A few days ago, El Universal reported that US Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, blocked $95 million from the Merida Initiative, which has been the main funnel of US money to the worse-than-futile drug war in Mexico. (What’s worse than futile? Fatal.)
His decision was explained a few months ago in this report, which I missed at the time, as surprisingly commonsensical for drug-war politics—the US has been pouring money into a program that has led to corruption, violence, and doom. So, Sen Leahy (quite reasonably) asks, why keep funding it?
Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Appropriations Committee, blocked release of $95 million dollars in funding for the Merida Initiative, citing the lack of a clear strategy on the part of the U.S. State Department and the Mexican government.
“The whole things looks like just coughing up money with no accountability,”Leahy was quoted as saying in the legislative monitor, CQ Roll Call.
The decision is a long-overdue recognition that the drug war in Mexico has been a bloody fiasco. The Merida Initiative, a Bush-era plan to attack cartels in Mexico and reduce trafficking of prohibited drugs to the U.S. market, began in 2008. Congress has appropriated $1.9 billion dollarsfrom the federal budget for the program over the past five years, mostaimed at bolstering Mexican security forces. Since the drug war was launched and armed forces deployed to fight the cartels, the homicide rate in Mexico soared 150%, between 2006 and 2012.
Last August the State Department asked the committee to obligate some $229 million assigned to the Merida Initiative in the 2012 budget. At first, Leahy decided to hold up the entire amount, after receiving a two-and-a-half page explanation from the State Department that he felt failed to adequately describe spending and objectives.
Senator Leahy’s financial holdup won’t solve the problem, of course, but it’s nice to see a senior sitting politician openly challenge the idea that we should continue to fund this enormously destructive, atavistic, and fantasy-based way of dealing with our international drug problems.
