 Particularly in the Latin American continent, drug trafficking played an important role in the recent increase in homicides and the use of violence. We consider the efforts made by Mexico and the family of victims, the 35,000 or 40,000 victims. To think about the price that their family has paid is certainly a loadable effort. So it's on the right track, basically? Absolutely, yes. Years ago, Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs in Mexico. How do you see the situation after four years? Did it improve or is it worse? Well I think there are some achievements that we must recognize. But I think that considering the results, almost 30,000 victims and extended violence all around the country, portions of the territory under control of organized crime. What I think is that the strategies to confront organized crime have to be changed. This report from the UN in 2011 mentions an increase in marijuana production in Mexico considerably, from around 25% from 2009 to 2010. Also for example, the cultured area of Amapola has grown tremendously, so it doesn't see that there is any impact on the production or on drug commercialization. The methamphetamine has also grown a lot in Mexico. I don't see any progress. What you can see even in cities like where I'm from, you see two or three killings a day. If we would see violence reducing more jobs, that's when you would say that we're winning the drug war. Like there are a lot of people, it's very sad to hear news, for example, that two cities with borders that are stuck, such as Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, in the United States, El Paso is declared as the safest city in the United States, and Ciudad Juarez is declared since 2008 as the most violent city in the world. Ciudad Juarez, from being a prosperous border with a very important tax reduction for Mexico, is becoming a kind of peaceful people without people. The violence goes beyond the murderers, the people who are extorted, the people who are kidnapped, the people who are robbed. Felipe Calderón, with his usual bravado, declared this war on drugs without knowing what was going to come on him. He said, I'm going to be the drug lord's worst nightmare while a guest who's not sleeping these days. I would think it's the president, but also many Mexicans. It's a shame that many communities have to live with the terror and the lack of the minimum conditions of survival. Some people who are using Twitter, for example, to report that don't go through that street in Monterey because there's gunshots being fired. Don't cross on that way because there's a bunch of unknown people holding the road. Don't go that way. I think Mexicans at some point need to say, hey, stop, we can't live this way. And when they tell us this is going to be a long fight, and a prolonged fight, and that we need to be patient, I disagree. Why should we be patient? I don't want to live my life driving from work to home with a military truck next to me with a gun pointing to my head because that's the way they drive through the city. The violence today in Mexico associated with organized crime can only be explained by that fragmentation of both political power and the organized crime itself. The first information about drug markets in Mexico has been from the first moment linked to the Mexican state, to governors, to military, to the police, as institutions that, at the same time, have repressed but have also protected the organized crime. The organized crime grew under the protection of the state and the Mexican political system that focused a lot on power for many years, kept the organized crime very controlled. By the 20th century, we had police institutions such as the Federal Security Council, which were openly administrators of illegal markets, of drugs, the police itself. When the democratic transition in Mexico comes, two phenomena arise. Exponential growth, intense growth of the organized crime globally, and political fragmentation in Mexico. That is, the hegemonic party system was over, the regime of the PRI was over, and we began to have new groups governing, new political parties governing, and that generated a phenomenon of autonomy of the organized crime. The Colombian plan, although it has not been able to contain the production of coca and coca-cay plant, it was able to extirpate the groups organized more strongly from Colombia, and what it ended up doing is translating part of that power to the organized groups from Mexico. There are several parts of the country that have no state whatsoever, and where organized crime is the state or is the main actor taking leadership and making decisions. In Mexico, there are actually two important cartels, the Sinaloa Cartel and the CETAS. Those are the most important because they have international connections, and because they control the most traffic and drugs from South America to USA. And for example, in Sinaloa Cartel, it's controlling basically the most of the exportation of marijuana, increasingly are getting more strength, stronger in the exportation of metamphetamines. The CETAS control one part of cocaine and the arms trafficking from USA to Mexico, and right now they're getting control of all the Gulf territory in Mexico. The CETAS were the surters from the Mexican army. When they're part of the Mexican army, they're getting trained in USA and Israel for terrorist tactics, intelligence and counterintelligence tactics. The Sinaloa Cartel and the CETAS, they're the most important. They're getting the most important firepower also, so the confrontation in Mexico, actually right now it's getting between these two cartels. After continuing the fight against the organized crime in general, they've cut a lot of heads of the capos, of the criminals, let's say, from above in the delictive hierarchy. And what has happened is that many of these groups that were in the middle or below no longer had leaders that were telling them what to do. However, they already had the firepower because they already had the weapons that these groups had given them, they already had a certain capacity, they already knew how to put fear in many communities, and that's what these groups have done. We have a bunch of young Mexicans without any perspective of future, without any aspiration to become anything other than rich and whose lives don't matter to anybody. The procuration of justice in our country is very weak, and this has ensured that many people see that situation as a propitious field to exercise the activities of the delictives. There must be many different connections between cartels and the elites, not only political but also economic. It's not an unknown phenomenon that many families these days are marrying their daughters into drug trafficking families because that's a way to acquire social mobility. Drug cartels are basically offering, hey, you know what, we're giving you a way of life. You're going to have money to feed your family, and I think that's the number one issue. Well, people are going to defend even the drug lords, right? If you have a drug lord that is the one who's taking care of all the sewer problems in the small town, electricity, finding other elements so people can live, that's why they become so powerful, because people depend on them. They started to provide services that the state, in all of its three levels of government, couldn't provide. We've heard of roads built by drug traffickers, we've heard of airports built by drug traffickers, we've heard of schools and clinics. So it's very hard to think that, again, this is something that floats and can be surgically removed with the army. This is something that has deep roots in Mexican society. Many parts of the society are accepting this way of life. In Mexico, contrary to what happened in the rest of Latin America, the army did not have