Some responses to the question of how the War on Drugs has affected El Paso and Juarez. The authors' names below are linked to their essays.
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We want no more carnage, no more death tallies, no more mysterious disappearances, no more addiction, no more drug-possessed lost causes. We want progress, we want answers and most of all we want Alejandra Salcido back at home with her parents planning a fruitful future that is ripe.
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We have become a morbid spectacle to the world and it seems that our values are in a state of transition because what others find hard to believe, we have come to accept.
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There is big business in drug use because we Americans are buying to the tune of $40 billion a year. Why not, do, what we do best, capitalize on it?
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In the late 1990s our community developed projects that envisioned a bi-national region connected seamlessly by commerce, culture and community. Now, our projects include multi-billion border fences. How things change so quickly.
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Almost daily in El Paso, a teenager lured by the siren song of an easy $1,000 is caught with a trunk full of drugs at the port of entry, crippling her future before it starts. The prohibition model of drug regulation has failed, and proof of this is written in blood in the streets of Juarez.
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Our communities have become further dependent on law enforcement and military as significant chunks of the economy. Crossing the border is more difficult, and the ropes that hold our communities together are gradually fraying.
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The war on drugs was the best opportunity for whoever is interested in making disappeared those who fight for social and environmental justice in our region.
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In 1991, the Mayors of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez were invited by the German and Polish governments to travel to the former East German-Polish border to make a presentation on the world of global manufacturing. All of the region's efforts and accomplishments, though, began to erode by the mega-shift of the importation of illegal drugs (cocaine) from a Miami sphere of influence to the Mexican border.
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In the last few years as the stories of violence surrounding drug cartels and narcos attracted national media attention, my visitors dwindled and the comments grew worse.
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Affected “refugees” are denied opportunities to seek productive means of survival. Their only alternative is to seek employment in the “multinational business” that the drug underworld has succeeded to establish.
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By 21 I was involved in every aspect from purchasing in Mexico to smuggling to street level activity. At 24 I was arrested by the DEA.
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“The war on drugs” is akin to all the U.S. wars fought since World War II, an economic war waged for and by the military-industrial complex. Furthermore, it’s a war against the American people.
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We all know that the stuff costs next to nothing to produce, so if we’re going to make any mistakes I say let’s err on the side of humanity.
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We “border people” wait and huddle and continue to count: yesterday, over 1,600 murders for the year. There are three and a half months left in 2009. Dread.
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A strategic plan must take order and begin to resist all levels of the pervasive violence that is occurring.
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I feel that we are one mandatory curfew away from becoming a police state.
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The War on Drugs is an endless battle between the bad and the worst.
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The violence in Juarez is our problem. This region, El Paso and Juarez, have sat perched at the edge of a great renaissance.
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With the six-degrees-of-separation nature of El Paso, it's not uncommon for those with no relations in Juarez to hear about someone's uncle's cousin's friend's brother who was affected. As the numbers climb, the degrees seem to shrink.
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There is a humble man mourning the mysterious disappearance of his daughter. It was a Thursday like any other, waking up to the grind of a grueling work day. The War on Drugs was just another hot topic on the newspaper of the 10th of September of 2009. The time was 5:30 p.m., and this vivacious 16 year old daughter called her mother to pick her up at her high school. The mother drove and sat there and searched for over an hour and Alejandra seemed to have just vanished. The confused mother retreated to the house where the father had been waiting, when they get a telephone call from a friend of Alejandra. She states that Alejandra had not been at the school where she stated but that she was across the border in Juarez wanting her parents to pick her up at the Mercado by the US Consulate Office.
What seemed like a short drive was an eternity and when the parents arrived they were pelted with the reality that their little girl was nowhere to be found. Shopkeepers weren't saying a peep, the parents were dazed and confused, and they have maintained that same lost look as that fate-less Thursday! Alejandra vanished, could she have been assaulted, kidnapped, lost, hurt, alive, or dead? Were they ever to hear her sweet melodic voice, see the joy in her eyes, feel her rhythm of her dance? An answer has yet to be found, and the police on both sides of the border don't want to be bothered with another foolish teenager.
Alejandra is not just another foolish teenager or a case number or a bother, she is a daughter, an older sister to three, a cousin, a friend, a classmate and above all a Human Being. Could she be a statistic on the War on Drugs, we will never know but we speculate. We contemplate the possibility that she was snatched from the streets of Juarez, stuck in an unknown gloomy world involving the hideous crimes that seem to unfold daily on our Newspapers.
Now we wish that the War on Drugs was much more than just another great headline for the newspapers, we hoped that this was not a fight that this up-and-coming generation has had to fight. We want no more carnage, no more death tallies, no more mysterious disappearances, no more addiction, no more drug-possessed lost causes. We want progress, we want answers and most of all we want Alejandra Salcido back at home with her parents planning a fruitful future that is ripe.
Andrea Aguirre is an El Pasoan.
