by Ioan Grillo
Protesters have called for the resignation of presidents over the crime wars. Governments need to be overthrown for change to happen, they say. The demand harks back to the protest movements of the Cold War. Dictators Pinochet, Galtieri, Baby Doc, and Trujillo killed to maintain power. The people had to topple them to move forward.
There are valid reasons to change many leaders today. There are certainly some corrupt politicians who should not be in power. But in the crime wars, the solution is not as simple as toppling a president. After they are gone, you will still be left with billions of drug dollars, corrupt police, and ineffective courts. It’s not just necessary to overturn an oppressive government, but to mend a corrupt system. And this corrupt system is not even in one country. It is a collective problem that Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, the United States, Britain, Spain, Italy, and others face together; and recent history shows how bad the world is at dealing with international challenges.
In searching for a solution, it helps to come to terms with what the problem really is. Governments find it uncomfortable to admit that cartels and commandos clearly challenge the nature of the state and its monopoly on waging war and administering justice. The fact that gangsters have won genuine support in some marginalized communities is also a painful truth.
The twenty-first century has thrown up a world where irregular forces with scattered cells of combatants provide an immense challenge for democratic governments. Light infantry weapons are everywhere, and it is easy for criminal gunmen to communicate and move money. Governments find their tanks, warships, and bombers are useless against these ragtag criminal militias. They often choose stalemates as the best option.
Yet while gangster warlords show frightening firepower, I do not believe their rule constitutes an actual alternate state. They care about selected aspects of domination in their territory. Cartels secure roads, control police, take over economic assets, and strong-arm politicians. But they let the government run schools, provide water, and collect garbage. They are a shadow power rather than a shadow government. They want a weak and corrupt government, which they can live off, like a tapeworm feeds off a host.
This differentiates the crime militias of the Americas with Islamist militants or old-school communist guerrillas. In Peru, the Shining Path used guerrilla warfare to create “liberated zones,” where the government could not enter, and tried to build an alternative Maoist state there. Likewise, the logic of Islamic radicalism has led to the so-called Islamic State and its caliphate. When it took Mosul in Iraq, one of its first actions was to take over schools and radically change the curriculum. They care about what is inside people’s minds, not just making money.
Gangster warlords nurture their culture, their pseudo religion, and their rhetoric of fighting for the poor. But this doesn’t constitute an ideology. The cartel massacres cannot be justified in religious scripture from the seventh century or revolutionary manifestoes. We don’t have to call on moderates in their communities to argue over the interpretation of their faith. But we need to change conditions in communities to stop the cartel life being more appealing than a legitimate job.
We journalists often disparage governments for what they do. That is a key part of our work. Yet it is easier to criticize than to offer solutions, and we need to search for real proposals. Are we just hearing the testimonies of killers and crying mothers out of interest, or can they help find working policies?
I base these following conclusions on fourteen years of reporting, and talking to thousands of people involved. Yet they are still simply ideas up for debate. Some may agree with certain points and not others. The important thing is to work out how to tackle this problem now, not after a million more murders.
I divide the conclusions into three areas: reforming drug policy, building justice systems, and transforming ghettos. I see these as the three pillars in confronting the region’s crime wars.
CHAPTER 49
DRUG POLICY REFORM
On November 6, 2012, as Obama made his reelection victory speech in Chicago, voters in Colorado and Washington State jumped up and down over a different win: the legalization of marijuana. Amid the discussion of Obama’s second term, many missed the seismic implications of the cannabis votes. This was the first time anywhere on the planet that marijuana was legalized since modern drug prohibition began a century ago. Even Holland had only kept its famous coffee shops open through legal ambiguity. Colorado and Washington directly confronted the U.S. federal government and the United Nations. It looked like the laws might be rapidly struck down.
Yet legalization not only survived but spread. In 2013, Uruguay became the first entire country to legalize, and in 2014, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, D.C., said yes to ganja. This wave of reform confirmed there was a real turning point in drug policy. It followed several countries decriminalizing drug possession and a major shift in the tone of the debate, especially in the bloodstained nations of Latin America.
Modern drug prohibition began with the 1914 Harrison Act that banned most opium and cocaine in the United States. But it was Nixon who escalated this to the “War on Drugs” in his 1969 to 1974 presidency. This takes us right back to the Cold War, hippie festivals, and Robert smuggling weed over from Juárez again. Nixon’s strategy—to browbeat foreign governments, militarize antidrug efforts, and create the DEA, a multi-billion-dollar agency fighting the offensive in over sixty countries—defined U.S. policy for the next four decades.
Nixon had absolutist objectives; he believed that with the right pressure, governments could obliterate drugs. “Our goal is the total banishment of drug abuse from American life,” he said in his 1972 campaign. The U.N. took these same goals on board. Even as late as 1998, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) held a meeting in New York under the slogan, “A drug free world. We can do it.”
