(To watch the video on Youtube, click here.)

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S Air Force worker, helps unload tons of relief aid at Armenia's airport, Colombia (Str Old/Courtesy Reuters).

Last week WOLA released the report “A Cautionary Tale: Plan Colombia’s Lessons for U.S. Policy Toward Mexico and Beyond.” The study is a useful reminder of the real differences between Colombia and Mexico. Unlike Colombia, where security forces fought to assert control over territory left to criminal groups, Mexico has had a strong state presence throughout the country for decades. Whereas violence in Colombia was concentrated in rural areas, in Mexico the highest rates of crime are in population centers and along drug trafficking routes.Their analysis also puts the Colombian experience into historical perspective. The real fight against drug cartels, as opposed to guerrillas and paramilitaries, happened in the 1990s – before Plan Colombia was even on the table. Successes here depended on police work by specialized vetted units, as well as a strong public prosecutor’s office – not sending the military into the streets or hills.

There are a number of good recommendations about how the United States and Mexico can apply these lessons to their joint policy on the drug war going forward.  A few stand out.

For Mexico (and other countries dealing with organized crime):

•             Don’t rely on the military, as it lacks the investigative capacity and the right training to provide public safety to civilians.

•             Measure what matters. Rather than process (e.g. how many arrests or drug kingpins captures) the government should focus on tangible results, such as how many cases are successfully prosecuted, or how much violence and other crimes decline.

For the United States:

•             Take on challenges at home – guns, money, and demand. Since the United States is asking other countries to implement politically difficult policies, policymakers at home should try it themselves – particularly because all these issues feed into the escalating violence Mexico (and other countries) face.

•             Make human rights a top priority, not an afterthought. Do more than just require police and military forces to take classes in human rights, and withhold bilateral security cooperation if standards are not met.

•             Let USAID take the lead in managing security  assistance, not the Department of Defense or even State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, as these are likely to overlook the crucial socioeconomic side of the security problem.

For all involved: protect local populations first. In addition to safeguarding, these governments need to invest in people – protecting them through law enforcement, courts, and social policies, and creating economic alternatives to a life of crime for those that today remain on the margins.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Photographs of missing people are on display at a square in Queretaro (Courtesy Reuters).

Last Wednesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its report “Neither Rights Nor Security: Killings, Torture and Disappearances in Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs’.” The report is incredibly thorough – based on two years of research in the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Nuevo León and Tabasco, and incorporating information from over 200 interviews. It charges Mexican security forces with routinely violating citizens’ most basic rights during President Felipe Calderón’s six years in office, and further argues that these horrific tactics are not incidental, but endemic to the government’s drug war strategy.

Some of the most worrisome statistics and findings include:

·       Formal human rights abuse complaints increased seven-fold, from 691 during the 2003-2006 period, to 4,803 from 2007-2010

·       Of some 3,700 military investigations into human rights abuses in the past four years, just 15 – less than one half of one percent — resulted in convictions

·      Formal complaints of “degrading treatment” – read torture — at the hands of security forces more than tripled since 2006

Based on witness testimonies and material evidence in specific cases HRW investigated they find:

·       Law enforcement – including the Army, Navy, Federal Police as well as local and federal judicial investigative police — participated in over 170 specific cases of torture – including beating,    asphyxiating, water boarding, electrically shocking and sexually torturing detainees

·       Others facilitate this torture –  medical examiners fail to document signs of physical abuse on detainees, and judges admit confessions and other evidence acquired through torture, even when the victim protests

·       Law enforcement played a part in 39 “forced disappearances” and 24 extrajudicial killings of civilians

After a meeting with HRW representatives Calderón agreed to investigate the findings, though he did say that the “main threat to the human rights of Mexicans is from criminals”.

Why have human rights violations expanded so drastically?  One explanation lies in the use of the military.  Armed forces are trained to kill the enemy on the battlefield, not police neighborhoods to ensure basic public safety. With some 50,000 soldiers now on the front-lines of the drug war, this disconnect can lead to abuses of the rule of law.

