AP SPEECH. EDUARDO MEDINA MORA I. (ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF MEXICO)
April 6th, 2009

Good day ladies and gentlemen.

Mister Tom Curley, President of the Associated Press

Mister Dean Singleton, Chairman of the Board of Directors

Dear members of the Associated Press

It is an honor to address this gathering and for my country to be given the opportunity to share our perspective about a common problem.

Let me start by illustrating the tragedy of drug abuse and drug trafficking with four brief life stories.

When Catherine tried cocaine for the first time, she thought like everyone else, "Nothing will happen." She turned into a recreational drug user who thought she would have a good time and could "keep everything under control". Catherine got married to John, and together they enjoyed a successful upper middle class USA lifestyle in Los Angeles, California. Soon Jenny was born, a beautiful little daughter who, before the current financial crisis, seemed to have her future assured. Along with the crisis came the economic problems and conflicts between Jenny's parents. Both lost their jobs and began to survive on part time work. Stress grew. A divorce resulted. In a few months Catherine's recreational cocaine use became an addiction and took control of her life. Divorced, unemployed, in debt, and burdened with both a young daughter to provide for and an addiction to sustain, Catherine started down the road to social and moral disintegration, a path that would be difficult to alter.

Sam, a young African American, grew up in a violent, poor neighborhood of Baltimore. Early on, Sam's father had abandoned him and his mother; she was the one who tried to teach Sam the difference between right and wrong. But Sam's mother had to dedicate more time to work than to Sam. Soon the street became Sam's playground and learning ground in that poor neighborhood dominated by gangs. Sam saw that the gang members were feared and respected, enjoyed privileges, had expensive clothes, and drove fancy cars. Like any adolescent, Sam felt the need to belong and to feel powerful. Soon, like many of his friends, he joined a gang. One day Sam was offered the job of selling cocaine in the fancy neighborhoods. Sam accepted, thinking "nothing will happen; I can walk away whenever I want". When Sam's gang challenged a rival gang for control of the strategic drug selling area, Sam was seriously wounded during a shootout that left him disabled for the rest of his life.

Pedro was a Mexican trailer truck driver with a cross border trucking business out of Ciudad Juarez. He was well respected in his neighborhood and much loved by his wife and children. With the business boom brought by NAFTA, Pedro was able to buy three more trailer trucks and improve his standard of living. For many years Pedro successfully resisted the temptation to smuggle cocaine in his trucks headed for the US. Some of his colleagues had done so, and Pedro saw how they began to enrich themselves easily. Since the drug cartels controlled Ciudad Juarez, the pressure to conform turned into intimidation. Finally Pedro succumbed to the pressure and temptation and, with the assurance of the protection of the cartels, allowed cocaine to be smuggled by his trucks into the US. He convinced himself by thinking "Nothing will happen. I’ll just do it a few times, and then I’ll quit". Years later the druglords of the cartel decided to sacrifice Pedro as a decoy to distract the authorities so as to allow a very important shipment of cocaine to slip by. Pedro was betrayed by his own "protectors," arrested, and is now serving a long sentence in a federal penitentiary.

Alvaro was a Colombian campesino, the owner of a ranch blessed with fertile soil. For years he grew fruit, coffee, and cattle. He was neither rich nor poor. Alvaro was from a large family with solid religious roots. He was devoted to his family and had little or no interest in what was going on around him. He knew that nearby were FARC and paramilitary right wing guerillas and that some of his friends grew coca plants – big business. Alvaro had managed to stay on the periphery and coexist with a war that didn't involve him. From time to time he heard of clashes and killings. One day, an old friend in dire straits asked him to lend him a few acres to grow coca plants; he consented to help his friend. Soon he was sharing in the profits, thinking "Nothing will happen; it’s just a small piece of land, I can control this". But time proved him wrong. The war intensified. His house was destroyed by the combatants. His land was rendered infertile by the anti-coca fumigation. Alvaro and his family had to abandon everything. Today they live in poverty as refugees in Bogota.

