l\u00fadico<\/em>) or \u201crecreational\u201d use of cannabis.<\/p>\nThe 8-3 ruling goes beyond the limited decriminalization that Mexico had passed in 2009, which removed penalties for \u201cpersonal use\u201d quantities \u2014 to be determined at the discretion of the judge, but in practice since then considered to be five grams.<\/p>\n
But the recent ruling stops short of what some may consider true legalization because it makes no reference to establishment of a commercial market. Nonetheless, it does explicitly permit \u201cplanting, cultivation, harvesting, preparation, possession and transportation\u201d in the context of \u201cautoconsumo<\/em>\u201d \u2014 personal use.<\/p>\nThe Supreme Court\u2019s decision came in a response to paralysis in the country\u2019s Congress on the question. The SCJN<\/span> declared cannabis prohibition unconstitutional in October 2018, saying it violated the fundamental right to \u201cfree development of the personality.\u201d That ruling ordered Congress to amend the law within 90 days. Unable to agree on terms, the Mexican Congress repeatedly applied to the SCJN<\/span> for extensions. The last deadline expired on April 30, without any reform of the Health Law having passed.<\/p>\nA \u201cHistoric Day\u201d<\/h2>\n \u201cToday is an historic day for liberties,\u201d SCJN<\/span> president Arturo Zald\u00edvar stated upon the new ruling.<\/p>\n\nIn 2018, the Mexican supreme court declared cannabis prohibition unconstitutional, saying it violated the fundamental right to \u201cfree development of the personality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n
Yet the protocols instated by the ruling are still limiting. In order to legally cultivate cannabis, citizens will have to apply for a permit from the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks (COFEPRIS<\/span>). The details of how this system will work \u2013 presumably including a definition of personal-use quantities and the degree of control assigned to COFEPRIS<\/span> \u2013 are to be outlined in a document called an engrose<\/em>, to be issued by the SCJN<\/span> within 60 days of the June 28th ruling.<\/p>\nActivists who have been increasing the pressure for legal cannabis in Mexico over the past few years are heartened by the ruling \u2014 but insist that it doesn\u2019t go far enough. \u201cThe step the Court is taking increases the responsibility of the legislative branch in this matter,\u201d advocacy group Regulaci\u00f3n por la Paz said in a press release. \u201cIt is necessary to continue the legislative process so that the work that has been invested to date is consolidated in the modifications necessary to guarantee the rights of citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n
In its new ruling, the SCJN<\/span> again stated that it \u201cexhorts\u201d Mexico\u2019s Congress to pass legislation recognizing the right to \u201cautoconsumo recreativo.<\/em>\u201d But full legalization remains mired in a parliamentary morass with different measures for commercial cultivation, distribution, and sale passed by the Senate and lower-house Chamber of Deputies. A revised version was last sent by the lower house to the Senate in March \u2013 where it languished, partly due to conservative opposition.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s a political fad,\u201d said Sen. Dami\u00e1n Zepeda Vidales of the right-opposition National Action Party (PAN<\/span>), dismissing the entire issue of legalization.<\/p>\nThis was a major disappointment not only for activists but also for foreign investors anticipating a Mexican \u201cgreen rush.\u201d Canada\u2019s Canopy Growth and California-based Medical Marijuana Inc. were among the industry players said to be eyeing a stake in Mexico\u2019s legalized market. For now, they will still have to wait.<\/p>\n
Referendum in the offing?<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO<\/span>, is a left-populist who was elected in 2018 on a pledge to de-escalate Mexico\u2019s blood-drenched and seemingly endless drug war. Yet he responded ambivalently to the SCJN<\/span> decision, saying he will honor it \u2014 but he also broached putting the question before the voters in a referendum.<\/p>\n\u201cOf course we\u2019re going to respect what the court has decided and we\u2019re going to evaluate. We\u2019re going to see what effects it has,\u201d AMLO<\/span> said in a press conference after the ruling \u2014 adding that \u201cthere are two views\u201d on the issue, including within his own cabinet.