The Solution to Violence that Must Never be Discussed

The exponentially increasing violence as a result of the Mexican government’s ill conceived attempt to crack down on the drug cartels is finally garnering some attention. The television program Sixty Minutes had a segment on it Sunday night. However, as per usual the piece had plenty of questionable scary sensationalism with virtually no analysis of the root of the problem, the drug laws. There was also no mention of the recent statement by former leaders Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil), César Gaviria (Colombia) and Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico) calling for a paradigm shift in drug policy. Instead, CBS attempted to blame U.S. demand for drugs and lack of gun control laws for the problem.

Meanwhile Defense Secretary Robert Gates is praising Mexican President Felipe Calderon for initiating the chaos and he promises more U.S. assistance, including joint military operations, to keep the violence going.

On the other hand, essayist for the Orange County Registrar, Alan Bock places the blame for the killings squarely where it belongs on drug prohibition. He asks us to substitute the phrase “drug law related violence” for the misleading drug related violence now commonly in use. Bock is arguing that so called successes in this war are actually failures when he points out that those “who have sought to win the ill-considered War on Drugs by main force have discovered time and time again, that the drug cartels are hydra-headed monsters. Kill or imprison the head of a particularly brutal cartel, as the authorities were able to do recently with the notorious Felix Arellano organization in Tijuana, and a half dozen contenders for leadership quickly emerge, all of them skilled to one extent or another in the dark arts of violence, concealment, intimidation, and cruelty.”

Cross posted on The Trebach Report