The “war on drugs” in Mexico is widely publicized in the United States, with newspaper coverage of the almost daily carnage, violence resulting from drug-trafficking and fighting it. Drug trafficking is a hot topic in Mexico because the current president, Felipe Calderon, has vowed to get tough on cartels by pursuing a military strategy since he took office in 2006. Due to this policy, there has been an upsurge in violence, with more than 13,6000 deaths resulting from his drug war, according to The New York Times. However, the issue is more complex than a mere showdown between cartels and the military. Drug trafficking is Mexico’s largest source of income and the illegal activity functions based on a system of corruption in the military, police force, the government, and banks. The Mexican government itself has reported that 60% of police at all levels are under the control of narco-traffickers, and in the military, even those up to the level of general have been arrested and charged with being on cartel payrolls. Mexican cartels depend on a steady demand for drugs in the U.S. as its main supplier of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine. The cartels also depend on poverty and limited job opportunities in Mexico. Since working for a cartel provides a better source of income than legal job options, it’s an incentive to participate in organized crime. As Todd Miller, who works for Witness for Peace, explained, the three most common options for making a living in Mexico are immigrating to the U.S., joining the informal economy, or getting involved in organized crime. Witness for Peace is a non-governmental U.S. organization that works to change U.S. foreign policy and corporate practices that contribute to poverty and oppression in Latin America. Although Miller has had four years of experiencing working in Mexico with Witness for Peace, the opinions expressed in this article are his own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the organization.
Dovetailing with President Calderon’s military strategy to combat organized crime, the current Mexican president and former U.S. President George Bush created the Merida Initiative. The Initiative allocates $1.4 billion to Mexico over the next three years, increasing U.S. military and police aid to Mexico by 10 times through the provision of helicopters, surveillance equipment such as ion scanners, and training programs. The Merida Initiative was announced in October of 2007, to much protest by non-governmental organizations.
    One such organization was Witness for Peace, which has an office in Colombia and has been following the effects of Plan Colombia, a U.S. agreement with the country to fight drug trafficking there. Although the U.S. government has denied comparisons of Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative (called “Plan Mexico” by some because of the similarities), both represent a military strategy to fight drug trafficking. Much of the outcry was because Plan Colombia, which went into effect in 2000, hasn’t been successful, as even the U.S. government has admitted in reports. Miller states that there is more coca production in Colombia now than there had been when Plan Colombia went into effect. Kristen Bricker, a NarcoNews correspondent who reports extensively on the drug war in Mexico, comments that Plan Colombia has succeeded in destroying the major cartels in the country but that in their place, thousands of smaller cartels have sprung up. Due to this, non-governmental organizations questioned the success of a military solution to drug trafficking. Robert Jereski, a founding member of Friends of Brad Will, a U.S. non-governmental organization that has fought the Merida Initiative since 2006, said, “by all evidence, this militarized approach to narco-trafficking has been an abject failure with no success.” The Merida Inititave, unlike Plan Colombia, includes no benchmarks against which to measure success or failure, which is “no surprise” to Jereski, because of the results of Plan Colombia.
Despite protests, the Merida Initiative was signed into law on June 30, 2008. President George Bush released $400 million of the funding in 2008 and 2009, and in March of 2009, current President Obama signed $300 million into law. About 80% of the funds were for armament, primarily helicopters. President Obama actually wants to increase funding above what Bush asked for, which Jereski calls a “very discouraging betrayal of his promise of a more neighborly [foreign] policy.”