Another reason is the profound weakness of Mexico’s judicial system.  Most crimes – likely 80 plus percent — are never even reported. Of the few complaints filed, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) investigates only one in every five; even fewer go to trial. In the end, only one to two of every hundred crimes end in a conviction. Once prosecutors do move forward with a case however, the chances of acquittal are slim, as roughly 9 in 10 of all suspects brought to court end up in jail. This has less to do with the stellar cases built around airtight evidence, and more to do with the underlying system, which is stacked against defendants – resulting in few safeguards and a de facto presumption of guilt.

Finally, Mexico doesn’t even have the laws needed in some cases to prosecute bad behavior. For instance, only eight of Mexico’s thirty-two states have laws against forced disappearances and only sixteen have formally criminalized torture. What it does have is opportunities to limit citizen rights – such as the arraigo procedure, which lets prosecutors lock up individuals for up to 80 days if they’re allegedly involved in organized crime, and vaguely defined “flagrancia” rules that dictate when police officers can make arrests without a warrant.

The spike in human rights complaints is worrisome on many levels. First and foremost, it reflects the government’s utter failure to protect thousands of citizens from itself. But more strategically, the abuses described in the report run counter to the state’s long-term aims.  In order to “win” the war on organized crime, Mexico’s government must have society’s support. Egregious human rights violations will just push away the one force the narcos can’t match. To end drug related violence, Mexico must construct a truly democratic rule of law, in which the means to and the ends are one and the same. To do so, the government must track and punish human rights abuses and abusers as fervently as it does those on its Most Wanted lists.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

– Latin Americans are second only to North Americans in terms of social networking — for those that access the Internet, 8 in 10 use social media.

– While broadband access is limited but increasing (expected to surpass 30% by 2014) some 36% of Latin Americans Internet access of some form. And, 90 percent of Latin Americans have cell phones – so the potential to expand is large.

– Facebook claims 100 million Latin American users, led by Brazil, and then  Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Venezuela.

– Some governments – most notably Colombia – are investing millions to expand Internet use, seeing it as an important driver of economic growth.

Overall it is an interesting and fairly positive technological look at the region. While Latin America falls behind Asia in terms of access to the Internet, the region’s citizens are more socially connected – at least as measured by Facebook, Twitter, and the like. These connections have had and can have broader political and economic impacts than just catching up with family and friends. Social networking has already played big roles in Colombia, with a Facebook-led series of marches against the FARC in 2008 that spread throughout the country (and as far as New York and Chicago), and in Mexico, where twitter updates on drug violence give people vital information the local press and governments are no longer able or willing to provide. Some even see the arrival of social media to Latin America as a great democratizer – helping open up governments (like in the Arab Spring) and media monopolies.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A man holds a symbol of the Patriot Party during a political rally in Solola (Jorge Lopez/Courtesy Reuters).

Front-runner Otto Pérez Molina won 36% of the vote in first round of Guatemala’s presidential elections on Sunday, and will face off against second place finisher Manuel Baldizón in the second round in November. Though winning the runoff election will not be easy for either candidate (both have to build coalitions to clinch a second-round victory); far trickier will be facing Guatemala’s long list of challenges, topped by insecurity.

Guatemala’s murder rate has more than doubled in the last twenty years, reaching a high in 2009 when nearly 6,500 people were killed – 17 a day — more than in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past four years the government of Álvaro Colom has been unable to quell the violence or bring its perpetrators to justice. During the campaign the leading presidential candidates advocated a mano dura, or iron fist security policy, with Pérez Molina as its most forceful proponent (his Patriot Party has a clenched fist as its emblem). He even proposed bringing back the notorious military task forces used against guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, this time to take on drug traffickers.

It is unlikely this strategy will work. Guatemala’s military today doesn’t have the capacity to ramp up its public safety functions. As a part of the 1996 peace agreements (ending 36 years of civil war) the military agreed to downsize. The current force stands at 17,000 troops (roughly 60 percent less than 1990 levels).  Earlier this year, when the government called a state of siege in the northern province of Alta Verapaz taken hostage by traffickers, the military could only send 600 soldiers in to patrol the area – less than one tenth the size of the Mexican military force sent to fight the La Familia cartel in Michoacán in 2006. After the operation, President Colom himself admitted that the military could not match the drug traffickers’ vast resources, noting “just the weapons seized in Alta Verapaz are more than those of some army brigades.”

