Thousands of protestors have poured into the streets of Mexico, expressing their grief and outrage after 43 college students went missing. While the incident itself is shocking, it merely exemplifies the widespread corruption and violence that has plagued Mexico as a consequence of the United States’ War on Drugs; for example, the Washington Post reports that 20,000 people are officially counted as missing in Mexico.
On Sept. 26, over 100 students from Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa stole three public buses and drove to Iguala in order to protest the unfair hiring procedures of teachers. The plan was to disrupt a conference where the wife of Iguala’s mayor was speaking; however, the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, directed municipal police to prevent the students from disrupting his wife’s speech. Police then opened fire on the students, killing six and leaving 25 injured.
Police rounded up 43 other students and then handed them over to members of a vicious drug gang known as Guerros Unidos. Thousands of Mexican soldiers scoured the area searching for the lost boys, uncovering a litany of mass graves. And last week, Mexico’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, announced that charred corpses were found at a dump and in a river in Guerrero; it is widely believed that the missing 43 students were among these bodies.
As news spread of the kidnappings, protests spread through Mexico like wildfire. The mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, were arrested on Nov. 6 and are suspected of masterminding the kidnappings of the students and being complicit in their executions.
The incident has become one of the biggest scandals under Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s time in office; with thousands of protestors wreaking havoc in the streets and pleading for justice, Nieto must tread carefully, and hopefully, he will pursue the rampant corruption within his midst.
While there are many factors that contribute to the widespread corruption and violence within Mexico, United States drug policy is chiefly among them. By keeping recreational drugs such as heroin, marijuana and cocaine illegal, cartels and drug gangs offset the risk of interdiction and prosecution by inflating the prices, thus giving rise to the massive profit incentive that fuels their murderous tendencies.
While difficult to measure, according to Colleen W. Cook in a 2007 report for the Congressional Research Service, cartels earn an estimated $49.7 billion annually from the sale of illegal drugs.
These funds allow the payoff of local and regional politicians within Mexico to allow organized crime to take place. People who speak out against such corruption can face murder by the cartels and/or gangs associated with them.
Despite the US giving $1.6 Billion to Mexico and various Central American countries via the Merida Initiative to fight the sale of drugs, efforts have been an utter failure. Over 100,000 casualties have been related to the War on Drugs within Mexico since 2006, and according to Transparency International, Mexico has consistently scored as low as most sub-Saharan African countries on the Corruption Perception Index over the past decade.
The best way to fight corruption and stop cartel influence over Mexican politics would be to decriminalize and/or legalize recreation drugs within the United States.
Many states lately have relaxing laws surrounding the possession of drugs, and in some cases, states have outright legalized marijuana; as a result, cartels have lost control of the marijuana trade. A Washington Post article from April 6 titled “Tracing the U.S. heroin surge back south of the border as Mexican cannabis output falls” reports that the price of marijuana dropped to a quarter of its street value within the last five years.
This has led to the closure of many marijuana farms in the Mexican State of Sinaloa that sell to the cartels. If such policies can be applied to other drugs like cocaine and heroin, then cartels will lose a lot of capital and power; consequently future acts of violence, such as the current crisis in Iguala, might happen less and less frequently.