"Drug War" Epistemology

Last week I made note of Alma Guillermoprieto’s new essay on Mexico’s “drug wars” in the New York Review of Books. Again, the piece is recommended if you haven’t had a chance yet to read it in-full. But on a day of little breaking news, Molly Molloy’s Frontera List offers an interesting critique of Guillermoprieto’s review. Here’s what Molloy has to say:

“Other than Drug War Zone, by Howard Campbell, which focuses on mostly street-level drug dealers and enforcers in Juarez and El Paso, these books and the essay focus on the power of much-talked-about and seldom seen ‘druglords,’ in the same misguided manner that the Calderon government's war-speech claims that arresting a few of these people will stop the slaughter that has taken over Juarez and now threatens the whole country of Mexico.”

For a distinctly different approach toward understanding the social dynamics of the drug war – less wrapped up in the power any particular drug capo, Molloy directs readers to Charles Bowden’s Murder City (unfortunately not among the books Guillermoprieto has reviewed for the NYRB). And in a July piece in The Nation, Bowden and Molloy together started sketching out the complexities of an alternative interpretation of Mexico’s “drug wars” – one which both emphasizes how little we really know about the nature of “drug-related violence” and acknowledges, as a recent Reuters report does, that it is the country’s poor who are most often the drug war’s principal victims (not cold-blooded criminals).

In the Reuters piece, Hector Gonzalez, a lawyer with the unenviable job of specializing in criminal cases in Ciudad Juarez, succinctly states what may be the effect of understanding the drug war in the “traditional” way: “the principle of innocence is being lost because of the eagerness to end the violence.” Case in point: General Jorge Juárez Loera, the first commander of the Joint Operation Chihuahua, who is quoted in Bowden and Molloy’s July article:

“I would like to see reporters change their articles and instead of writing about one more murder victim, they should say, ‘one less criminal.’”

The problem rests in believing we know something about crimes which have not, for a variety of reasons, ever been investigated. Again, Bowden and Molloy:

“[N]o one knows how many are dying, no one knows who is killing them and no one knows what role the drug industry has in these killings. There has been no investigation of the dead and so no one really knows whether they were criminals or why they died. There have been no interviews with heads of drug organizations and so no one really knows what they are thinking or what they are trying to accomplish. It is difficult to have a useful discussion without facts, but it seems to be very easy to make policy without facts.”

This is a point which should be taken seriously. And yet, despite differences between a “top down” assessment of the drug wars (beginning with drug lords) or a “bottom up” approach (beginning with victims), finding common ground about what to do next does not seem to be precluded. Indeed, Guillermoprieto ends her piece suggesting that perhaps no security strategy will work “as long as global demand persists for a product that is illegal throughout the world.” Charles Bowden, meanwhile, explains his pro-legalization views more directly, in a recent interview:

“If [our] policy were a ship, we would name it the Titanic. We’ve taken a public health problem, criminalized it, and not even touched drug consumption.”

See yesterday’s post on legalization.

To other stories:

· Perhaps an example of the drug war reporting which Molloy and Bowden critique, Reuters writes today on yesterday’s ambush of traffic police in Sinaloa which killed eight people. Reuters:

“The attack underscores the challenges for the Mexican police as the government tries to provide officers with the weaponry and training needed to take on powerful and brazen drug gangs whose arsenals include assault rifles and rocket launchers.”

· In the Boston Review, Tom Barry of the Center for International Policy’s TransBorder Project has a long piece on border security policies in Texas – a place where, he argues, there is “no cogent federal stance on border policy,” but rather policy “dictated by alarmist border-area sheriffs and politicians and increasingly supported by the American public, Congress, and the Obama administration.”

· And in Ciudad Juarez yesterday, new mayor Hector Murguía was sworn into office. Thousands—including Mexico’s top security chief Genaro Garcia Luna, the US ambassador, and others – apparently attended the inauguration ceremony while federal police and soldiers sealed off the area (at least 5 people were still killed in Juarez). Mr. Murguía spoke about the city’s sky-high unemployment but argued “combating drug-related crime” would be his number one priority. Murguía: “Let's not lose sight of our main problem. This will only be possible if we solve the equation of public safety.”

· From El Faro, a great interview with Francisco Dall’Anese – the man who recently replaced Carlos Castresana as the head of Guatemala’s CICIG. Among other things, he takes up the question of replicating the CICIG experience in other countries around Central America, stressing the particularities of each country’s challenges. Dall’Anese also sketches out what could be called an organized crime “balloon effect” in which crime syndicates are squeezed out of Mexico and Colombia and into Central America, and he emphasizes the need to attack the heart of cartel power: their bank accounts.

· Moving south, EFE reports on new and very positive signs of cooperation between Colombia and Venezuela. Foreign ministers from the two countries met late last week to restart joint infrastructure and energy security projects. A new trade deal is also in the works for next year. And, perhaps most notably, the two countries say they have created a new joint anti-drug policy.

· IPS reports on the on-going transnational struggle for justice in cases of forced disappearance during the region’s dirty wars. The piece comes as rights activists gathered last week in Mexico City for the international H.I.J.O.S (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence) conference which sought to put the issue of justice in cases of “forced disappearances” on the “regional agenda.

· Also from IPS, news that Guatemala has set up a high level commission to investigate the recently discovered medical experiments carried out on hundreds of Guatemalans by US doctors in the mid 1940s. The commission includes Vice President Rafael Espada and representatives of the ministries of health, interior, defense and foreign relations, as well as members of the Guatemalan College of Physicians and Surgeons.

· The AP reports on a new UN/OAS report (in Spanish, here), overseen by the UNDP’s regional program for Latin America, which says democracy in the region remains fragile despite notable improvements over the last decades. Drug violence, weak states with corrupt police and inefficient courts, and wealth concentrated in few hands threaten representative government across the region, the report says. UN Ass’t. Sec. General Heraldo Munoz added that the region “needs to strengthen institutions and the rule of law” so even those in power are held to account.

· More from the Havana Note on the new round of prisoner releases in Cuba.

· BBC reports on a new coca-production law which was annulled by the Morales government after facing widespread protests by coca growers. The law had cut the number of leaves coca growers could sell by 2/3 in an attempt to stop the sale of leaves to drug traffickers. The government will take up the legislation again, this time in closer consultation with the country’s social movements.

· And finally, an update on elections from Brazil. The Wall Street Journal says the race is tighter than expected ahead of an Oct. 31^st runoff. Datafolha puts Dilma Rouseff leading José Serra by just 7 percentage points (48% to 41%) in a campaign that has taken an unexpected turn toward social issues, namely the candidate’s positions on religion and abortion.