Drug Control Begets Gun Control

The violence in Mexico is caused by prohibition, not firearms.

Jacob Sullum

During his April visit to Mexico, President Barack Obama suggested that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence associated with the illegal drug trade there. “The demand for these drugs in the United States is what’s helping keep these cartels in business,” he said. “This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States.”

Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it’s the war on drugs our government has drafted the rest of the world to fight. Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, Obama is using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.

“More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States,” Obama claimed, repeating a favorite factoid of politicians who believe American gun rights endanger our southern neighbor’s security. The claim has been parroted by many news organizations, including ABC, which used it in a 2008 story that suggested the sort of policy changes the number is meant to encourage. The story, which asked if “the Second Amendment [is] to blame” for “arming Mexican drug gangs,” quoted an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives who said, “It’s virtually impossible to buy a firearm in Mexico as a private citizen, so this country is where they come.”

But as Fox News and Factcheck.org have shown, the percentage cited by the president greatly exaggerates the share of guns used by Mexican criminals that were bought in the United States. Fox estimates it’s less than a fifth, while Factcheck.org says it may be more like a third.

If the guns used by Mexican drug traffickers do not mainly come from gun dealers in the U.S., where do they come from? Many of the weapons are stolen from the Mexican military and police, often by deserters; some are smuggled over the border from Guatemala; others come from China by way of Africa or Latin America. Russian gun traffickers do a booming business in Mexico.

Given these alternatives, making it harder for Americans to buy guns is not likely to stop Mexican gangsters from arming themselves. The persistence of the drug traffickers’ main business, which consists of transporting and selling products that are entirely illegal on both sides of the border, should give pause to those who think they can block the flow of guns to the cartels.

The futile effort to stop Americans from consuming politically incorrect intoxicants is the real source of the violence in Mexico, since prohibition creates a market with artificially high prices and hands it over to criminals. “Because of the enormous profit potential,” two senior federal law enforcement officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, “violence has always been associated with the Mexican drug trade as criminal syndicates seek to control this lucrative endeavor.”

The more the government cracks down on the black market it created, the more violence it fosters, since intensified enforcement provokes confrontations with the police and encourages fighting between rival gangs over market opportunities created by arrests or deaths. “If the drug effort were failing,” an unnamed “senior U.S. official” told The Wall Street Journal in February, “there would be no violence.”

Perhaps it is time to redefine failure. Three former Latin American presidents, including Mexico’s Ernesto Zedillo, recently noted that “we are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.” The attempt to achieve that impossible dream, they observed, has led to “a rise in organized crime,” “the corruption of public servants,” “the criminalization of politics and the politicization of crime,” and “a growth in unacceptable levels of drug-related violence.”

Instead of importing Mexico’s prohibitionist approach to guns, we should stop exporting our prohibitionist approach to drugs.

The Drug Lord Who Got Away

Mexican Capo Unleashes Mayhem on U.S. Border; The Making of a Legend

DAVID LUHNOW JOSE DE CORDOBA

BADIRAGUATO, Mexico -- As a child, Joaquín Guzmán Loera was so poor that he sold oranges to scrape together money for a meal. Since then, the 52-year-old has built a business empire and a personal fortune currently tied for number 701 on Forbes magazine's list of global titans.

He also has another ranking: Mexico's most wanted man.

Mr. Guzmán is the informal CEO of one of the world's biggest drug-trafficking organizations, the so-called Sinaloa cartel, named for its home state of Sinaloa. It smuggles a big part of the marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines that end up on American streets, and it has links to organized crime in 23 countries, according to Mexican and U.S. officials.

Mexico's Most-Wanted Man

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Procuraduria General de la Republica/Associated Press

Joaquin Guzman Loera, alias "El Chapo," in a photo released in May 1993

• More photos and interactive graphics

Mr. Guzmán's rivalries and turf wars have contributed to a drug-war death toll that stands at 11,000 in the past two and a half years, an average of 366 murders per month. His feuds stretch back more than two decades, leaving a trail of tombstones that act as milestones of the narcotics business south of the border.

Part Al Capone and part Jesse James, Mr. Guzmán has become a narco folk hero. He is feted on YouTube videos and by musicians who pen ballads, known as corridos, in his honor. He is known throughout Mexico simply as "El Chapo," Mexican slang for a short and stocky man.

Adding to his mystique, "El Chapo" has survived several assassination attempts by rival gangs, including a 1993 attack that killed a Roman Catholic cardinal. He also pulled off the greatest escape in modern Mexico: from a maximum security prison in 2001 -- in a laundry cart. Ever since, he has stayed a step ahead of Mexican and U.S. officials in a game of cat and mouse that is now in its ninth year.

Each year that Mexico is unable to catch "El Chapo" his legend grows -- a direct challenge to the authority of the Mexican state. Last year, he flouted authorities by hosting a party, complete with cases of whiskey and a norteño band, in a remote Mexican village to watch his 18-year-old girlfriend, Emma Coronel, win a local beauty contest. Months later, he married her.

With each year, too, questions grow about why Mexico, together with help from the U.S., can't find him -- despite a $5 million bounty offered by Washington (tips can be sent to chapotips@usdoj.gov) and a $2 million reward from the Mexican government.

U.S. and Mexican officials say Mr. Guzmán has used money and cruelty to build a well-disciplined organization that protects him. He is believed to be hiding in the towering Sierra Madre mountains that run through Sinaloa and bordering states, making the task of finding him a bit like finding Osama bin Laden in the forbidding mountains of Pakistan. Another factor: Mr. Guzmán is believed to have bribed enough Mexican law-enforcement and army officials to get timely tip-offs that allow him to avoid capture.

