Congress [last week] gave final approval to the Merida Initiative for anti-drug security assistance to Mexico and Central America and sent the bill to the White House. The plan calls for $400 million in anti-drug and security assistance for Mexico, whose government sounds happy with the plan. It also provides for $65 million to be split up between seven countries of Central America from Belize to Panama plus Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Here’s WOLA’s take.

The bill’s language recognizes the “shared responsibility between the United States and Mexico to combat drug trafficking and related violence and organized crime.” It’s good to see the U.S. Congress accept that fact, but Mérida is definitely a mixed bag and, in some ways, a missed opportunity for the United States to finally start getting it right on fighting drugs.  It has some positive things — $3 million in technical assistance to help Mexico establish a unified national police registry, $10 million for drug demand reduction and rehabilitation in Mexico — but a lot of misguided spending on military hardware ranging from helicopters to surveillance systems to aircraft platforms. And it doesn’t address at all the critical need for drug demand reduction in the United States and controls on the smuggling of firearms over the border into Mexico from  the United States. These are the twin traffics — drugs into the United States, guns into Mexico — that threaten to erase any chance Merida has of succeeding even before it starts.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Politics, Foreign Policy .