 On behalf of the World Affairs Council, I'm Major General Mike Myatt, your moderator. It is my pleasure to introduce this evening's distinguished guest. General Douglas Fraser is the current commander of the U.S. Southern Command. Please help me in welcoming General Douglas M. Fraser. Most importantly, as we look out into the future, the fastest growing segment of our country right now is the Hispanic population. We're the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. By the year 2050, the estimate is that one-third of our population, or close to one-third of our population, will have Hispanic roots. So that will impact how we think, how we operate as a country, and how we look at that relationship with our partners to the south. Over the last decade, it's been a real decade of progress for Latin America. Over the entire decade, it's been 3.4% growth in GDP. Last year, it was 4.6% growth in GDP. They have weathered the downturn better than any other subregion in the world overall. A lot of that is really due to trade and growing trade with China, primarily a commodities-based relationship, iron, copper, oil, various specific commodities as you look through that. The region has the largest disparity of income distribution of any subregion in the globe, and therefore, there's social class exclusion. There's not a lot of ability to move from one social class to another. Country by country, and it varies country by country, but corruption is endemic throughout the region as well, and then that's compounded by weak institutions of government. Police forces in many of the countries are very corrupt, and they're not trusted by their populations. You compound that with judiciaries that in some of the countries, especially in Central America, only 2-3% conviction rates from those organizations. So you compound all those issues, and criminal organizations can come in and operate with near impunity because there's no government institutions that will put any restriction on them. And we talk about it from a transnational criminal organization because it's not just drugs, and we tend to focus on drugs, but it's more than drugs. It's trafficking in weapons, bulk cash, and a lot of that cash that goes to support those comes from the United States and it moves through the region and then it gets laundered within the region to be put into legitimate use. It's trafficking in persons, trafficking in exotic animals. There is a lot of different criminal activity and it's all corruptive as you look and how it impacts the region. To bring that into focus as we look at the situation, we have been supporting, we the United States have been supporting the government of Columbia for over 20 years now in addressing their issue with cartels. If you go back into the 70s and 80s, the Colombian drug cartels, we all remember those and United States government support and Colombian efforts to address those were largely successful. But there were organizations that filled in the gaps there. There are criminal bans now that are working with drugs and the FARC who the Colombians have been fighting for for 47 years now are still active and they are a narco-terrorist organization because they still advocate the overthrow of the Colombian government. The Colombians are very, very active there. They still are the largest producing cocaine in the country in the world, but that is changing. Coca production is down 60% over the last decade and the producers are moving into Peru and into Bolivia. In fact, the UN estimates that Peru is now the leading producer of coca and I've seen at least one report that says they're now the leading producer of cocaine as well. So largely successful in helping Columbia reduce the flow of drugs of cocaine out of Columbia. You mentioned these transnational criminal organizations. Are these just Mexican cartels? Are they truly international organizations? We think, we don't see them as just a cartel and the best way to describe them is a network of networks and we're just now trying to really put an effort together that understands the entire relationship of how all these networks work but there is no one organization that controls the drugs or the criminal activities that goes from one point to another. In some cases, we even see micro-businesses, if you will. Criminal elements that just have a very small requirement, they're very, very specialized and they conduct that part of the business and it may only go for 100 kilometers, it may go for a little bit longer and that's all they do. As you look at what's coming through the Southwest border, actually marijuana is a larger portion of what comes across the Southwest border than is cocaine. We're starting to see heroin and we're starting to see heroin not only come across the borders but being grown in the region and then we're also seeing Central America as a real first stop for precursors, chemicals for methamphetamines coming from China, coming from India. So that's an area of growing concern because it is really not just cocaine anymore, it is a lot of the illicit activity. Weapons, most of the weapons that we have seen have trafficked on land, not in the maritime, so we have not seen as much interdiction of weapons as we have the drugs. We've had more interdiction of bulk cash moving back south than we have weapons. Sir, several questions on U.S. drug policy summed up here. What kind of impact, if any, do you think a change in U.S. drug policy would have on your region? I'm assuming that means legalized. I'll read between the lines there. It's a very complex issue and from my standpoint I don't think there's one answer. And if you take one answer, how far do you go with that answer? And from my standpoint, I think it's a discussion that I hear is growing. It's probably a discussion that we need to have. But I guess what I would ask, and this is a personal opinion, what I would ask is that we not only look at the issue at hand, but we look at the second and third order impacts of that decision on our society. And that all needs to get put into the equation so that we really understand the impact that we'll have. Sir, transitioning to the use of drones, we see a lot of news on the use of drones in Afghanistan. Has it been considered for you to use drones in your area, specifically perhaps to use armed drones to take out the leadership of the drug cartels? I think it's important to remember that we're working with sovereign countries. And is their laws and their desires of how we need to work. So they're the ones who get to decide what types of support that we're providing with them. And in this issue, unlike the combat operations were involved in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is a law enforcement issue. It is not a combat or a military issue. So we need to be very, very deliberate at how we approach that and approach it from a law enforcement aspect and not a military aspect. We have an opportunity to support those capacities or support the efforts, but it really is a law enforcement focus and that government decides how we engage. The country that I'm most concerned with is Haiti, I would say, just because they're still growing their government institutions. They're not strong yet. There's still 500,000 people who are not in a permanent shelter and a transition shelter. There has been a lot of progress in Haiti. They've built 100,000 transition shelters. I'll put that in perspective. Those shelters are better than the houses that most people were living in before the earthquake. There's 450 more kilometers of paved roads than there was before. Half the rubble has been removed from the streets in Haiti. There's a lot of construction. You can see a lot of capacity that has grown there, but there is still a long way to go. It can turn very quickly depending on what the natural disaster situation or the political situation happens in the country. A lot of the capability that supports business on a global basis also supports criminal organizations on a global basis. If I go back 20 years ago at the start of the internet and the capacity to move information around, the ability to move forces someplace outside of a country or even within a country to finance them, to get intelligence information, awareness of what was going on, and command and control them was really the purview of governments. Now it's the purview of individuals and small organizations, and that's what criminal organizations are doing. So it's having a direct impact as you look at how technology has enabled them to pursue illicit activity in a similar manner to way illicit business conducts business as well. And so it is really bringing a lot of capacity together, but in some cases I'd argue there's a lot of information out there that we don't use, that we could use. And so as you look at it from a Silicon Valley standpoint, it is how do we take advantage and where are the tools and where is the analytical capacity that helps us simulate and assimilate that information so that it becomes usable information and it's not just something that we have to continue to go out and find. It's making those connections. On behalf of the World Affairs Council and the Marines Memorial Association, we thank you so much for coming and sharing your thoughts here with us this evening. Please join me folks in thanking General Fraser. Thank you very much. Thank you.