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Iván Duque: I should have been more forceful with US on drugs
Iván Duque has few regrets from his time as Colombia's president. But if he could go back and do better on one thing, perhaps he should have been more vocal on the War on Drugs.
For Duque, there's too much focus on the supply side of the problem — Colombian cocaine — and too little attention on the demand side: Americans hungry for the drug.
In a GZERO World interview, Duque tells Ian Bremmer that he brought this up with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Maybe, he adds, he should have said it more and raised his voice.
Another thing he wished he could have done more on: migration from Venezuela.
- Can there be capitalism without freedom? No, says Iván Duque ›
- Colombia's new president Gustavo Petro: Biden team aware the war on drugs has failed ›
- The Graphic Truth: Did the war on drugs work? ›
- How to solve Colombia's cocaine problem ›
- Will Gustavo Petro overhaul Colombia's economy, forests, and drug policy? ›
Will Gustavo Petro overhaul Colombia's economy, forests, and drug policy?
Colombia is Latin America’s longest-standing democracy, but it’s never elected a leftist president … until now.
Gustavo Petro swept to power by a slim margin in June, thanks largely to young Colombian voters. What do they want from him? Change. It won't be easy. Petro wants to provide free university education and health care, to end oil exploration and to tax the rich. Will he deliver?
On GZERO World, Colombia's new leader sits down with Ian Bremmer in his first American interview to talk about his plans for Colombia's future, his views on the War on Drugs, and how he'll handle relations with Venezuela and the US.
How to solve Colombia's cocaine problem
According to a 2022 White House report, during the pandemic, coca cultivation and production in Colombia reached a record 245,000 hectares and 1,010 metric tons. In an exclusive interview with GZERO World, Colombia's new president, Gustavo Petro, said that enough is enough.
“It's shameful that just because we are the producers of the coca leaf or cocaine we’ve believed that we must silence ourselves and accept the policies of world powers in this regard, even though they are totally wrong. This must end.”
Key to curbing Colombia’s drug problem, Petro explains, is reassessing the Colombia-US relationship.
The Biden administration has already signaled to Petro that they know the War on Drugs has failed. But both nations, Petro argues, must stop viewing the jungle as “the enemy.” Only then can there be progress.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Gustavo Petro: the guerilla-turned-president who wants to "develop capitalism"
Gustavo Petro: the guerilla-turned-president who wants to "develop capitalism"
Colombia is Latin America’s longest-standing democracy, but it’s never elected a leftist president … until now.
Gustavo Petro swept to power by a slim margin in June, thanks largely to young Colombian voters. What do they want from him? Change.
It won't be easy. Petro wants to provide free university education and health care, to end oil exploration, and to tax the rich. Will he deliver?
On GZERO World, Colombia's new leader sits down with Ian Bremmer in his first American interview to talk about his plans for Colombia's future, his views on the War on Drugs, and how he'll handle relations with Venezuela and the US.
Also in this episode of GZERO World: an update from John Kerry on the Biden administration's climate agenda.
- Colombia's new president Gustavo Petro: Biden team aware the war ... ›
- Will Colombia really elect a leftist? - GZERO Media ›
- Petro at the Pinnacle: Colombia's new president takes office ... ›
- From stunted capitalism to economic growth in Colombia - GZERO Media ›
- Who is Colombia's new president? - GZERO Media ›
- How to solve Colombia's cocaine problem - GZERO Media ›
Colombia's new president Gustavo Petro: Biden team aware the war on drugs has failed
Colombia has long been the United States' staunchest ally in Latin America. It's also been one of the longest standing democracies in the region. But it has never elected a leftist leader....until now.
Last June, former Bogotá Mayor Gustavo Petro made history eking out a narrow victory in the presidential election. Since being sworn into office last month, he has signaled a radically more liberal policy agenda.
He's also said he's ready to reassess the historically close US-Colombia relationship. In an exclusive GZERO World interview with Ian Bremmer, Petro's first broadcast interview with US media since taking office, Bremmer asks the new president if he thinks the United States wants to help him.
The answer to that, he explained, will have much to do with whether the Biden administration is ready to leave behind the failed War on Drugs.
This interview is part of an upcoming episode of "GZERO World with Ian Bremmer," which begins airing on US public television on Friday, Sept 23.
- Will Colombia really elect a leftist? - GZERO Media ›
- Petro at the Pinnacle: Colombia's new president takes office ... ›
- Hard Numbers: Petro aims for trillions, killings of Muslims rattle ... ›
- For Latin America, political risks overshadow economic gain from ... ›
- Is Latin America's new “pink tide” for real? - GZERO Media ›
- Restoring ties with Venezuela is a no-brainer for Colombia's new president - GZERO Media ›
- From stunted capitalism to economic growth in Colombia - GZERO Media ›
- Who is Colombia's new president? - GZERO Media ›
- How to solve Colombia's cocaine problem - GZERO Media ›
The global trend towards legalizing marijuana
The world was recently shocked when US sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson was disqualified from Tokyo 2020 after testing positive for marihuana, a banned yet non performance-enhancing substance. That's because global public opinion on pot is shifting: cannabis is now legal in more than 40 countries and almost three-quarters of US states — red ones too. And although everyone is cashing in on the green gold these days, high profits are not the only factor driving legalization. Mexico may soon become the world's largest cannabis market in part to blunt the power of drug cartels, while the famously square World Bank is now best buds with Malawi for growing the world's finest sativa. Delve into the weeds of legalization on GZERO World.
