Paul KeenanThe nation’s bishops have issued a plea in the war on drugs, writes Paul Keenan
“Enough!” The cry of Argentina’s Catholic bishops leaps from the communiqué issued in their name earlier this month. The single word becomes the culmination of no small measure of frustration and indignation felt by the prelates as they address their plea to the government of President Mauricio Macri to finally and at last do something concrete in the face of the rising scourge of drugs that threatens to consume Argentina.
An examination of recent history shows the scale of a very real threat, and the prelates’ despair to be entirely understandable, in its light.
By the time of the communiqué’s release, the right-leaning President Macri had marked the first full year since his election, a political moment which ended the 12-year ‘dynasty’ of the leftist Nestor Kircher and his wife Cristina who in turn held the presidency from 2003 to 2015.
The lack of substantive action the Kirchner administrations had demonstrated on the issue of drugs, it would, it was hoped, give way to a fresh approach under a president, who, like his opponents in the election race, made combatting drugs central to his campaign.
Approach
That fresh approach came within weeks of Mr Macri entering the Casa Rosada presidential palace when he publicly declared a security emergency on drug trafficking as a “threat to national sovereignty” and he dispatched his Security Minister, Patricia Bullrich, to the US for discussions with the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Drug Enforcement Agency on tackling drug smuggling and for the procurement of armaments and technologies for Argentina’s entry to the war on drugs.
In addition, the president announced the expansion of the nation’s radar capabilities to intercept the plethora of light aircraft known to be exploiting blind spots in Argentina’s defences to rain drugs consignments – quite literally – onto the nation’s isolated backwoods. Mr Macri threatened that such flights would be shot down when identified.
Strong and determined action at last. So why the frustrations expressed so many months later on the part of the bishops?
Answer
The seeds of the answer to that lie in a statement from the Argentine Bishops’ Conference in 2013. Entitled ‘El drama del narcotráfico y la droga’ (The crisis of drug trafficking and drugs) the bishops offered a serious forewarning of the consequences of allowing drugs to infiltrate Argentine life.
With clerics active in those poorest of areas so often overlooked in every society, the Church was best placed to perceive the coming storm and its multi-layered reality, and to sound the alarm.
The Church’s perspective was thus one in which cross border drugs smuggling was merely one element in the overall fight. The other was that of the inevitable fall-out of drug barons transiting Argentine territory, as they have done in search of new routes for their product to North America and to Europe.
That fall-out was initially the payment in drugs, and more especially the coca base for cocaine, to Argentine smugglers eager to increase their profits by supplying the relatively small home market. That has today given way to a prevalence of drugs labs on Argentine soil, many specialising in ‘paco’, a potent crack-like form of cocaine.
Numerous studies bear out the consequences.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that by 2010, three times more Argentine adults were cocaine users than in 2004.
A later study by the Catholic University of Argentina revealed that between 2010 and 2014, public awareness of neighbourhood drug sales increased by 50%. More alarming yet, a 2015 study by the Latin American Observatory for Drug Policy & Public Opinion (OPDOP) – into perceptions of drug availability among ordinary citizens drawn from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay, showed that while the average of those reporting that drug trafficking had increased over the preceding five years was 67%, in Argentina, that number rocketed to 92%.
The year 2015 was also one in which the bishops called on drug dealers to experience a “call to conversion” from their harmful practice.
That same year one Argentine, Gustavo Vera, who heads up the anti-crime NGO La Alameda, penned an appeal to his fellow countryman Pope Francis on the drugs crisis and in turn received a papal reply in which the Pope lamented his nation’s plight and wrote: “Hopefully we are in time to avoid Mexicanisation.”
In this one short sentence, Pope Francis captured the panoramic nature of the issue.
Just as Argentina is now experiencing, Mexico’s story with drugs followed the same tragic arc from a point of transit for narcotics and to a state rent asunder by local cartels locked in brutal conflict for territory and influence among the highest seats of power. (Argentina’s own gang violence is growing steadily to ever more murderous heights)
But more than this, the Pope’s words pointed to the heavy militarised response in Mexico which, far from stamping out the drugs scourge, served to pour petrol on the flames of conflict. In Mexico, which deployed its military to face the cartel threat there, and Venezuela similarly, where the national guard was set the task, the results have been a surge in extreme violence, extra-judicial killings and other human rights violations, all without a lasting reduction in drugs related crime in either nation.
This now is the path Argentina has opted for, and the reason for the bishops’ latest imploring message.
“We wonder what the answer we are offering is as a society,” the bishops stated. “We must be honest. In urban centres we are discussing novel ways of intervening…and the answer remains insufficient.”
Generation
Pointing to a generation of young people who have fallen into drug abuse due to a serious lack of opportunity, they conclude: “Because of the seriousness of the moment we are living, the deaths, tragedies, and sufferings of thousands,…the pain of their families, our neighbourhoods, towns and cities…[we] call for the prompt declaration of the national emergency on addiction, and call on the different arms of the state: municipal, provincial and national, to the media, companies, churches and different creeds that echo this request, as a cry that rises to the sky of the country: Enough!”
The bishops’ message is all too clear: in working to secure Argentina’s borders against the narco-traffickers, the authorities are slamming the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The interior rot has already begun in those poor areas all too seldom frequented by politicians and a very different response to soldiers and hard weapons is now required to help in the quiet battle led by the Church in saving lives from addiction.