Four decades after Nixon, this goal has obviously not been met. The United Nations itself estimates the global drug trade is worth four hundred billion dollars a year. Both the U.S. drug czar and UNODC have finally given up hope of a drug-free world and talk of containment. Drug warriors concede that military raids, crop burning, multinational stings, and prisons packed with drug offenders, which together cost the U.S. upward of forty billion dollars a year, will not end the drug trade. They now argue they are just stopping it getting bigger.
This has created an ominous experience: the war on drugs failed to end the narcotics trade while it created an enormous global black market that has funded cartels with catastrophic consequences. This realization is at the heart of the renewed debate. Drug policy reformists are winning ground fast, while drug warriors struggle to be heard. In the U.S. states that legalized marijuana, opposition from social conservatives was scattered and muted. We live through a paradigm shift in thinking.
Drug policy reform does not mean legalizing every drug, and certainly isn’t to say that drugs are good. But it is a fundamental change in approach. The key to the new reasoning is that problematic drug use cannot be stopped by “war” but is a health issue. Societies need to offer as much help as they can to reduce the harmful effects of drugs, while also drastically reducing the size of the black market.
The decades of experience show that harder drug policies do not necessarily mean fewer drug users. Holland, with its more liberal approach, has always boasted fewer users than the United States. Since Portugal decriminalized the use of all major drugs in 2001, narcotics use has been relatively stable, while HIV infections from needles and drug-related deaths have gone down.1 It achieved this by switching to treatment programs.
Just a decade ago, politicians across the Americas saw questioning the war on drugs as political suicide. But first former and then current presidents began to challenge it. Among them are Colombians César Gaviria and Juan Manuel Santos, Brazilians Fernando Cardoso and Lula, Guatemalan Otto Pérez Molina, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, Uruguay’s José Mujica, and Mexicans Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. Even Cald
erón, who waged his bloody offensive on cartels in Mexico, has questioned whether prohibition works.
Surveys in the United States now show that more than half of respondents support marijuana legalization.2 Hundreds of celebrities, from newscasters to billionaires to movie stars, have come out in favor. Legalizing weed in the four U.S. states and D.C. has created a paradox. While the United States invented the war on drugs, parts of it have become a global vanguard of progressive laws.
Despite the pendulum swing, key institutions perpetrate the war approach. These include the U.S. Drug Czar’s office and DEA as well as global agencies in dusty offices that you may never have heard of such as the International Narcotics Control Board. Drug policy reform means confronting these entrenched bureaucracies. A big battle will take place at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in April 2016. Prepare for fireworks.
Reforming drug policy will impact the whole world, but will make an especially big splash in the Americas. As the trail in this book shows, the region has suffered history’s bloodiest wars financed by the narcotics trade, from Mexico to Jamaica to Brazil to Honduras. Drug money is not the entire problem. But it is a big part of it. And drug policy is an area that we can make a difference in. What we do in the United States, Britain, Spain, Italy, and other countries will directly affect lives on the streets of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The most urgent objective is to reduce the size of the narco black market in the region. Neither the Shower Posse nor the Red Commando nor the Knights Templar could have become such deadly forces without drug profits. If these crime families earn fewer narco dollars they will have less money to buy guns, bribe police, and train kids to be assassins.
Critics argue that drug policy reform in itself will not destroy these mafias. They are right. But it can reduce their power substantially so they don’t overwhelm nations. They could become more like criminals in the United States and Europe and not gangster warlords devastating communities.
Marijuana is the first drug on the table. Uruguay and the legalizing U.S. states have taken a lunar-size step. But the process needs to move much further. If societies are ready to accept it, and I think they are, it is time to legalize marijuana across the region and push organized crime completely out of the business.
Nobody can claim they know the exact percentage of cartel money made from cannabis. The very nature of a black market means we can’t count it accurately. But evidence based on seizures and user surveys all points to billions of dollars. (Estimates on what Mexican cartels alone make from cannabis vary from one billion dollars to twenty billion dollars.)3 Despite the pace of marijuana reform, the Zetas and Knights Templar are still making profits from smuggling cannabis into the United States. The strength of marijuana-funded gangsters in Mexico or Jamaica also has a knock-on effect into Central America and other nations in the chain of crime wars.
If marijuana becomes legal across the hemisphere then these billions would move from the hands of gangsters into those of legal businessmen and tax coffers. Ganja is an industry that is heavy on workers; many take their first step into a crime family by growing marijuana, selling it on a corner, or smuggling it. That link would be severed, and legal jobs created.
While legalizing weed garners mass support, most people cannot envision lifting the ban on hard drugs—cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth. Perhaps policy reform needs to move forward with cannabis regulation before a discussion on these can take place. After marijuana, the priority is to confront the cocaine market, as it generates so much money. White dollars fund the Zetas in northeast Mexico, the Maras in Honduras, the Red Commando in Brazil, and dozens of other mafias. Heroin and meth are particularly heinous, but are cheaper and less widely used.