Culiacan, Sinoloa is the unofficial capital of Mexico's drug-trafficking business. Given the shortened lifespan for drug traffickers, shrines and mausoleums honoring fallen narcos have become an integral part of the city's landscape. David Luhnow and Jose de Cordoba reports from Mexico.

On at least three occasions during the past three years, Mexican security agencies have gotten leads on Mr. Guzmán, only to find he had vanished by the time they turned up, according to a U.S. official. Part of the problem is logistics. In the mountains, the capo's people can spot a caravan of military vehicles coming from miles away, giving him time to flee on anything from a helicopter to horseback.

Over the past few years, Mr. Guzmán has regularly visited a ranch in the remote mountains of Chihuahua state to check on his marijuana crop, according to a 2008 Mexican intelligence document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The ranch, owned by Mr. Guzmán's associates, has an airstrip and an underground tunnel for access. "On at least three visits, he has arrived with a caravan of at least six vehicles, under the protection of some authorities in the Mexican army," the document says.

Mexico's Defense Ministry said in an email that it was unaware of the allegations, but added that "various criminal organizations have used army clothing and vehicles as a cover for their activities."

In April, the archbishop in Durango, a state known for its scorpions, outlaws and rugged wilderness, declared that Mr. Guzmán was living there. "Just up the road from [the town of] Guanaceví, that's where he lives, but, well, we all seem to know this except for the authorities," Archbishop Héctor Gonzalez Martinez told local reporters.

'He Leads a Gang of Mafioso Gunmen'

Read the lyrics of songs in written in honor of "El Chapo."

Leaving His Mark

• Tracking Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán Loera Across Mexico

Four days later, the bullet-riddled bodies of two army lieutenants turned up near Guanaceví in the trunk of a car, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs. Next to the dead men was a note that read: "Neither the government nor the priests can handle 'El Chapo.'"

Purported sightings of Mr. Guzmán are common. In at least three Mexican cities, including Culiacán, Sinaloa's capital, people have reported seeing the capo turn up to eat at a local restaurant. They say he was preceded by bodyguards who confiscated diners' cell phones and didn't allow anyone to leave. As repayment for the patrons' brief loss of liberty, Mr. Guzmán was said to have paid everyone's tab.

An owner of one of the restaurants denies any such thing happened. But a Mexican intelligence report says that at least one of the restaurant stories is believed to be true.

Mexican officials say they don't want to get obsessed with capturing Mr. Guzmán at the expense of winning the broader war on drugs. "In the past, the strategy was just to capture top guys and ignore the operational guys. Now we are trying to weaken the structure of the cartels," says Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora.

This week alone, Mexican troops arrested José Parra, a leading gunman for the Sinaloa cartel who police say was helping Mr. Guzmán's outfit wage war against the Tijuana cartel, a fight that claimed 749 lives last year. And in Durango, soldiers said they killed three of Mr. Guzman's gunmen, including the alleged head of his organization in that city, and captured two others.

A U.S. official agrees that the capture of Mr. Guzmán himself would do little to slow the illegal drug market, but said it would be a major coup. "Catching him would be like the capture of Saddam Hussein after the Iraq war," says the U.S. official. "His capture didn't stop the insurgency, but it was a huge victory."

Some U.S. officials believe Mexico will catch Mr. Guzmán soon. They say his status as Mexico's most wanted man forces him to be constantly on the move, making it harder to conduct day-to-day business. They say he has aged rapidly in appearance, and draw parallels to the late Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was finally killed after years on the lam.

"Chapo Guzmán is a dead man walking, and he knows it," says Michael Braun, who retired eight months ago as the head of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "No one in his business lives to old age, or to enjoy his grandchildren."

But Mr. Guzmán has been underestimated before. In 2005, then Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said Mr. Guzmán was "no longer operating" in the drug business. In early 2007, the current attorney general, Mr. Medina Mora, wrote off Mr. Guzmán as a has-been in the drug business.

Associates

From left, Mr. Guzman's brother Arturo "The Chicken" Guzmán was murdered in prison by a rival drug cartel; longtime associate Héctor "El Guero" Palma was captured in 1995 and sent to prison in the U.S.; Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel is now considered Mr. Guzman's top associate in the cartel.

(Photos, left to right: Reuters, Associated Press, Zuma Press)

"I don't care where he is," he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. "He's like a washed-up soccer star."

A Central Figure

Since then, Mr. Guzmán has left little doubt he's a central figure in the drug war. Experts say it was his gang's push into northern Chihuahua state to try to wrest control of lucrative smuggling routes from rival gangs that has turned the place into a war zone. Some 3,300 people have been killed in the past 15 months, according to press reports. A separate feud between Mr. Guzmán and a former associate, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, led to a killing spree in Sinaloa that claimed more than 600 lives. Among the victims of the feud: Mr. Guzmán's 22-year-old son, Édgar, killed in a mall parking lot outside a Bridgestone tire-repair center in Culiacán.

Today, experts say Mr. Guzmán's group is battling other cartels in states as diverse as Chihuahua, Durango, Baja California, Guerrero, Sonora, Michoacan, and Quintana Roo.

Rivals

From left, brothers Benjamin, Francisco and Ramón Arellano Félix feuded over territory with Mr. Guzman's Sinaloa cartel for nearby two decades. They initially went to war to wrest control of the Mexicali border from Mr. Guzmán and Hector Palma.

