Mr. Calderón and his security team argue that the violence shows the desperation of the cartels as the government dismantles them. The D.E.A. agrees that the cartels are in their death throes, but it says it expects the violence to get worse in the near future.
An effort is under way to change laws to make it easier to seize businesses that are linked to traffickers, but it has been bogged down by fierce political infighting. “We keep hearing we’re going to win,” Víctor Hugo Círigo Vásquez, the speaker of the Mexico City Assembly, said to a reporter recently. “That’s what the U.S. president said in Vietnam.”
There are calls for a completely new approach. One of Mr. Calderón’s predecessors, Mr. Zedillo, recently joined two other former heads of state from Latin America in pushing for a complete rethinking of the drug war, including the legalization of marijuana, which is considered the top revenue generator for Mexican drug cartels.
Mexico is nowhere near such a transformative step as legalizing drugs, which would cut drug profits but also might cause use to soar. Still, there are initiatives on the horizon.
Three years ago, the Mexican Congress passed a plan to decriminalize the possession of small quantities of cocaine and other drugs, but Vicente Fox, then the president, killed the bill after American officials raised an alarm. Mr. Calderón made a similar proposal last fall, albeit lowering the amounts still further, and this time American officials did not utter a peep.
via – The New York Times “In Drug War, Mexico Fights Cartel and Itself“
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