Thursday, January 20, 2005

Drugs in Mexico

Cuaderno Latinoamericano

I realize that Mexico's role in the trade of drugs to the United States is important because of its neighboring location. After reading an article in the Americas section of The New York Times online, I also realized that a lot more is going on than I had origianlly thought. President Fox had cracked down on the drug cartels in Mexico in previous years and many leaders had been arrested. I learned from this article that those successes have attributed to more problems now as a result of some cartels joining together to create more power since many of their leaders were jailed. Even more interestingis the fact that jailed leaders have been able to communicate, and in some instances give orders for death, through corrupt gaurds and lawyers. I was amazed that such a triumph (or a supposed one) could crumble so easily within the span of only a few years. The article mentions that some of the cartel leaders have even been able to escape. I wonder what the best steps to take to avoid such merges and violence directed from prison from happening in the future would be. It is a very deadly field for both the drug cartels and the law officials working to get rid of them. Does Mexico and possibly the U.S. need to work on the law enforcement side? Here is the link to the article:

1 comment:

Huck said...

Hey, Claire - good post. Think you could try re-posting the link for us again? It doesn't seem to have come through. Also, these stories of waves of successes and setbacks in the prosecution of the war on drugs makes me wonder if the whole thing is an exercise in futility. From my perspective, we won't really be able to get a handle on this problem if we don't find a way to deal with the consumption side of it. Otherwise, we're always going to have sellers and traffickers and a so-called war against them.