(Photos: Associated Press)

In Culiacán, urban legends about El Chapo are daily bread. One says that a thief unwittingly robbed the capo's niece's car, and got his hands cut off by Mr. Guzmán's thugs as a lesson. In another, a former top state official reportedly fell for a local beauty and sent her an expensive gift. The gift was returned to his office along with a note from Mr. Guzmán saying the girl was his. "Send her another gift and I'll kill you," the note said.

Separating fact from fiction is difficult. Asking Mexican officials about El Chapo usually draws blank stares. "I don't know much about him," says Juan Millán, a former Sinaloa state governor. A local reporter who covers the drug trade for Noroeste, a leading Sinaloa newspaper, says he stays away from writing too much about the kingpin. "It isn't worth dying for."

According to the few people who have met him and are willing to talk publicly about it, Mr. Guzmán comes across as down-to-earth and intelligent, despite a third-grade education.

"He's a simple guy, a rancher type, who talks with a country accent, but he's very smart," says José Antonio Ortega, a lawyer who took Mr. Guzmán's deposition in prison shortly before he escaped in 2001. Scheduled to meet Mr. Guzmán at 10 a.m., Mr. Ortega says he was kept waiting at the prison until 10 p.m. He met the capo in a well-appointed prison cell that Mr. Guzmán used as his personal anteroom.

Mr. Guzmán apologized for the 12-hour delay, telling the lawyer that he had had a conjugal visit that day, and had then taken a nap and a shower in order to be ready to "receive [you] with all the courtesy you deserve to be received with," Mr. Ortega recalls.

Mexico's 'Golden Triangle'

One of four brothers, Mr. Guzmán was born in a Sinaloa mountain hamlet of some 40 houses known as La Tuna. La Tuna sits in Badiraguato County, which has the dubious distinction of being the birthplace of most of Mexico's famous drug lords. Badiraguato's location has a lot to do with it: It's the gateway to Mexico's "golden triangle," a remote, mountainous intersection of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua states where opium and marijuana have been grown for generations.

Little is known about Mr. Guzmán's early years. But it is believed that like many of his neighbors, Mr. Guzmán's late father was a gomero, a person who grew poppies for opium and heroin. The family was so poor that when Mr. Guzmán was a baby, his mother turned an old wooden crate used to pack tomatoes into a cradle for him, says a local official who has seen a Guzmán family photograph.

"When he talked about his childhood, he became suspended, as if it were something he wanted to forget," Zulema Hernández, a former policewoman who met Mr. Guzmán while she was serving a stint in prison for robbery, said in an interview with Mexican journalist Julio Scherer for his book on the country's prison system.

Ms. Hernández said Mr. Guzmán was driven by a fear of returning to poverty. "We both shared this dread of having to be poor," she told the journalist. Ms. Hernández went into the drug business herself after her release in 2004, Mexican police say, and was found dead in the trunk of an abandoned car in Mexico City last year. Police don't believe her death was linked to Mr. Guzmán.

Badiraguato, one of Mexico's 200 poorest counties, offers its young few jobs other than the drug trade. In the small town of Santiago de los Caballeros, near the birthplace of legendary drug lords Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, local peasants, or campesinos, haul freshly cut marijuana on their backs. The smell of marijuana wafts through the air.

The mountain folk of Badiraguato are widely seen as macho, close-mouthed people of tight-knit clans, given to intense loyalty, bloody vendettas and honor killings. "The Omerta of Badiraguato is much deeper than that of Sicily," says Luis Astorga, an expert on the drug trade at Mexico's UNAM University who was born and raised in Sinaloa.

Here, up-and-coming drug lords pick out girls as young as 13, returning to claim them -- usually with the girl and her families' consent -- when they reach 16 or 17. "It's not seen as a negative when a narco comes calling. He can offer a way of life," says a local official.

Many of the fathers and grandfathers of these young capos are buried by the side of Badiraguato's dusty roads or on hillsides with views of the crumbling adobe homes where they were born. They lie in grand marble mausoleums built like mock colonial cathedrals or Greek temples, far more elaborate than the humble houses below.

Judging by photographs or paintings of the dead displayed on the tombs, Badiraguato's native narcos often die young. "Better to live like a rey [king] for six years than as a guey [ox, or fool] for sixty," is a common saying here.

Trying to catch Mr. Guzmán in a place like Badiraguato is a tall order. The county covers 2,300 square miles -- half the size of Connecticut -- with more than 450 tiny towns sprinkled throughout inaccessible mountains. Badiraguato has just 38 cops and five police cars, all stationed in the county seat, leaving every other town with no police at all, just gunmen from the cartels.

Mr. Guzmán's hometown sits a five-hour drive from the county seat down a bumpy dirt road. From June to September, rains make the road nearly impassable. The town itself hasn't changed much, say local officials, except for a bunker-like compound Mr. Guzmán built for his mother and a small church he built for his mother's evangelical Christian group.

Wall Street Journal reporters tried to visit the town along with a local official, who wanted to show off the county's economic development efforts such as building eco-friendly log cabins for tourists. But after two days' delay, the official said a trip was too dangerous. "I was told a visit would be seen as inconvenient," he said. "[Chapo] is not eager for publicity."

Working as an Enforcer

As a young man in Badiraguato in the 1980s, Mr. Guzmán rose through the ranks to become a top lieutenant for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, another Badiraguato native and former cop who had become Mexico's top drug lord, according to analysts and former police officials. Known as El Padrino, or the Godfather, Mr. Félix Gallardo cobbled together a super-cartel dominated by fellow Sinaloans called "The Federation."