However, there is a first step on hard drugs that people can find a consensus on: addiction treatment needs to be stepped up. Rehab workers now have decades of experience treating people with problematic drug use and have developed effective ways of helping junkies confront their demons. These treatments need to be more widely available. Addicts use big quantities, with some spending more than a hundred thousand dollars a year on smack, crack, or meth, so everyone that kicks it is a big hit to traffickers. Money currently spent on marijuana prohibition, or even that generated by the legal business, could be switched to rehab. If treatment campaigns could reduce users by a third, that would be a substantial whack on finances of meth traffickers in Michoacán or heroin producers in Guerrero.
There is a common counterargument to drug policy reform. If gangsters made less money selling drugs, it goes, they would turn to other crimes, such as kidnapping, which really hurt people. By this logic, legalizing drugs could actually lead to more violence. Some police officers, business lobbies, and even gangsters themselves claim this. Prosecutors have shown me cases of criminals who got cut off from drug trafficking (for example, when a supplier was arrested) and turned to kidnapping to make quick cash.
But on further investigation, this argument falls apart. When gangsters make billions of dollars smuggling drugs they become more powerful, overwhelming law enforcement and turning to other crimes. When they make less from drugs, police have a better chance of dealing with them. Therefore, countries with big trafficking networks such as Mexico and Colombia have suffered from the world’s highest kidnapping rates.
You can also see this logic within countries. Tamaulipas is one of Mexico’s biggest drug trafficking states, sharing a border with Texas. It also suffers from the highest kidnapping rate in the nation. Yucatán State is rarely used by traffickers, and has one of the lowest kidnapping rates as well as Mexico’s lowest homicide rate—about the same as Belgium.4
Even if drug money does shrink from a tidal wave to a stream, however, Latin American nations need to confront militias of violent criminals. They cannot allow gangsters like the Maddest One Moreno or Dudus Coke to claim territory and challenge the state. They have to battle crimes such as extortion and murder, whatever happens with narco markets. And this involves a huge overhaul in the police and justice systems.
CHAPTER 50
HOW DO YOU POLICE CRIME WARS?
It is easy to criticize how Latin American leaders confront cartel bloodshed. But from a government’s point of view, there aren’t easy answers. If gangsters wreak havoc in a city, critics scream the government is too passive. If it sends in troops, they shout it is being repressive. Rulers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Even when they catch kingpins, critics say they are scoring media points and it won’t change things. Of course, officials often have their pockets stuffed with drug dollars. But even politicians who aren’t in league with narcos struggle to find a working policy.
However, the years of crime wars have taught at least one lesson: large parts of the region’s security forces are fundamentally flawed and need to be reformed from the bottom up. When the U.S. and other nations lend support, it has be in building new institutions—not just bankrolling rotten ones.
After the Cold War, international organizations focused on building electoral systems and markets in the emerging democracies of Latin America. The U.N., European Union, and Organization of American States sent election monitors and helped young political parties hammer out voting rules. Likewise, the World Trade Organization and World Bank oversaw deregulation carried out by the region’s Harvard-educated technocrats. If people had the freedoms to choose their leaders and make money, it was assumed the rest would follow. But they missed a vital element in viable democracies: the rule of law. Latin America shows that you can have elections and markets hand in hand with dysfunctional justice systems.
Through the twentieth century, order in much of the continent was kept by dictatorships, whether they were military, as in Brazil and Honduras, or virtual, as in Mexico. They kept control with curfews, imprisonment without trial, and police and soldiers killing with impunity.
When democracy dawned, these same security forces didn’t know how to operate. Many police off
icers across the continent understood how to torture and disappear people but not how to gather evidence. As they stumbled into the new era, they have carried on making cases by forcing confessions, sparking outrage from human rights groups. This has created a sorry status quo. The security forces often don’t act, creating lawlessness, and when they do, they torture and kill.
Impunity rates are off the charts. In Europe, about 80 percent of murders lead to a conviction. In Latin America as a whole, it is close to 20 percent.1 In Honduras, the conviction rate hit less than 4 percent—similar to that in Juárez when it was the world’s murder capital.2 At the same time, jails hold many innocent people who were tortured into confessing. It’s a double tragedy.
Going back to dictatorships is off the table. While it is not impossible to see generals or politicians trying it in some places, the people would never accept it. Societies have to build police and courts that function under democracy.
Some academics say that violence has a function in human societies. The world wars forced nations to form international organizations, such as the United Nations and European Union. In Latin America, violence should force nations to build working justice systems.3
Governments and civil society groups have to view the building of these justice systems as a generational project. Presidents can lay bricks but they need their successors to add cement and paint, a tough challenge in the short-term point scoring of electoral politics.
But what kind of security forces do societies want to build? The balancing act is to limit the capacity of gangster militias while not hurting the population.
All nations in the region need to set a long-term goal of getting soldiers off the streets. While some extreme circumstances can warrant sending out the troops, a lasting solution has to be based on police forces. Soldiers are trained to kill. That is the whole point of soldiery. When they are used instead of police, they will kill, and some of those victims will be innocent. This was shown when the army stormed Tivoli Gardens in Jamaica.
