Experts are drawing comparisons between the drug fuelled violence raging in Latin America and the potential for similar developments in certain countries in Africa.
Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn the US government for soaring drug violence in their countries, blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.
Mexican president Calderon stated in September at a public dinner held in his honour by the Council of the Americas in Washington.
"We are next to the largest illegal drug market in the world, we are living in the same building, and our neighbour is the largest consumer of drugs in the world and everyone wants to sell him drugs through our door and our window."
But the Latin American leaders need to tread cautiously because of their economic, political and military relationships with the United States, it is also important to see the US war on drugs as an extension of its foreign policy, particularly in the military arena.
A law enforcement war on drugs has proved challenging to defeat a dynamic global commodities market, the illegal drug market is very much the same as alcohol, food, etc.
As long as there is demand, there will be a supply. Attempts at interdiction just moves the drug trafficking around, wreaking havoc in its wake.
We are being told that the African continent is transforming into the newest centre in the international cocaine and heroin trade and that the international community and African governments need to act swiftly to contain the threat. West Africa is fast developing as a gateway for a cocaine trade pushing into Europe, thanks to a hollowed Euro and evolving U.S. drug interdiction in the Caribbean and Latin America.
The comparisons between West Africa and Central America are striking both find themselves geographically between the large drug consumption markets (Europe & U.S.) and the largest drug producers. Add into the mix political instability, poorly funded law enforcement agencies, low illiterate rates, no social welfare, endemic corruption and porous borders and you have cocktail for extreme social upheaval..
Another interesting development in this underground, trans-Atlantic trade route is the transformation of West African markets from delivery and transit to production-oriented. This was one of the concerns noted by the UNODC, “In the past few months several laboratories used to produce cocaine hydrochloride (HCL), the finished product, from cocaine paste have been discovered in Guinea-Bissau's neighbour Guinea, along with machines that can be used to make ecstasy pills.”
If drug traffickers are indeed exploiting cheaper labour to produce finished drugs in West Africa instead of Europe or elsewhere, profitability increases along with risk. Colombian, Venezuelan Brazilian and Mexican traffickers are feeling sufficiently confident in their ability to move product through West Africa and upping the size of their loads based on that confidence. In testing new routes they always start small, to minimize losses if the route isn't working. Once they are confident they flood the zone. It seems that this is the first indication that the West Africa zone is now being flooded.
Kind as the past decade has been to West Africa’s business people – the region includes some of the world’s faster-growing economies – it’s been even kinder to its people whose business is drugs. European consumption of South America’s cocaine doubled in the decade, and West Africa juts outward into a particularly profitable stretch between the two. The region, the size of the US, hides impenetrable wetlands and vast Saharan tracts, whose police often earn, in the case of Guinea-Bissau, around $100 a month. The country’s border agents don’t have uniforms, many police stations don’t have bicycles, cars, or gas, and the coast guard doesn't have a ship.
Closing the trafficking routes through the Caribbean by the United States coastguard just drove traffickers to find alternative routes like Africa. It is no coincidence that since Colombia has improved, Mexico’s drug situation has declined. And again, no big coincidence that since Felipe Calderón’s government started to fight back against the drug gangs in 2006, levels of drug related violence have increased in Guatemala and other Central American countries.
Since Colombian cartels first docked in Guinea-Bissau in the early 2000s, the tiny West African country was supposed to be the crossroads – just the crossroads – of Africa’s booming drug trade, a four-continent-crossing caravan of cocaine, heroin, and war weaponry. More and more, however, this country’s cobblestone capital and the region around it constitute a thing more dreadful: a market. It has become a place to sling crack and hook users
“We have seen a huge increase in crack addiction in West Africa,” says Regional Representative Alexandre Schmidt for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Tons of
cocaine intended, originally, for Europe have been kept in West Africa as payment for shipments. They accounted for one-third of the 35 tons thought to have been unloaded that year from the unregistered speedboats, planes, cargo ships, Boeing jet liners – and maybe even submarines– that dock, land, or bubble up onto West Africa as they carry their coke toward Europe’s night life.
Most payments are now being done in drugs, and these drugs are falling into the streets. This is exactly the same scenario we've seen in Jamaica, Haiti, Honduras Mexico and Guatamala and their dire consequences for these countries.
Traditionally it was Latin Americans doing the deals but now Russians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Lebanese and Moroccans are thought to be involved, with many more acting as middlemen and agents on the ground. The traffickers use ground agents to disperse the drugs across porous African borders and onwards to Europe, either by boat or on commercial flights to Europe with human mules carrying cocaine in their stomachs.
Africa’s cities are larger, younger, and flush with more disposable income than ever before. Increasingly, drug traffickers – who are often paid in drugs themselves – are finding way to unload their product inside the region’s overcrowded cities. The tonnage is staggering: The UN estimates that 13 metric tons of cocaine – an $800 million snow worth as much as the entire gross domestic product of Guinea-Bissau– were inhaled in West Africa in 2009, the UN’s last year on record.