But the relative unity imposed by Mr. Félix Gallardo collapsed after his arrest in 1989. His empire, in particular the border crossings that were useful smuggling points, was divided up among his lieutenants. Mr. Guzmán and his close friend Héctor "El Guero" Palma got the border crossing at Mexicali, about 70 miles from Tijuana.

Mr. Guzmán began building an empire of his own. He pioneered the use of underground tunnels across the U.S.-Mexico border to ferry drugs. One such tunnel near San Diego had electricity, air vents and rails to transport the drugs, according to the DEA.

Mr. Guzmán operated an assembly line packing cocaine into chili pepper cans under the brand Comadre, exporting the drugs to the U.S. by rail, his former top accountant, Miguel Angel Segoviano, testified in 1996 at the trial of one of Mr. Guzmán's associates. In return for the drugs, Mr. Guzmán imported into Mexico millions of dollars packed into suitcases flown into the Mexico City airport, where bribed federal officials made sure there were no inspections.

A lot of the money "was given to people who worked for the attorney general's office," testified Mr. Segoviano, who became a DEA protected witness in 1993, and was referring to a period in the early 1990s when there was a quick succession of attorneys general.

All the while, Mr. Guzmán fought other traffickers, notably the Arellano Félix clan that controlled the border at Tijuana. Believed to be Mr. Félix Gallardo's nephews, the clan -- including brothers Ramón, Benjamin and Francisco -- initially went to war to drive Mr. Guzmán and Mr. Palma from the Mexicali border. The feud unleashed almost two decades of unremitting violence.

In one of the earliest incidents, Rafael Clavel, a Venezuelan believed to be working for the Arellano clan, seduced Mr. Palma's wife, Guadalupe Leija, according to former Mexican police officials. They say he took her to San Francisco, where she gave him access to some $7 million of Mr. Palma's money. Mr. Clavel cut off her head, and sent it to Mr. Palma's house in Culiacán in a cooler. Soon after, Mr. Clavel threw Mr. Palma's two small children off a bridge in Venezuela.

Arrested and charged for that crime in Venezuela, Mr. Clavel was murdered in prison. Ms. Leija and her two children are buried in a tomb in Culiacán, adorned with a fresco of the trio. Captured in 1995, Mr. Palma was later extradited to the U.S. and sits in prison for drug trafficking and conspiracy.

The beheading of Ms. Leija was Mexico's first linked to the drug trade. Twenty years later, decapitation has become common practice as the country's warring cartels try to outdo each other in barbarity.

"The killing of El Guero Palma's wife and children shattered the unwritten rules of drug trafficking," says Gregorio Ortega Molina, a Mexico City-based writer who has written a novel about Mexico's first generation of drug capos.

Messrs. Palma and Guzmán sought revenge. In 1992, gunmen for the two men kidnapped and killed nine people, including lawyers and nephews of Mr. Félix Gallardo, the imprisoned drug lord, according to Mexican police reports reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Seeking Revenge

The Mexican attorney general's office created a special unit to investigate the executions. But the unit was taken off the case after investigators said they discovered Mr. Guzmán had paid $10 million to the country's top police officials, including the then head of the federal police and the top anti-drug official, according to police reports and interviews with former police officials.

Mexico's Attorney General's Office said it had no comment about allegations of corruption in past administrations.

In early November 1992, Ramón Arellano and four gunmen riddled Mr. Guzmán's car with their AK-47s as he was driving down a main avenue in Guadalajara, then the hub of Mexico's drug trafficking industry.

Associated Press

José Alfonso Sánchez and Miguel Ángel Piedra Gallardo, were arrested this week in Durango.

Days later, El Chapo struck back. A commando team of about 40 gunmen posing as policemen attacked Christine's, a nightclub frequented by American tourists in the resort town of Puerto Vallarta. Five people died in the shootout, but Ramón and Javier Arellano, both in the bathroom when the gunfire started, escaped unharmed.

Six months later, Arellano gunmen killed seven people in a spectacular shootout in the parking lot of Guadalajara's airport where Mr. Guzmán had gone to catch a plane. Among the dead were two of Mr. Guzmán's bodyguards and five bystanders, including Juan Jesús Posadas -- the city's cardinal and one of Mexico's two top prelates.

Mr. Guzmán escaped by crawling and rolling out of the airport parking lot, eventually grabbing a taxi, he later told police. He took refuge in Mexico City, bought false passports and set out with a girlfriend and a business associate for Guatemala while "the problem at the Guadalajara airport was resolved."

The Cardinal's killing shocked Mexico, and forced the Mexican government to make a show of cracking down on drug traffickers. Just 16 days later, Mr. Guzmán was captured by Guatemalan soldiers and handed over to Mexico.

Interviewed by police after his arrest, Mr. Guzmán denied being involved in drug trafficking. He said that "all of my life I've been dedicated to agriculture." He said he was a farmer and businessman, buying and selling corn, sugar, canned goods, and seeds, and dabbling in cock fighting. His income, he said, was about "20,000 new pesos [$5,700] a month without any extras." A gun lover, he told police he favored the Russian-made AK-47 automatic rifle.

A Good Life in Prison

Mr. Guzmán was sentenced to 20 years for conspiracy, bribery, and drug trafficking. He was sent to Puente Grande prison, a maximum security facility, where he continued to run his empire. At the prison, he bribed nearly everyone, including the warden, who is now in jail himself for letting the escape occur under his watch.

Mr. Guzmán's money bought him privilege, according to police officials who investigated his escape. His cell had a television, and he sometimes chose his meals from a menu rather than be served with the rest of the inmates. He had a cellphone to continue directing his drug business, and met often with members of his organization. Other regular visitors were his wife, several lovers and prostitutes. He was given Viagra.

