The U.S.-supported “get tough” anti-drug strategy in Mexico has achieved some success, but has come at a price: 5,376 deaths so far in 2008—15 a day. This approach has caused drug trafficking groups to collapse and splinter. The U.S., which released a report earlier this year saying that Mexican drug organizations have infiltrated every region of the US and nearly 200 cities, agrees. John Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that crackdowns in both Colombia and Mexico have caused a doubling of US cocaine prices in the past two years. But there is little hope that drug trafficking and drug war violence will abate. Erubiel Tirado, a security expert at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, blames “the intermixing of organized crime with crimes of emergency, of a social origin that come from unemployment and need.”

 

 

Two Years After its Launch, Mexicans Question President Calderón’s Drug War (by Sarar Miller Llana, Christian Science Monitor)