Obama Visits Mexico, Clarifies Stance
April 20th, 2009 by Rick
During a joint press conference last Thursday with Mexican President Felipe Calderón, President Obama clarified his stance on the war on drugs. He said that the goal of the American government and the Mexican government is to keep the drug and criminal activity in Mexico.
Obama even said something that everyone in the counter-culture scene needs to be weary of:
I will not pretend that this is Mexico’s responsibility alone. Demand for these drugs in the United States is what is helping to keep these cartels in business. [...] Are we going to eliminate all drug flows? Are we going to eliminate all guns coming over the border? That’s not a realistic objective.
Yet, a realistic objective is to keep the cartels and their drugs in Mexico.
Obama added:
What is a realistic objective is to reduce it so significantly, so drastically that it becomes once again a localized criminal problem, as opposed to a major structural problem that threatens stability in communities along those borders and that increases corruption and threatens the rule of law
That will be interesting to see. With an increase of technology and the profit that the cartels have achieved, they are now essentially mobilized armies able to topple fully-established governments.
In conclusion of the press conference, Obama claimed that they have targeted three cartels as significant foreign narcotics drug traffickers and with the help of the U.S. Treasury Department and Mexico, they plan to freeze the assets of the cartels and create sanctions.
Freezing their bank accounts will not stop them from starting over in another area of Mexico.
