Notes

Advantage Counterplans: If something is labeled Idea here, it is probably too underdeveloped to use in a debate, but can be a starting point for future research. Some of the econ counterplans were especially tricky because it is hard to help another countries economy without economic engagement. Thus the econ counterplans are sometimes borderline economic engagement and there might be a debate about linking to net benefits. We tried to ensure they would be distinct enough but itll be a debate. Shouts to Panny, Nick, Bob, Leighton and Arielle for the file. Notes ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Cuba ................................................................................................................................................. 3 Cuba Econ .................................................................................................................................... 4 1NC Support Reform CP .......................................................................................................... 5 US Support Key ........................................................................................................................ 7 Internal Reforms Solves Econ .................................................................................................. 8 Tourism Solves Econ ................................................................................................................ 9 Tourism Solves CETIM Concedes ........................................................................................ 12 Aff Answers............................................................................................................................ 13 Cuba Relations ........................................................................................................................... 16 1NC State Sponsors of Terrorism CP ..................................................................................... 17 Exts Solvency ...................................................................................................................... 18 Regime Turn NB ..................................................................................................................... 20 EXT Regime Turn ................................................................................................................. 21 AT: Rubio ............................................................................................................................... 23 AT Removal Undermines U.S Credibility ............................................................................... 24 Aff Answers............................................................................................................................ 27 Idea: Cuba Cooperation CP .................................................................................................... 29 Venezuela ...................................................................................................................................... 34 Venezuela Relations .................................................................................................................. 35 1NC Boston Group CP ............................................................................................................ 36 Solves Relations ..................................................................................................................... 38 AT: Say No.............................................................................................................................. 39 Idea: Designation CP .............................................................................................................. 40 Venezuelan Econ ....................................................................................................................... 42 1NC Pressure Diversification CP ............................................................................................ 43 AT: Inevitable ......................................................................................................................... 44 Idea: Venezuela Ptx Diversification .................................................................................... 46 1NC Election Reform CP ........................................................................................................ 47 AT: Fair Elections Now ........................................................................................................... 49 Aff Answers............................................................................................................................ 51 Idea: Venezuela Ptx Elections ............................................................................................. 52 Mexico ........................................................................................................................................... 55

Mexico Relations + Econ............................................................................................................ 56 1NC Legalize Marijuana CP .................................................................................................... 57 Legalization Solves Drug Cartels ............................................................................................ 59 AT: Mexico Doesnt Do it ....................................................................................................... 63 AT: Mexico Cant Do It ........................................................................................................... 64 Cartels K2 Relations ............................................................................................................... 65 Solves Mexican Econ ............................................................................................................. 68 Solves US Econ ....................................................................................................................... 69 AT: Perm only some states .................................................................................................... 70 AT: Drug War Good ............................................................................................................... 71 Aff Answers............................................................................................................................ 73 Idea: End the Cartels Addenum ............................................................................................. 77 Mexico Econ .............................................................................................................................. 79 Idea: Mexico Education CP .................................................................................................... 80

Cuba

Cuba Econ

1NC Support Reform CP

The United States federal government - should publically acknowledge that Cubas current reforms are genuine
specifically, President Obama should expand categories of opportunities for Americans to visit to Cuba.

US support for Cuban Reforms and loosening travel restrictions solve Cuban economy, but keeps the embargo in place Laverty 11 (Collin Laverty is a Cuba consultant at the Center for Democracy in the Americas. Cubas New Resolve Economic Reform and its
Implications for US Policy. 2011. http://democracyinamericas.org/pdfs/CDA_Cubas_New_Resolve.pdf)

We have a new opportunity to be seen by Cubas people and its future leaders supporting their efforts to build a new economy and