<\/p>\n\u201cIf we see \u2026 that it\u2019s not working to address the serious problem of drug addiction, that it\u2019s not working to stop violence, then we would act,\u201d the president stated, suggesting he could send a new and more restrictive bill to Congress, or call for a popular referendum.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, AMLO<\/span> enacted rules that greatly expand the medical marijuana program, allowing domestic production and research. The new regulations assign an oversight role to COFEPRIS<\/span>, which will issue permits and develop standards jointly with another agency, the National Service for Agro-Alimentary Safety &<\/span> Quality (SENASICA<\/span>).<\/p>\nBut the regs primarily concern pharmaceutical companies \u2014 with no provision for personal cultivation. This was met with enthusiasm by potential corporate investors \u2014 but emphatically not by Mexico\u2019s activist community.<\/p>\n
Activists turn up the heat<\/h2>\n The medical use of cannabis is another issue in which Congress has taken a long time to enact changes mandated by the judiciary. In August 2015, eight-year-old Graciela Elizalde of Monterrey became Mexico\u2019s first legal medical marijuana patient, when a judge overruled the government\u2019s refusal of her family\u2019s request for permission to obtain CBD<\/span> oil to treat her epilepsy. It wasn\u2019t until June 2017 that Mexico\u2019s Congress passed a bill instating a limited CBD<\/span>-only medical marijuana law.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Mexico City, May 8, 2021: Activists march to legalize marijuana<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Mexican patients have since been confined to use of CBD<\/span> products imported from the United States \u2014 certainly an historical irony, as illicit cannabis has long gone north from Mexico to the US<\/span>.<\/p>\nThe activist community, meanwhile, has been making its power felt in Mexico as never before. This year on April 20 \u2014 the international day of cannabis celebration known as \u201c420\u201d \u2014 a thousand people demonstrated outside the Senate building in Mexico City, demanding legislative action.<\/p>\n
Many expressed frustration at the restrictive nature of the legalization bill that was then under consideration in Congress, which would have limited possession to 28 grams and kept prison terms for over 200 grams. Personal cultivation of up to six plants was to be by license only, with terms of up to 10 years imprisonment for those who grow more.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the legislation is proposing is not what the Supreme Court mandated. They declared that we are free, that it\u2019s not a crime anymore to smoke weed or carry it,\u201d Pablo Alfa of the Asamblea Cannabica told the Texas Standard, which had a reporter at the scene at the 420 rally.<\/p>\n
The Senate building has actually been the site of a permanent protest camp, known as Plant\u00f3n 420, or Vigil 420. When the Plant\u00f3n was first launched in February 2020, activists planted hundreds of cannabis plants in the patch of parkland outside the Senate building where they are camping. It has since grown into a virtual jungle of cannabis right in the very center of Mexican federal power \u2014 and, amazingly, the police have tolerated it.<\/p>\n
After the SCJN<\/span> decision in June, activists also launched a plant\u00f3n<\/em> outside the Court building as they await issuance of the engrose<\/em> with final regulations for personal use.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Will narco-violence de-escalate?<\/h2>\n De-escalating Mexico\u2019s nightmarish narco wars has been a critical imperative behind the push to legalize cannabis. But there are reasons to temper expectations in this regard.<\/p>\n
As the New York Times wrote in March, when the Congressional legislation was still pending in Mexico: \u201cSecurity experts agree that the law\u2019s practical impact on violence will likely be minimal: With 15 American states having now legalized marijuana, they argue, the crop has become a relatively small part of the Mexican drug trafficking business, with cartels focusing on more profitable products like fentanyl and methamphetamines.\u201d<\/p>\n\nThe drug war has taken more than 150,000 lives since 2006, when the Mexican army was deployed to fight the cartels.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n
\u201cWe shouldn\u2019t overestimate the power of this bill,\u201d Falko Ernst, senior Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group, told the Times. He said that the bill would not \u201csubstantially change the dynamics and drivers of lethal conflict in Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n
