Guatemala's President Otto Pérez Molina has performed an unexpected volte-face by ditching his campaign stance of opposing drug legalisation and proposing an early top-level debate on the matter with a view to arriving at a regional consensus. He will take the issue to a Central American summit in March, and later to the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, on 14-15 April.
Pérez Molina aired the proposal on 9 February during a visit by his Salvadorean peer, Mauricio Funes, who said at a joint press conference that he was open to considering legalisation — only to reverse his stance upon returning home, arguing that legalisation would turn the region into a drug consumer’s paradise. He told the Salvadorean audience that he had told Pérez Molina that he personally didn’t agree with legalisation.
Since the Honduran president Porfirio Lobo has also declared his opposition to legalisation, it does not look as if Pérez Molina’s proposal will get far even in Guatemala’s immediate neighbourhood.
On 12 February, the US embassy in Guatemala issued a statement to the effect that the US opposes legalisation on the grounds that ‘the evidence shows our shared drug problem is a threat to public health and safety’ and that legalisation would not stop the drug gangs from continuing to traffic in people and guns, and from engaging in extortion and kidnapping.
Four days later, though, Pérez Molina held forth more extensively on the rationale behind his proposal in an interview granted to the Mexican television network ‘Televisa’. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that decriminalisation of drugs would have to be a strategy on which the entire region was in agreement. We’re talking about everyone from the south, where [drugs are] produced, through all the countries like Guatemala which are conduits, transit [countries], to Mexico and the United States [...] The analysis [of this option] should take place as soon as possible and in all seriousness’. He continued: ‘I believe that if that is not the path, we shall have to find another, but it will have to be a regional strategy in which we are all willing to make the same effort. President Calderón has made a huge effort [which] has not been matched by the US, which is his neighbour and the biggest market [for drugs]. This case proves that a country cannot be left to face on its own a phenomenon like this one, with transnational implications, in which cooperation is fundamental.’
On the same wavelength
On 13 February, Pérez Molina discovered that he was not alone. Colombia’s Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín, who is preparing to host the Summit of the Americas, said, ‘For certain, the war on drugs has not been as successful as it should have been, and this is an issue which the countries should discuss and work out what should be done about it.’ That same day Juan Manuel Corzo, president of Colombia’s senate, said that legalisation worldwide is ‘a good remedy’ which should be discussed in international forums such as the Summit of the Americas and the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos has been saying for some time — most recently in January at the Hay Festival in Cartagena — that legalisation should be considered. Like Pérez Molina, he believes no country could do it alone. ‘It is a solution acceptable to Colombia if the whole world adopts it.’ Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón has taken a similar position, urging the US to consider ‘market solutions’ (a euphemism for legalisation) to curb its drug consumption which is the main driver of the regional drugs industry.
A different real aim?
It has been suggested that Pérez Molina is well aware that regional (let alone global) agreement to legalise drugs is not attainable, at least not as urgently as he says the matter should be discussed. His real aim, this argument goes, is to persuade the US to increase antidrug aid and get the US congress to lift the ban on military aid, imposed in 1978, following the involvement of Guatemalan military in the killing of a US national. Top-level moves to lift that ban have been floated since early 2005, when then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared himself satisfied with Guatemalan efforts to reform its military, and announced that the move was imminent.
The man who coordinated Pérez Molina’s transition team, former vice-president Eduardo Stein Barillas (2004-08), says the President’s change of mind came from the realisation that, without the reduction of US demand, no amount of aid would suffice for Guatemala to combat the drugs trade effectively. Barillas described Guatemala as ‘a mere corridor of illegality’ and said that, while drug trafficking and use were marginal issues for the US, they were central issues for Guatemala and Central America as a whole. This said, Pérez Molina has made it clear that he does want more anti-drugs aid and the lifting of the ban on military aid.
The counter-arguments deployed by the US embassy, similar to those adopted by Funes, are debatable on two grounds. The first is that there is contradictory evidence about the effects of (partial) legalisation of drugs in different parts of the world. The second is twofold: almost all of the drug legalisation proposals are accompanied by calls for strong action against other organised crime activities, and Mexico’s experience suggests that there is no inevitable link between drug trafficking and other high-impact criminal activity.
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