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What I feel is no longer fear. It is a feeling that has no name. I am out of words to describe what the violence in my city has done to me physically and mentally. This is no longer a drug war. It is a mutated war that has every single citizen, good or bad, in a state of distress. It is a war of corruption and of conflicting interests.
Those of us who used to be on the outside witnessing cartels killing each other have become trapped in between the violence and psychological abuse. The victims are no longer just drug dealers, we are all victims. Some way or another we have all lost something in this city. More than my safety and my freedom, I have lost hope. My city has been taken away from me. I am aware that we have become a morbid spectacle to the world and it seems that our values are in a state of transition because what others find hard to believe, we have come to accept.
Juarez is a city with soldiers on every corner pointing guns at us. We live in a city where it is easier to get away with murder than it is to find a job, where drugs reign over justice, where life has a price.
Rhetorical arguments have proven insufficient to fight the hundreds of bullets that are shot daily in the streets. I wonder when this will stop and how it will end. But more than anything I wonder what any of us can do and how much more will we have to lose.
Alejandra Gomez is a border journalist and a philosophy professor.
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The simple, glib answer would be —legalize drugs, and, sometimes, the simplest answers are the best. I say legalize the use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and otherwise-legal pharmaceuticals that are now obtained by illegal means or used for non-medicinal purposes. I say this with the full knowledge of the devastating affects drugs, drug addiction, and the trafficking of drugs has on a family. I have lived it within my own family from hospital to penitentiary to death. Legalization is a more practical and far-reaching solution to the United States’ “war on drugs” as proclaimed by Nixon in the ‘70s. If we legalize narcotics then our government can step in and ‘openly’ regulate, control, and make profit off of the drug trade. For those soothsayers who think that the legalization of drugs is going to create a nation of addicts, I say, open your eyes; we already are that nation, from the gas guzzling fat American cars we drive, to the tasteless non-nourishing food we eat.
Americans, who are addicted, will buy their drugs from anyone—legally or illegally. The morality of whether or not to use should be decided by the individual. The burgeoning “illegal” drug trade already supplies 114 million U.S. citizens with their fix. (2007 National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health, NSDUH) Why not take it out of the hands of the narcotraficantes, and put into a government regulated setting. The potential for job creation would stir the economy, and the murder, death and mayhem that is occurring in our sister city and many other border communities would taper off substantially.
Legalization would create drug districts, much like in Amsterdam, and governmental regulatory and control departments, not to mention its off shoots. There is big business in drug use because we Americans are buying to the tune of $40 billion a year. (Office of National Drug Control Policy) Why not, do, what we do best, capitalize on it?
Christine Granados is a writer and former El Pasoan.
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A few days ago I received a note from a close friend. It said a family member had been killed in Juarez because he witnessed the murder of someone else. That hit close to home. But, with more than 1,500 murders in Juarez this year alone, it’s probably more appropriate to ask, who hasn’t been affected?
Death affects everyone—friends, family, neighbors. The spillover violence isn’t blood on the streets, it’s the violence that terrorizes and paralyzes our entire bi-national community. It’s the hope and dream of returning to the El Paso/Juarez of our childhood—with daytrips for haircuts, ice cream and family—that has died with the Drug War.
In the late 1990s our community developed projects that envisioned a bi-national region connected seamlessly by commerce, culture and community. It really seemed possible in those sunnier days. These were projects like the Empowerment Zone and the Stanton Designated Commuter Lane (DCL). Now, our projects include multi-billion border fences. How things change so quickly.
All the violence must end. There must be a solution. More likely than not, it is an economic solution for this economic war—driven by profit and unabated greed. The one thing I know about El Paso/Juarez is that we will never give up. We are a resilient people. With time and persistence, we will find peace again and rejoin the community that has always been one community.
Anthony Martinez is enjoying the cooler weather and looking for work in Austin, Texas.
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The “War on Drugs” has created more problems than it has solved. Drug use has not lessened under this campaign, the U.S. has attained the highest per capita incarceration rate on Earth, and other countries, including Mexico, have been socially destabilized by the inexorable economic gravity of American demand for prohibited drugs. It’s time to admit that the criminal justice system is the wrong tool to fix whatever problems drug use causes.
Recreational drugs can be bad for you, and some of them almost always are, especially when used to excess. Irresponsible conduct often produces lamentable results, whether it involves drugs or not. And it would be pointless to deny the sad pathologies which result from self-destructive, addictive behaviors that often manifest themselves in obsessive substance abuse. Yet American drug policies have been shaped more by anecdotal arguments than by any clear-eyed clinical analysis. Marijuana, the most widely used and unfairly slandered illegal drug, has been used by more than 46 percent of Americans, according to a 2005 report of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. You can’t walk through a mall without brushing shoulders with someone who has used it, probably with no known ill effects.
Because of what some view as cynical restrictions by the DEA on legitimate scientific investigation of the effects of prolonged marijuana use, much of the evidence about the medical effects of this substance is speculative. Medical science assumes, though without much empirical proof, that marijuana smoking harms the respiratory system. A sensible caution about the possible neurological effects of repeatedly ingesting a psychoactive substance informs the American Medical Association’s official position that marijuana should remain a Schedule I drug, like heroin and cocaine. But it is beyond dispute that the known harms of marijuana pale in comparison to those of alcohol, whether calculated on a medical or a social basis. And compared to tobacco, marijuana is positively benign.