     The major concern of social justice organizations was the human rights cost of increased financial support of Mexico’s military and police force, which have been known to commit human rights violations. To address this issue, the Merida Initiative stipulates that the release of 15% of the funds is on condition of meeting four human rights requirements: first, the transparency and accountability of federal, state, and municipal police, second, ensuring that civilian authorities investigate and prosecute members of the police and military forces who have committed human rights violations, third, that the government and authorities consult with Mexican social justice organizations, and finally, that the prohibition of testimony obtained through torture is enforced. Bricker described it as “window dressing to whitewash the Merida Initiative.” The U.S. State Department released a report in August called the “Mexico-Merida Initiative Report,” which Bricker reported on, trying to prove that Mexico is meeting the conditions to release the 15% of funds. However, recommendations by a recent United Nations investigation into the state of human rights in Mexico suggest otherwise, expressing concern especially about the issue of military trials instead of civilian trials for human rights violations by members of security forces and confessions made under torture. “The cost of the release of that aid is the sacrifice of protection for future victims of human rights [violations] at the hands of better armed and trained security forces in Latin America,” said Jereski.
Human rights organizations oppose the use of the military to do police work, because they’re not trained to work on domestic issues and with civilians. Witness for Peace brought a speaking tour from Mexico to, among other speaking events, lobby Congress in Washington, D.C. in Fall of 2007, as the Merida Initiative was first introduced to congressmen, emphasizing the potential for the funding being misused for human rights violations. One of the members of the speaking tour was Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa of Services for an Alternative Education (Servicios para una Educación Alternativa, or EDUCA), where he is currently working on a project to increase popular political participation and reduce corruption in government. EDUCA is based in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, which was the site of an intense conflict between the people and the government in 2006. A social movement sought to force the governor of the state to resign and create a popular-assembly style government, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). The conflict led to violent confrontations between the federal police and unarmed protesters and up to 26 deaths. One of the dead was an Indymedia journalist from New York, Brad Will, who was shot while filming for a documentary on the conflict. Witnesses and photos, published in El Universal, provide evidence that his killers were local officials. The U.S. government included a section in the law releasing funding for the Merida Initiative that Brad Will’s case had to be resolved and someone had to be brought to justice at the latest 45 days after the law went into effect. The Oaxacan government responded by arresting Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno on October 17th, 2008, an activist in the APPO, and not any of the local officials captured in the photographic evidence, who rushed to save Will’s life after he was shot, accusing him of the murder. Martinez Moreno continues to be imprisoned. Jereski says the Merida funding is “rewarding a government that not only murdered [Brad Will] but covered it up by blaming it on an activist…[The Mexican government isn’t] showing signs of cooperation and law enforcement that the U.S. should sanction.” Friends of Brad Will also protested the Merida Initiative in Washington, D.C. In 2007, they disrupted hearings on the Initiative because, as Jereski says, “the testimony was so blatantly reckless of human rights of Mexicans [and other] people [the government] has been arming.” He critiqued the roles of New York Representatives Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey, who had key roles in the passage of the Merida Initiative, saying that “Engel, as the Chair of Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs,…refused to invite opponents of the Initiative to the hearings he chaired on it.”  Lowey is Chair of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, through which the money is granted. Jereski says “both ignored constituents’ call for them to oppose Plan Mexico and neither made efforts to leverage their considerable power to demand accountability for the murder of dozens of innocents at the hands of Mexican security forces, including [Brad Will,] a U.S. citizen who lived and worked in New York state for years.”
In Vasquez de la Rosa’s experience, the congressmen he lobbied on Capitol Hill, including Raúl Grijalva, John Hall, Kirsten Gillibrand, Robert Menéndez, Dodd Chair, Chairman Engel, Michael McNulty, Dan Burton, Ros Lehtinen, and Senator Corker, were receptive to his perspective on the Merida Initiative and expressed concerns about the state of human rights in Mexico, especially as a result of Brad Will’s murder, and about corruption in the Mexican government. He shared his experience in Oaxaca of strong police repression of the non-violent, unarmed APPO movement and about human rights violations committed by security forces at all levels of the government with the congressmen. In fact, this Fall, the Mexican Supreme Court found Oaxacan governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz himself guilty of human rights violations committed during the movement in 2006. However, he remains in office as governor of the state.
