BUENOS AIRES, June 27 (Itar-Tass) — Comprehensive infrastructure development is a key factor facilitating efficient anti-drug efforts, Russian anti-drug chief Viktor Ivanov said on Tuesday, addressing a meeting of the Argentine Council for International Relations.
“Neither force, nor police, nor military measures will be efficient if they are not accompanied by projects aiming to change the socio-economic situation,” he stressed. In his words, a solution to the problem of stopping drug production lies in national development to ensure actual sovereignty of states.
According to Ivanov, the world has two so-called planetary drug production centres – Afghanistan and South America, from where global drug traffic originates to flood the entire planet. In the long run, drug traffics undermine stability of countries, adding up crime and violence. At the same time, Ivanov noted, “a paradox of international efforts is that anti-drug agencies concentrate their efforts not on the elimination of such centre but on a secondary phenomenon – on drug trafficking.” Such efforts are not enough to solve the problem of drug production and often result in mere changing of drug traffic routes, he stressed. “Thus, the recent upsurge in cocaine traffic via Argentina and Brazil was caused by intensified anti-drug efforts in Mexico and Colombia, which only made drug dealers to look for other ways to reach the market,” the head of the Russian anti-drug agency said.
He urged Latin American countries to pool efforts to “exterminate the planetary drug production centres” and came forth with an idea of an informal international group that would be “work out projects and programs of alternative development.” In his words, it might be expedient to draw an interactive map of the struggle against drug production in Latin America. He also proposed to look at a possibility to set up a centre to train Latin American anti-drug specialists on the basis on Russian techniques.