If drugs have ruined some lives, drug laws have ruined even more. The number of prisoners serving sentences in the U.S. for drug-related crimes has increased by 1200 percent in the past 30 years. Throughout 2008, according to the FBI, the U.S. recorded one drug arrest every 18 seconds. In 2003, of approximately 1 million state and federal felony convictions, almost one third – 32 percent -- were for drug-related offenses, almost twice as many as for crimes of violence and more than any other category of crime, including property crimes such as theft and burglary. Federal prison populations have increased fivefold since 1980, and this is mainly because of drug laws: In 2008, approximately 120,000 people were serving federal prison sentences for drugs, compared to about 40,000 for violent crimes, 20,000 for immigration violations, and 40,000 for all other federal offenses.
Most of these drug offenders are neither violent nor hardened criminals. Almost daily in El Paso, a teenager lured by the siren song of an easy $1,000 is caught with a trunk full of drugs at the port of entry, crippling her future before it starts; an impoverished Juarez father is arrested by the Border Patrol trying to splash a load across the river to feed his family; a wife who puts up with her husband’s cocaine use is taken to jail along with him when the powder is found in their glove compartment. And thus the prisons fill.
Despite these policies and their monetary and human costs, drug use has continued to flourish in the U.S., a fact made obvious by the gruesome war over drug smuggling routes unfolding on our border. The cartels and their minions fill the economic niche created by criminalization, and it is a lucrative one. Marijuana, which today is the largest cash crop in California despite its underground status, is being smuggled by the megaton into the U.S. by gangs of the most bloodthirsty hoodlums this side of Al Queda. The cartels are creations of American drug policy. Decriminalization would put them out of business.
Marijuana should be legal but regulated and taxed. Abuse of other drugs, such as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines, should be dealt with as a medical problem, possibly with the use of civil commitment proceedings to force unrepentant addicts into treatment. The prohibition model of drug regulation has failed, and proof of this is written in blood in the streets of Juarez.
Stephen Peters is a lawyer in El Paso.
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The War on Drugs is an exercise in futility, so long as the manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs remains one of the most lucrative industries in the world. As I wrote last year, the war has shifted from symbolic to actual, with El Paso and Juarez on the frontlines. Our communities have become further dependent on law enforcement and military as significant chunks of the economy. In Mexico, the War on Drugs has succeeded in creating some of the most historically powerful organized crime syndicates, as well as a growing number of addicts. Crossing the border is more difficult, and the ropes that hold our communities together are gradually fraying.
The libertarian in me would like to see drugs regulated and taxed, so as to cover the externalities that arise, with the profits diverted to prevention and treatment. The status quo is to keep pouring more resources into the many interest groups that favor prohibition, and wonder why things aren’t getting any better. While legalization is a serious option that should be considered, ultimately there is no solution unless each person individually addresses his or her own addictions. Drug abuse is a public health problem, and should be treated as such. The most holistic and compassionate approach to a War on Drugs would address education, unemployment, racism, and the hopelessness of so many people who feel they have no other options in life.
Johnson is the former publisher of Newspaper Tree.
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The war on drugs took over everything. I was personally affected since one of my best friends, colleague and mentor, Dr. Manuel Arroyo, was killed and the only sin he committed was to expose and write about what he thought about social justice. I believe in my heart that the war on drugs is the best opportunity for whoever is interested in making disappeared those who fight for social and environmental justice in our region, to make a mess in our region and come up with a "plan" for our region.
We live in fear and despair but the rich, the developers, the corrupt elected officials at federal, state and local level in both sides of the border are living healthy and wealthy as if they do not live in our beloved border region and are not affected by anything is happening here. On the contrary you see huge maquilas built (FOXCONN), you see a highway built along the border fence, you see El Paso Downtown development for a rich community, you see the businessmen who made money out of the poor people coming to live in El Paso after their contribution to a social, economical and political mess in Juarez. It is amazing how they keep working for a plan and development without even mentioning all the social crisis and keep moving forward with their "vision," a vision for themselves and not for our border wel-being.
It will be very tough for us, the common citizens to recover. Information and education will be the only tool the community will have to recover and understand that War is not only about "drugs" but land, oil, power, money.
Mariana Chew-Sanchez is an Environmental Science and Engineering Ph.D. candidate who works in both sides on the border on environmental and social justice issues. Her family has lived in the El Paso del Norte area for more than a century.
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In the midst of the Vietnam War, the War on Drugs was established by President Richard M. Nixon, shortly after taking the oath of office in 1969. The War on Drugs was initiated with good intentions, but over the course of the next forty years it "morphed" into something quite different from its original purpose. Millions of Americans have since been affected by the US government's campaign against illegal drugs.