Especially given the bill\u2019s limited scope (and the SCJN<\/span> ruling is even more limited), there is warranted skepticism that it could have much impact on a drug war that has cost an estimated 150,000 lives, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.<\/p>\nThis may actually be a low-balled figure for the grim body count since President Felipe Calder\u00f3n began his term in the final days of 2006 by deploying the army to fight the cartels.<\/p>\n
\u201cA failed state\u201d<\/h2>\n On Jan. 6 Mexican authorities announced that an estimated 61,637 people had \u201cdisappeared\u201d during the relentless drug war. While the cases analyzed date back as far as the 1960s (when an incipient guerilla movement was taking hold in the southern mountains), more than 97% of the cases occurred since 2006. Within the last year, more than 5,000 people disappeared, said Karla Quintana, head of Mexico\u2019s National Search Commission (Comisi\u00f3n Nacional de B\u00fasqueda de Personas Desaparecidas).<\/p>\n\nIn 2009, the Pentagon issued a report naming Mexico as a possible near-future \u201cfailed state.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n
The US<\/span> Congressional Research Service in an October 2020 report offered an even worse assessment, estimating 275,000 people killed and another 71,678 \u201cdisappeared\u201d in Mexico since 2006.<\/p>\nThis puts Mexico over the past decade-and-a-half in the same horrific league as Argentina, where 30,000 disappeared in the \u201cdirty war\u201d between 1976 and 1983, and Guatemala, where 40,000 disappeared over the course of a 36-year civil war.<\/p>\n
As far back as 2009, when Mexico was going over the edge into extreme narco-dystopia, the Pentagon issued a report naming the country as a possible near-future \u201cfailed state.\u201d With a profusion of militias tied to the cartels (most notoriously, Los Zetas) fighting both each other and the security forces, it was increasingly evident that the state\u2019s monopoly on the use of force was breaking down.<\/p>\n
Nor does the situation show much sign of improving, as the mass graves of the cartels\u2019 victims \u2014 popularly known as \u201cnarco-fosas\u201d \u2014 continue to be unearthed with unnerving regularity. Twenty-two bodies were exhumed from a clandestine grave in Celaya, Guanajuato state, in March 2021. This was shortly after gunmen ambushed a police convoy on a security patrol just southwest of the capital \u2014 in Coatepec Harinas municipality, M\u00e9xico state. A total of 13 state police and prosecutors were killed, and the assailants all escaped.<\/p>\n
Migrant massacres<\/h2>\n Security personnel are also deeply implicated in the ongoing violence. There\u2019s actually an overlap between the security forces and the cartels \u2014 which have now expanded beyond smuggling cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine to dealing in pirated oil and minerals, and industrial-scale ransom kidnapping.<\/p>\n
Mexican federal authorities on Feb. 3 arrested 30 naval troops (known as Marines) suspected of forcibly disappearing people along the US<\/span> border in 2014. While the exact number of the disappeared in question is unclear, Nuevo Laredo, in northeast Tamaulipas state, has one of the highest missing persons rates in the country \u2014 an estimated 80,517 people having gone missing between 2006 and December 2020.<\/p>\nThere have been numerous mass abductions and massacres of migrants along the Tamaulipas border in recent years. On Jan. 19, 2021, Tamaulipas authorities announced the discovery of 19 shot and burned bodies on a dirt road outside Camargo, a town just across the Rio Grande from Texas. The victims were Central American migrants seeking to enter the US<\/span>; they were seemingly intercepted and slain by one of the warring narco-militias in the area. Twelve members of a state police Special Operations Group (GOPES<\/span>) have been arrested in connection with the Camargo massacre, according to an announcement by the Tamaulipas prosecutor\u2019s office.<\/p>\nUprising against femicide<\/h2>\n Human rights advocates have called attention to the incessant targeted killings of women, which has been concomitant with the narco-violence. This phenomenon has been increasing at an alarming rate, with hundreds of women slain on the basis of their gender annually.<\/p>\n