One of his lovers was Ms. Hernández, the policewoman in jail for robbery. After the pair became romantically involved for the first time, Mr. Guzmán sent her a bottle of whiskey and flowers, followed by dozens of love letters, dictated by Mr. Guzmán and written by someone else.

"Zulema, I adore you... [To think] that two people who didn't know each other could meet in a place like this," says one of the letters, as quoted in a book by journalist Mr. Scherer. All were signed with the initials JGL, for Joaquin Guzmán Loera.

El Chapo, together with his longtime associate Mr. Palma, terrorized the jail. Female members of the prison staff, ranging from nurses to cooks, were paid to have sex with the drug lords. One woman who refused was raped, according to documents from the Jalisco state human rights agency viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Prison guards, too, were offered money to cooperate with the capo. Those who refused were beaten with baseball bats by a group run by Mr. Guzmán known as "the batters," according to the documents, which include first-hand accounts from people working in the prison.

In January 2000, a prison guard named Felipe Leaños filed a complaint with the Jalisco state human rights commission about the abuses at the jail. In the following months, he persuaded four other guards to step forward. The state agency, run by a lawyer named Guadalupe Morfín, tried to get federal officials to intervene in the jail during the course of the year. Mr. Leaños disappeared in May 2007 and is presumed to have been murdered by Mr. Guzmán's men. Ms. Morfín received death threats and had a government-assigned security detail until last year.

Mexico's official story of Mr. Guzmán's escape goes like this: He befriended a prison maintenance worker named Javier Camberos. Mr. Guzmán then told the guards who were on his payroll that Mr. Camberos was going to be smuggling some gold out of the prison in a laundry cart, and to not search the cart. But on the night of Jan. 19, 2001, Mr. Guzmán hid in the cart as Mr. Camberos wheeled him out of the prison. Mr. Camberos is now in prison for helping the escape.

Many Mexicans believe prison officials essentially let Mr. Guzmán walk out. It is difficult to know what really happened, partly because the prison's camera surveillance tapes of that night were erased by prison officials. Jorge Tello, one of Mexico's top security officials at the time, visited the prison on the day of the escape, after having heard rumors the capo might flee. Despite the visit, Mr. Guzmán still managed to escape.

Mr. Tello, who didn't respond to requests for comment, is now President Felipe Calderon's top adviser in the war on drugs.

Drug Control Begets Gun Control

The violence in Mexico is caused by prohibition, not firearms.

Jacob Sullum

During his visit to Mexico last week, President Obama suggested that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence associated with the illegal drug trade there. "The demand for these drugs in the United States is what's helping keep these cartels in business," he said. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States."

Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it's the war on drugs our government insists the rest of the world help it fight. Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, the Obama administration is using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.

"More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States," Obama claimed last week, repeating a favorite factoid of politicians who believe American gun rights endanger our southern neighbor's security. The claim has been parroted by many news organizations, including ABC, which used it in a 2008 story that suggested the sort of policy changes the number is meant to encourage. The story, which asked if "the Second Amendment [is] to blame" for "arming Mexican drug gangs," quoted a federal official who said, "It's virtually impossible to buy a firearm in Mexico as a private citizen, so this country is where they come."

But as Fox News and Factcheck.org have shown, the percentage cited by the president greatly exaggerates the share of guns used by Mexican criminals that were bought in the United States. Fox estimates it's less than a fifth, while Factcheck.org says it may be more like a third.

If the guns used by Mexican drug traffickers do not mainly come from gun dealers in the U.S., where do they come from? Many of the weapons are stolen from the Mexican military and police, often by deserters; some are smuggled over the border from Guatemala; others come from China by way of Africa or Latin America. Russian gun traffickers do a booming business in Mexico.

Given these alternatives, making it harder for Americans to buy guns, in the hope of preventing straw buyers from supplying weapons to smugglers, is not likely to stop Mexican gangsters from arming themselves. The persistence of the drug traffickers' main business, which consists of transporting and selling products that are entirely illegal on both sides of the border, should give pause to those who think they can block the flow of guns to the cartels.

The futile effort to stop Americans from consuming politically incorrect intoxicants is the real source of the violence in Mexico, since prohibition creates a market with artificially high prices and hands it over to criminals. "Because of the enormous profit potential," two senior federal law enforcement officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, "violence has always been associated with the Mexican drug trade as criminal syndicates seek to control this lucrative endeavor."

The more the government cracks down on the black market it created, the more violence it fosters, since intensified enforcement provokes confrontations with the police and encourages fighting between rival gangs over market opportunities created by arrests or deaths. "If the drug effort were failing," an unnamed "senior U.S. official" told The Wall Street Journal in February, "there would be no violence."

Perhaps it is time to redefine failure. Three former Latin American presidents, including Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo, recently noted that "we are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs." The attempt to achieve that impossible dream, they observed, has led to "a rise in organized crime," "the corruption of public servants," "the criminalization of politics and the politicization of crime," and "a growth in unacceptable levels of drug-related violence."

Instead of importing Mexico's prohibitionist approach to guns, we should stop exporting our prohibitionist approach to drugs.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Change and Hope on Drug Policy?

by Gene Healy

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama Justice Department would end federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. That's a welcome change from the Bush administration's policy, which violated constitutional principle and common decency.

Bush claimed to respect federalism, but his Justice Department repeatedly brought the heavy hand of the law down on desperately sick people who, with the approval of their state governments, used marijuana to ease their pain.

