Hillary Hectors--And, Just Doesn't Get It

Secretary of State Clinton ended a swing through Latin America with stops in Central America where she went on rant after rant regarding the assorted small countries not taking a firmer stand in favor of a "rule of law."

She also fulminated at great length about how these same states are failing to take hard line against corruption and infiltration by drug smuggling rings. Poverty and fear are apparently not reason enough in her lofty view.

She ended her trip with a crescendo about the "failure to take a strong stand" in Guatemala where the national police chief and the head of the police anti-drugs unit have been arrested for stealing for resale beaucoup cocaine. By this time her rhetoric must have been wiggling seismographs world wide.

A person less given to high-minded moralism and sanctimonious righteousness at the expense of others might be inclined to view Guatemala with a touch of tenderness--even genuine pity. The country went through thirty-six years of insurgency, counterinsurgency, and downright banditry with a total body count of over two hundred thousand. It is also more than a bit poor.

And, in large measure because of the US-inspired and in part financed Mexican Very Real War on Drugs, it is a geographically well situated alternative waystation for drugs in transit. The "narcos" of Mexico have increasingly shifted their operations to Guatemala and other equally small, equally poor, equally neglected Central American countries. Waves of violence, oodles of money, and loads of corruption abound.

All of which are the result of one cause and one cause only. That's right, bucko, the monument to policy failure called the War on Drugs. In the forty years since Dick Nixon declared all out war on the human desire (or is it need?) for an altered state of consciousness, billions have been spent, thousands killed, perhaps millions jailed. Governments have been weakened, states destabilized, and lives ruined.

All for what? A war which was lost the instant it was declared.

The casualties of the war are still mounting today throughout Central and South America. The dead are really dead. The corrupt are corrupt because taking the silver is infinitely preferable to receiving the lead. States, small states in particular, continue to waver, trying to find a measure of peace if not prosperity in the gales of American drug demand on the one hand and torrents of American rhetoric and pressure on the other.

Guatemalans realize what is happening to and in their country as well as those neighboring. They know who is responsible for the bodies, the corruption, and the pervasive loss of faith in institutions old and new. The US is the villain of the piece in the narrative the Guatemalans and other Latin Americans have been and are writing about the "War on Drugs."

The real deal is simply that the narrative written by blood in Mexico, Guatemala, and other points south of the Rio Gande is both more compelling and truthful than the tropes delivered by the hectoring Ms Clinton. It is also far more compelling and realistic than the hoary justifications for continuing the so-called war by moralists or those with a vested interest in its continuation whether US cops or the bureaucrats of the UN anti-drug lash-up.

The Geek is in solidarity with the Guatemalans, the Mexicans, all the others down South who have called for legalization and regulation of drug commerce. It is long past time to acknowledge that regardless of alleged bad consequences, the attempt to stamp out either the desire to alter consciousness or the delivery of desired means to do so has been a long, bloody failure which has destroyed far more people and institutions than even the most purportedly evil mix of organic compounds.

The US must in the long term interests of itself and its neighbors bring this "war" on ourselves to an end. Ms Clinton would do her country and many others a profound and lasting service if she would drop the strident and offensive lectures on civic responsibilities and urge an end to the War We Cannot Win.