Opening Statement

Chairman Eliot L. Engel

House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere

U.S. Obligations under the Merida Initiative

Thursday, February 7, 2008

A quorum being present, the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere will come to order.

It is my pleasure to welcome you to today’s hearing on U.S. obligations under the Merida Initiative. As always, it is an honor and a privilege to have Assistant Secretary of Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom Shannon here with us. And, I must recognize the presence of my very good friend, Marisa Lino, who I know as the former U.S. Ambassador to Albania, but who comes before us today as Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at Homeland Security.

As you may know, the Merida Initiative got off to a rocky start in Congress. Members were not consulted or briefed on the package before it was sent up, even after several requests. This was not the way to kick off such an important effort to combat drug trafficking and drug-related violence in Mexico and Central America.

Nevertheless, the Merida Initiative is very important. The U.S. inter-agency counter-narcotics community estimates that 90% of the cocaine that went from South America to the United States transited through Mexico and Central America in 2004 and 2005. And, drug-related violence has left more than 4,000 Mexicans dead in the last two years. No one can deny the severity of this problem. Something must be done and, as a country that consumes most of the drugs coming from Mexico and sends most of the guns to Mexico, the United States has a moral responsibility to help.

The Foreign Affairs Committee has held two hearings on the Merida Initiative already- one in this Subcommittee on October 25, 2007 and one in the full Committee on November 14, 2007. Those hearings focused on the narco-trafficking problem in Mexico and Central America and how the Merida Initiative will help the countries involved respond to the growing problem.

As I said during those hearings, I believe it is critical for the U.S. to assist Mexico and Central America in combating the drug cartels operating throughout the region and poisoning our youth. Too many people have already died; too many lives have been disrupted; and, and too many young people have been captured in a dangerous cycle of drugs and crime for us to sit back and do nothing.

But, it’s simply too easy to say the problem is “over there,” and that we can just send some money and helicopters to a few foreign countries and keep the narco-trafficking scourge outside our borders. If only we could just train enough Mexican police, put enough high tech scanners at ports of entry in Central America, or throw up a big fence on our Southwest border, we’ll be safe from the violence and all of our kids will simply ‘just say no to drugs’.

Of course this isn’t true. Drugs, drug violence, and the lives destroyed by illegal drugs are right here in the United States. We have tried for years with the Andean Counter- Narcotics Initiative to staunch the flow of cocaine to the United States and have provided more than $5 billion to Colombia from FY2000 through FY2007 – and still virtually the same amount of drugs is reaching the United States.

The problem, my friends, is here, too. As long as there is demand for illegal narcotics in the United States, suppliers will sell their cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin on our streets. And, as long as the narco-traffickers are armed with guns from the United States, the brutal violence of the drug gangs will continue unabated. So, we have to fight the scourge here at home just as we help our partners to the South address the problem in their countries.

This is my concern with the Merida Initiative and why we are holding this hearing today. We will spend more than a billion dollars on security assistance for Mexico and Central America over the next two years, but it is not clear that we are stepping up our efforts in the United States so we can cement the gains the Merida Initiative is designed to achieve abroad.

The State Department’s stated commitment, however, has been strong. Secretary Shannon, in your testimony before the Foreign Affairs Committee in November, you said:

“we are working domestically to enhance our efforts against the trafficking of drugs, arms, money, and humans, as well as to reduce the demand for drugs within the United States.”

We are here, today, to follow up on Secretary Shannon’s statement. We want to know what specifically the U.S. government is doing to live up to our side of the Merida bargain by reducing the demand for drugs and fighting gun running here at home.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) have told Congress of an “iron river of guns” with thousands of weapons per week crossing the border into Mexico from the United States. The Christian Science Monitor reported in a July 2007 editorial that more than 90% of the guns confiscated yearly in Mexico originate in the United States. And, approximately 40 percent of the total trafficked weapons are linked to drug trafficking organizations.

I was also very disturbed to recently hear an allegation that heavy duty weaponry has been stolen from Department of Defense facilities and National Guard armories and trafficked into Mexico. This is a very serious charge, and I hope to learn more about it in today’s hearing.

U.S. gun laws, whether you agree with them or not, are quite permissive when they come to sales of firearms at gun shows and other outlets. Unless ATF has specific information that someone is actually breaking the law, meaning carrying the weapons into Mexico, it seems ATF can do very little. I would like to know if that is true or whether our investigative rules and techniques allow ATF agents to aggressively investigate gun running.

Along the 2000 mile border from Brownsville, TX to San Diego, CA, there are 6700 licensed gun sellers, but only 100 ATF special agents to investigate allegations of weapons trafficking and only 35 inspectors to ensure compliance with U.S. laws.

Honestly, I’m not sure our staffing levels are up to the challenge. On January 16, ATF announced that it will add 25 special agents and 15 inspectors to their Project Gunrunner along the Southwest Border. And, the ATF budget request for FY 2009 includes another 12 inspectors. These are steps forward to meet our responsibility to fight gun trafficking.

But, more must be done. I am, therefore, pleased to announce that Ranking Member Burton and I and other members of the Subcommittee are sending a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) today requesting a detailed report on U.S. firearms trafficking into Mexico.

Internationally, the United States has signed the Inter American Convention on Arms Trafficking. I would like to know whether we are in compliance with this treaty and whether the State Department intends to ask the Senate to ratify it. Ambassador Shannon, I hope you can address this, as well as your sense of what Mexico and countries in Central America expect us to do here in the United States under the Merida Initiative.

Other than staunching the flow of weapons, it is my impression that our friends to the South hope we will take greater action to reduce demand for drugs on our streets. As Mexican President Felipe Calderón said during President Bush’s March 2007 visit to Mexico, “while there is no reduction for demand in your territory, it will be very difficult to reduce the supply in ours.”

When drug traffickers in Mexico and Central America, not to mention Colombia and elsewhere, look at the United States, they see a giant market – a place to sell their illegal drugs. If we are really serious about reducing the amount of drugs on our streets and in the hands of our nation’s young people, then I believe we must aggressively step-up our efforts to diminish the demand for drugs.

I was pleased that the joint U.S. – Mexico statement on the Merida Initiative noted that “the U.S. will intensify its efforts to address all aspects of drug trafficking, including demand-related portions.” Our funding for drug prevention and treatment programs, however, has been steadily declining since FY 2005. In fact, the prevention budget gets whacked by another $73 million in the President’s just-released FY 2009 budget.

Why are we cutting demand-side spending at a time when we have promised the Mexican government to “intensify” our efforts on the demand side of the drug war? This is absolutely shocking to me and is no way to show our commitment to our partners in Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere who are combating narco-traffickers on a daily basis.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that our commitment to Mexico and Central America should also mean stepping up our efforts to curb the flow of bulk cash transfers and the smuggling of chemical precursors for drugs such as methamphetamines into these countries.

We have a full battery of witnesses from across the government today, representing the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and, of course, the State Department. I look forward to hearing what each of these agencies is doing to make the Merida Initiative a success by addressing the parts of the transnational drug and violence problem which exist here in the United States.

I am now pleased to call on Ranking Member Burton for his opening statement.