Washington on Friday warned that the security of Mexico and the US were at stake in the battle against Mexico’s booming drugs trade, acknowledging that the increasingly violent fight is far from being won.
In a comprehensive annual report on the international drug trade, the US also said opium production in Afghanistan hit “historic highs” last year, with a harvest valued at $4bn, more than a third of that country’s gross domestic product.
Some 90 per cent of the cocaine consumed in the US passes through Mexico, which last year also increased cultivation of both opium poppies and marijuana. Washington maintains that Mexican drug traffickers now control many of the drug distribution networks within the US.
Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president, has made his attempted crackdown on the country’s drug cartels one of the signature issues of his tenure since taking office in December 2006.
“Mexico is confronted with an extraordinary challenge in the level of organised crime that it faces from the drug trade,” said David Johnson, the chief State Department official responsible for anti-narcotics strategy, presenting the annual survey.
“The fact that they are looking at it and seizing it and trying to confront it is a positive sign ... If it is not confronted it will go very bad for both us and for Mexico.”
Praising what it described as Mr Calderón’s efforts “to reassert control over areas that had fallen under the virtual dominion of drug cartels”, the report notes what it labels Mexico’s “unprecedented results” in the fight last year.
These include the extradition of 83 fugitives to the US, the seizure of 48m tons of cocaine and, in one raid, of $200m in cash. But the report also notes between 2,300 and 2,600 drugs-related killings in Mexico last year, including the deaths of several high-level law enforcement officials. Mexico blames drug cartels for a failed bomb attack in Mexico City last month.
Mr Johnson also praised Colombia, which last year eradicated more than 200,000 hectares of coca cultivation, but which remains the source of 90 per cent of the cocaine entering the US. By contrast, he had strong words of criticism for Venezuela, which the US says is becoming an increasingly important transit country, especially for cocaine.
The report said that Afghanistan increased its position as the world’s largest heroin-producing country, with 93 per cent of world cultivation.
“Narcotics law enforcement was hampered by corruption and incompetence within the justice system as well as the absence of governance in large sections of the country,” it said, noting that no significant drug traffickers have been arrested since 2006.
