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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Monday, December 19, 2011

DRUG WAR - People turn to the military

Otto Pérez Molina, a Guatemalan president-elect Otto Perez Molina, a former general, says he will
use the military to crack down on drugs.

Drug money flows to nearly every party and candidate, so no matter who wins they will owe a debt to the cartels



The insane war on drugs is militarizing society in Guatemala as well as Mexico and the United States.  Civilian institutions get weaker while the military-police segments of society get stronger.  Civil liberties slowly vanish in a desperate attempt to bring law and order.

The idea of re-legalizing drugs in some form to eliminate the drug war is never addressed.

Local drug gangs and Mexican drug cartels run fever-wild, capturing territory and corrupting institutions so that Guatemala will remain a safe haven for cocaine, guns, money laundering and new recruits.

“It’s even scarier now than during the war,” said Josefina Molina, 52, making tamales a few steps from where a neighbor was killed two days earlier. “The danger used to be in the mountains — now it’s everywhere.”

Violence attributed to Mexican cartels, especially the Zetas, also keeps spreading: a decapitated head dumped in front of Congress last year; a massacre of 27 farm workers near the Mexican border in May, in which a severed arm was used to write a message in blood; and then the murder and dismemberment of the case’s prosecutor two months later, reports the New York Times.

Army deployed in Guatemala drug war


Guatemala’s presidential election could represent a turning point. The President-elect Otto Pérez Molina called for a stronger, crime-fighting military, borrowing heavily from the Mexican model of attacking the drug cartels head-on, even though that strategy has claimed more than 40,000 lives without yielding peace.

“For many, there is a sense that the military is going to put things in order,” said Raquel Zelaya, executive director of Así Es, a research group. And yet, she and others added, what if that faith is misplaced?

“The notion that the military is the ‘deus ex machina’ that’s going to resolve everything” does not recognize that the military “may also be part of the problem,” said Cynthia Arnson, an expert at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Drug money has also poisoned politics. Several senior members of the national police, including the chief and deputy chief, were purged in 2009 for their involvement in drug trafficking.

Packages of cocaine are lined up before they are loaded onto an airplane in San Andre.  Guatemalan anti-narcotics police seized 1.2 tons of cocaine on it's way to Mexico.  ( REUTERS)

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