But the issue is not just one of capacity. Even if the government found the resources to beef up the military, it shouldn’t be the force to take over the fight against organized crime. If deploying the armed forces in Mexico’s drug war is considered controversial, in Guatemala it is decidedly more complicated. The Guatemalan army enjoys considerably less citizen trust than their Mexican counterparts due to their long and ignominious involvement in the country’s brutal civil conflict. The U.N. truth commission report (whose findings Pérez Molina questions) deemed the war a genocide, and blamed the army for 93 percent of the massacres of innocent civilians that occurred. Breaking the peace accords’ promise to keep the military out of citizen security would be a step backward to a past many would rather not revisit.

Growing evidence too suggests the military itself may well have ties to organized crime. Reports from the UN peacekeeping mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA), and a number of NGOs show that long standing military ties with the criminal groups that today work with Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers.  The Kaibiles, an elite special operations force, trained some of the Mexican soldiers that would later become the Zetas, and many former Kaibiles now work full time for the cartels.

If the army is not the right choice for improving security, the only alternative is the National Civil Police (PNC). Unfortunately, the PNC faces many of these same challenges: a lack of manpower, resources, and public trust. Furthermore, the U.S. and the Guatemalan government have tried a number of times, and on the whole failed to reinvent the PNC in the past.

Still, trying again is the least bad alternative. And there are a few hopeful signs from the past year. With new wiretapping, plea bargaining and seized assets laws in place (in no small part due to the work of CICIG), the police have arrested some high-ranking drug traffickers and suspects in high-profile murders. With human rights leader Helen Mack at the helm of a new police reform initiative, some observers are more optimistic about the chances of finally building a professionalized Guatemalan police force.

As the U.S. and other countries in the region look to begin working with the new administration, security assistance – including Mérida funds — should focus on strengthening the national police (and court systems). Despite the PNC’s past failures, and Guatemala’s weak institutions in general, the issue of security is simply too important to let fall by the wayside, or worse, into the wrong hands.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Passengers on a bus pass a vehicle painted with a slogan during an anti-drugs campaign to mark International Anti-Drug Day in Jakarta (Dadang Tri/Courtesy Reuters).

The “drug war” strategy of the last four decades revolves primarily around  supply side measures. Whether  eradication, interdiction, or arrests, it fixates on stopping the seemingly endless flow of drugs and cash across U.S. borders. But there is obviously another side to the equation – U.S. demand. The United States is the largest consumer of drugs across the globe (though there are signs that the cocaine and marijuana markets in Europe and the developing world are catching up) with 1 in every 7 Americans having tried an illegal substance. Marijuana accounts for the vast majority of that consumption, followed by prescription drugs and cocaine.

Three basic strategies underlie the traditional approach to dealing with drug abuse at home: prevention, treatment and enforcement. Prevention programs seek to stop substance abuse by educating primarily schoolchildren on the dangers of narcotics. Even with their memorable slogans (such as Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign or Drug Abuse Resistance Education’s “D.A.R.E. to resist drugs and violence”) the results have been  disappointing. A number of studies show these efforts – costing millions of dollars – may slightly slow marijuana experimentation among teens.

Treatment programs, particularly when focused on rehab for heavy drug users, are by far the most cost effective U.S. policy. For every million dollars spent, these programs reduce lifetime cocaine consumption by 100 grams.This may not seem like a lot, but it is more than three times as effective as preventive programs and punitive measures. Investing in treatment also yields impressive returns in terms of public safety, as every dollar spent on substance abuse rehabilitation reduces  the costs of associated crime by an estimated seven dollars. Still, soaring dropout rates – even within mandatory programs — question the long-term benefits of formal treatment for the relatively few drug addicts who choose to participate.

A final major element of demand side in the United States has been enforcement, namely incarceration of those selling and using drugs. From 1972-2002, the number of drug offenders behind bars increased twelve-fold (accounting for about half of the total growth of the federal prison population). This has hit African American communities the hardest, as 1 in every 3 black males goes to prison at some point in his life (1 in 15 black adults are currently behind bars). This is at least in part because the punishments for crack are harsher than those for powder cocaine, leading to longer sentences for black vs. white offenders. This style of stepped up enforcement doesn’t seem to have changed the fundamental drug markets, at least not for the better. Cocaine and heroin prices have hit all-time lows, indicating  greater availability, while purity has increased by more than half in recent years. Methamphetamine rose from near obscurity in the early nineties to become the drug of choice for roughly 1.5 million Americans today.

