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The Road to Mérida: Interviews with Participants in the "Out from the Shadows" Campaign
One of the goals of the "Out from the Shadows" conference series is to elevate the voices of anti-prohibitionist advocates throughout the world. Out from the Shadows Mérida will feature a wide array of impressive and knowledgeable leaders from Latin America, and over the next several weeks we will be interviewing them and other Out from the Shadows participants for the Week Online. . . . Are we fighting drugs? they asked. I told them the DEA is effectively the most powerful cartel in the world. The United States is the great drug consumer, and the DEA only persecutes those whom it doesn't control. We know how the drugs flow north, and we know this war on drugs is a farce. And we know that the government of the US tells the government of Mexico -- all the governments of Latin America -- what to do. . . . Menéndez: I believe we should legalize and depenalize drug consumption and the drug trade. That is how we reduce the violence and corruption of those huge black market profits; that is how we reduce the robbing and killing by addicts who need to buy their drugs. But legalization must be accompanied by a strong campaign of education and prevention and rehabilitation for addicts. But even when we educate people about the dangers of drug consumption, we violate their rights if we forbid them from using drugs. Just as an alcoholic can drink without fear of persecution, so it should be for drug users. . . . But this is a $600 billion a year business and too many people profit from things they way they are. That is why I say the war on drugs is a big fake, a simulation to fool the people. The drug war will continue with all the suffering it brings. And you have so many people in prison up there! And now you can't afford to keep them there. Now you have to choose: More schools or more prisons? What a stupid question. Education is the key to human freedom, not more prisons. . . . Malamud-Goti: I had been challenging the drug war from a political philosophical standpoint, and I realized that a philosophical approach was not working. So I looked for something empirical. I found that drug repression in Bolivia has been lethal and destructive, and its results paradoxical. The criminal law is used to repress deviants, but when you have something as high-yielding as coca in Bolivia, the criminal law is powerless to stop it. So the Bolivian and US governments -- the US funds most Bolivian anti-drug activities -- try to repress coca and they create the paradox of a powerful mass movement, a political opposition. Evo Morales [leader of the Chapare coca growers' federation] is a national hero now and a powerful political figure. I don't think that is what the drug war anticipated. . . . Then there is the paradox of competing anti-drug agencies. You would think the more drug fighters, the more efficient the drug war, right? In Bolivia, while the DEA was supervising the repression of coca, the CIA was profiting off drug laboratories and using the proceeds to hire Argentine and other Latin American military officers to teach the Contras all those lessons they learned in the dirty war.

posted by LoZo 7:54 AM