La Jornada: Editorial
Translated by Melanie Orr
The Caravan for Peace, Life and Justice arrived in the main square in Mexico City on Sunday. On the 28th of March its diverse members left Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, headed for New York City, where they are expected to arrive on the 18th of April, just one day before the start of the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drug Policy. The group, made up of experts, leaders of social movements and relatives of victims of the war on drugs, took part yesterday in an event at the Mexico City Museum and then had a meeting in the Political and Social Sciences Faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Throughout their journey, those who make up the Caravan have heard and shared testimonies and reflexions about the monumental social and human cost that these countries have suffered due to the anti-drug strategy put in place by the U.S. in collaboration with local governments. This strategy has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, devastated the social fabric of large regions, eaten away at institutions and promoted corruption more than drug-trafficking, which was used as an excuse. The strategy has also, paradoxically, strengthened the criminal organizations that it supposedly aims to eliminate.
Worst of all: the official persecution of drug-trafficking in all of its many forms has allowed for the horrific deterioration of the rule of law in general, and of human rights in particular. Anti-drug policies have undermined civic values in the name of defending civilization by creating enormous scope for abuse, arbitrariness and impunity.
Mexico has experienced these undesirable phenomena first hand. Failings in education, health and employment have made it possible for thousands, if not millions, of people to become involved in some way or another in the supply chains for the production or transport of illegal drugs. From the rural farmers who grow marijuana and opium poppies to the big bosses, including professionals working for the cartels- lawyers, doctors, accountants, telecommunications experts, to name but a few-, to young people who become paid assassins and people of different ages and from different social conditions who become “camels” or drug dealers and even children who are recruited as “hawks” [lookouts].
Instead of trying to create employment and improve general living conditions, Felipe Calderón’s government had no scruples about declaring war against the entirety of this sector, even explicitly hoping that “they would kill each other”. Consequently, the country experienced and continues to experience one of the most violent chapters in its history and this is aggravated further by the fact that such violence does not indicate any social transformation, but rather pure and simple brutality. The war on drugs has revealed itself to be more a war against the people.
After decades of death, destruction and institutional disintegration, the upper echelons of global power have begun to recognize that the strategy has failed. Indeed, the highest international organizations, and even some governments, are heeding calls to radically modify the official approaches in the fight against drugs and are finally beginning to talk about the need to prioritize public health perspectives over misinterpreted national security criteria.
Such is the backdrop for the Caravan for Peace, Life and Justice. This is undoubtedly an auspicious moment for making social demands so often unheard by government agencies and multilateral organizations. It is worth hoping that they are attended to and that an end is put, once and for all, to this disastrous and particularly absurd war. Spanish original