Study: L. American anti-drug efforts insufficient

The U.S. State Department’s 2008 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) was issued last week and for the most part it was not good news for Latin America. Of the twenty countries listed as “having 'failed demonstrably’ to live up to their obligations under anti-drug agreements” fourteen were from Latin America. According to Reuters, the report notes that numerous problems persist in the Americas:

Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chavez is a strident foe of Washington who stopped helping U.S. counternarcotics work in 2005, is "a major drug-transit country with rampant high level corruption and a weak judicial system," the report said...

Colombian cocaine moving through Venezuela continue to be mostly destined for the U.S. market, but the amount directed to Europe through small, poor countries in western Africa was rapidly growing, the report said...

The report identified Mexico as "a major source of heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana" and the transit country for 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States. Mexico suffered some 2,600 drug-related killings in 2007, it said.

This year’s INCSR appears to differ little from last year’s version which blasted Bolivia and Venezuela while also criticizing Mexico and Colombia.

All 600+ pages of the INSCR can be accessed here. (Warning: it’s a PDF document).

Image- New York Times (“A Bolivian soldier searched for drugs inside a bus that was passing through the Yungas region, where three-quarters of Bolivia's coca is grown.”)

Sources- The Swamp, CNN, Reuters, U.S. Department of State