Latin American officials such as presidents Felipe Calderon of Mexico and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia are increasingly calling on the United States to do more to reduce consumption, and a recent report co-authored by former President of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso urged a “paradigm shift” in global drug policy to treat “drug addiction as a health issue, reducing drug demand through educational initiatives and legally regulating rather than criminalizing cannabis.” So what should the U.S. government do?

Some experts favor legalizing narcotics, putting an end to drug war once and for all. These advocates maintain that making drugs commercially available will replace illicit markets with formal ones, and thus eliminate the violence of the illegal drug trade. Researchers have found that legalizing marijuana would not necessarily lead to a rise in substance abuse (since those that want to get high today can, at least in many states, do it quite easily), and could slash one fifth of Mexican cartels’ profits. Ending the prohibition on harder drugs may not have the same effect, as legalization could prompt more consumption of cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine (because current enforcement against these drugs is more effective than for marijuana). To appreciate the potential costs of a surge in use, one need only to look at the double-edged consequences of ending the prohibition against alcohol. While the likes of Al Capone are history, Americans today are four times more likely to abuse alcohol than all illicit drugs combined. Alcohol-abusers are also more prone to break the law, as more than half of the current prison population committed their crimes drunk.

Other experts (especially those at RAND corp.) suggest we focus our anti-drug resources on enforcement that prioritizes harm reduction. The idea here is not to lock people up indiscriminately, but to go after the most violent drug traffickers and retail dealers. While this may not alter the availability and price of drugs (current policies haven’t done this either), it would they suggest reduce the effects on the larger community and population – whether here in the United States or in places such as Mexico.

For the past three decades Washington has spent the bulk (an average of two thirds) of anti-drug resources on supply side solutions. Even as the U.S. drug control budget expanded by more than 50 percent in recent years, expenditures for demand side policies remained stagnant, growing less than one percent per year over the past decade. Realizing that there is no easy solution on either side of the border, it is time to rethink these strategies, keeping in mind the brief successes and unfortunate failures of the last four decades.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Argentine President Fernandez waves to supporters after hearing the first results of the nationwide primary election in Buenos Aires (Enrique Maracarian/Courtesy Reuters).

The Pew Research Center released the results of a wide-ranging public opinion poll based on interviews with some 800 Mexicans (the study is part of their larger Global Attitudes Project). It finds strong continued support for military – 83 percent favor their role in the drug war – and for U.S.-Mexico security cooperation, with nearly 3 in 4 Mexicans supporting U.S. training and weapons for national security forces. Calderón, despite an economic recession and ever more bloody drug war, still enjoys the confidence of a majority of Mexicans, with 57% saying they view his political influence in a positive light. While these numbers look bad vis-à-vis past Mexican presidents entering their last term in office, other Western Hemisphere leaders (Barack Obama and Sebastian Piñera, for example) would be quite pleased with such levels of support.

A recent survey of the Guatemalan judiciary, on the other hand, paints rule of law institutions in a much more more troubling light. The Plaza Pública study shows that overall Guatemalans see judges as corrupt, controlled (by vested economic interests and other political elites), and inefficient.

This Cefeidas Group report provides an update on the Argentine elections, where Cristina Fernández de Kirchner looks even more likely to win a second term in the October 23rd election, due in part to the weakness of the opposition.

On a different note, Rolling Stone has an in-depth and well written article about La Barbie, a native Texan who rose to become the top drug kingpin in Acapulco. The behind the scenes narrative of his rise and fall shows why going after kingpins will not, on its own, make Mexico safer.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Undocumented Migrants travel on raft bound for Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico (Daniel Leclair/Courtesy Reuters).