At the beginning of the 1960s, there was promise across the country that we could build a better society. President Kennedy in a sense represented that attitude. Americans believed in their government and stood ready to help bring positive change. While illegal drugs were in use from coast to coast in the early sixties, usage was minimal compared to what took place during and in the wake of the Vietnam War. In response to the government's intervention into Southeast Asia, men and women from all walks of life were drafted or answered the call to arms to fight communism and thwart the so called "domino effect." Unfortunately tens of thousands went and never came home. By the end of the war, many returned to a divided society, disillusioned and feeling deceived by the federal government. It was at this point in time that the proliferation of drugs at home exploded, the War on Drugs launched and our way of life changed. From my vantage point the War on Drugs and all its trappings is a legacy of that tragic time in our country's history.
Turning to how El Paso and Ciudad Juarez have been affected by the War on Drugs, twenty years ago, the two cities enjoyed a period of prosperity and cooperation. It was a time of bonhomie and optimism. In 1991, the Mayors of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez were invited by the German and Polish governments to travel to the former East German-Polish border to make a presentation on the world of global manufacturing (maquiladoras). The "Iron Curtain" had fallen. They were accompanied by economists and academicians from the University of Texas at Austin. The intent was to demonstrate that the two sister cities were changing the image of the border. As incredible as it may seem today, they were viewed as a model of economic integration. While initially skeptical about "cowboys" coming from the Wild West, the old line Polish communist leaders reluctantly embraced most of the concepts that were expounded upon at the conference.
It was also during this period of time that entrepreneurs on both sides of the US-Mexican border began to work together to attract global manufacturing. It was a time of cross border planning, the opening of the Zaragoza international port of entry, water resources cooperation, brisk banking and lively international commerce. Medical institutions and non profit organizations served the poor, the sick and needy on both sides of the border. Academic institutions such as UTEP and the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez launched exchange programs that benefitted students, the community and business. Even Ft Bliss and a number of NATO representatives at the military base engaged in charitable activities in Juarez.
All of the region's efforts and accomplishments, though, began to erode by the mega-shift of the importation of illegal drugs (cocaine) from a Miami sphere of influence to the Mexican border. The rapid proliferation of cartels in Tijuana, Sinaloa and Ciudad Juarez can be directly tied to how illegal drugs were smuggled into the United States. These nefarious activities and the federal government's response, in concert with Mexican President Calderon's initiatives to combat the drug trade, have completely changed how the El Paso del Norte region is perceived today. Sadly, the simple fact is that the region is now viewed around the world as a war zone where thousands of people have died. Tourism, cross border activity and international cooperation have dramatically shrunk and fear reigns across the frontier.
Solutions to this complex dilemna will not be easy, given vested interests and the present political climate. Hopefully, small steps will be taken soon in El Paso to begin the long overdue debate on the War on Drugs. Better late than never!
Bill Tilney is a runner, writer and former member of the Texas Mexico Commission.
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I can’t speak to the entirety of the failed 40 year War on Drugs, I can only speak to what I’ve seen from living El Paso for the last ten years and that is an escalation in violence and violent crimes in our sister city of Juarez; an escalation in violence and crime that has staggering death tolls, economic loss in the millions of dollars for the region and an image crisis for El Paso that billboards or a Vanity.com article cannot fix.
Because I’m a transplant, 70 percent of my relations (friends and family) live outside of El Paso and 95 percent of them have never been to El Paso. Even before moving to El Paso, when I told people I was moving here there were quite few “what will you do for a living” and “why” questions that caught me by surprise. But over the course of the years, I really believed I was changing people’s perceptions of our town. Friends and family would visit and we’d walk around Downtown or I would mail El Paso Magazine to people in Chicago and get the same reaction: “I had no idea.” (Side: Morris Pittle did not pay me to say that, but for those of us who talk to people outside the county at least once a day, “I had no idea” is a reference made to our town all the time. He was so right on with that campaign.)
But in the last few years as the stories of violence surrounding drug cartels and narcos attracted national media attention, my visitors dwindled and the comments grew worse. On a recent visit to San Francisco, I ran into a friend who lived in S.F. but was from Italy. She asked if I was still living in El Paso and when I said yes, she looked me in the eye and said “how can you do that to your children?” She wasn’t kidding and stared as I stumbled through my defense of El Paso; quiet streets, nice people, great food.
As I looked at my two boys, both under ten and both totally unaware of what a narco, or pot, or drug lord is, I started going through all the things I love about El Paso. And one of things I have always loved about this town is its proximity to Mexico and the Mexican culture that permeates everyday life. Mexico was a big sell for my move to El Paso, that and the insanely low cost of living. (My El Paso mortgage is cheaper than my rent in San Diego in 1995.)
In the last ten years, I’ve lost Mexico. I haven’t gone in more than two years and don’t know when I’ll be confident enough to go back again.
The failed drug policies of the last 40 years have caused me to lose access to a people and a culture that I am watching get destroyed everyday, all because some kid in San Diego wants to smoke weed before he goes to see Twilight.