Catherine, Sam, Pedro, and Alvaro represent people caught in the trap laid by the four stages of the drug cycle: consumption, distribution, trafficking, and production. These persons are fictitious, but their stories represent reality for thousands of Americans, Mexicans, and Colombians. Which of them deserve our empathy and compassion and which of them deserve our disgust and condemnation? Who is guilty and who is innocent? The truth is that we are confronted by a shared tragedy that obliges us to accept a shared responsibility. We can resolve the drug problem only if we confront the problem together and not try to blame one another or feel sorry for ourselves. Not all Anglo Americans are addicts by nature. Neither are all African Americans criminals, nor all Mexicans corrupt, nor all Colombians violent. We are confronted by a common problem in societies with distinct economic and social development, with unique institutional entities, and with disparate processes of law and order.

Simplistic approaches divide us, keep us ignorant, and give advantages to criminals. The drug cycle reproduces, feeds, and multiplies itself efficiently and viciously. The drug cycle procreates human tragedy, greed, violence, crime, and death. Drugs destroy the lives of those who consume them, feed upon the street gangs that distribute them, arm dangerous cartels that traffic them, and generate bloody wars among those who grow them. Catherine's American dollars finance the violence that leaves Alvaro impoverished and homeless; Alvaro's Colombian coca plants result in the addiction that will end by killing Catherine. Drugs have both a homicidal and a suicidal logic.

Catherine represents the search for new "highs" and diversions among the well-off urban middle class. Sam, Pedro, and Alvaro represent those who desire to escape from poverty the fastest way possible. Indeed, all of them are victims of our materialistic society in the pursuit of what society defines as success. When vanity, luxury and money are the central values of society, greed becomes the engine of organized crime and the motivation for armies of poor people to succumb to criminal activities.

We recently witnessed how the so-called “best executives” of the world’s financial system triggered the most serious economic crisis of the past 70 years. Their greed has thrown millions into unemployment and poverty around the world. It is also greed that drives the drug business, within American gangs as well as among the Mexican and Colombian cartels that are overwhelming us with corruption, addicts and death. We have to find a way to strengthen the social fabric and values and generate self-control in our societies to fight the temptations our economies foster. This is everyone’s obligation. As far as my job is concerned, it is all about establishing controls and setting limits so that law and order can prevail.

Mexico is suffering from an explosion of violence that has surprised the whole world, including us. We Mexicans haven't experienced such violence since the 1910 Revolution. The main question is why? Why did it happen so suddenly? How could this Monster have been hiding in our own house? How did the cartels become so powerful?

Mexico has not always been the principal route of drug trafficking into the United States. The most profitable, quickest, and most geographically logical route was always through the Caribbean. It allowed the Colombian cartels to export first marijuana and then cocaine directly into the US without the need for intermediaries. We only have to remember Al Pacino in Scarface or the Miami Vice TV show. However, towards the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's, the US was successful in closing the Caribbean route with a concentrated drug interdiction force. Colombia experienced what could be called its first great war against drug trafficking, a war that resulted in over 70,000 deaths in Medellin alone. This represented 204 violent deaths for every hundred thousand inhabitants in 1993.

The death of Pablo Escobar is the single most emblematic event of that war. Since then, the Colombian cartels have tried to evade extradition by leaving their Mexican counterparts with the last leg of the long trip to get drugs into the United States. The urban cartels fragmented, the FARC became drug trafficking guerrillas and they began controlling nearly all production of cocaine. As a result, Colombia entered into its second great war against drugs.
With the Caribbean route closed, the transportation of drugs became more complex, passing through both Central American and Mexican territory. With this development, the Mexican cartels’ share of the value-added chain increased, along with their wealth and their power to corrupt and to intimidate. A monster began to grow in Mexico's house, and we were surprised by its unprecedented propensity for violence.