Instead of crossing north toward the Sahara, West Africa’s drug cartels increasingly transverse Africa, transit the product toward Somalia, and from there, Persian Gulf states, Russia, and finally Europe. In the past year, the UN says they've seen the region’s drug trade shift. Afghanistan’s heroin has found a route through Africa’s Sahara, where it exits the continent through Guinea-Bissau before heading to the US.
Much of that heroin is being bought locally, too. In the first six months of 2011 West Africans consumed 400 kilograms of heroin, a drug that was nearly non existent prior. West African barons are achieving decision-making ranks in Latin American drug cartels that use them as traffickers. What we are seeing in West Africa is similar to what we've seen in Mexico, a rise in the number of drug traffickers who are becoming more powerful.
We only have to look at the effect on much smaller Honduras – which has the largest homicide rate in the world, with prisons that are virtually lawless. Or Guatemala, which aside from now having a murder rate higher than during their civil war, is dealing with the Mexican Zeta and Sinaloa drug gangs, preferring to pay locals in drugs rather than cash, bringing on a whole new dimension of problems. In all, a UN 2011 Global Study found that Central American countries are near “breaking point” with their levels of homicide. Somewhere between 250 and 350 tons of cocaine, The Economist notes, now pass through Guatemala on the way to the United States. Mexico's Sinaloa, Gulf and Zetas mobs operate through much of the Central American isthmus and — unlike the Colombians — pay their help in drugs, not cash.
Danny Kushlick, from UK-based international NGO Transform Drug Policy Foundation, explains that “any victories against the cartels in one area only serve to squeeze the gangs into new territory.” It is a metamorphosing organ, like trapped air, just looking for the next space to move into, in what is aptly named ‘the balloon effect’.
Kushlick, states that “a shift in the global regime from prohibition to one of management of production, supply, and use would bring numerous wide-ranging benefits to Central America.”
He explains that “first, with the reduction in price following regulation, the narcos would leave the trade, as there would no longer be the huge untaxed profits to be made. This would have the knock on effect of reducing violence as gangs stop fighting over turf.
There are no wine "cartels" or beer "gangs." No one "smuggles" alcohol. Off-Licenses are called "businesses," not gangs, and they "ship" products instead of "smuggling" them. They settle disputes with lawyers rather than guns.
On a global level, as the U.S. expands its drug interdiction efforts to Africa and elsewhere, critics are expressing alarm about the impact of those policies on countries already rocked by instability and weak democratic institutions. Given the deadly toll the drug war has exacted in places like Honduras, Bolivia, Mexico, and Colombia, the United States should be exceedingly careful about the consequences of militarising counter-narcotics efforts.
All over the world, drug organizations depend upon corrupting border guards, customs inspectors, police, prosecutors, judges, legislators, cabinet ministers, military officers, intelligence agents, financial regulators, and presidents and prime ministers. Drug cartels corrupt bank officers and tellers, accountants, lawyers, financial advisers property brokers, securities dealers, freight forwarders, shipping companies, airline employees, etc. to ship and pay for drugs, and to launder their receipts and profits. Large amounts of money are made trafficking drugs through the weak states like The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, but the process does not stop there. The profits go on to countries with stronger economies, like Senegal and Ivory Coast, to be "cleaned" in formal businesses like bars and in the construction business.
In one example, in March 2010, corruption was exposed in the Wachovia unit of Wells Fargo Bank, now the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits. Wachovia was forced to disgorge $110 million and was fined $50 million for failing to internally police $378 billion in transactions with casas de cambio in Mexico that laundered drug profits.
In 1971, US President Richard Nixon decided put an end to “public enemy number #1” and declared a war on drugs. Since then, the United States, the world’s largest consumer of drugs, has spent over US$1 trillion on fighting this war at the root, instead of focusing on treatment at home. In 2010 alone, the bill was US$51bn, yet according to the UNODC, the number of drug users has risen from 18 millions to some 210 millions in the last 10 years.
In the U.S. over the last 40 years drug money has fuelled the growth of violent street gangs , from two (Bloods and Crips) with a membership of less than 50 people before the drug war to 20,000 gangs with a membership of about 1 million across the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice. These gangs serve as the distributors, collection agents and enforcers for the Mexican cartels that the Justice Department says occupy more than 1,000 U.S. cities.
When one cartel leader is arrested or killed, it makes no impact on the drug trade and only serves to create more violence, as lower-level traffickers fight for the newly open top spot. Moreover, US law enforcement depends heavily on the $44 billion spent annually on the drug war. In spite of the expenditure in money and personnel, the drug trade and the violence has increased. A recent news report stated that the cost of cocaine is 74% cheaper than it was 30 years ago.
The hard lesson is that the war on drug dealers, decreed by Calderón and partially funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government assistance, has not only failed to curb the trade but intensified horrific violence, corruption and human-rights abuses.
A sad reality — underscored by a recent report in The Economist — is that the drug-running and drug wars between cartels are now infecting virtually all of Central America. We need to learn lessons from the past so that West Africa doesn't become the next Honduras, Guatamala or Mexico with the bubble effect.
Is there an alternative? Maybe
In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead?
At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, suggest otherwise.
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive.
Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%.
New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