a specific role in politics and bringing it into combat drugs has given it some space in the political arena. And it has been a very costly space in that political arena for the military because it has lost most of the prestige it had and it has also lost a lot of lives in a war that is very difficult to win. The army is trained to fight a concrete enemy in a concrete situation of battle. That is not the way drug lords work. They consider big achievements not only capturing drug lords but killing drug lords. If this were a true democracy and if this were a true state with rule of law, you wouldn't need to kill people like in the Wild West, even if you're facing them in the context of war. Even in the context of war, there would be rules to deal with prisoners, there would be rules to deal with the enemy. And when they consider a big achievement, the killing of Nacho Coronel or the killing of the Beltran Leivas, well, I ponder and I say, well, excuse me, these people, even these people, as rotten as they were, if we buy that argument, deserved a fair trial and the whole thing that comes with the rule of law. On the one hand, we have a fairly clear policy of the US government and of Mexico fighting drug trafficking, but on the other hand, there is a armed flow that nourishes drugs. The weapons go from the United States to Mexico without the smallest possible control. There is a whole practice where this has historically a government validation. In fact, it is a source of quite important income for that country. Since the Mexican Revolution, well, they have given us weapons to nourish all these instruments in the revolution and we have seen in other countries that sell them to one side and another. I think that the US needs to check the issue with who they, if they want to sell the weapons to their citizens, that's a decision that the US has and it's a second amendment right that they have. But I think you need to make it very difficult for those arms to be sold to people and then being smuggled into Mexico. It is impossible to believe that only Mexico has corruption and that is why the drug trafficking takes place. There has to be a counterpart in the United States for the drugs to be coming in the way they are. Do we have any estimations like how much money the Calderón government spent on the war on drugs since 2006? Well, one of the problems in Mexico to try to trace the budget oriented to combat drug trafficking in general is that we don't have access to that information as a civil society. You don't know how they spent the money and you don't know where and in what. Some politicians have said that there needs to be a pact between government and drug cartels. I don't think that's the issue either but I don't think that the issue is going and confronting them and fighting a war when you don't really have an alternative of how you're going to end that war and then how many years you're going to end that war. That's the problem with Felipe Calderón's tactics because he's basically fighting drugs but he's not doing anything for better health, better education, more money for families, etc. Indirectly a problem in drug trafficking, right? You can't generate peace in this country with weapons. You can't generate peace in this country with violence. It's a logical rule. Violence generates violence, right? Death generates death. We've taken out policemen who don't even know how to solve a conflict between two people who crash into the car. They don't know. They prefer to leave. People who have used their weapons twice in a year and who are facing a subject who uses their daily weapons. They kill them. They kill them. The first solution is police dignification. This requires investment. You have to invest in the police in Mexico. I think our government needs more weapons. It doesn't need more policemen. It doesn't need more judges. It needs more trust. Trust has to do with transparency. You need a paradigm change to use money in a different way. You have to spend a lot of money in the police, in prisons, in taxis, in judges. You have to spend a lot of money in the social prevention of crime. This includes treatment, education, legal culture, civil culture. You have to empower the citizen. You have to stop empowering the state and start empowering the citizen. That's what I'd like to understand to the people of the United Nations. The cost of the war against drugs is being paid in these countries. And in developed countries it doesn't seem real that the consumption is going to stop. They are condemning us to keep having orphans. They are condemning us to keep having violence in our streets. And they are condemning us ironically to increase the consumption of drugs in our countries. Because it has proven that one of the things that produces the most drugs is the post-traumatic stress derived from violent experiences. There are drug users in Mexico not only a transit country but also a producer country and a consumer country. The idea that drug users are criminals and the idea that drug use is associated directly with organized crime is still an idea that is out there and we need to change that if we are to respond in a different way. Many people are afraid of responding, offering treatment, offering prevention strategies, even offering harm reduction. Not as much because of what harm reduction entails but because they think what we're doing is fostering organized crime. You have to divide the world of the drugs from the world of the crime and then focus on organized crime in a very different approach. The state has to gain again the control of the market, making regulation of it. And that's the point where we are. We are proposing regulations for different drug markets in Mexico. We were practically taken by crazy people and now a lot of people are realizing that it's a plausible alternative, the fact of spying on cannabis and regulating it in this chaos we currently have. Is there any political support for the idea of legalization in Mexico? I think there are politicians that have started to talk about the issue of legalizing drugs, some drugs, not all drugs and I think we need to debate that. What types of drugs should be legalized and what are the consequences? Are they going to be paying taxes for that? What is that money on taxes going to be used for? And I think education on not to use drugs should be the issue. I'm not saying that we should legalize all drugs but I think we need to debate and see what are going to be the consequences if we do that, if that's going to resolve any of the problems. El problema se acaba cuando la droga se legaliza. Yo no lo pensaría igual. Creo que esa ilusión a la mejor puede ser una puerta falsa. Porque sabemos que el crimen organizado igual vende marihuana igual secuestra. Si le quitamos el mercado de la marihuana igual se incrementa otra dinámica de extorsión, de secuestro, de crimen. Entonces, yo no estaría tan claro y tan cierto de que legalizando la marihuana disminuye la violencia. La cannabis sigue siendo el 60% alrededor del 60% de los ingresos de los grupos que se dedican al tráfico de drogas. Entonces retirarles esa fuente de ingresos necesariamente haría merma en su capacidad de fuego y su poder corruptor. We have to discuss legalization of different drugs and that this has to be also discussed, widely discussed in the United States. And in this case I think we should adopt common policies if we want to be effective in the results to obtain. In 2012 we have a new government coming into place at the presidency level. We don't have too high expectations of them but we need to learn from the past very failed experiment that we had with the war on drugs and we want to make sure that all these opinions, the debate that has been opened, it continues to be there and that we use that and move forward and not stay there.