Prohibition and the War on Drugs policies are a total and undeniable failure and even to think that the problem will disappear by gunning down the drug cartels is not only wishful thinking, is just blatant stupidity (see the balloon effect). But what you do when a criminal organization manages to cumulate almost unimaginable power (economically and politically speaking) and makes of corruption and violence the means through which that power is kept and feed? What do you do when these organizations manage to interfere, manipulate and determine who should be elected to all sorts of public bodies? And let’s be clear about it, it is not as if the drug cartels were a marginal criminal organization, a mere nuisance, an anecdotal punctuation in the daily lives of millions of citizens all over Latin American countries. Just the opposite.
One may debate about the optimal strategy to rein on the drug cartels power and whether declaring all out war on them is the best tactic, but are we to believe, really, that as some commentators around the corner in the blogsphere that the best strategy is do nothing and left the drug cartels alone? Should we just try to appease these bloody thirsty organization, and every other criminal organization that blackmail us with unimaginable atrocities, and say: you do your business but be discrete: hear nothing, see nothing!
One has to be totally disingenuous or blatantly ignorant about the recent history of Latin America to believe that doing nothing is just right. One may ignore the corrupting and destabilizing force drug cartels represent at our peril.
The only way to cut drug cartels power for good, to effectively stop their violence and corrosive influence is to put an end to Prohibition. A regime sponsored, sustained and imposed by the U.S.A. As long as the atrocious price paid for U.S.A. policies remains in foreign soil, as long as they do their business discreetly, we hear nothing, see nothing!
