The other day, there was a little bit of a rumble in the media about some of the Democratic candidates who were asked if they knew the name of the president of Mexico. A couple did. A couple didn’t.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was elected president, and had previously been very far to the left. He came in pledging to fight corruption and the dismissed are now weakened in every way.
All of the ways that the instruments by which the federal government might fight corruption are greatly weakened. Law enforcement in Mexico, which is already weak enough, and now the Mexican Supreme Court has basically ruled that marijuana prohibition in Mexico is unconstitutional. So it really seemed clear the Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador might then necessarily move to legalize marijuana. But he has now announced that all he is wants to do is medical and that the emphasis now has to be on fighting drugs and corruption. In other words, he’s going to keep the principal sources of income for the organized crime. Organizations that are now so powerful that, by the way when you have guacamole, you are actually depending on where you are, subsidizing organized crime in Mexico.
I love Mexico. I’ve been there many times since I was a small. It really is terrible for me to see the destruction of Mexico, that one that the United States has been so much a party of because of our drug war and thereby subsidizing the so-called cartels and Mexican gangs. All this started with marijuana prohibition and this has been a major source of corruption and has done the same thing to undermine the rule of law in Mexico as it has in the United States. The difference is, is no rule of law in Mexico is beyond fragile. It’s almost ephemeral.
The idea that Lopez Obrador is going to fight corruption, fight drugs, and then limit marijuana to legal medical purposes in Mexico, is off because you can go into a pharmacy in Mexico and buy almost anything.
If the idea of the damage that is done by the drug war, it is an international ideology that turns the world upside down. That works as well in Iran as it does in Mexico or the United States or any other country. It is a subsidy to organized crime. It is a threat to the public health. It is a threat to the public order.
But this great revolutionary of Lopez Obrador, for God’s sake, Jeff Sessions is now the president of Mexico. Well, they deserve one another.
