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Toll of a long war sparks calls for a new approach
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<p>prada outlet The bodies were found just north of Monterrey near the town of Cadereyta Jimenez, some in rubbish bags, some strewn on the roadside. They were mostly men, mostly missing their heads, hands and feet.</p>
<p>There were 49 in all, which was a lot even for Mexico, so the grim discovery a fortnight ago made news in a country where mass murder is so common as to be banal.</p>
<p>Earlier in the month 15 bodies were found on the road to Chapala and 23 were discovered in Nuevo Laredo. Of those, nine were hanging from a highway overpass and 14 were decapitated.</p>
<p>Advertisement: Story continues below More than 50,000 prada 2012 have been killed in the war on drugs in Mexico since a crackdown began in December 2006. (A quick comparison: it took the United States nearly 15 years to lose 47,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War.)</p>
<p>Mexico's tragedy is that it lies between the US, which has an apparently insatiable appetite for drugs, and Colombia, where most of the world's cocaine is produced.</p>
<p>As the US prosecuted its war on drugs, both in its own territory and in that of its southern neighbours, its interdiction became more sophisticated. The sea routes through the Caribbean into Florida became more difficult, so the smugglers turned inland, up through Central America into Mexico with its porous 3000-kilometre border with the US.</p>
<p>The drug war was now largely over border crossings and, rather than being fought at sea or in remote jungle, it was being fought in towns and cities. Its victims were not only gang members but also illegal immigrants being forced to work as mules, civilian witnesses, politicians and journalists who would not be silent.</p>
<p>And the victims are not just the bloodied and tortured corpses turning up on freeway verges, in sewers and in back alleys, but Mexico's institutions, which are being corrupted by the $US15 billion trade. Some fear gangs will install their own politicians at this year's federal election.</p>
<p>Adding insult to considerable injury, while the US insisted that Mexico reflect its drug laws, it declined to mirror Mexico's tough gun laws. So as the drugs move north, the guns go south, mainly from American border states that introduced lax gun laws backed by the National Rifle Association.</p>
<p>It is thus perhaps little surprise that Latin American leaders have begun to challenge the US policy that they complied with so reliably for years.</p>
<p>Cracks started to show when the Global Commission on Drug Policy released its report last year calling for an end to the criminalisation of drugs and for governments to experiment with new forms of regulation.</p>
<p>Among others, it was signed by the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, as well as the former US secretary of state George Schultz.</p>
<p>Then the Guatemalan President, Otto Perez Molina, a former military hard man trained in the US, and the Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, a former defence minister, lobbied for decriminalisation to be debated at the key regional summit held in prada shoes March, the Summit of the Americas.</p>
<p>The Obama administration could no longer ignore the position and he sent his Vice-President, Joe Biden, to Colombia for preliminary talks. He delivered a blunt message in diplomatic terms: yes, the issue was worth discussion; no, the administration would not change its policy.</p>
<p>But a former Drug Enforcement Agency intelligence agent, Sean Dunagan, believes the war on drugs started by Richard Nixon and waged ever since will inevitably fail.</p>
<p>Dunagan, a veteran of the agency's outposts in Guatemala and Monterrey, believes the US will eventually come to see the benefits of prohibition do not outweigh the cost in blood and treasure - an estimated $US26 billion a year, not including the costs incurred by the military and state prison systems.</p>
<p>During his time in Monterrey, Dunagan saw how the drug war came to destroy the very fabric of Mexican society. ''Once the gangs had corrupted the police and local governments, everything was on the table - people smuggling, prostitution, insurance fraud, kidnapping, extortion,'' he said.</p>
<p>''My middle-class friends who had nothing to do with the drug trade knew that they could not go to the government or the police for help.'' Instead those that could packed up their businesses and took them north to the US, further white-anting the prada outlet online communities they left behind.</p>
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