The greatest contribution our country can make now is to demonstrate we want the reforms to succeed, because we want the Cuban people to succeed. If this were a core principle of our democratic policy, a series of logical steps could then follow. My criterion is that if there are measures being taken within Cuba that benefit Cubans that should be recognized and encouraged. First, President Obama and other U.S. policy makers should acknowledge that Cubas reforms are real; that this program opens the way to a greater role for the market, and the changes are likely to exact great hardships on the Cuban people. They should also acknowledge that the reforms represent an important beginning. Until that all happens, our ambivalence plays into the hands of hardliners in Cuba who oppose reform or rapprochement with the United States.
to help the Cuban people lead more prosperous lives. Second, Cubans lack cash and credit to make full use of their newlygranted right to form businesses. The embargo and its byzantine sanctions prevent U.S. banks and developers from financing investments in Cuba. By loosening restrictions on travel and remittances, President Obama mobilized the financial capital and support of a good portion of the Cuban American community on behalf of Cubas economic revival. There are additional executive decisions the president can take to ease the flow of financing to Cuba and to spur demand for the activities the emerging private sector is performing. For example,

the president could further loosen restrictions on U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba. Although repeal of the statutory bar against tourist travel to the island would require an Act of Congress, unlikely in this political climate, President Obama could use his executive authority to open and expand categories of opportunities for Americans to visit Cuba.128 As Stephen Propst, an expert on international trade and investment laws explained, Although tourist travel remains prohibited by statute, the President still has room under the current legal framework to significantly expand opportunities for legal travel to Cuba. For example, the existing category of travel for professional meetings could be broadened to include a range of new authorizations for participation in meetings. If combined with additional authorizations for the exchange of services with small private businesses in Cuba, the President could authorize travel for purposes of professional meetings with Cuban architects, artists, musicians, consultants and others.129 According to this analysis, President Obama can, for example, order general licenses provided to freelance journalists, professional researchers, athletes who want to attend international sports competitions in Cuba, persons engaged in humanitarian activities, private foundations doing research, and business-related travel for authorized activities such as telecommunications, informational materials, and some marketing.
He could also broaden the licensing for advisors from firms who could assist the Cubans in safe drilling and environmental protection as Cuba explores for oil in the Gulf of Mexico (as CDA recommended in the 21st Century Report on energy).There is a broad consensus extending from the U.S. travel industry to the international human rights community that travel to Cuba should be expanded: travel is a constitutional right of U.S. citizens and has the added virtue of providing U.S. businesses broad opportunities. For

Cubas citizens, it provides a source of

profits and jobs for small businesses.

US Support Key
US acknowledgement of Cuban reforms would improve Cuban reforms and the Cuban economy Castor 13 (Kathy Castor. Representative for the 14 district of Florida. 5/19/13. What I learned from my trip to Cuba.
th

http://castor.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=334653) Cuba is changing, however, as I learned on my recent fact-finding visit. Cuba

has embarked on meaningful economic reforms, which deserve encouragement by the United States, not continued isolation. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have a window of opportunity to engage and encourage reform in Cuba and should act now. Cuba has instituted significant changes to its economy through decentralization and some private ownership of property and private business, such as restaurants (paladares), private lodging (casas particulares), construction and other self-created small businesses (cuentapropistas). Reforms also are also under way in Cuba's agricultural sector. I met with several Cubans who now work for themselves and are creating employment opportunities for other
Cubans, which increases autonomy and self-determination. Cuba's decision to eliminate most travel restrictions is modestly increasing mobility, earning power and the ability to provide financial support for their families. These developments remind me of the historic economic changes since the 1980s in the former Soviet bloc countries, and in China and Vietnam over the past 25 years. Indeed, I traveled to the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution. The United States was directly engaged with those nations during their transition, and Americans were free to travel and interact with their people. American legal

If America officially acknowledged changes under way in Cuba, it would strengthen the hands of Cubans who want these reforms to succeed, and we could encourage Cuba to go further and faster.
and economic experts and businesses directly aided the transition to greater freedom and personal economic opportunity.