While two weeks ago Damien Cave’s great New York Times piece highlighted the positive economic factors keeping Mexicans at home, this week the Wall Street Journal adds border crossing dangers to the reasons for a downward trend in undocumented migration. This holds doubly true for Central Americans. A recent RAND study shows that while fewer Mexicans are coming to the United States, fewer are leaving as well, even with the economic downturn. Its authors suggest that this is due to the “target earner hypothesis,” which holds that migrants will not return to their home country until they have earned a prefixed level of savings. I’d add that the increasing costs and dangers of returning must also affect migrants’ calculation.

Though unlikely before the 2012 presidential election, these changing dynamics may open a space again to talk about immigration reform.  I recommend CFR’s immigration policy Task Force, published in 2009, for some serious thoughts on what U.S. national interests here comprise, and what should be done.

Lastly, Arturo Valenzuela’s tenure at the State Department has now officially ended. Steve Clemons offers his take, emphasizing the positive steps the outgoing Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs took toward establishing a more consistent, less volatile U.S. policy toward Latin America. Let’s hope for continuity rather than change going forward.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Seized weapons are displayed to the media by the Mexican Navy in Mexico City (Jorge Lopez/Courtesy Reuters).

Reformers say never to waste a crisis — or a scandal. They certainly have found one with the ATF’s Fast and Furious program, in which bureau officials allowed hundreds of firearms to “walk” across the border, straight into the hands of Mexican drug traffickers. Designed to track complex cartel networks and increase border security, the operation relied on surveillance to document so-called straw buyers’ purchase and sale of arms to Mexican drug traffickers, in hopes that the dealings would lead them to important criminal targets. Those in charge, however, lost track of the guns. When two Fast and Furious military-style firearms were found at the scene Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder last year, ATF employees broke rank and began to speak out on the program’s failings. Since the initial whistle-blowing in March of 2011, the revelations of high-level ATF and justice officials involvement just keep expanding.

Fast and Furious illuminates the deep problems within ATF. In a recent report based on ATF data, Democrats highlight that  roughly 70 percent of all illegal guns found in Mexico come from the U.S., and attribute this to the weak tools ATF holds. They argue that to address the problem, the U.S. needs to better enforce the ban on imports of military-style weapons and ratify the CIFTA treaty, which would establish a standard for the control of  illicit manufacturing and trafficking of firearms.

Republicans, led by Darrel Issa (R-Vista) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)are more interested in holding top justice officials accountable for their involvement in Fast and Furious. Issa has all but ruled out any discussion of gun laws during the investigation into the scandal, interrupting a witness’s testimony in a hearing last week to remind him,“we’re not here to talk about proposed gun legislation.”

The Obama administration, trying to take initial steps to address the issue, recently issued new regulations requiring gun dealers to notify the ATF when a customer buys more than one gun in a short period of time, in an effort to detect so-called ‘straw buyers’ who purchase firearms on behalf of Mexican drug traffickers.

What else can and should be done? In a report for the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the University of San Diego, Colby Goodman and Michel Marizco recommend that states criminalize straw purchasing and urge ATF to boost its staff so the bureau can increase its inspections of gun stores. At current staffing levels, it would take the ATF a minimum of three years to inspect every licensed firearms dealer in the country. Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns group wants to close the “terror-gap” in gun legislation, under which more than 1300 known terror suspects purchased firearms in the U.S. since 2004. The coalition of mayors also advocates the repeal of the Tiahrt amendments, which prevent the release of trace data to state and federal officials. One effect of this measure is to force the U.S. to rely on data from the Mexican government about the status of Fast and Furious guns. A repeal would to improve law enforcement’s ability to track criminals armed with illegal guns.

Studies of California’s regulation show that steps like these matter – of the thousands of guns heading to Mexico and into cartel hands, only an estimated 3% were purchased in California. Whats more, since it tightened restrictions on the sale of firearms in the early 1990s, its rate of firearm-related deaths has plummeted more than 45%, dwarfing the 16.5% average drop across the rest of the United States.

Average U.S. citizens are increasingly inclined to regulate gun sales, as a recent poll shows that the overwhelming majority of those surveyed, including gun owners, support more probative background checks for buyers. But to make a real move means taking on the NRA in a Presidential election year. This may mean, unfortunately, that this scandal will go to waste, and U.S. guns will keep fueling Mexican cartels’ fire.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.