Mexico's cartels operated cynically with impunity and flagrantly dominated some regions and small cities that formed part of the strategic routes used to traffic drugs to the US. Dollars coming from the sales of drugs in US cities allowed the cartels to bribe the police and arm themselves to the hilt with weapons readily available from the US.

In just two years we have seized almost 52,000 firearms in Mexico, of which, more than 27,000 are assault weapons. In 2009 63% of total weapons seized are assault rifles. This volume of firearms is equivalent to five times the number of weapons seized from the FARC by Colombian authorities in the year 2008 and over three times the total number of weapons in the hands of El Salvador’s FMLN when civil war ended in that country in 1992. The unrestricted arms market in the U. S. is affecting Mexican security far more than was seen in Central America during the eighties. We are at war against criminal organizations that have in their possession millions of dollars and tens of thousands of weapons, both of which originate in the United States.

So, it is after all this that we ask ourselves: what are we doing in Mexico to fight organized crime rings, and what options do we have to defeat them? Going after individuals who break the law is not enough, because we are not addressing the specific reasons why they break the law, and why they do it in a particular manner. When we are talking about such massive amounts of money and power, the individual deterrent provided by criminal punishment is not enough. There is always someone willing to run the risk. To have a real impact on drug trafficking, we have to visualize it as a business that we want to destroy. By seeing drug smuggling activities from the business point of view, we can increase their opportunity cost, take away any advantage they can find in our territory, and diminish their power to corrupt. We have invaded their routes, laid siege to their networks, and in only two years we have captured 63,584 criminals linked to narcotics trafficking.

Now, the cartels are waging a two-front war. The bloodiest one is amongst the cartels themselves, as they seek to control pieces of a shrinking pie. The other war is against government forces. Between December 2006 and March 2009, there have been 10,657 violent deaths related to drug traffic, of which 988 have been policemen. The great majority of deaths -- 9 out of every 10 -- belong to organized crime members. Slowly but surely, the cartels are entering a state of fragmentation and self-destruction. We are witnessing right now a wave of significant arrests that have this illegal industry in upheaval. More are to come. Nevertheless, success is by no means guaranteed; we need to be relentless; we cannot let them bounce back.

As we become successful, we will bring much deserved peace and tranquility to all Mexicans. Unfortunately, our success is not going to end the drug problem. If the demand for drugs does not change, drugs, as water, will always find their course; they will find the path of least resistance. As it happened in Florida twenty years ago, our victory may very well mean that Central America becomes a hell of its own. Shifting routes will most certainly put unbearable pressure upon the security of the Caribbean nations, and it is necessary to consider if this violent monster could not hit back again inside the United States as it did during the crack wars.

In this meeting there are many journalists, but also owners and editors of newspapers who know that the part of their businesses that requires the greatest number of employees is neither production nor transportation, but rather the distribution of the newspapers to their readers. It is the same with drugs. A recent FBI report states that in the US there are a million gang members, organized in 20 thousand gangs, present in all 50 states. They are an army of street-sellers and they have in their hands a sizeable part of the distribution of drugs that reach 35 million consumers, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on different kinds of drugs. I can assure you, knowing the problem in detail, that these distribution networks employ more criminals than the Mexican and Colombian cartels put together, because fewer personnel are required for production and transportation than for distribution. In that sense, it is a serious mistake to think that violence is overflowing from Mexico to the United States and that closing the borders can contain it. It is American residents, regardless of their race, national origin or citizenship status, who distribute drugs in the United States. In other words, the U. S. has its own monster right at home, and its potential for violence should not be underestimated.

