California voters rejected Proposition 19 Tuesday, a ballot initiative which would have made the state the first in the US to allow limited amounts of marijuana to be sold legally for recreational purposes. With ninety percent of precincts reporting this morning, some 54% of voters voted against measure. Some 46% came out in favor.
According to the LA Times, the principal failure lay in the the fact that voters under the age of 25 – the initiative’s principal backers – “did not turn out in unusually high numbers” on election day. In fact, the San Francisco Bay area was the only part of the state to see a majority favor Proposition 19 – and even there the majority appears to have been slimmer than expected.
Nevertheless, drug policy advocates saw many bright spots in the California campaign which, using the LA Times words once again, “transformed talk about legal pot from a late-night punch line into a serious policy matter.” Stephen Gutwillig, the California director of the Drug Policy Alliance says Prop. 19, even in defeat, marked a “watershed moment” by “moving marijuana legalization into the mainstream of American politics.” Legalization advocates are expected to bring the measure up for a second vote in California in 2012 while it’s likely that similar initiatives will be placed before voters in Washington, Colorado, and Oregon as well. But to win two years from now, advocates may have to harvest more targeted in-state support. As I have written here, the measure drew significant national and international attention over the last months, but, quoting the Times:
“[T]he opposition was broad…Men and women opposed it. Voters of every race opposed it. The campaign had hoped black and Latino voters would see the measure as a way to end disproportionate arrests of minorities caught with marijuana.”
Meanwhile, in Mexico, the country perhaps most closely monitoring the California vote on Tuesday, there has been no public statement from the government as of yet. But yesterday afternoon, President Felipe Calderon, by way of Twitter, did reiterate his belief that policies on the “production, transportation, and consumption of drugs” should be reconsidered within a “global and integrated” regulatory framework, rather than locally. If nothing else, Prop. 19 has gotten people talking.
In other news today:
· Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Colombian counterpart Juan Manuel Santos met in Caracas Tuesday where they agreed to strengthen ties through a series of joint initiatives. The AP reports such projects included the resurrection of an idea to build a natural gas pipeline from Venezuela to Central America as well as an oil pipeline from Venezuela to the Colombian coast. The Venezuelan president also said his country would resume fuel sales to Colombian border states, and he even went so far as to invite Colombian oil company Ecopetrol to enter into an oil pumping deal in Venezuela’s Orinoco River basin. El Tiempo also highlights the significance of a new accord committing both countries to cooperation in the “fight against the global problem of drugs.” The meetings lasted three hours and, according to President Santos, marked a very important moment in re-founding relations between the two countries. “We've gone from good-intentioned statements to concrete accords,” Santos said Tuesday. For his part, Chavez added that “no foreign force is capable of provoking any type of damage in these fraternal relations.”
· Meanwhile, in Colombia, the AP writes on a new investigation that was opened this week, examining possible corruption at the country’s National Narcotics Directorate. The agency, housed within the Interior Ministry, has “managed assets seized from drug gangs over the last two decades” and there are now growing “suspicions” that some of those assets have gone missing.
· In Ciudad Juarez, El Diario de Juarez has a brief report on a mass demonstration Tuesday which brought somewhere between 500 and 1000 participants – mostly students – onto the streets of the city. The students’ demands, according to El Diario: the demilitarization of their city. AFP adds that the student demonstrators demanded punishment for two police officers accused of shooting a student at a protest last week. “We're tired and fed up with suffering from the same. It's time to act,” one medical student who took part in Tuesday’s protests tells AFP.
· Costa Rica has asked the OAS to address an “alleged incursion by Nicaraguan troops onto Costa Rican soil.” The border river (the San Juan) where the incursion is said to have occurred has been at the center of disputes for “nearly two centuries,” says the AP. The most recent conflict stems from Nicaraguan dredging in the river.
· IPS’s Thelma Mejía says Honduras will be forced to answer to the UN Human Rights Council about rights abuses that occurred during and after the June 2009 coup which toppled President Manuel Zelaya. Honduran officials will go before a UNHRC panel in Geneva tomorrow for their first ever “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR). IPS says that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has documented “more than 4,000 cases of violations of fundamental human rights…since the coup, ranging from censorship and the closure of media outlets to brutal crackdowns on protesters, curfews, and reports of torture and rape.” In addition, the IACHR says at least seven murders have been “politically motivated.” Human rights groups in Honduras put that figure much higher. Bertha Oliva of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared in Honduras tells IPS that her group has documented 23 “politically motivated” murders in addition to 200 individuals being forced into exile. Those representing the Lobo government are expected to outline their work in the area of human rights protection – including granting the human rights unit in the Attorney General's Office a budget of its own for the first time and creating a ministry of justice and human rights. The Lobo government will also argue that human rights violations committed since President Lobo took office do not reflect “state policy,” but have rather been “isolated incidents.” For their part, human rights groups will present a formal proposal to the Council, asking that the UPR focus specifically on the June 28, 2009 coup and that it reject amnesty for human rights violators.
· The New York Times writes about growing examples of cultural exchange between Cuba and the US – Cuban jazz in New York and US ballet in Havana being the primary examples – since Washington took small steps toward loosened travel restrictions over one year ago.
· Haiti is still preparing for Tropical Storm Tomas to come ashore. The storm, which could regain its hurricane status by Friday, would be the first big storm to strike Haiti since the Jan. 12 earthquake. Already the US has dispatched its amphibious warship, the Iwo Jima, to the country. But disaster looms in the country’s many tent cities, says the AP.
· The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) has a good analysis of Brazil, regional integration, and UNASUR in the post-Lula era.
· And finally, two more post-election opinions on Brazil. In the Miami Herald, Glauco Arbix, a member of Brazil’s National Council of Science and Technology, says the country’s “main challenge…will be to continue Lula's effort to build a new relationship between the public and private sectors -- a model capable of combining transparency and proactive measures that neither devolves into centralizing statism nor surrenders to the markets”— and one which improves innovation and moves the country toward the production of competitive, value-added goods. And at the Huffington Post, professor of Latin American history, Jeffrey Rubin echoes many of those points, arguing that “understanding the origins of Brazil's success” will be the “key to forging policies that will enable the country's economic and political reforms to endure.” What are those origins, according to Rubin? First, “a broad and long-lasting surge of radical grassroots activism” that accompanied the transition back to democracy in the late 1980s. Second, the emergence of an inclusive, non-vanguardist left-wing party, the PT, during that same period. And third, the creation of a state-oriented market economy that has produced a healthy “tension between private sector and government initiative.” Rubin:
“Enduring reform in the developing world needs active social movements and adherence to democratic procedures, state economic planning and investment and commitment to markets. President Rousseff would be wise to continue to challenge political and economic orthodoxies as she promotes equality and inclusion in what could continue to be a pioneering global success story.”
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