This isn’t exactly “good” news, but it does put Mexico’s war against the cartels in some context:
Mexico had higher homicide rates under three presidents before current President Felipe Calderón, who is being blamed for most of the violence because of his war against drug cartels, according to El Paso Times research and analysis. …
The country’s historical statistics suggest that Mexico was at least as violent in the past as it is today. However, the drug violence, which is concentrated in certain areas, is getting all the attention because it is being carried out in dramatic and public ways.
Mexico’s successful evolution into a modern industrialized democracy is the most vital foreign-policy interest we have — way, way more important than which gang of goat-herding barbarians rules the Hindu Kush or anything that happens in Syria or Yemen or Libya or Belarus or Burma or Uganda or even Iran. And yet Mexico’s an afterthought, both for the media and for policymakers, unless someone’s head gets chopped off — the president didn’t even mention it once on Tuesday. Talk about taking our eye off the ball.
Imagine how much lower the numbers would be if we weren't running guns to the cartels.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong"
Ben Wattenberg, 1985
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSome simple facts:
* Colombia, Peru, Mexico or Afghanistan with their coca leaves, marijuana buds or poppy sap are not igniting temptation in the minds of our weak, innocent citizens. These countries are duly responding to the enormous demand that comes from within our own borders. Invading or destroying these countries, thus creating more hate, violence, instability, injustice and corruption, will not fix our problem. We need to collectively admit that we are sick. -- Prohibition is neither a sane nor a safe approach; left unabated, its puritanical flames will surely engulf every last one of us.
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs, such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced and widely used by those who desire to do so.
* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* The massive majority of people who use drugs do so recreationally - getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
* A small minority of people will always experience drug use as problematic.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement - even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* The involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Cocaine from Central America has been well documented by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the late journalist Gary Webb.
* It's not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste hundreds of billions of our money in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the prohibited drugs have ever done.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it's own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes, yet it has far higher use/addiction rates than most other countries.
* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.