US should support any Cuban economic reform

Perez 10 (David A. Perez, Yale Law School, JD, 2010, Harvard Latino Law Review, Spring, 13 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 187, Americas Cuba Policy: The
Way Forward: A Policy Recommendation for the U.S. State Department, p. 196-7) The importance of this argument cannot be overstated. The fact that economic reforms will precede political reforms means at least two things. First,

given this ordering, any quid pro quo from Washington should provide due credit to any economic liberalization that the island may implement, however piecemeal. For example, when the Cuban government privatizes parcels of agricultural land, or when it allows its tourist industry to engage in the dollar economy, or when it allows its taxi drivers to charge their own rates, these reforms should be seen as the economic equivalent of allowing small-scale political pluralism. When economic reforms are implemented, they should be praised not belittled and followed by positive reinforcement by Washington.

Internal Reforms Solves Econ

Cubas internal economic failures outweigh US impacts on Cuban Economyreliance on imports, inequality, lack of opportunities
Laverty 11 (Collin Laverty is a Cuba consultant at the Center for Democracy in the Americas. Cubas New Resolve Economic Reform and its
Implications for US Policy. 2011. http://democracyinamericas.org/pdfs/CDA_Cubas_New_Resolve.pdf)

Today, the principal peril that Cuba faces comes not from the United States ineffective threat but from its own crushing economic realities. The countrys government is struggling with both demographic burdens and pressures from global creditors. It cannot ignore either. Cubas nearly intractable problems stem from the limited ways in which its economy produces wealth, its heavy reliance on imports to feed its population, growing domestic economic inequality, and the lack of opportunities for citizens to productively use knowledge acquired through advanced education.

Cuban reforms are liberalizing the economy Laverty 11 (Collin Laverty is a Cuba consultant at the Center for Democracy in the Americas. Cubas New Resolve Economic Reform and its
Implications for US Policy. 2011. http://democracyinamericas.org/pdfs/CDA_Cubas_New_Resolve.pdf)

Rhetoric in a top-down society matters. The fact that the Cuban leadership no longer primarily blames the U.S. for all of its economic problems, publicly recognizes the importance of private entrepreneurs, and openly, if imperfectly, engages in a public debate about ambitious changes to the Cuban system, all demonstrate a new direction to the Cuban public. I think this moment is differentThe bureaucracy resists and will continue resisting, that is evident, but it is also very evident that the people in the government want to continue moving forward with the reforms. I think that the process
is unstoppable. Orlando Mrquez, spokesman for Cubas Catholic Church110The policies speak as loudly as the words. As several scholars, including Philip Peters of the Lexington Institute and Archibald Ritter at Carleton University have noted, Ral is not simply tinkering around the edges of the system. Most Cubans are convinced that their lives are going to change and not necessarily for

the Cuban government is taking steps to reduce the size of the state in ways that remind Cubans of the privations they endured during the Special Period and the impact of the Eastern Blocs reforms when economies shrank by as much as 40% and took over a decade to recover.111A long era of economic targets and production goals based on ideology or high aspirations is giving way to the discipline of the market. A range of enterprises will have
the better. While disavowing shock therapy, greater autonomy to hire and fire, set wage structures and prices, and obtaining financing, but also face bankruptcy. The replacement of the ration book with a system of targeted benefits is being sold to the population as a work incentive, but on a practical level, it means that the majority of Cuban families have to work even harder to make ends meet. The government layoffs announced but not yet implemented will cost 1 million workers their jobs and also signal that Cubas promise of employment for all is finished. To absorb state workers,

the new agenda relies on market-friendly reforms to create jobs and growth for the Cuban economy, placing a large bet on the emerging private sector to hire and pay unemployed workers Although small businesses, especially so many nascent enterprises, cannot absorb this number of workers without significant additional reforms, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have already stepped up with their own wagers by forming businesses, hiring other Cubans as workers, and making independent decisions about how they will earn their livelihoods. In turn, consumers will have expanded choices as competition raises the quality of goods and spurs innovations. Cuba is creating a retail sector with little government control. Because the new work largely involves services and not production, the experiment will not remake the entire economy, notes the Chicago Tribune, but its an important start.112

Tourism Solves Econ

Tourism is essential to Cuban Economy-income gained from operation and construction of tourist spots. Crespo and Diaz 07 (Nicolas Crespo and Santos Negron Diaz are writers for the ASCE. Cuban
Tourism in 2007: Economic Impact. 2007.http://www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume7/pdfs/crespo.pdf)
The economic impact of tourism is a key component of the study. In order to arrive at a conclusion,

we analyzed the income and employment generating capacity of the industry and the fiscal resources which it generates. The conclusion arrived at in the study is that the operation of tourism, hotels, motels and other related assets represents a growing major contribution to both foreign currency income generation and employment in Cuba and that it will play a major role in the coming years based on the number of hotel rooms under development, the investment required and the potential impact on the economy during construction and operation.

