Guatemala's President Leading the Way in International Drug Policy Reform
Submitted by fyl on Thu, 2013/01/31 - 07:01.
I have posted before about Otto Perez Molina's blunt statements about the failure of the war on drugs (and now Central America has become a big victim). At the Davios World Economic Forum, he delivered his message and got a big ally in the idea to fix the war on drugs.
From an Alternet article,
In Davos, the right-wing retired general found an unlikely ally in billionaire liberal philanthropist Georges Soros, who joined him to announce a Drug Policy Reform summit, scheduled for June 2013 in Tika, Guatemala. The summit will gather world leaders and policy organizations to discuss alternative drug control proposals. It will be organized in coordination with the Soros Foundation, as well as the Beckley Foundation and the Carter Foundation. Based in the UK, the Beckley Foundation established a Guatemala office in June 2012 and works closely with President Perez Molina and his government on issues of drug policy. The foundation director, Amanda Feilding, met with President Molina in Guatemala on January 17 to deliver proposals for alternative drug policy options.
Could this be the beginning of a sane approach to dealing with illegal drugs?
Unlikely ally?
Strange thing about the article (or at least the one paragraph) is that there is nothing at all unlikely in Soros endorsing such a position – which he has done personally now for decades and institutionally for 20 years, via his Soros Foundation funded Open Society Institutes. Soros has had in place for many years a Global Harm Reduction Institute which eventually gave birth to a whole array or other policy works and think tanks, including the 2008 Open Society Global Drug Policy Program.
I interpreted that different
Soros' position is well established. I interpreted that statement as Molina's position is unusual which is aligning him with people who tend to be in a very different political space.
Molina is a retired general with an established conservative position. His pragmatic position with regard to drugs adds fresh air to the very stale war on drugs. He admits that Guatemala's drug problem has little to do with drug use in Guatemala and all to do with it being a victim of the producer to consumer pipeline. And he readily admits the failure of the war on drugs.
He has been trying to get the other nations of Central America to take his legalization approach seriously. As I remember, the first major player was Laura Chinchilla, president of Costa Rica. Daniel Ortega has not endorsed this approach suggesting that, at least regionally, the left is not buying his plan. Soros jumping on his bandwagon is likely to help get support from the left.