Plan Merida Border Drug War Claims 4,200 in 18 Months

Mexico's death toll from Plan Merida, the Drug war crackdown, reached 4,200 over the Memorial Day weekend, 450 of them law enforcement and judiciary personnel. President Felipe Calderon seems proud of his success, suggesting that the remainder of the dead are all drug traffic gangsters. No one in the media is asking how many of the dead are collateral casualties, innocent bystanders or innocent family members and neighbors of the "evil doers." Nor is anyone bothering to ask whether toppling drug cartels is a good thing. Calderon claims the gigantic numbers of dead have resulted from a process of the cartels trying to realign themselves after cash seizures and the killing of top drug lords by Mexico. Has anyone wondered whether it is desirable to destabilize the cartels? After all, the demand for cocaine and marijuana and heroin lies across the border in the US. Demand isn't going to go away. The cartels or their successors will still provide the drugs to meet the demand - we call it Capitalism here - so they are just throwing more lives into the meat grinder of the War on Drugs. Then when this body of cartel leaders is destabilized a few years from now we can expect another similar round of killings. It makes you wonder what was it they were trying to prevent in the first place. Left alone what is the worst that would have happened? Maybe a few people would OD. Maybe some local drug deals would go bad, exacerbated by DEA and local law enforcement heavy handedness. Once again we see that the War on Drugs kills more people than drugs. And for this Calderon is being praised. What kind of monsters gauge progress by boasting of thousands killed? The same people who want to put a teenage kid smoking a joint in prison where his or her life will be ruined by violence, corruption, sexual abuse and disenfranchisement after release. Also, out of sympathy with law enforcement, do you believe the 450 Mexican cops and judges and prosecutors willingly gave their lives for anti-drug ideology? Do you think they believed drugs were worse than rape and murder as priorities for cops on the streets? This recent bloodshed shows the role police and government have in drug violence. They create the violence through their ignorance of the drug issue, and then blame the deaths on drugs. 30,000 Mexican troops on the border will never solve the problems of addiction, social injustice and poverty that fuel the demand for drugs in the US. It is telling they will spend 1.4 Billion dollars to kill people, but they won't spend a fraction of that for drug education, rehab, poverty programs and legal reform that would fix this problem. Drugs will never go away, ever. The problem right now isn't kids doing dope - it's 4,200 dead in Mexico. The problem is the War on Drugs.
read more: http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/534/plan_merida_sinaloa_drug_forum