Tourism increases Cuban Economy despite the embargo Federico-OMurchu 4 (Sean Federico-OMurchu is a reporter for NBC. Cuba bets heavily on tourism to lift
economy. 10/11/2004. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6225107/#.UdHKC_m1F6I)
Its all part of a decade-long shift in Cuba, born in the wrenching aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the end to Havanas lifeline of subsidies from Moscow.

After five years of economic distress, when the countrys gross domestic product plummeted at least 35 percent, the government of Fidel Castro reluctantly opened the door to tourists. In 1992, Cuba had 12,000 rooms for international tourism, said Oscar Gonzalez, the vice minister for tourism. Now its 41,000. In addition, we have improved in terms of quality as well as
quantity as 70 percent of the hotels are now four- and five-star, up from 30 percent.

The transformation has been a boon to the government , which has little access to foreign currency due to the economic blockade imposed by the United States in 1961. Tourist traffic has risen at least 10 percent annually and the government expects a record 2 million visitors this year. In dollar terms, tourism now ranks with the oil and mining industries as the countrys biggest earners.

Tourism is a structural factor to the Cuban economy high investments, high growth rates, stimulates other sectors Castillo and Gaspar 02 (Orlando Guitierrez Castillo and Nelida Gancedo Gaspar. Nelida Gancedo Gaspar is
aprofessor at the Center for Studies of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana. She has carried out several studies on the impact of tourism on the Cuban economy. Orlando Gutierrez Castillo is an associate professor at the University of Havana and has a PhD in Economics. Tourism Development for the Cuban Economy. 2002. http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/winter-2002/tourism-development-cuban-economy)

Tourism eventually became more important because it represented a significant group of investments that could generate hard currency. The 1997 Cuban Economic Resolution spells out the necessity to develop hard currency-earning sectors of the economy to finance other important activities, making explicit the role tourism could play in the country's economic future. To achieve this,
it set a goal: to attract more than two million tourists to the country by the year 2000 and earn more than $2,600 million from the tourist trade.

Thus, tourism, in ten years of sustained development, has been converted into the most dynamic sector of the Cuban economy. One-fourth of the investments in Cuba have been made in tourism. It has contributed an impressive 43% to the balance of payments at the end of the decade, more than any other industry. In a mere decade, tourism has gone from being an incidental source of income to becoming a structural factor in the Cuban economy . Few times in international history has

such a dynamic structural transformation occurred. Ten years ago, the sugar industry provided between 70 and 75% of the income of the balance of payments, while the tourist sector accounted for only 6%. Cuban

Tourism Minister Ibrahim Ferradaz observed that "in the last ten years, the sector multiplied its gross income eight-fold; the number of visitors multiplied by five, the number of rooms in tourist establishments tripled, and the number of jobs in the tourist sector doubled. "
This achievement can be attributed to the design and implementation of a strategy for sector development, aiming to consolidate the "structural competitivity" of tourism through the use of Cuba's existing social and cultural assets, as well as the creation of long-term sustainable competitive advantages. It is said that when Christopher Columbus arrived at the northeast coast of Cuba on October 27, 1492, startled by the island's beauty, he exclaimed, "This is the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen!" And he became de facto the first tour operator on the island. Undoubtedly, Cuba is an obvious site for tourism, with its picturesque beaches, underwater beauty, countryside landscapes, and ecological reserves (many yet to be explored). Its climate complements its easy air and sea access, as well as its important historical and cultural patrimony. An educated population and improved infrastructure of roads and communications add to the mix.