Vasquez de la Rosa stated that while the human rights conditions placed upon the release of 15% of the funding for Plan Merida are good in theory, Mexico does not meet the criteria. He argues that social justice organizations would have to play a more powerful and more clearly defined role in order to effectively monitor the use of the money, because there are no clear mechanisms for transparent monitoring of the Merida funds. Although social justice organizations write reports or make recommendations, the government simply disregards them. Vasquez de la Rosa echoes many other social justice groups in Mexico when he says that three years after Calderon declared a war on drugs and sent in the military to fight cartels, the level of insecurity and violence in Mexico has only increased. He also says that the war on drugs has led to detrimental changes in the Mexican justice system, pointing to the concept of pre-charge detention, or “arraigo,” where a person suspected of a crime can be held for 80 to 120 days without charge while the government tries to build its case, and a new law enabling security forces to search homes without a warrant. Bricker describes it as an “organized crime track with fewer due process.”
Vasquez de la Rosa suggests a different tactic is necessary in the war on drugs, saying that an investment in security is not enough because of poverty and corruption in Mexico. He points to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect 1994, for having exacerbated poverty in Mexico, displaced two million small farmers, and dramatically increased migration to the United States so people could earn a living. Due to this, investment in Mexico’s economic development is key to dismantling the power of cartels, especially in terms of creating jobs. Jereski also critiques the Merida Initiative as “a response to the mobilization against the poverty and other social, cultural, and economic dislocations caused by NAFTA.”
Vasquez de la Rosa says a modernization of the justice system in Mexico is necessary because the level of public distrust in security forces is high. According to him, “of every 100 crimes, only 25 are reported, and only 5 are resolved” with judicial action. Merida Initiative funding could support human rights violations and the criminalization of protest, of which the conflict in Oaxaca in 2006 is only an example. Bricker has reported on the arrest of Jose Manuel Hernandez Martinez (known as Don Chema) on September 30, 2009, a leader of the Emiliano Zapata Peasant Organization—Carranza Region (OCEZ) in Chiapas that promotes land invasions for peasant farmers to occupy and gain legal right to land in the state. He and the OCEZ were charged with links to organizations that traffic drugs, arms, and migrants. Police searched OCEZ communities with ion scanners, and found not a single weapon, drug or migrant. Bricker called it a “test case” to see how civil society will react to such arrests, and if this type of crackdown can be applied to other dissident organizations. Don Chema has since been released on bail due to political pressure, but still faces two minor charges and his hometown remains occupied by the police.
    Hillary Clinton herself has named two sources of Mexico’s drug violence, neither of which the Merida Initiative addresses: the “insatiable demand for drugs” in the U.S. and the illegal trading of guns. Jereski says that “funding the military is an impractical response to a public health issue where funds are needed to reduce [the number] of [drug] users,” comparing the current situation to 1930s Prohibition. A study by the RAND Corporation found that domestic drug treatment programs are 10 times more cost-effective than drug interdiction programs. Bricker, Jereski, and Miller agree that some form of drug legalization is necessary. Jereski says marijuana supplies 75% of drug cartels’ resources and that former presidents of Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia have encouraged the U.S. to make a close examination of legalization or decriminalization of the drug.  As the U.S. and Mexican government get tougher on drugs, prices go up and it becomes more profitable—and the violence increases too. An estimated 90% of weapons used by cartels come from the United States, an issue Vasquez de la Rosa noted was key to the violence. The Merida Initiative includes no mechanisms to fight the illegal arms trade.
    Through the Merida Initiative, the United States funds President Calderon’s war on drugs by training and arming police and military forces in Mexico, but doesn’t increase efforts to stop illegal arms trading from the U.S. to Mexico or increase funds for programs for drug prevention and rehabilitation in the U.S. The military solution to drug trafficking puts Mexican citizens, civil society organizations, and protesters at risk of human rights violations. To protest the Merida Initiative or to get more information, go to www.witnessforpeace.org, www.friendsofbradwill.org, or www.narconews.com.