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 Editorials | Opinions | April 2007 
“Sowers of Violence and Terror”
 California Catholic Daily
| | Leftists in Mexico propose legalizing drugs – and surrender to the narco-mafia. |
While the new government’s offensive against organized crime is going through its most critical and decisive phase, with important blows by the police and military against narco-traffickers and increasingly violent reactions from drug gangs, some are beginning to say the war on drugs is a failure - and that it’s time to quit the battle and capitulate to the enemy.
“Violence provoked by the drug mafia won’t end until more radical measures are implemented, such as legalizing drugs, first in the United States, because it’s the biggest market, and then in Mexico,” Javier González Garza, legislative coordinator of the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution in the federal Assembly, said on April 17. Three days later, Sen. René Arce Islas, secretary of the Senate’s Public Security Commission, proposed a “National Agreement to Combat Drugs,” including drug legalization at a continental level.
The calls for surrender come while the government has begun winning important battles in a war on drugs that began just four months ago. Joint military-police operations in several regions of the country have struck at the drug cartels’ command structure, including the extradition of several top capos to the United States. Key territories previously dominated by the mafia have been recovered, and tens of thousands of acres of drug crops have been destroyed, while police networks that were working under the mafia’s payroll have been dismantled.
“Organized crime groups are suffering a severe crisis” in their profits and in their ability to carry out criminal activities because cocaine consumption is decreasing in the United States, and because of “the strikes we have blown to them” in Mexico, attorney general and former secretary of public security Eduardo Medina Mora said on April 19.
On the other hand, violence by the drug gangs has increased notoriously in recent days. On April 16, it reached a record number of 20 executions between diverse drug cartels, for a total of more than 500 deaths thus far in 2007. Macabre “mail corpses,” left lying in the streets with clear signs of torture and bearing written messages to adversary gangs, are one of the latest techniques used by the drug mafia to terrorize those who would oppose them.
Confrontations between criminal armed commandos and security forces, such as one that occurred on April 17 at Tijuana’s General Hospital, have become increasingly violent. On that occasion, a group of gunmen tried to rescue one of their members wounded in a previous shooting, resulting in three deaths – two police officers and one criminal. Hundreds of patients were evacuated and several people were arrested.
Drug cartels never defied the government so openly in the past. Their goal now is apparently to create the impression that the state lacks the means and determination to dismantle them, to cut off their economic capacity, and to destroy them as a “parallel power.”
In the middle of all this, Carlos Navarrete, legislative leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution in the Mexican Senate, declared that the government’s anti-drug operations were a total failure, and that the government is cornered by the drug cartels. “We all are in danger, including the president,” he said. At the same time, other members of his party in Congress were proposing drug legalization.
In face of this pressure from the left to surrender, President Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party said at an April 21 military ceremony “to collude with the ones that are damaging public security is to betray Mexico.” Calderón warned he “won’t give up any stronghold to the enemy,” and called for the formation of an alliance between society, political and economic powers and all levels of government to fight the drug traffickers.
Mexico’s bishops, in the meantime, applauded the government’s effort “to salvage the rule of law.” They asked the Mexican people not to support in any way the “sowers of violence and terror.” |
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