Latin American push for drug legalization

President of Columbia favors drug legalization.
An indigenous Bolivian woman drops petals on the head of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos at a meeting associated with the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia.

The Failed Drug War
"We cannot eradicate global drug markets, but we can certainly regulate them as we have done with alcohol and tobacco markets."   - - - Otto Perez Molina, President of Guatemala

• Over 20,000 people have been murdered in Central American drug wars.
• 48,000 drug war deaths in Mexico.

Comrade President Obama will get an earful from Latin American leaders at a regional summit in Colombia this weekend. Nations in Central and South America leaders are pushing to legalize marijuana and other drugs in a bid to stem rampant trafficking and end violence.

Obama, who opposes decriminalization, is expected to face a rocky reception in Columbia. The American demand for illegal drugs has caused fierce bloodshed, plus political and economic turmoil, across much of the region.

Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos, wants the 33 leaders at the Summit of the Americas to consider whether the solution should include regulating marijuana, and perhaps cocaine, the way alcohol and tobacco are. Other member states also are calling for that dialogue despite the political discomfort it may cause Obama back home says the L.A. Times.

The call for change comes from front-line veterans of the drug wars, including Colombia. Santos says he has the moral authority to seek new solutions because his country's citizens and security forces have spilled so much blood fighting drug traffickers.
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Also leading the charge is Guatemala's President, Otto Perez Molina. After a pre-summit meeting with leaders of Costa Rica and Panama, he called for a "realistic and responsible" discussion of decriminalization in Cartagena.

"We cannot eradicate global drug markets, but we can certainly regulate them as we have done with alcohol and tobacco markets," he wrote in the British newspaper the Observer on April 7.
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Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina said the US-led regional war against drug trafficking is being lost and requires a change in strategy, including decriminalizing drug consumption.
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"The war we have waged over the past 40 years has not yielded results. It's a war which, to speak frankly, we are losing," he said in an interview with AFP on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia.

"Meanwhile, the black market continues to exist and dollars and weapons continued to flow in from the United States. The way we are fight this war, we cannot win," he added.
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Marijuana use in America has increased by 15% since 2006, but cocaine use has dropped by 40% in that time, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Experts say the global market for cocaine is unchanged because use in Europe more than doubled in the last decade.

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(AFP News)
(Los Angeles Times) 

"The war we have waged over the past 40 years has not yielded results."
Otto Perez Molina, President of Guatemala