Weekly Report - 24 June 2010 (WR-10-25)

The UN's Office for Drugs and Crime (Unodc) argued that the decision by President Felipe Calderón to take on the drug gangs was responsible for the upsurge in violence in Mexico but that this was a necessary step, as it had been in Colombia, to defeating the gangs which were threatening the state. Jorge Castañeda, foreign minister during the first part of President Vicente Fox's administration (2000 to 2006), has a slightly different take: he argued that the government could not beat the gangs without a Plan Colombia.