After last year\u2019s International Women\u2019s Day, tens of thousands of women across Mexico walked out of their jobs in protest of the government\u2019s lack of action regarding \u201cfemicide.\u201d<\/p>\n\nIn 2020, tens of thousands of women across Mexico walked out of their jobs in protest against the government\u2019s lack of action regarding \u201cfemicide.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n
Ahead of this year\u2019s International Women\u2019s Day march on March 8, authorities in Mexico City erected fencing to protect the National Palace \u2014 doubtless recalling the increasingly militant women\u2019s rights demonstrations in the capital in recent months. But activists turned the three-meter high barrier into a memorial to the victims of femicide \u2014 painted with the names of hundreds of victims from around the country.<\/p>\n
The barrier was subsequently torn down by hundreds of activists on Women\u2019s Day, who had gathered in the capital, where they expressed their anger at AMLO<\/span>. Mexico\u2019s president was then standing by a powerful politician and longtime loyalist even though multiple women had come forward with accusations of rape and sexual assault. F\u00e9lix Salgado Macedonio of AMLO<\/span>\u2019s left-populist MORENA<\/span> party had his campaign for governor of Guerrero state derailed by the allegations. Years earlier, as mayor of Acapulco, he had been investigated by the federal Prosecutor General for possible narco ties.<\/p>\nDecapitating the cartels?<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
El Chapo, kingpin of Sinaloa Cartel<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Some had hoped that the February 2019 conviction in a US<\/span> federal court in New York City of Joaqu\u00edn \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Guzm\u00e1n, the infamous extradited kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel, would prove to be a turning point that could see the most powerful of the Mexican cartels (at least) diminished. Instead, it has turned into something of a lesson in the futility of attempting to \u201cdecapitate\u201d the cartels.<\/p>\nTwo years after his conviction, Chapo\u2019s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, was arrested on arrival at Dulles International airport outside of Washington DC<\/span>, and charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and marijuana for importation to the US<\/span>. She had apparently inherited many of her imprisoned spouse\u2019s operations.<\/p>\nMedia reports in Mexico also indicate that Chapo\u2019s sons, known as \u201cLos Chapitos,\u201d are waging a struggle for control of the Sinaloa Cartel against the last remaining member of the so-called \u201cold guard,\u201d Ismael Zambada Garc\u00eda aka \u201cEl Mayo,\u201d who had been considered the heir apparent.<\/p>\n
Decapitation of cartels can often lead not to decline so much as fragmentation and factionalism, further fueling violence.<\/p>\n
This was evident in a close reading of the news when Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, Mexico\u2019s former defense minister, was arrested at Los Angeles airport in October 2020, and charged by US<\/span> authorities with narco-corruption. In the usual cycle, a few years earlier, Cienfuegos had been hailed by US<\/span> officialdom as a bulwark in the war against drugs. In 2018, he received an award for his contributions to \u201chemispheric defense\u201d from the Pentagon\u2019s National Defense University.<\/p>\nThe Cienfuegos affair<\/h2>\n Prosecutors now said that Cienfuegos was the \u201cPadrino,\u201d or Godfather, of the \u201cextremely violent\u201d H-2 drug cartel. This was revealed to be a breakaway faction of the Beltran-Leyva Organization, which had itself earlier splintered from the Sinaloa Cartel \u2014 each of these splinterings occasioning much bloodshed.<\/p>\n
But Cienfuegos didn\u2019t go on trial. In November, a federal judge in New York granted the US<\/span> government\u2019s request to drop the charges against him. The Justice Department, acceding to pressure from Mexico, stated that the general should be investigated in his home country. And in January 2021, after he had been returned to Mexico, federal authorities in that country announced that no charges would be brought.<\/p>\nAMLO<\/span> later asserted that Cienfuegos had been arrested for political reasons, the charges against him \u201cfabricated.