What a Gun Does in Mexico Stays in Mexico
February 26, 2009
New York Times article today explains how the drug war in Mexico is fueled by smuggled guns from the United States. The core of the story is this sentence:
The gun laws in the United States allow the sale of multiple military-style rifles to American citizens without reporting the sales to the government, and Mexicans search relatively few cars and trucks going south across their border.
Big point: our wocka-wocka crazy gun laws, which suggest some worrying things about the priorities of our population but do not usually result directly in Beirut-style violence, have their worst effects not in our country but abroad. Kind of like our frat boys.
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In a related story, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, which was founded by such major figures as former Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil), César Gaviria (Colombia) and Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico), just released what the Drug Policy Alliance is calling a “groundbreaking report.” Some of the highlights:
“Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of consumption have not yielded the expected results. We are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.”
And:
“Mexico has quickly become the other epicenter of the violent activities carried out by the criminal groups associated with the narcotics trade. This raises challenges for the Mexican government in its struggle against the drug cartels that have supplanted the Colombian traffickers as the main suppliers of illicit drugs to the United States market. Mexico is thus well positioned to ask the government and institutions of American society to engage in a dialogue about the policies currently pursued by the U.S. as well as to call upon the countries of the European Union to undertake a greater effort aimed at reducing domestic drug consumption. The traumatic Colombian experience is a useful reference for countries not to make the mistake of adopting the U.S. prohibitionist policies and to move forward in the search for innovative alternatives.”
The full report is here.
Wow. It is remarkable that former heads of state could collaborate on such a substantive and intelligent document. Can you imagine any of our living former presidents, Carter excepted, doing anything like that? Cardoso’s participation makes sense: he is a sociologist, a central proponent of “dependency theory,” and currently a professor at Brown. Anyway, that report strikes me as spot-on. And it highlights a point I was trying to make in my post: just as our unusually lax gun laws have important international effects, so too do our unusually stringent drug policies.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could manage to put these international issues front-and-center in our debates, if a politician could say without fear of ridicule that we need to alter our drug policies because of the effect they are having on Latin America?