Calling off the raids was the right thing to do, and—for a liberal president vulnerable to the charge of being "soft on drugs"—a politically courageous move ("the Audacity of Dope"?).

Thousands of Americans use marijuana to treat glaucoma, cancer, and other diseases. The federal government has no business coming between them and their doctors. Cancer survivor Richard Brookhiser made that clear when he testified before Congress in 2006.

We're still far away from calling an end to our foolish and destructive War on Drugs, but the debate finally seems to be headed in the right direction.

Brookhiser, a staid senior editor at National Review, hardly resembles the stereotypical pot smoker. But in 1992, he contracted a particularly virulent form of cancer and found that only marijuana would allow him to hold down enough food to survive the treatment.

"God forbid that anyone in this room should ever need chemotherapy," Brookhiser testified, but if you do, "Let me assure you that whatever you think now, or however you vote, if that moment comes to you, you will turn to marijuana. Extend that liberty to your fellow citizens."

In recent years, 13 states have done just that. After California passed the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, the Clinton administration commissioned a comprehensive study on medical marijuana.

That report came out 10 years ago this month, and it indicated that the drug had shown promise as a treatment "for symptoms such as pain relief, control of nausea, and vomiting." The scandal-scarred Clinton worried that his opponents might portray his administration as a klatch of licentious Baby Boomers, so he wasn't entirely happy with the report's result. His administration sued medical marijuana dispensaries, and tried to revoke the licenses of doctors who prescribed the drug.

President Bush was more aggressive still. In the case of Gonzales v. Raich, the Bush Justice Department insisted that, regardless of what California's voters had decided, it had every right to deny use of the drug to a woman with an inoperable brain tumor.

In the process, the Bush team undermined the core constitutional principle that federal power is limited. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his Raich dissent, "If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."

Holder made clear last Wednesday that the Obama administration won't pursue cases like Raich. That's good news, but the new policy doesn't go nearly far enough. There's no good reason to wage war against people who use marijuana as medicine, but neither is there any reason to prosecute recreational users. It's a disgrace that, in the 21st century, in a free country, we continue to send people to prison for using or selling the drug.

Survey data tell us that some 40 percent of Americans have tried pot. Any policy that suggests that 100 million Americans are criminals needs rethinking. Among them are a host of political elites who support the drug war, at least tacitly: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama himself.

Obama's no legalizer. But his early moves—including the appointment of a moderate as drug czar—suggest that he's much less hawkish than his predecessors. There are even some signs of new thinking on Capitol Hill.

Last year Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX) cosponsored a bill to decriminalize possession of marijuana. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) recently took to the pages of the Washington Post to lament the fact that the United States locks up more people per capita than any other country in the world—many of them nonviolent drug offenders.

We're still far away from calling an end to our foolish and destructive War on Drugs, but the debate finally seems to be headed in the right direction. The prospects for drug policy reform look better than they have for decades.

Central America: An Emerging Role in the Drug Trade

By Stephen Meiners

As part of STRATFOR’s coverage of the security situation in Mexico, we have observed some significant developments in the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere over the past year. While the United States remains the top destination for South American-produced cocaine, and Mexico continues to serve as the primary transshipment route, the path between Mexico and South America is clearly changing.

These changes have been most pronounced in Central America, where Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have begun to rely increasingly on land-based smuggling routes as several countries in the region have stepped up monitoring and interdiction of airborne and maritime shipments transiting from South America to Mexico.

The results of these changes have been extraordinary. According to a December 2008 report from the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center, less than 1 percent of the estimated 600 to 700 tons of cocaine that departed South America for the United States in 2007 transited Central America. The rest, for the most part, passed through the Caribbean Sea or Pacific Ocean en route to Mexico. Since then, land-based shipment of cocaine through Central America appears to have ballooned. Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala Stephen McFarland estimated in an interview with a Guatemalan newspaper that cocaine now passes through that country at a rate of approximately 300 to 400 tons per year.

Notwithstanding the difficulty associated with estimating drug flows, it is clear that Central America has evolved into a significant transshipment route for drugs, and that the changes have taken place rapidly. These developments warrant a closer look at the mechanics of the drug trade in the region, the actors involved, and the implications for Central American governments — for whom drug-trafficking organizations represent a much more daunting threat than they do for Mexico.

Some Background

While the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere is multifaceted, it fundamentally revolves around the trafficking of South American-produced cocaine to the United States, the world’s largest market for the drug. Drug shipment routes between Peru and Colombia — where the vast majority of cocaine is cultivated and produced — and the United States historically have been flexible, evolving in response to interdiction efforts or changing markets. For example, Colombian drug traffickers used to control the bulk of the cocaine trade by managing shipping routes along the Caribbean smuggling corridor directly to the United States. By the 1990s, however, as the United States and other countries began to focus surveillance and interdiction efforts along this corridor, the flow of U.S.-bound drugs was forced into Mexico, which remains the main transshipment route for the overwhelming majority of cocaine entering the United States.

A similar situation has been occurring over the last two years in Central America. From the 1990s until as recently as 2007, traffickers in Mexico received multiton shipments of cocaine from South America. There was ample evidence of this, including occasional discoveries of bulk cocaine on everything from small propeller aircraft and Gulfstream jets to self-propelled semisubmersible vessels, fishing trawlers and cargo ships. These smuggling platforms had sufficient range and capacity to bypass Central America and ship bulk drugs directly to Mexico.