Degliantoni is editor in chief for El Paso Media Group
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It’s a misnomer to declare war on drugs. The term “war” denotes a violent response to what is occurring. Rather, inclusion of those directly affected is paramount -- El Paso and Juarez should be the peaceful catalysts that find solutions, with government in a supportive role.
The cartel violence affecting our community stems from economic disparity that has been perpetuated for the past 45 years. Economically displaced latinos have no alternative but to come to the U.S. to work in the agriculture or service industries. Multinational corporations such as GM and Monsanto continue exploiting the working class of Latin America. Purposely ignored go femicides that have plagued the region for the past ten years. The same superficial outrage about Darfur is expressed, but no solution is derived. The U.S. counters these events by erecting walls and increasing Border Patrol presence. Subsequently, affected “refugees” are denied opportunities to seek productive means of survival. Now that financial impact is being felt, we acquiesce to the militarization of our community. This results in further economic despair for those being usurped from traditional means of subsistence. Their only alternative is to seek employment in the “multinational business” that the drug underworld has succeeded to establish. Let’s not qualm about legitimacy of this industry, for it has an insatiable consumer in our country, and a “disposable” and desperate workforce reminiscent of the Dust Bowl era.
El Pasoans have been directly affected. Notions that families are separated not only by the border, but by violence, are being recognized as systems of control. How can a culture that has so freely moved to and fro for centuries be terrorized by the status quo? Not even when the conquistadores were in our midst, was geographic movement restricted. I’ve not seen members of my family residing in Mexico in eighteen months. Fear for my life is factored, but fear for what would become of my children far outweighs the latter. With consternation, I limit family interaction. As an educator, I see the influx of Mexican citizens re-locating to our city in hopes of escaping violence. They seek a safe and higher standard of life. I also see the resentment and xenophobia that result from this migration. To that I answer, would we not do the same to protect our children? We are responsible for current conditions. Let’s be empathetic, if not compassionate.
Then it dawns on me, I’ve lived in the specter of fear for the past 20 years; i.e., 1,600 homicides in the span of a year in Juarez, the 9/11 attacks, and the eradication of the local textile industry. In my estimation, the current situation needs examination through historical and economic lenses. Rather than be reactionary, we need to be proactive. Let us provide educational opportunities that NAFTA neglected in favor of profits. Promote environmental practices that address toxic environments. Foremost, address economic sentiments that isolate individuals, and dissuade drugs as a sanctuary from despair. Our community hopes.
Xavier Miranda is an educator with EPISD and EPCC, and an El Paso Grassroots member.
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While I am sure that the war on drugs has affected every person living Cd. Juarez/ El Paso; I am sure that my experience was more intense than most. Drugs have been around my family for at least three generations with levels varying from casual user to addict to dealer. I was personally introduced to drugs at the age of 11 by one of my cousins; at age 13 my uncle gave me my first “load” to sell. By the time I was 18 I was taking drugs out of state; at 19 I became independent of the group who first showed me the way. By 21 I was involved in every aspect from purchasing in Mexico to smuggling to street level activity. At 24 I was arrested by the DEA.
I spent several years in prison and met yet more people who were part of the drug trade from India, Europe and South America. I believe this problem is global.
I believe that the war on drugs has directly contributed to the decline of society in many ways physical, psychological and sociological.
The physical reality is that there is that few own most of the world’s resources; you can break that down locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. The class war is as alive today as it ever was and the drug trade is the great equalizer, in that it allowed poor countries to produce and export a product that yields profit many times over and has brought wealth to those who had none. Many children grow up poor, forgotten, and hungry, becoming easy prey for cartels. Food equals loyalty. Contrast this to the diamond mining of Africa and South America where large corporations “re-appropriated” huge swaths of land.
The psychological reality is that the demand for drugs, both legal and illegal is at all-time highs because people have problems and they are looking for escape. It is somehow counter-intuitive and -productive to permit dangerous drugs such as alcohol and anti-depression drugs (which bring in huge revenues both for corporations and governments who tax them) while keeping safe recreational drugs such as marijuana illegal, which drives teens and adults alike into the black market and the wrong side of the law.
The sociological reality is that today Tony Montana is more popular than Dr. Bill Cosby or Cesar Chavez. The reality is the legislation that separates crime into blue and white collar categories is the instigator of the class war. College students lose their financial aid for having small amounts of marijuana and yet there are bars in school. Federal law in many instances punishes drug dealers harsher than rapists, murderers and embezzlers. I still think of many of the young men my age who will spend the next 25 years in prison. In many ways, I live free for them.
I am happy to report that since my time in prison, I have committed myself to education, to family, and to community. I am committed to drug law reform and solutions to a complex problem.
Luis Ruiz is a student, journalist and filmmaker.
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Our government only superficially represents the American people’s interests or U.S. espoused ideals. Our representatives are bought by corporate lobbyists for corporate interests, military and war-related corporations, and the financial, industrial, technological, healthcare and commodities industries.
