Small Wars Journal

Mexicans Wonder Why Drug War Doesn't Rate in Presidential Debate

Wed, 10/24/2012 - 11:08am

With 60,000 Dead, Mexicans Wonder Why Drug War Doesn't Rate in Presidential Debate by Sara Miller Llana, Christian Science Monitor.

Much of Latin America was dismayed that they got only a glancing mention in Romney and Obama's final presidential debate.

Mitt Romney’s single mention of Latin America last night, calling it a “huge opportunity" for the United States, generated immediate glee from Latin Americanists across Twitter – but the hemisphere got no nod from President Obama, and then both went silent on the topic...

Categories: El Centro

Comments

The potential "bad" side of globalization/westernization, to wit: Negative change in societal attitudes, values and beliefs leading to increased criminal activity; this is not a popular topic.

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/publications/ideasToday/06/organisedCrime.p…

"When vanity, luxury and money are the (new) central values of a society, greed becomes the engine of organized crime and the motivation for armies of poor people to succumb to criminal activity."

(Item in parenthesis ["new"] is mine.)

Robert C. Jones

Thu, 10/25/2012 - 8:09am

With the clear failures of US drug policies at home, and of our enforcement policies abroad being so central to any discussion on this topic, it is little wonder the candidates leave it alone. Similar for discussions of Afghanistan and our foreign policy in general as it stumbles and staggers out of Cold War containment-based logic toward some new logic yet to be articulated or defined.

Such discussions would also have to talk about legalization - and that is a third rail that no presidential candidate is apt to touch just weeks before the election.