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In a change of plans, Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto will participate in the Tuesday kickoff of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on international drug policy, to be held in New York City.
According to Mexico’s Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu in a Monday press conference in Mexico City, Peña Nieto will lay out and further define Mexico’s position on the growing debates on drug prohibition policies at the U.N. session.
“Mexico believes that although it is necessary to keep the commitments that the international community has with existing drug policies, it is also necessary to recognize that the global drug problem requires more comprehensive strategies that include a perspective of public health, and human rights,” said Ruiz Massieu.
The minister affirmed that Peña Nieto’s participation in the session – co-solicited by Mexico, which was previously not scheduled, underscores the country’s commitment to conduct a “comprehensive” reassessment of the global strategy of tackling the issue of drugs.
The minister also stressed that Peña Nieto will “pointedly” outline his government’s plans on drug policy on Thursday in Mexico after participating in a government organized forum and debate on drugs.
In November, 2015 the president ordered his cabinet to organize the National Forum of Debates for the Legalization of Marijuana, after a group of legalization activists won an unprecedented supreme court ruling that deemed the criminalization of the use of marijuana violated individual rights (of the 4 plaintiffs).
Although the Mexican government has toned down its overall discourse of treating the “drug issue”, Peña Nieto did make clear his personal position when he ordered the national debate on legalization. “I am not in favor of consuming or legalizing marijuana,” he said at a Dec. 2015 speech,
“I am not in favor because it has been proven, demonstrated, that consuming this substance damages the health of children and youths … However, I am in favor of debate, so that specialists can give us some indication of where we should be going.”
Pro-legalization activists, aligned with families of victims of drug-war related violence, however, argue that ultimately prohibition policies cause much more harm than the consumption of substances.
Participants in the five country Caravan for Peace, Life and Justice organized by legalization advocates and drug-war victims, argue that four decades of prohibition policies, with Mexico’s 2006 hardened militarization strategy, has fueled unprecedented violence and insecurity in the region.
In Mexico alone more than 100,000 people have been killed since 2006 and 27,000 disappeared. Although exact statistics are hard to determine, human rights defenders say cases of forced disappearances, extrajudicial murders and illegal torture have also increased.
According to the general coordinator of the caravan, Ted Lewis, the goal of the initiative is to pressure the drug policy debate at the U.N. with a greater perspective on human rights and to make clear the negative impacts a strategy of criminalization has on populations. The groups want “to point out the failure of the war on drugs, but also to denounce the violence, which increases the need to migrate to the U.S., and the dangers on the road for those forced to leave their countries,” said Lewis at the Caravan’s launch in Honduras on March 28.
Pro-legalization activists also argue that the prohibition and militarization strategy also paves the way to the usurpation of control of territory and natural resources.
Andres Hersch, academic and co-organizer of the caravan says, “The war on drugs legitimizes state violence and the removal of natural resources from original or Indigenous peoples, this is not a war against any plant or substance but rather a war against people and communities.”
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