Every nation struggles with the problem of illegal drug use. The related crime issues, such as robberies and burglaries for money to buy drugs is important. But civil societies all try to come up with a solution to keep people from killing themselves from illegal drugs.
Experts and politicians pointed to success in this area by looking to Portugal, which effectively decriminalized many drugs and saw a significant fall in the amount of OD deaths. Maybe making these drugs legal is the answer.
Then again, Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia have fewer drug related deaths than Portugal, while Malaysia and Singapore have an often-enforced death penalty for drug trafficking. A single joint will get you five years prison time in Japan.
Further, Portugal never had much of “drug lord” problem. It is easy to transport drugs around Europe as border controls are almost non-existent. Rarely do you hear of large drug busts in Europe. The exception is like when in February 2021, billions of dollars of cocaine was seized off a container ship in the German port city of Hamburg. Had that shipment hit the streets, it would have disappeared into the market.
As many as 250,000 people—cartel members, law enforcement, and civilians—have died in a real “Drug War” in Mexico since 2006. And that is through four presidential administrations.
The birth of the Mexican drug cartels is traced to former Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent Miguel Félix Gallardo who founded the Guadalajara Cartel in 1980. He controlled everything moving through Mexico until he “retired” to a high-security prison in 1993. By 2003, several other cartels started springing up.
But police, military, and political corruption was so high that the cartels grew like Columbian coca leaves and Sinaloa marijuana. In 2005, about 110 people died in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas as a result of the fighting between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels. The newly elected President Felipe Calderón dispatched 6,500 Mexican Army soldiers to Michoacán state in 2006 to end drug violence there. During his six-year term, 50,000 drug related homicides occurred and US Ambassador in Mexico Carlos Pascual argued that this rise in violence was a direct result of Calderón’s military response.
In 2012, newly elected president Enrique Peña Nieto emphasized that he was opposed to the previous policy of attacking drug-trafficking organizations by arresting or killing the drug lords and intercepting their drug shipments. But between December 2012 and January 2014, 23,640 people died in the “drug war.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018 with a “strategy for peace,” a policy of de-escalation and appeasement. He pledged during the campaign to offer “Abrazos No Balazos”—“Hugs, not Bullets.” The hugs included social poverty programs, encouragement towards good behavior, and the insistence that he would ban corruption.
One analyst: “Unfortunately, while these policies were enough to convince the wider Mexican public, it relied on every level of the cartels to be filled with honest individuals, and the number of cartel officials that fit that description was virtually zero. Obrador’s policy was manipulated by the cartels the moment it was introduced as should have been predicted when a nation gives mass-murderers a chance at spreading their power without the threat of judicial retribution.”
In 2019 Obrador was forced to release from capture ‘El Chapo’ Guzman’s son and high ranking Sinaloa cartel member after they fought the Mexican military with their .50 caliber machine guns and anti-aircraft weapons.
“We saved lives, which is the most important thing,” the president said. “We will not confront violence with violence. There is no war against drug trafficking.” That is good news to the Mexican drug cartels that earn an annual revenue of $30 billion from illicit drug sales.
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