Let me tell you another story, this one factual. On January 11th, 2008, in Queretaro, Mexico, Craig Petties, an American citizen, an African-American from Memphis, was arrested. He started his criminal career as a gang member and grew to control drug distribution in Tennessee. After being chased by the American authorities, he fled to Mexico where he received the support of members of the Beltran-Leyva cartel, with whom he had done business in the US. In return for this hospitality, Petties became a broker for the cartel, using his contacts in the United States to secure and speed up the traffic of drugs to the north. Petties is only one example of crime globalization, and from his story some questions arise: How many criminals like him are needed to lead a million gang-members to distribute small quantities of drugs in thousand of cities to millions of American users? What is the potential of violence of these criminal networks in a country where assault weapons are sold like pancakes? No offense to your Second Amendment, but it is beyond my comprehension how can there be a law that explicitly prohibits the creation of a federal database of gun purchasers in the US, purchasers who have to identify themselves on a written record for the government, but that the government then cannot then consolidate into a searchable list. No obligation for second hand buyers to register or to sellers to notify whom they sold the weapons to. Just an example.

Like Catherine, Sam, Pedro and Álvaro; Mexico, for years, told itself: “nothing will happen, we can walk away from this”. We thought we had everything “under control”, but like them, life proved more complicated than that, and now we are paying a high price for years of indifference, for living in denial. Until recently, drug problems have been confronted with wars against the suppliers and tolerance towards the users. Outside the US, the problem is seen as political and military; within the US, the problem is considered one of Public Health. This approach survives because it is thought that in the United States “nothing happens” and “everything is under control”. But as we just described, alongside the monster of personal destruction through drug abuse, lives the monster of criminal violence linked to the distribution of drugs in every state of the United States. The crack wars were not an aberration that can be written off, they are a latent threat.

Today, all of us are part of the problem and all of us are part of the solution. The United States can do much for Mexico and we can do a lot for the United States. There are five weighty tasks in which the support of the United States is essential to Mexico’s efforts.

1. Decrease the supply of offensive weaponry of military use, like assault rifles, to the criminal organizations in Mexico. While gun ownership in the United States is an entirely internal and sovereign matter, we are certain that the Second Amendment was never meant to arm foreign criminal groups. The US already banned assault weapons for ten years. During the ban, one third of guns seized in Mexico were assault rifles, today two thirds are assault rifles.

2. Substantially reduce the income that marijuana exports generate for the Mexican cartels, through aggressive application of US law against smugglers who transport it across the border. Today, half of the cartels’ income comes from the marijuana trade; it is their bread and butter.

3. Prevent the money from retail drug sales in US cities from being exchanged within the territory and presumably within the financial system, for high denomination bills that are easier to move as bulk cash to Mexico and Colombia.

4. Use the intelligence already in the hands of individual US law enforcement agencies to effectively dismantle the organized crime networks along the border that provide the logistics and protection for drug shipments.

5. Undertake a joint regional effort to strengthen Central America’s capabilities and commitment in the fight against organized drug crime.

The bottom line is: we are asking you to make business difficult for the criminals, to reduce all advantages that allow the corrupt to become powerful, and to enable small states to combat them. In this way, you are not only helping Mexico, but also weakening the monster you already have in your basement.

The battle against drug traffickers, and the violence it triggers, is very complex and requires an integral and consistent strategy. In that sense, the challenge for our imaginations is enormous in the search for creative solutions. We need law and order, but in the fight against drugs we can only win if we have a strong social fabric of citizens, armed with values that can stand up to the temptation of corruption and the vice of addiction.

I close with a thought on Catherine whom we find fighting to reconstruct her life in a rehabilitation clinic. Catherine constantly thinks about her daughter Jenny. Catherine remembers that Jenny has seen both her parents smoking marijuana and has seen Catherine herself snorting cocaine. Catherine is aware of the existence of methamphetamines and that those drugs are even more addictive, more destructive, and more dangerous than cocaine. Catherine's anguish now is: How is she going to educate Jenny so that when she is confronted by the temptation to take drugs, she will not think "Nothing will happen.'?". Indeed, how to educate our children and provide them with effective strategies to defend themselves from drugs is the main challenge we face today.

Thank you.