This is evidenced in that local representative Sylvestre Reyes has “enjoyed an increasing stream of campaign contributions from government defense, security, and intelligence contractors; these firms are now among his largest sources of campaign funds.” [link]. We know Bush was 100% a corporate stooge.
“Researchers found 42% of people surveyed in the U.S. had tried marijuana at least once, and 16% had tried cocaine.” [link] In response, the economic war machine has militarized our borders and filled our court rooms and our prisons with harmless citizens. There is, however, no “war on alcoholism,” when “nearly 17.6 million adults in the United States are alcoholics or have alcohol problems.” [link] As of 2008, 2,310,984 prisoners were held in federal or state prisons or in local jails, and 20% are incarcerated for drug offenses. [link] This 20% non-violent offenders, 460,000 mostly of the poor and minorities, traumatizes individuals, families and communities and saps the strength of the nation.
"Year-to-date, the drug war has cost us $30,895,065,000 or over $141 million per day.” [link] Arrests for drug law violations in 2009 are expected to be almost two million, 13% of total arrests, exceeding any other offenses. In 2007, 872,720 persons were arrested for cannabis violations. Meanwhile, the DEA budget exceeds $2.415 billion and employs over 10,800. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection has a workforce of over 56,000, with many of their tasks drug related. [link]
El Paso is economically dependent on the war machine? Our largest employer is Fort Bliss, with “…on average nearly 80,547 combined military (and family) and civilian personnel …“ The coming “…influx of troops and family members is projected to push Fort Bliss’ population to 90,418 by … 2012” [a href=http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:vXE_1eNXqhQJ:www.elpasotexas.gov/omb/_documents/fy2009_budget/3%2520-%2520Comm%2520Profile%2520Revised.pdf+el+paso+texas+work+force+statistice+%22ft.+bliss%22&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a target="_blank">link]
Like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, America can’t win nor cares to win the “war on drugs.” The military-industrial complex corporation nonetheless has every time won. This “war on drugs,” instead of drug legalization, has created an international underworld, chaos, corruption and mass murder in Mexico, and threatened our personal safety. It’s another historical American deception and mistake, a drain on our resources, and a war against Americans. It’s a boon to El Paso, however, employing thousands of law enforcement personnel. Unspoken, too, is the drug money filtering through our banks. Drug operatives live among us, buy our real estate and shop in our stores. Illegal drugs are an integral part of our economy, and Silvestre Reyes, though hardly the brightest star around, is doing his job in keeping “the war on drugs” a thriving industry.
Ho Baron is a sculptor and a librarian, who has traveled extensively yet spent most of his life in El Paso.
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Read the intro to the new book Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juarez by Howard Campbell – UT Press --The drug war is prohibition all over again. Now, in the 21st century, when you want to buy a bottle of liquor do you visit the state-licensed liquor store, or do you buy your booze from a bootlegger? Can you even find a bootlegger anymore? I don’t think so. Legalization has entirely removed 
the criminal element from the equation, and you won’t end up with an adulterated product. During the prohibition era people died from poisoned alcohol all of the time! Drug use and abuse is a public health issue, not a criminal issue – every time I end up called for jury duty it seems to be another drug case, and I make this same point and explain that as a former law enforcement officer, I just don’t see any use in sending some poor drug addict to jail when all they need is counseling and rehab when they’re ready to quit. Of course then everyone laughs and I am dismissed from the jury pool. I refuse to convict some poor junky for merely possessing drugs. Marijuana should be legal, licensed, taxed – I was in California in the spring and that’s how it’s done there – very civilized. Hard drugs should be controlled and prescribed by doctors and given to registered addicts – again this would remove the criminal element and the poisons. We all know that the stuff costs next to nothing to produce, so if we’re going to make any mistakes I say let’s err on the side of humanity.
Richard Dugan is an El Pasoan.
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I miss my sister.
We’re friends and we’re losing track of each other.
Nothing can replace her. Without her there is a sense of emptiness. She’s not really gone.
She’s in hiding.
It’s Juarez I’m referring to, of course.
How many times have those of us who consider ourselves border people been offended and recoiled, when, at just the mention of the word “Juarez,” someone, who we thought was a friend, would all but shout, “Juarez! Juarez? I never go to Juarez. Used to go.
Used to love it. But it’s turned into a Sh__hole. I hate it!”
Yet, here I am, now, not crossing the border much anymore. Not walking – or driving - across those bridges. Now I go to work and I try to get back before night. My Juarez friends who come to this side also try to get back, to Juarez, before night, before most of the killing begins.
I am not saying “never again,” or, “Used to love it,” or any other angry declaratives. I am just more careful now. I go for necessity, not joy.
We wait. Hoping. Wondering: what will be left when this is all done? What will be?
I hope the Juarez I know reappears but fear she will not.
I wonder, what will be left of the smile, the joy, the aliveness, the sheer swagger?
I suspect I am doing what most of us are doing: waiting.
Will the murderous dissolution of law be put back into the bottle? Can it be?
The Cartel War will end. Someone will be a victor. Sometime. The Colombia model will emerge: Rich is rich. Look the other way. Life goes on.
