Drug policy in Mexico and Colombia Research Paper

Drug policy in Mexico and Colombia - Research Paper Example South America, in stark contrast to its other counterpart North America or U.S.A, the world of riches as we know it, has long being plagued with the curse of poverty and deprivation coupled with alarmingly low levels of overall development. It is known that poverty, chronic unemployment and underemployment and illiteracy often give birth to crimes and Latin America has been no different. In Mexico, unemployment is around 20% while underdevelopment is just the double of unemployment (Gilbert 22). Drug trafficking, with all its vices in this context has been alleged as the prime concern spreading its â€Å"wings† with each passing day not only in Latin American nations but also in the U.S and the whole world. Countries like Mexico and Colombia have been the main architects of drug trafficking throughout the American sub-continent. In the early’80s Colombia used to be the main exporter of drugs and narcotics throughout the world, but with the Colombian government policy ge tting more stringent, Colombian drug-lords started using Mexico, mainly due to its suitable geographic locations to export drugs through Mexico to the U.S. (Rosin, 2). Mexico One prime social policy taken by the Mexican government towards curtailing the drug trafficking is to decrease violence in the Mexican drug market and reduce increasing crime frequency to controllable levels (Venda Felbeb-Brown,1). The ongoing drug war in Mexico is mainly an armed conflict among the several drug cartels fighting each other for market control and also with the Government armed forces installed to fight drug trafficking. Mexico is the main supplier of heroin in U.S. ... ijuana DTO, the Gulf DTO and the Juarez DTO, the smaller organizations being the La Familia(Venda Felbeb-Brown, 5).Further actions taken by the Presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon pitted the DTOs against the government as well as raised the competition in the market thereby destabilizing it even more. According to the Government data, this drug related violence has till date resulted in the death of more than 34,000 people in the last four years since President Felipe Calderon took charge. The president has used his army troops to combat the drug cartels. Mexican government said that the figures are proofs of desperation of the mafia getting pressurized by the security forces (â€Å"Mexico's drug war: Number of dead passes 30,000†, Dec 16, 2010). Now, the policy taken by the Government to reduce drug trafficking should be constitutional in a way that it should try to bring in some organization in the drug market which is otherwise very unorganized with high transaction costs that undermines the drug market itself. The illegal Mexican drug market really needs an intermediary or regulator to control the frailties of the market. The form of the stabilizer will depend on several factors, one of which is the state itself. There are various possibilities that can be discussed: With the surfacing of one or more DTOs having sufficient control over their territories so as to be able to secure their domains if need be. They should be having adequate control and can impose regulations to carry on their businesses, decrease transaction costs and reach a point of common agreement with newly acquired controls and new-formed boundaries so as to reduce violence. Such territorial division was predominant in Mexico prior to the early 2000s.Such an aspect of evolution is missing