Is the War on Drugs a “Humanitarian Crisis”? (original) (raw)
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The Reframing of the War on Drugs as a " Humanitarian Crisis " Costs, Benefits, and Consequences
The War on Drugs has had grave humanitarian consequences for Latin America. It has encouraged a highly militarized and ultimately unsuccessful approach to drug control, leading to violence, displacement, and human suffering throughout the region. In acknowledging and responding to this suffering, humanitarian organizations have recently begun to frame this situation as a " humanitarian crisis " to facilitate humanitarian entry into new spaces. There is a need for a conceptual conversation about the use of the label " humanitarian crisis " in reference to the human costs of the War on Drugs in Latin America, particularly its rhetorical and normative use by the media and civil society and its strategic and moral use by humanitarian actors. La Guerra contra las Drogas ha tenido grave consecuencias humanitarias para América Latina. Ha promovido un enfoque altamente militarizado y en última instancia fallido, para controlar las drogas, lo que ha provocado violencia, desplazamientos y sufrimiento humano a través de la región. Como reconocimiento y respuesta a este sufrimiento, las organizacio-nes humanitarias recientemente han empezado a plantear esta situación como una " crisis humanitaria " para así facilitar la entrada humanitaria en nuevos espacios. Es necesario que se dé una conversación teórica sobre el uso de la categoría " crisis humanitaria " en referen-cia a los costos humanos de la Guerra contra las Drogas en América Latina, especialmente su uso retórico y prescriptivo por parte de los medios de comunicación y la sociedad civil y su uso estratégico y moral por parte de los agentes humanitarios.
The 'War on Drugs'': The Latin American Debate.
Published in 'South America, Central America and the Caribbean 2017' (Corp Ed) London, Routledge (2016) Historically, the USA has dictated the terms of the ‘war on drugs’, and has used its political and economic might to crush any debate on alternatives. However, over the past 10 years Latin American governments and civil society organizations have pushed back against prohibitionist drug policies. A regional debate has emerged, focused on the failure of present policies to achieve their desired objectives and the high cost of implementing supply reduction efforts, in terms of drugs- fuelled violence, corruption and institutional instability. This essay begins by outlining the characteristics of the global cocaine market. It then examines some of the objectives, methods and consequences of the US-designed and -funded ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America and the Caribbean. The regional debate in Latin America is then introduced—with a focus on the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs of April 2016. Finally, localized steps towards drug policy reform are outlined.
Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2021
This article breaks new conceptual ground by questioning orthodox interpretations of nation state agency in the global drug wars. Specifically, it challenges the David vs. Goliath conception of Colombia as a passive, client state simply abiding to the United States' hegemonic war on drugs. It provides the first published analysis of Colombia's leadership during the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) in 2016. It argues that the UN served as a useful forum for Colombia's displacement of state building dilemmas, including drug control, and that Bogota utilised the UN as a proxy negotiating mechanism with the US and other international donors.
Policy Studies, 2011
The Obama administration has an historic opportunity to reform US "War on Drugs" (WOD) policies in the strategically important Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. This paper examines the impact of the WOD policies and concludes they have seriously exacerbated crime and corruption rates in LAC. The result is weakened governance structures and economic capacities in LAC. The WOD has emphasized supply curtailment in source and transit countries, rather than demand reduction in the US This off-shoring of attacks on drug organizations has resulted in the acceleration of violence and corruption as drug traffickers develop new strategies to maintain their profits. The LAC region has the highest murder rate in the world, even higher than regions with armed conflict.
The Elephant in the Room: Drugs and Human Rights in Latin America
This article seeks to expose the tensions between the enforcement of drug laws and human rights. Due to their varied impacts and negative consequences, drug policies can act to increase violence against, and cause the repression of, the most vulnerable sectors of the population in the countries where they are being implemented. Starting with an analysis of the impacts of the implementation of the international drug control regime and critical factors related to the violation of human rights, the authors highlight the challenges that United Nations Special Session of the General Assembly in 2016 (UNGASS 2016) faces in defining drug policies for decades to come, with special attention given to Latin America.
2012
When then U.S. president Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, Colombia and Mexico became the first countries to experience American-led crop eradication campaigns. This was the beginning of 40 years of warfare against drug trafficking organizations in Latin America. Since then, prohibitive drug policies have been responsible for widespread human rights violations and the displacement and deaths of thousands of individuals, while persistently ignoring many of the fundamental social, economic, and political roots of the drug trade. This article explores the human security implications of the War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico, as carried out under Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative. By applying a human security perspective to the War on Drugs, it highlights the ways the War on Drugs adversely affects the populations of Colombia and Mexico and seeks to challenge traditional notions of security that dominate current drug policies and debates. It reiterates the need to ...
Taking narcotics out of the conflict: the war on drugs
Illegal drugs have become the center of gravity of Colombia's conflict. Traffic in narcotics catapulted the military capacity of the armed groups, increased their capacity to obtain income, criminalized their activities, eroded the legitimacy of the political system and internationalized the confrontation.
2013
The use of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) in the so-called War on Drugs has considerable implications for the application of international humanitarian law and raises concern about the respect for human rights under antidrug assistance programs. This article will focus, in particular, on the ways in which the lack of state control over PMSC activities poses a major challenge for human rights protections in the shortterm-by restricting the application of human rights law-as well as in the long-term-by further undermining state capacity and weakening the rule of law. Using the cases of Colombia and Mexico, this article will illustrate how PMSCs tend to add another dimension of complexity to complicated situations where the application of the rule of law is already uneven, increasing the risk of human rights violations and impunity.
Visions of Peace Amidst a Human Rights Crisis: War on Drugs in Colombia and the Philippines
Journal of Global Security Studies, 2020
Peace is one of the most widely used yet highly contested concepts in contemporary politics. What constitutes peace? That broad analytic inquiry motivates this article, which focuses on the contentious discourses of peace within a society besieged by widespread trafficking and use of illegal drugs. Focusing on the illegal drug problem in Colombia and the Philippines, the central puzzle of this paper constitutes two fundamental questions: How do state leaders justify their respective "war on drugs"? How do they construct and discursively articulate ideals of peace in the context of the illegal drug problem? This paper compares the post-9/11 Colombian war on drugs (2002-2010) vis-à-vis the Philippine war on drugs under the Duterte administration (2016-2019), particularly in terms of how their presidential administrations articulate "peace" in the context of resolving the drug problem. The paper examines the varying discourses of peace, investigates how those local discourses relate to global discourses on peace and illegal drugs, and underscores how and under which conditions those peace discourses portray the material distributive conflicts in those societies. The core argument states that the Uribe and Duterte administrations primarily deployed the notion of peace as a justificatory discourse for increased state repression, intensified criminalization of the drug problem, and the reluctance of the state in embracing a public health approach to the proliferation of illegal drugs.