However, down on the street where the newly addicted live, where the unemployed turned soldier live, where the families of the slaughtered live, where blood flows and misery festers and the pain of loss is everywhere, what will Juarez become?
The 10,000 soldiers will tip this battle and go home after they do what they were sent to do (and it was not what they said they were sent to do). The maquilas will dust themselves off and start hiring (with a little help from the world economy).
The night streets will become busy again as people come out of their homes.
Juarez will come back.
For the Juarenses who came to El Paso for safety there will be consideration of returning to home, but wondering, Will it begin and happen again? Why not live more sedate lives over in El Paso? Can one take a chance on this city and country that recently had its skin peeled off in this Cartel War, its dark secrets exposed, its real political heart revealed?
That time is not here yet.
We “border people” wait and huddle and continue to count: yesterday, over 1,600 murders for the year. There are three and a half months left in 2009. Dread.
Dread and hope while waiting for my “sister to return.
Bruce Berman is a photojournalist.
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War on Drugs: A Public Health Concern
As a public health advocate, it is gripping how the war on drugs along our border has contributed to the rising level of violence in our region, clearly becoming a local public health concern due to the mortality rates that have become chronic and widespread. The kind of pervasive community violence happening in our region represents a “public” issue insofar as it affects, directly or indirectly, broad segments of the population regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, and economic status.
Furthermore, exposure to pervasive community violence ultimately diminishes the quality of law enforcements’ effectiveness, its consistency of enforcement of policies and procedures, and sensitivity to victims' needs. It is because of this that the violence permeates through a substantial portion of the community’s population over an extended period of time, contributing to this continuum of violence, weaker services for all citizens, and threadbare civic engagement.
The unchecked violence in Juarez negatively impacts the emotional, physical, behavioral, and interpersonal functioning of those that enter or approach the environment, even with an act as simple as a cross border-jaunt or a more significant engagement. Impressionably, some fellow community members explain that the violence in Juarez has not directly impacted them. However, as the violence continues, the salience of the issue needs to be addressed and improved at all levels in our region.
A strategic plan must take order and begin to resist all levels of the pervasive violence that is occurring. First, it must start with assisting the individual victim’s needs. This involves the “overwhelming majority” of the community, youth and adults, who refuse to put up with staying inside and act together in response to acts of violence and must express and live the sentiment that aggression against any one of its members is aggression against all. The majority already tends to rely heavily on community organizations, ranging from churches, formal and informal youth groups, neighborhood or tenant associations and other social systems. By joining and forming social organizations within the community, it may enable expression of a community’s health and thereby release its herd immunity.
The second level of eliminating violence must shift from an individual level to a community level in order to take on its effectiveness. The community is involved in helping each other through a form of intervention that involves groups such as neighborhood watch, community policing, and coalitions with community leaders organizing to stop the social acceptance of the pervasive violence. Residents can then become engaged directly in the reduction of their vulnerability and program developers can help enable the cause by offering technical support, funding for programs and help empower its members against the pathogen. With shared responsibility and protecting each other, neighborhoods can begin to feel a “sense of community” and can diminish the breed, spread and contamination of violence.
Elena Acosta, MPH, is a public health advocate and grant writer at the Center Against Family Violence.
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"Prohibition means that the ONLY forces able to respond to market demand are those of the underworld. The only way to police the underworld is through law enforcement..."
That portion of your write up kinda sums it all up. There is, and always will be a heavy demand for drugs. Especially the ones banned for distribution by the U.S. government due to actions taken by the U.S. government, many years ago, when diversity was just a word in the dictionary and not at all implemented or considered in the highest offices of the land (Senate, Congress, presidency). These people passed these laws out of fear and hatred of minorities. They claimed that minorities used cocaine, marijuana, and heroin to commit acts of violence and to seduce saintly white women. These politicians were able to generate enough fear (much like today), amongst the white populace, that they were given free reign to draw up and make into law all sorts of unnecessary drug reform.
Now, we are about to see the end of the first decade of the 2000s and these archaic laws are still in place. All the while, 'the underworld,' has grown and grown almost unchecked. The violence that our sister city is currently facing is on the scale of a comic book super villain. News reports are graphic and almost unbelievable, like they're reading off a movie script. But, it's real, it's happening almost daily and there seems to be no end to it.
The current situation has evolved into something else, it's not just cartels quarreling with each other. How can a group of people wield so much 'killing power?' There has to be another motive we are overlooking or the governments (U.S. and Mexico) are hiding.
Recently, Gov. Rick Perry has declared that he wants to station Texas Rangers on the border (what about the Border Patrol?) and the Mexican government has been stationing troops in our sister city. I feel that we are one mandatory curfew away from becoming a police state, and that's scarier than any decapitated corpse.
