13 The Merida Initiative to battle drug cartels
The Merida Initiative was launched in in June, 2008 to provide security and financial assistance to the Mexican government and later expanded to include several Central American countries to assist them in fighting organized gang activity. The initiative focused on drug traffic, and was later expanded to include the interdiction of guns smuggled into Mexico from the United States. The American Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms revealed in 2014 that over 60,000 firearms were smuggled into Mexico by arms dealers in the United States, an activity which ATF has traced since 1996. The Merida Initiative was criticized from the beginning for corruption and for the seeming American support for human rights violations conducted by some of the Mexican army and police forces.
The United States provided the Mexican government and those of several Central American countries with security vehicles including helicopters, training in drug detection, and infiltration techniques to weaken the drug cartels and gangs. In 2009, at the request of several Caribbean nations, the Merida Initiative was expanded to include them as well. The plan was also directed at ferreting out and eliminating police and government corruption. By 2017, nearly $2 billion dollars of aid and equipment were delivered to Mexico alone as part of the ongoing War on Drugs, despite a US government study conducted by the RAND Corporation which recommended that a focus on the production and importation of drugs was futile, and that the money would be better spent on treatment of addiction and education.