LatinNews Daily Report - 16 February 2012

Guatemala: On 12 February the US embassy in Guatemala released a statement in response to remarks by Guatemala’s President Otto Pérez Molina that he was going to “seek consensus” with his regional peers regarding the decriminalization of drugs as part of a regional anti-crime strategy. According to the statement, “the US government continues to oppose such measures, because evidence shows that our shared drug problem is a major threat to public health and safety”. It went on to highlight efforts to reduce domestic demand, noting that in 2011, the US spent more than US$10bn on reducing demand, compared with US$2.4bn on international control programmes which had reduced “general drug use by one third over the past three decades”. The statement warned, however, that “if illegal drugs were decriminalized tomorrow in Central America, transnational criminal organizations and gangs would continue engaging in illegal activities, including human trafficking and illegal arms trafficking, extortion and kidnapping, bank robbery, theft of intellectual property and money laundering”.

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