By early 2008, however, a series of developments in several Central American countries suggested that drug-trafficking organizations — Mexican cartels in particular — were increasingly trying to establish new land-based smuggling routes through Central America for cocaine shipments from South America to Mexico and eventual delivery to the United States. While small quantities of drugs had certainly transited the region in the past, the routes used presented an assortment of risks. A combination of poorly maintained highways, frequent border crossings, volatile security conditions and unpredictable local criminal organizations apparently presented such great logistical challenges that traffickers opted to send the majority of their shipments through well-established maritime and airborne platforms.

In response to this relatively unchecked international smuggling, several countries in the region began taking steps to increase the monitoring and interdiction of such shipments. The Colombian government, for one, stepped up monitoring of aircraft operating in its airspace. The Mexican government installed updated radar systems and reduced the number of airports authorized to receive flights originating in Central and South America. The Colombian government estimates that the aerial trafficking of cocaine from Colombia has decreased by as much as 90 percent since 2003.

Maritime trafficking also appears to have suffered over the past few years, most likely due to greater cooperation and information-sharing between Mexico and the United States. The United States has an immense capability to collect maritime technical intelligence, and an increasing degree of awareness regarding drug trafficking at sea. Two examples of this progress include the Mexican navy’s July 2008 capture — acting on intelligence provided by the United States — of a self-propelled semisubmersible vessel loaded with more than five tons of cocaine, and the U.S. Coast Guard’s February 2009 interdiction of a Mexico-flagged fishing boat loaded with some seven tons of cocaine about 700 miles off Mexico’s Pacific coast. Presumably as a result of successes such as these, the Mexican navy reported in 2008 that maritime trafficking had decreased by an estimated 60 percent over the last two years.

While it is impossible to independently corroborate the Mexican and Colombian governments’ estimates on the degree to which air- and seaborne drug trafficking has decreased over the last few years, developments in Central America over the past year certainly support their assessments. In particular, STRATFOR has observed that in order to make up for losses in maritime and aerial trafficking, land-based smuggling routes are increasingly being used — not by Colombian cocaine producers or even Central American drug gangs, but by the now much more powerful Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

Mechanics of Central American Drug Trafficking

It is important to clarify that what we are defining as land-based trafficking is not limited to overland smuggling. The methods associated with land-based trafficking can be divided into three categories: overland smuggling, littoral maritime trafficking and short-range aerial trafficking.

Click to view map

The most straightforward of these is simple overland smuggling. As a series of investigations in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua demonstrated last year, overland smuggling operations use a wide variety of approaches. In one case, authorities pieced together a portion of a route being used by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel in which small quantities of drugs entered Costa Rica from Panama via the international point of entry on the Pan-American Highway. The cocaine was often held for several days in a storage facility before being loaded onto another vehicle to be driven across the country on major highways. Upon approaching the Nicaraguan border, however, the traffickers opted to avoid the official port of entry and instead transferred the shipments into Nicaragua on foot or on horseback along a remote part of the border. Once across, the shipments were taken to the shores of the large inland Lake Nicaragua, where they were transferred onto boats to be taken north, at which point they would be loaded onto vehicles to be driven toward the Honduran border. In one case in Nicaragua, authorities uncovered another Sinaloa-linked route that passed through Managua and is believed to have followed the Pan-American Highway through Honduras and into El Salvador.

The second method associated with land-based trafficking involves littoral maritime operations. Whereas long-range maritime trafficking involves large cargo ships and self-propelled semisubmersible vessels capable of delivering multiton shipments of drugs from South America to Mexico without having to refuel, littoral trafficking tends to involve so-called “go-fast boats” that are used to carry smaller quantities of drugs at higher speeds over shorter distances. This method is useful to traffickers who might want to avoid, for whatever reason, a certain stretch of highway or perhaps even an entire country. According to Nicaraguan military officials, several go-fast boats are suspected of operating off the country’s coasts and of sailing outside Nicaraguan territorial waters in order to avoid authorities. While it is possible to make the entire trip from South America to Mexico using only this method — and making frequent refueling stops — it is believed that littoral trafficking is often combined with an overland network.

The third method associated with land-based drug smuggling involves short-range aerial operations. In these cases, clandestine planes make stops in Central America before either transferring their cargo to a land vehicle or making another short flight toward Mexico. Over the past year, several small planes loaded with drugs or cash have crashed or been seized in Honduras, Mexico and other countries in the region. In addition, authorities in Guatemala have uncovered several clandestine airstrips allegedly managed by the Mexican drug-trafficking organization Los Zetas. These examples suggest that even as overall aerial trafficking appears to have decreased dramatically, the practice continues in Central America. Indeed, there is little reason to expect that it would not continue, considering that many countries in the region lack the resources to adequately monitor their airspace.

While each of these three methods involves a different approach to drug smuggling, the methods share two important similarities. For one, the vehicles involved — be they speedboats, small aircraft or private vehicles — have limited cargo capacities, which means land-based trafficking generally involves cocaine shipments in quantities no greater than a few hundred pounds. While smaller quantities in more frequent shipments mean more handling, they also mean that less product is lost if a shipment is seized. More importantly, each of these land-based methods requires that a drug-trafficking organization maintain a presence inside Central America.

Actors Involved

There are a variety of drug-trafficking organizations operating inside Central America. In addition to some of the notorious local gangs — such as Calle 18 and MS-13 — there is also a healthy presence of foreign criminal organizations. Colombian drug traffickers, for example, historically have been no strangers to the region. However, as STRATFOR has observed over the past year, it is the more powerful Mexico-based drug-trafficking organizations that appear to be overwhelmingly responsible for the recent upticks in land-based narcotics smuggling in Central America.