The Cuban government's economic policy and support mechanisms have complemented these advantages. In the Caribbean region, Cuba is now the second most popular tourist destination .
Pillars of Tourism Development Strategy

In the context of an economic crisis, decisive Cuban government policy "bet on" tourism. Between 1990 and 1999, more than $3.5 billion were invested in the tourist industry. The number of rooms available to international tourists grew from 12,000 to 35,000. Significant resources were also devoted to infrastructure such as airports, causeways connecting the keys, and other tourist facilities. The shift from an emphasis on goods and productivity to that of services has made tourism the "locomotive" of the Cuban economy. Tourism is not only important in and of itself. It serves to stimulate other sectors of the economy .
The real challenge is how tourism can contribute to the development and consolidation of sectors of the domestic economy that aren't truly competitive without losing "structural competitivity". However, the utilization of tourist demand has been sustained in a basic principle: to not force any tourist entity to buy national products, especially if those products are not considered internationally competitive. In this sense, the government does not provide support to national products in the context of the tourist industry. Sectors related to the tourism sector operate in an environment of competition. In 1990, only 18% of the

sector's purchases were domestic; by the end of 2000, the amount increased to 61%. As a result of the incorporation of several sectors of the economy into the tourist "locomotive," 198,000 jobs were created or recovered.

Tourism is key to Cuban economy despite challenges and the recession. Castillo and Gaspar 02 (Orlando Guitierrez Castillo and Nelida Gancedo Gaspar. Nelida Gancedo Gaspar is aprofessor at the Center
for Studies of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana. She has carried out several studies on the impact of tourism on the Cuban economy. Orlando Gutierrez Castillo is an associate professor at the University of Havana and has a PhD in Eco nomics. Tourism Development for the Cuban Economy. 2002. http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/winter-2002/tourism-development-cuban-economy)

The Cuban tourist sector now faces the challenge of increasing its competitive capacity and taking advantage of important opportunities and resources. Weaknesses associated with both objective and subjective factors have to be worked out through a coherent strategy that adequately uses the human capital in Cuba as its principal economic resource. After discussing the tactical adjustments that the country would need to adopt to confront the current depression caused by worldwide recession and the impact of September 11, Tourism Minister Ferradaz stressed that "the situation would not affect the important construction already underway." He confirmed that tourism would continue to be a key sector of the Cuban economy .
Cuba is not going to offer just any type of tourism to bring in hard currency; guidelines have been established about the kind of tourism that Cuba wishes to develop as a destination. President Fidel Castro himself has declared, "Sex tourism will never be permitted, nor drugs nor anything of that sort. This is not gambling tourism; it is healthy tourism, and that is what we want; it is what we promote, because we know that today tourists are worried about their safety and we have the conditions to offer them that security. We have a hospitable people, a high and growing level of education, that is, we have the conditions to offer these tourist services and at the same time, to cooperate with other Caribbean islands."

Cuba is not looking at tourism as some sort of short-term solution that exploits people's curiosity about the island. Nor does it see tourism as "a necessary evil" in the heart of a socialist society,

explanations sometimes given by those confused about the impressive dynamism of the Cuban tourist sector. Tourism in Cuba is a strategic development associated with creating a new concept of sustainable tourism from the vantage point of its ecological, economic, and social dimensions.

Tourism Solves CETIM Concedes

Tourism is key to the Cuban Economy their 1AC authors say so CETIM 3 (Centre Europe Tiers Monde, independent research and political organization
working at the UN, THE EFFECTS OF THE US EMBARGO AGAINST CUBA AND THE REASONS OF THE URGENT NEED TO LIFT IT, http://www.cetim.ch/oldsite/2003/03js04w4.htm)
If it affects negatively all the sectors3, the embargo directly impedes - besides the exportations -