\u201d The affair came amid a dispute between the US<\/span> and Mexico over AMLO<\/span>\u2019s move to strip DEA<\/span> agents in the country of sovereign immunity and bring their activities under greater oversight by Mexican authorities. These were provisions of a new Security Law passed by Mexico\u2019s Congress last year. It merely mentions \u201cforeign agents,\u201d but was clearly aimed at the US<\/span> Drug Enforcement Administration, which has massive operations in Mexico. The provisions were softened in the implementing regulations issued in January, and the diplomatic spat passed.<\/p>\nMeanwhile, Mexico\u2019s former secretary of public security Genaro Garc\u00eda Luna, who was arrested by US<\/span> authorities in Dallas in December 2019, continues to face charges of having assisted the Sinaloa Cartel. His former right-hand man, ex- Federal Police commander Luis C\u00e1rdenas Palomino, was arrested in Mexico City this July 1 on charges of torture. Although implicated in many human rights abuses (including threatening journalists), the case they finally charged him on concerned the abuse of a kidnapping suspect in 2012.<\/p>\nAMLO<\/span> talks de-escalation<\/h2>\nAMLO<\/span> ran for the presidency in 2018 on a promise to end the relentless narco-violence, with a slogan of \u201cAbrazos, no balazos<\/em>\u201d \u2014 Hugs, not shoot-outs. Upon taking office at the end of the year, he even declared the drug war over.<\/p>\n\nLegalization will not be the proverbial magic bullet. It may, however, be an essential first step on the road to drug war de-escalation.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n
In a March 2019 speech before the National Search Commission, he admitted that in Mexico, \u201cthe principal violator of human rights has been the state,\u201d and he pledged to change that.<\/p>\n
Then in May, he announced that his administration was dropping out of the regional US<\/span>-led drug enforcement pact known as the Merida Initiative, and was turning down the latest aid package offered through the program. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t worked,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want cooperation in the use of force, we want cooperation for development.\u201d<\/p>\nInstead, he proposed a dialogue with Washington on \u201cbinational decriminalization\u201d of drugs \u2014 with both nations coordinating on a transition away from the enforcement-based model.<\/p>\n
Since 2008, the US<\/span> had supplied Mexico\u2019s security forces with training and equipment under the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative, which also included the Central American nations. Most of the big transfers of military equipment were made early in the program; in recent years more of the funding had gone to training police and prosecutors in an effort to improve Mexico\u2019s notoriously corrupt justice system. But, at a minimum, AMLO<\/span>\u2019s announcement was a strong symbolic statement.<\/p>\nAMLO<\/span> has also launched a new federal National Guard to combat narco-violence, ostensibly a force untainted by the corruption that has compromised the federal police agencies he inherited. But the National Guard has been widely deployed to intercept migrants on the Guatemalan border \u2014 leading to criticism that it had essentially become a proxy force for Trump\u2019s anti-immigrant policies. And under a new deal on immigration enforcement cooperation with the Biden administration, AMLO<\/span> has agreed to keep at least 10,000 troops on Mexico\u2019s southern border.<\/p>\nAMLO<\/span> is now halfway through his six-year term, with re-election barred by Mexico\u2019s constitution. Whether or not his left-populist coalition holds on to power in 2024, and whether or not Mexico\u2019s Congress finally legalizes cannabis, the dilemmas of the drug war will persist. There have been oceans of blood spilled in Mexico since the cartels first emerged as marijuana syndicates in the 1970s. After the cocaine boom of the \u201880s and the diversification into multiple criminal enterprises over the past grisly decade-and-a-half, the situation is now considerably more complicated.<\/p>\nLegalization will not be the proverbial magic bullet. It may, however, be an essential first step on the road to de-escalation. And the decision by Mexico\u2019s Supreme Court of Justice in June may prove, with some luck, to be an important first step toward that first step.<\/p>\n
Bill Weinberg, a Project CBD<\/span> contributing writer, is a 30-year veteran journalist in the fields of drug policy, ecology and indigenous peoples. He is a former news editor at High Times magazine, and he produces the websites CounterVortex.org and Global Ganja Report.<\/em><\/p>\nCopyright, Project CBD<\/span>. May not be reprinted without permission.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n