M. De Santiago is a freelance music journalist and director of EP Culture Beat, online magazine, at epculturebeat.com.
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The War on Drugs is an endless battle between the bad and the worst. While it might seem easy for many of us to blame Mexico and Juarez for this drug problem and violence that is overflowing to the U.S., I believe we too are to blame. Just like prohibition, making drugs illegal has created more problems than what its intended purpose, which is to stop the drug flow. The underground networking of drug lords and front liners are
almost impossible to stop, and unfortunately, it is the innocent that are caught in the crossfire. While I am not stating that drugs should be legalized, I do not believe that putting such hard restrictions on drugs solves the problem at all. There needs to be more effort into finding new solutions to an existing problem that has plagued our community for years. Community leaders as well as citizens need to join together to solve the complexities on the border region, only then might this war on drugs officially end.
Davi Kallman is the Vice President of External Affairs of the Student Government at UTEP and Senior at UTEP.
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I went backpacking this past weekend and managed not to think about work or El Paso or much of anything. My mind quiet, I came home, relaxed and ready for just about anything.
First thing I did was check out the newspaper to see what I missed. A man from Horizon City was kipnapped in front of his home while schoolchildren watched on. Later that week, he was found brutally murdered in Juarez, his hands carved off and laid over his chest. Eighteen people were slain in a Juárez drug rehab center. Maybe the center was a cover for the cartels. Maybe not. But 18 people were dead.
It is strange to live so close to such daily and relentless and consuming violence, just minutes really. And yet I feel safe. There is not one neighborhood in this city that I would feel anxious in walking around after dark. We are the third-safest U.S. city of our size sharing a common border, a common culture, a common history with a city that is by most accounts the most dangerous city in the world today.
It wasn't always that way. I miss Juarez. I miss crossing over for dinner, for New Year's Eve at Martino's, a drink at the Kentucky Club, a walk down to the Cathedral, shopping with friends from out of town... My mom and dad used to take the kids over for a special dinner and the Feria. We haven't been in a long while, a year maybe. It was always familiar, like home. Not anymore. Better not to chance it.
So it is easy to seal ourselves off from the violence in Juarez, not cross over. Bemoan the daily headlines and trust the law enforcement agencies that it will not spill over. But as citizens of El Paso, as citizens of the United States, we should not let our sense of security distance us from the violence in our sister city, from the violence begat from an insatiable hunger for illegal drugs in the United States and the laws that have created irresistible profit margins for greedy thugs with guns. The violence in Juarez is our problem. This region, El Paso and Juarez, have sat perched at the edge of a great renaissance. The insecurity in Juarez has unraveled economic gains in our region. Momentum is lost. Worry sets in.
We can't really afford to just stand by.
It is with this in mind that several UTEP professors and community folks came together to host "A Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs." The War on Drugs was declared by Richard Nixon 40 years ago. Given the level of violence in Juarez, it is fair to ask whether the war is working and at what costs. The forum brings together thinkers and actors on this issue from all walks of life--government, journalists, academics, law enforcement--to examine the history of the war, its successes and its failures and to ask what options and alternatives we have as a global community to significantly reduce the threat of drug violence and drug use to our communities. The forum is meant as a time to reflect on current policy but its true aim is to develop an action plan for how we pull our region out of this crisis.
I invite you to attend, to participate, to put in your two cents, but most importantly to act.
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Growing up in El Paso, there always seemed to be a minor hubbub among locals when was mentioned in pop culture. Even in Seinfeld, when Kramer told Newman: I spent a week in El Paso one day, or in Kill Bill, when the confusing set decoration and desolate chapel were meant to represent a metropolitan area of 700,000, there was still an uplifting sense of, Hey, that's where I live, and it was mentioned. Also, the consistent rankings as one of the safest cities doesn't hurt.
After reading through on Newspaper Trees In the News feature, in which NPT highlights mentions of El Paso in other news outlets, much of the coverage and mention in El Paso from national and international media outlets was dedicated to the raging drug war. Each story seemed to include the phrase: Juarez, situated across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
Anyone in the city or even expats trying to keep up with the news of their hometown can't help but hear the grisly stories from the other side of the border. While these stories illuminate the nation about the violence in Juarez and the toll the illegal drug industry is taking, there is still a sense of concern from those who no longer live in El Paso for those who still do. With the six-degrees-of-separation nature of El Paso, it's not uncommon for those with no relations in Juarez to hear about someone's uncle's cousin's friend's brother who was affected. As the numbers climb, the degrees seem to shrink.
While the imagery and description of the crimes are always very vivid, the real sense of risk to El Pasoans can seem murky, particularly when reading over the debate of the term spillover, which is considered either an imminent threat to the American public or a reality that has been faced by the United States portion of the illegal drug industry for years.
Even for those with no direct ties to Juarez, basic human empathy and fear seems to kick in for those that do. After interviewing people for our Man on the Street feature asking them about how the drug war affects them, many said that it doesn't. But what seems to get a rise out of many is the perceived danger on either side of the border because of proximity. In May 2008, UTEP professor Tony Payan was quoted in NPT as saying: Most of you, if you're not involved in drug trafficking have nothing to be concerned about. Despite the course of the last year, many people on the border still hold this to be true.
Elizabeth Ruiz is associate editor of the El Paso Media Group.
