our drug laws shouldn't be spiked with fictitious references to future victories or meaningful progress. An honest defense of the drug war, if such a thing could exist, would have to defend our current conditions and claim that it would be best if things stayed this way forever.

If you don’t know that the drug war is to blame for all the world's problems, everything you do know will only confuse you. For example, the drug war is helping sustain a deadly mosquito plague in Brazil called the dengue fever:

It's true no vaccine exists for the fatal strain, hemorrhagic dengue, which causes internal and external bleeding. But there are preventative measures one can take to avoid being bitten by the Aedes aegypti black mosquito – keeping the body covered, using mosquito nets at night, and avoiding standing water where mosquitoes swarm.

The trouble is one in four people in Rio live in poverty in the favelas or shanty-towns where pools of water are common in the rainy season. Efforts to contain the spread of the disease are being hampered by the never-ending drug war which impedes access to the favelas. [thefirstpost]

This is probably not what most reformers have in mind when calling for an end to international drug prohibition. But anyone who takes a good hard look at the war no drugs will find a million problems they never imagined. Any cost benefit analysis of drug prohibition is incomplete unless it accounts for every last inconvenience and injustice that we've unleashed in the course of this great fiasco, including the fact that you can't conveniently disinfect puddles in the slums of Rio to prevent plagues.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is super popular with U.S. drug warriors for his crackdown on drug trafficking, but it doesn’t sound like the cartels are very scared. If they were, they wouldn't be posting job listings on the highways:

(AP) Hitmen tied to Mexico's Gulf cartel appear to be boldly seeking recruits by posting help-wanted signs in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, including a giant banner hung across a thoroughfare, a federal anti-drug enforcement official said Monday.

The banner appeared over the weekend in Nuevo Laredo near the border with Texas: "Operative group 'The Zetas' wants you, soldier or ex-soldier. We offer a good salary, food and benefits for your family. Don't suffer anymore mistreatment and don't go hungry."

Yeah, Calderon's drug war troop surge is a joke that serves only to delay the inevitable realization that the drug war is a contractual guarantee of endless violence. The cartels aren't the least bit intimidated and we haven’t seen a fraction of the violence that is possible if Calderon wants to throw more gas on the fire.

He'll be voted out of office by war-weary constituents long before he ever drives out the powerful organizations that recruit their armies right out in the open. There is only one way to close these drug war job openings and that is to end the war on drugs.