Based on reports of arrests and drug seizures in the region over the past year, it is clear that no single Mexican cartel maintains a monopoly on land-based drug trafficking in Central America. Los Zetas, for example, are extremely active in several parts of Guatemala, where they engage in overland and short-range aerial trafficking. The Sinaloa cartel, which STRATFOR believes is the most capable Mexican trafficker of cocaine, has been detected operating a fairly extensive overland smuggling route from Panama to El Salvador. Some intelligence gaps remain regarding, for example, the precise route Sinaloa follows from El Salvador to Mexico or the route Los Zetas use between South America and Guatemala. It is certainly possible that these two Mexican cartels do not rely exclusively on any single route or method in the region. But the logistical challenges associated with establishing even one route across Central America make it likely that existing routes are maintained even after they have been detected — and are defended if necessary.

The operators of the Mexican cartel-managed routes also do not match a single profile. At times, Mexican cartel members themselves have been found to be operating in Central America. More common is the involvement of locals in various phases of smuggling operations. Nicaraguan and Salvadoran nationals, for example, have been arrested in northwestern Nicaragua for operating a Sinaloa-linked overland and littoral route into El Salvador. Authorities in Costa Rica have arrested Costa Rican nationals for their involvement in overland routes through that country. In that case, a related investigation in Panama led to the arrest of several Mexican nationals who reportedly had recently arrived in the area to more closely monitor the operation of their route.

One exception is Guatemala, where Mexican drug traffickers appear to operate much more extensively than in any other Central American country; this may be due, at least in part, to the relationship between Los Zetas and the Guatemalan Kaibiles. Beyond the apparently more-established Zeta smuggling operations there, several recent drug seizures — including an enormous 1,800-acre poppy plantation attributed to the Sinaloa cartel — make it clear that other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are currently active inside Guatemala. Sinaloa was first suspected of increasing its presence in Guatemala in early 2008, when rumors surfaced that the cartel was attempting to recruit local criminal organizations to support its own drug-trafficking operations there. The ongoing Zeta-Sinaloa rivalry at that time triggered a series of deadly firefights in Guatemala, prompting fears that the bloody turf battles that had led to record levels of organized crime-related violence inside Mexico would extend into Central America.

Security Implications in Central America

Despite these concerns and the growing presence of Mexican traffickers in the region, there apparently have been no significant spikes in drug-related violence in Central America outside of Guatemala. Several factors may explain this relative lack of violence.

First, most governments in Central America have yet to launch large-scale counternarcotics campaigns. The seizures and arrests that have been reported so far have generally been the result of regular police work, as opposed to broad changes in policies or a significant commitment of resources to address the problem. More significantly, though, the quantities of drugs seized probably amount to just a drop in the bucket compared to the quantity of drugs that moves through the region on a regular basis. Because seizures have remained low, Mexican drug traffickers have yet to launch any significant reprisal attacks against government officials in any country outside Guatemala. In that country, even the president has received death threats and had his office bugged, allegedly by drug traffickers.

The second factor, which is related to the first, is that drug traffickers operating in Central America likely rely more heavily on bribes than on intimidation to secure the transit of drug shipments. This assessment follows from the region’s reputation for official corruption (especially in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama and Guatemala) and the economic disadvantage that many of these countries face compared to the Mexican cartels. For example, the gross domestic product of Honduras is $12 billion, while the estimated share of the drug trade controlled by the Mexican cartels is estimated to be $20 billion.

Finally, Mexican cartels currently have their hands full at home. Although Central America has undeniably become more strategically important for the flow of drugs from South America, the cartels in Mexico have simultaneously been engaged in a two-front war at home against the Mexican government and against rival criminal organizations. As long as this war continues at its present level, Mexican drug traffickers may be reluctant to divert significant resources too far from their home turf, which remains crucial in delivering drug shipments to the United States.

Looking Ahead

That said, there is no guarantee that Central America will continue to escape the wrath of Mexican drug traffickers. On the contrary, there is reason for concern that the region will increasingly become a battleground in the Mexican cartel war.

For one thing, the Merida Initiative, a U.S. anti-drug aid program that will put some $300 million into Mexico and about $100 million into Central America over the next year, could be perceived as a meaningful threat to drug-trafficking operations. If Central American governments choose to step up counternarcotics operations, either at the request of the United States or in order to qualify for more Merida money, they risk disrupting existing smuggling operations to the extent that cartels begin to retaliate.

Also, even though Mexican cartels may be reluctant to divert major resources from the more important war at home, it is important to recognize that a large-scale reassignment of cartel operatives or resources from Mexico to Central America might not be necessary to have a significant impact on the security situation in any given Central American country. Given the rampant corruption and relatively poor protective security programs in place for political leaders in the region, very few cartel operatives or resources would actually be needed if a Mexican drug-trafficking organization chose to, for example, conduct an assassination campaign against high-ranking government officials.

Governments are not the only potential threat to drug traffickers in Central America. The increases in land-based drug trafficking in the region could trigger intensified competition over trafficking routes. Such turf battles could occur either among the Mexican cartels or between the Mexicans and local criminal organizations, which might try to muscle their way into the lucrative smuggling routes or attempt to grab a larger percentage of the profits.

If the example of Mexico is any guide, the drug-related violence that could be unleashed in Central America would easily overwhelm the capabilities of the region’s governments. Last year, STRATFOR considered the possibility of Mexico becoming a failed state. But Mexico is a far stronger and richer country than its fragile southern neighbors, who simply do not have the resources to deal with the cartels on their own.

Mexican Drug Cartels