'Better to be belligerent than innovative': Argentina's new approach to fighting drugs is stoking co

[Judi Lynn]

'Better to be belligerent than innovative': Argentina's new approach to fighting drugs is stoking concern

Christopher Woody
1h

In late January this year, at little more than a month after he took office, Argentine President Mauricio Marci issued a presidential decree declaring a "state of emergency" in South America's second-largest country.

One of the things asserted in the decree was that trafficking of illegal drugs posed a "threat to national sovereignty."

. . .

As part of the decree issued in January, Macri also authorized the shoot-down of suspected drug planes, a policy recently reinstated by countries in the region that has worried human-rights advocates.

. . .

"It is ironic and tragic that Argentina has not learnt from this regional and international debate, and is now reverting back to [militarised] policies that have failed,” Coletta Youngers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America in Washington, DC, told the Financial Times.



http://www.businessinsider.com/argentina-police-militarization-drug-war-2016-11?r=UK&IR=T

[Eleanors38]

1. Not to deminish this state-sponsored violence, but Marci is a piker...

...compared to the psycho in the Philippines.

The WOD is an integral part of foreign policy in a number of countries, not just the U.S. In some countries, murderous crackdowns are part of the arsenal of diversion tactics when things get especially bad domestically. The important question is how much of this violence is in part a response to the wink & nod of U.S. policy. After all, Argentina was/is a "very apt pupil" in the School of Dirty Wars.