by Joanna Beltrán Girón, CISPES National Office Intern

On March 28, 2016, a group of activists from Central and South America and México, began the Caravan for Peace, Life and Justice in Honduras, traveling through El Salvador, Guatemala, and México and making a brief stop in Washington, DC on their way to New York City. Their destination was the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) that was held on April 19-20. The UNGASS was the most significant high-level international drug policy event in almost two decades; global leaders last met at the UN to discuss drugs in 1998.
 
The Caravan for Peace, Life and Justice, organized with the help of Global Exchange, was inspired by the 2012 Caravan for Peace, when over a hundred people from diverse nationalities, the majority survivors and relatives of people killed or disappeared in the “war on drugs,” crisscrossed the United States to protest the devastation caused by the US-backed war in Mexico. Similarly, this year’s Caravan for Peace, Life and Justice traveled long distances in order to build international solidarity, to shed to light the human rights violations caused by the criminalization of drugs and repressive security policies, and to propose alternatives “that put the genuine welfare of people and communities at the center of our institutional efforts, without resorting to unhelpful stigmas or moralistic dead ends.”

At panels and community gatherings organized in DC by allied organizations including CISPES, the American Friends Service Committee, School of the Americas Watch, Caravan participants presented their testimonials, their analysis, and a powerful conclusion: the War on Drugs is being used as a powerful pretext for states and corporations to repress popular resistance movements. The chilling examples range from Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina sending in the army to crack down on protesters he’d accused of being drug traffickers in May 2012, killing eight and wounding thirty five, to the Honduran Naval Force opening fire on a small gathered crowd, killing two unarmed Garifuna Afro-Honduran men this past December.

As Caravan supporter Laura Zúniga Cáceres, daughter of indigenous and environmental rights activist Berta Cáceres, who was murdered on March 3 in Honduras for her leadership in resisting a hydroelectric dam, explained, “Narcotrafficking has taken over our towns, and the War on Drugs has only been utilized to invade and militarize our towns, while criminalizing the people, especially the youth.”

On May 24, during a Congressional briefing in Washington, DC, Félix López, a leader in the Fraternal Garífuna and Black People's Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) explained that youth, indigenous and Garifuna Afro-Hondurans are the ones targeted as drug traffickers. Meanwhile, organized crime that’s actually facilitated by the police and the military - who have been seen unloading drugs from their boats - is systematically ignored. Community leaders from Guatemala and Honduras further testified as to how the War on Drugs has failed to decrease drug trafficking; instead, the power of criminal organizations has only expanded, creating “narco” collectives: “narco-churches,” “narco-priests,” ”narco-mayors,” and “narco-presidents.”

The regional policies under the banner of the War on Drugs include a particular set policing dynamics that consist of the militarization of civilian police forces. That is, the police are receiving paramilitary-style training, using military weapons and generally acting like the military. Since 2007, many Latin American police have been trained at the US’s International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador, the police version of the infamous School of the Americas. Additionally, the US has supported the creation and deployment of many new joint military-police units in the name of counter-drug efforts. This is particularly worrying because the communities that are most affected by the military-police paradigm are poor communities, as well as communities who are actively resisting natural resource extraction by transnational corporations. Ultimately, US security aid has led to greater violence in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, as documented in the 2013 report “Re-Thinking the Drug War,” which increasing numbers of asylum-seekers from those countries are now trying to escape.
 
In light of these devastating consequences, members of the Caravan joined together to advocate for an open, transnational dialogue about the War on Drugs and a shift toward policy based on a public health. The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in New York City presented a critical opportunity to influence the debate.

Unfortunately, when the Caravan arrived to the UN, the meeting got off to a bad start. As Linda Farthing reported in NACLA, after pre-registering online, “hundreds of people from all over the world were told they couldn’t even participate because there were only seats for 130 people. But, even if more civil society groups had been granted access, the outcomes would not have differed.” According to Farthing, “the UNGASS resolution was actually drafted a month earlier... behind closed doors, during the annual meetings of the UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND) in Vienna.” Although human rights, gender, and public health concerns were mentioned the session’s concluding resolution, it ignored decriminalizing drug use, did not promote hard-hitting measures against money laundering, and did not account for respect for indigenous use of psychoactive plants, many of the priorities for which Caravan participants and others from Latin America had come to advocate.  

Despite disappoints at the General Assembly, the Caravan brought together organizers from different countries and different movements to create a counter-hegemonic spaces, encouraged a debate about decriminalization, including in communities in Central America where the subject of still very much taboo, built the kind of international solidarity that’s essential among people and movements facing state violence, and presented an urgent call to action to allies in the US to stop our own government’s funding for the perilous War on Drugs.