In 1936, a church group commissioned a film “to strike fear in the hearts of young people tempted to smoke marijuana.” But it was not until the 1970s that Reefer Madness — billed as “the original classic that was not afraid to make up the truth” due to its grotesque portrayal of the supposed dangers of marijuana — obtained cult status.
Mexico’s drug war is spiraling into bedlam. Within the past month, local Ciudad Juarez authorities deemed 15-year-old girls attending prison parties “impossible to control,” a 14-year old was accused of beheading and kidnapping for cartels, and masked guerilla groups continued to avenge their countrymen’s deaths. The war has no end in sight. Atrocities plague northern Mexico and other Central American countries, including Guatemala and El Salvador.
Public confidence in the Mexican army and judiciary has declined considerably. Meanwhile, 73 percent of Latin Americans perceive corruption among public officials as a widespread problem.
Conservative attempts to link the war on terror and the war on drugs in order to justify maintaining a global U.S. military presence.
“It is undeniable that Mexico is going through a situation of violence in which groups of armed civilians (organized crime) sow terror and death, provoking the displacement of entire families so they are not murdered,” read a statement from three human rights groups.
On March 3 of this year, Agent John Dodson of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) blew the whistle on a secret government project that allowed guns to be smuggled from U.S. merchants to Mexican drug cartels.
Mexico’s House of Deputies has brought the country to the cusp of a police state. The reform to the National Security Law now before the lower house would grant sweeping military powers to the executive and limit congressional oversight of domestic military activity.
A secret operation to run guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels — overseen by U.S. government agents — threatens to become a major scandal for the Obama administration. The operation, called “Fast and Furious,” was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona. ATF sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.
The presidential meeting this week between Mexico’s Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama looked from the outside like a hastily arranged exercise in damage control. But while most analysts emphasized the tensions between the neighboring nations going into the meeting, the real crisis behind the visit was the failure of what the two leaders most strongly agree on: the war on drugs south of the border.
Much of the narco-trafficking violence comes from compromised local governments corrupted by drug money.