Guyanese Online

As the 35-nation Summit of the Americas gets underway in Cartagena, Colombia the United States faces a long overdue reckoning on its War on Drugs. Ever since President Nixon insisted on a instead of treating drug use as a medical, cultural and societal problem, drug trafficking has become an extraordinarily deadly and lucrative business. Yet despite huge subsidies to countries that adopted America’s heavy-handed approach, the War on Drugs has done little more than introduce catastrophic violence and widespread political corruption. The Summit’s host knows the costs better than most, having suffered more than 450,000 homicides since 1990 and with defence spending in excess of US$10 billion (5.3% of GDP, compared to the regional average of 1.7%).

The latest high-profile critic of the US approach is Otto Pérez Molina, Guatemala’s new president, who recently conceded that: “all the technology and resources and millions of dollars the United States have contributed have not managed to diminish the drug problem.” Pérez Molina is hardly a wide-eyed idealist. He served as a director of military intelligence during Guatemala’s civil war and has a raft of alleged human rights abuses hanging over his military record. This pedigree makes him a difficult critic to dismiss.  [more]