Watch the episode: The (political) power of alcohol
Has the “war on drugs” been won yet?
It's been fifty years since the United States declared one of the costliest wars in its history — a trillion-dollar campaign waged at home and abroad, which continues to grind on today.
In June of 1971, President Richard Nixon, alarmed by the rise of permissive hippy culture and drug use, unleashed what would become known as the "war on drugs," a tough-on-crime approach that melded law enforcement, military action, and a public messaging campaign that both scared and scolded.
Aiming to reduce American drug use, it severely criminalized consumption in the US, while attacking international cartels' capacity to produce and export illicit narcotics, in particular from Latin America.
Did it work? We take a look at three of the war's major "battlefields" today.
The producer: Colombia. In the 1980s Colombia became the center of the global cocaine trade, which helped fuel the decades-long conflict between FARC guerillas, drug cartels, paramilitaries, and the Colombian government.
In 2000, Washington and Bogotá inked the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia, in which the US trained and equipped Colombian soldiers to crush militants and quash the drug trade. To its credit, Plan Colombia helped force the FARC to negotiate a landmark peace deal in 2016 — but there has been no discernable success against drugs. Coca cultivation is near all-time highs, vastly surpassing levels seen even during the heyday of Pablo Escobar. And Colombian authorities are still making record cocaine busts.
The political problem is that the government hasn't met pledges to help farmers replace coca crops with legal ones. Doing so would mean providing security and economic opportunity in remote regions where the FARC dissolved but narcos filled the vacuum. Instead, the state has focused on US-backed eradication programs: wrecking coca crops either with environmentally-hazardous aerial spraying or, more recently, sending troops in to tear up coca fields, plant by plant. The trouble is, it doesn't work. Congress found in a 2020 report that eradication has produced "dismal results" -- it creates tension between farmers and the state, without diminishing coca cultivation for long.
If the 2016 peace deal is to have any meaning at all, this circle still needs to be squared. In Colombia, the war on drugs is still an obstacle to peace.
The middleman: Mexico. After US feds in the 1980s busted up the Caribbean transit hubs linking Andean producers and American consumers, overland routes through Mexico took off. By one FBI estimate, some 93 percent of drug flows from South America to the US now go via Mexico. These routes are controlled by the murderous and mind-bogglingly well-armed Mexican cartels that effectively run huge swaths of northern Mexico themselves today. Despite some joint US-Mexico successes, like taking down notorious kingpin El Chapo in 2014, the cartels are as powerful as ever.
What's more, cooperation between the DEA and Mexican officials has broken down under the administration of Mexico's prickly nationalist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
All of this has contributed to Mexico's soaring homicide rate, one of the world's highest. And that's a big problem for López Obrador. He was elected in 2018 partly on pledges to tackle the violence — but so far his "hugs not bullets" approach has yielded more lead than love.
In sum: the US war on drugs has failed to cut the enemy's biggest supply chain.
The consumer: the United States. "Just say no," former US First Lady Nancy Reagan told us. This sizzling egg is your brain on drugs, we learned. And still, decades later, rates of illegal drug use -- of all kinds -- remains high and rising.
Meanwhile, a raft of laws from the 1980s and 1990s -- some written by then-Senator Joe Biden -- heavily criminalized drug possession, causing the prison population to explode. That helped to make US incarceration rate the highest in the entire world. Black and Latino Americans have suffered disproportionately: drug convictions are more frequent and sentences harsher than for whites, though drug use rates are similar across racial groups.
But the politics are shifting. More than 80 percent of Americans — of both parties — now say the war on drugs has failed, and two-thirds believe it should end. A big majority favors decriminalization of drug offenses.
So far, more than half of US states have decriminalized small amounts of marijuana for personal consumption, and Oregon has done the same even with harder stuff. One of the thorniest debates now is how to ensure that profits from legal drugs go towards helping the communities of color ravaged for decades by drug enforcement.
And on Tuesday the Biden administration -- taking a Trump-era criminal justice reform even further -- endorsed an important bill that would finally eliminate disparities in sentencing between powdered cocaine, a more elite drug, and crack, whose generally-poorer (and Blacker) users have suffered harsher punishments for decades.
Still, the US pours billions into drug-oriented law enforcement annually. A drug arrest is made every 23 seconds, activists say. And overdose deaths have more than tripled in the past twenty years amid a raging opioid crisis kickstarted not by distant cartels, but by American drug companies, including those owned by the now-disgraced Sackler family.
The last line (so to speak): After 50 years, the war on drugs has not, by any reasonable standard, been won. Is there a better way? Let us know here
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The Graphic Truth: Did the war on drugs work?
It's been 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs in the United States, a campaign underscored by punitive policies aimed at eradicating everything to do with illicit drug use. Since then, the US government has spent over $1 trillion on the campaign, roughly a 1,090% increase in spending in just 39 years. But all this money hasn't stopped drug use from surging in recent decades, along with overdose deaths. In fact, the war on drugs' main legacy is that of mass incarceration; severe penalties for drug-related offenses resulted in mostly Black and Latino Americans being thrown into prison. We take a look at government spending on drug control and the prison population size in recent decades.