Mexico has turned into the new center of distribution and epicenter of the war against the drug trafficking.

I have been thinking lately about my old friend Jorge Castañeda. In case you do not recognize the name, it is a question of the ex-Secretary of State of Mexico under the presidency of Vicente Fox. Very well, since it seems that he turned out to be also a clairvoyant. I knew it at the end of the years ’80, when I was a teacher and political analyst. When we discuss about the end of the cold war, I remember to have asked what would replace it in Latin America. He answered “the drug trafficking” to me. He is a man with vision, or informed. Of any form it was right and it is now when we see the dramatic effects of the wars of the drug trafficking.

They say that Mexico is the new Colombia. Neither the Colombians nor to the Mexicans like the comparison. Nevertheless, it is clear that although the business of the illegal drugs is still alive and wriggling in Colombia, Mexico has turned into the new center of distribution and they are the Mexican drug traffickers, not the Colombians, which are in charge and those who direct the war. And it is a dirty and bloody war.

The Mexican government has spilled all his resources to fight to the cartels of the drug. Dozens of cities have been militarized and in some cases federal police officer forces have assumed the functions of local police officers. But the power to serve just has led to more blood spilling. In fact, more than 12.000 persons have died like part of this war in Mexico, more that in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan you join during this period of time.

But this problem is not only of Mexico. An investigation of the agency Associate Press shows that the Mexican drugs traffickers have interspersed his tentacles to approximately 47 countries. Only in our hemisphere, they have gone to Argentina to obtain raw material destined for the metanfetamina. They have taken advantage of the weak judicial system and Argentine financial oversight to establish false companies in order to import the ephedrine from India and China. In Peru, the second producing cocaine country in the world, after Colombia, Mexican drug traffickers bribe customs officials and wash money. In Honduras and El Salvador, Mexicans have been arrested by drugs contraband and in Guatemala the authorities fight against the infiltration in his territory of the Zees, one of the most awesome cartels of the drug of Mexico.

Here in the United States, the Mexican cartels of the drug have gone beyond the frontier states and less 230 cities have scattered for, between them Chicago, Houston, Denver and Los Angeles. According to the Department of Justice, in 2008 the authorities confiscated $ 70 millions in cash, product of the business of the drugs in Atlanta.

The war against the drugs in Mexico is not easy to win. In the brains of the problem there is the culture of corruption that has existed per decades in this country. The police agencies have been infiltrated by the organized crime to the grade of which the Mexicans already do not know of whom they must be afraid more: if to the delinquents or the police. There are evidences of how police officers have helped to escape from followers of the drug traffickers, and agents of the order they have been linked to a series of massacres.

Also there is the problem of the access to weapon that flow of the side of the USA towards Mexico and finish in traffickers' drugs hands. Only in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, there are approximately seven thousand shops of sale of firearms where one can buy easily weapon, sometimes more powerful than the used ones by the Mexican authorities.

But possibly the biggest obstacle to gain the war against the drugs is the economic one. While so many industries fight against the world financial crisis, the drugs contraband is a multimillionaire business in which all the implied ones can do exorbitant money quantities for very little work. Only in the USA approximately 20 million consumers invest $ 64.000 millions in illegal drugs. Some of them believe that the solution to end with the narcoviolencia is to legalize the drugs and to extract this hand business of the organized crime.

My friend Castañeda was right, the war against the drugs is the new cold war: The struggles for the power, the double agents, clandestine operations, secret hidden places, the massacres. But this is not a battle for ideology but for the lucrative routes of the contraband. It is a world problem that needs a world solution. Meanwhile, it will keep on covering the blood.

(c) 2008 by Maria Helen Salinas.