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Marijuana Cultivation Up in Mexico in 2009
 Reuters
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March 02, 2010
Colombia and Afghanistan slashed the area of land under cultivation for illegal drugs in 2009, but marijuana growth in Mexico rose despite a crackdown on drug trafficking, a U.S. report released on Monday found.
The annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released by the State Department said Mexican President Felipe Calderon's anti-drug trade campaign led to the arrest of 36,332 people, including 10 high-profile cartel members, last year.
The report also said between $8 billion and $25 billion is "repatriated to Mexico from the U.S. annually by drug trafficking organizations," a reference to money laundering, which is a major issue for Mexico and the United States.
"We still have work that we can do and must do on this," said David Johnson, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement.
"We are dealing with the millions on a problem that is best expressed with billions and so we need to make further progress in the financial institution piece of this," he said.
Drug trafficking in Mexico has fueled a conflict that has killed more than 18,000 people across the country since 2006, including some 4,600 in the past two years in the border city of Juarez across from El Paso, Texas.
The violence has prompted concerns of a spillover into the United States, but Johnson said the impact of Mexican drug trafficking is often not felt immediately in U.S. communities on the frontier but much further inland.
"There's a broad impact in the United States of cartel operations that are based or emanating from Mexico. ... The spillover if you will is more broadly in the United States, and some of the border communities can be not nearly as affected as some of the inland areas are," he said.
Despite Mexican government efforts, the area of land under marijuana cultivation has continued to grow. The report said cannabis cultivation there grew by 35 percent in 2009 to nearly 30,000 acres (12,000 hectares).
By comparison, Colombia, the largest producer of coca, reduced its land under cultivation by about 28 percent to about 295,000 acres (119,000 hectares), and Afghanistan, the largest producer of poppies, reduced land under cultivation by 22 percent to 300,000 acres (120,000 hectares).
(Editing by Paul Simao)
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