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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2007 
Calderon Unveils Anti-Drug Plan
 Dudley Althaus & Marion Lloyd - Houston Chronicle
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 |  | Society is demanding a coordinated response from the authorities to confront this social cancer.
- Mexican President Felipe Calderon |  | | Monterrey, Mexico — Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a new phase of his anti-narcotics crusade this week that will include the drug testing of students in more than 8,000 schools nationwide.
Calderon's initiative is seen as recognition of a growing problem among Mexican adolescents. Many Mexicans, including police and other officials, have long seen drug trafficking as an American problem, limiting the public's support for combating the problem.
"Society is demanding a coordinated response from the authorities to confront this social cancer," Calderon said at a junior high school in Monterrey, the industrial hub 150 miles south of Laredo, Texas, that has been battered by gangland violence this year.
"As a father I understand the worry of Mexicans who fear that their children are victims of crime on the way to school, in the parks, in the streets," said Calderon, who has three young children. "I know the anguish and pain of mothers who realize, sometimes too late, that their children have fallen into the claws of drugs."
In addition to calling for drug testing, Calderon said local, state and federal governments will build more parks and sports complexes and push for public involvement in them, with an initial $7 million investment in Monterrey. And he said more than 300 clinics would be opened across Mexico to treat drug and alcohol addictions.
The abuse of cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, heroin and other narcotics in Mexico has skyrocketed during the past decade, by some estimates increasing as much as 2,000 percent.
Authorities have become particularly concerned about crystal meth, which is cheap enough to be widely used even among Mexico's poor majority.
Drug use going up
The number of Mexico City middle- and high-school students who admitted using crystal meth doubled between 1997 and 2003, to 3.6 percent, according to the most recent study by the National Psychiatric Institute. Fifteen percent admitted to using some kind of narcotic, with cocaine, marijuana and meth the drugs of choice.
However, experts say actual drug use among Mexican adolescents is probably twice that high, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods.
"Everything they can do to keep kids away from drugs is important," said Rodolfo Ramirez, president of the Mexico City-based policy group Education and Change. But, he said, "the problem has deep social roots that can't be attacked just through the schools."
He argued that Calderon's proposal would fail unless it also helped adolescents find part-time jobs, reducing the incentive to turn to drug-dealing.
Calderon said the student drug testing and other school enforcement programs were a pilot program whose expansion would depend on an evaluation of its effectiveness and feedback from parents. He did not detail how the initial 8,000 schools would be selected, but his speech focused on drug use in poorer neighborhoods.
'A consumer country'
Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told Mexico City's El Universal newspaper that drug abuse in Mexico "is a phenomenon that has gone unattended in recent decades and now we have to face reality: that we're a consumer country."
Medina Mora argued the need for more funding for prevention in Mexico and the United States. Currently, the Mexican government spends 16 times as much on combating the drug traffickers as it does on fighting addictions, he said.
Warfare between the criminal gangs that smuggle cocaine and other drugs into the United States has killed more than 1,300 people this year and rattled the Mexican public. Police increasingly blame rivalries among retail drug traffickers — who sell in neighborhoods and villages — for a growing percentage of the bloodshed.
Calderon has sent more than 24,000 army troops into drug producing and trafficking regions where the violence has been worse in recent years. Last week, his administration removed nearly 300 commanders from the federal police forces, replacing them with officers supposedly more trustworthy.
The violence has slackened in recent weeks, spurring speculation that the major trafficking organizations have reached a truce that will help take public attention off them.
dqalthaus@yahoo.com - marionlloyd@gmail.com |
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