the driving forces of the Cuban economic recovery, at the top of which are tourism, foreign direct investments (FDI) and currency
transfers. Many European subsidiaries of US firms had recently to break off negotiations for the management of hotels, because their lawyers anticipated that the contracts would be sanctioned under the provisions of the "Helms-Burton law". In addition, the buy-out by US groups of European cruising societies, which moored their vessels in Cuba, cancelled the projects in 2002-03. The obstacles imposed by the United States, in violation of the Chicago Convention on civil aviation, to the sale or the rental of planes, to the supply of kerosene and to access to new technologies (e-reservation, radio-localization), will lead to a loss of 150 million dollars in 2003. The impact on the FDI is also very unfavourable. The institutes of promotion of FDI in Cuba received more than 500 projects of cooperation from US companies, but none of them could be realized - not even in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry, where Cuba has a very attractive potential. The transfer of currencies from the United States is limited (less than 100 dollars a month per family) and some European banks had to restrain their commitment under the pressure of the US which let them know that indemnities would be required if the credits were maintained. In Cuba, the embargo penalizes the activities of the bank and finance, insurance, petrol, chemical products, construction, infrastructures and transports, shipyard, agriculture and fishing, electronics and computing, but also for the export sectors (where the US property prevailed before 1959), such as those of sugar, whose recovery is impeded by the interdiction of access to the fist international stock exchange of raw materials (New York), of nickel, tobacco, rum.

Aff Answers
Perm do both solves the Counterplan Eckstein 10 (Susan Eckstein. Professor at Boston University and past president of the Latin American Studies
Association. A Helping Hand to Cubas Market Reform? 9/29/10. http://blogs.reuters.com/greatdebate/2010/09/29/a-helping-u-s-hand-to-cuba%E2%80%99s-market-reform/)
As both Raul and Fidel acknowledge that their economic system no longer works, we have an opportunity to respond in kind, to make a full market transition more probable. If we acknowledge that our 50-year embargo has been

ineffective (never strangulating the Castro regime to the point of collapse) and signal to the Cuban government that we are supportive of their effort to restructure their economy, we will be working in our best interests as well as Cubas. U.S. business will benefit from new investment and trade opportunities, and we will minimize the likelihood of another mass exodus from Cuba, of un- and under-employed Cubans who envision their future prospects far better in the U.S. than in their ailing economy.

Reforms failing now slow growth, slow and weak reforms, and high food imports. Tamayo 7/1 (Juan O. Tamayo is an award winning journalist for the Miami Herald who reports specifically on
Latin America. 7/1/13. Report says Cuban economic growth hasnt quickened despite reforms. http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/01/3480625/report-says-cuban-economy-is.html)

Cuba said Monday its economy will grow by no more than 3 percent this year, about the same as in 2012 but far short of the 3.6 percent goal and another indication that ruler Ral Castros reforms are generating little new economic activity.
Castro, nevertheless, seemed pleased with the reports on his reforms submitted Friday to a meeting of the Council of Ministers and detailed in a story Monday in Granma, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party. We continue advancing and the results can be seen. We are moving at a faster pace than can be imagined by those who criticize our supposed slow pace and ignore the difficulties that we face, he was quoted as saying at th e meeting. Since succeeding older brother Fidel in 2008, Castro has allowed more private enterprise and cut state payrolls and subsidies. But many economists have dismissed his reforms as too slow and too weak to rescue Cubas

Soviet-styled economy.
Minister of the Economy and planning Adel Yzquierdo told the Cabinet meeting that he expects Gross Domestic Product will grow by between 2.5 and 3 percent, far short of the 3.6 percent goal. The countrys GDP grew by 3 percent last year. GDP growth for the first half of this year was estimated at 2.3 percent, compared to 2.1 percent for the same period last year, he added. Cuba uses a unique way of counting GDP that exaggerates the number when compared

to other countries.
Yzquierdo blamed the shortcomings on a broad range of factors that went from last years Hurricane Sandy it caused an estimated $2 billion in damages to what Granma called the deficiencies that are part and parcel of the Cuban economy. Granma and Yzquierdo ticked off a list of reasons for the economic stagnation, from delays in projects to broken contracts and the low productivity and shortage of the labor force as well as the economic situation in Latin America and the rest of the world. Spending on social services remained stable for the first semester of this year, Yzquierdo declared, and many parts of the economy grew at a 2.9 percent clip or better. But the sugar harvest fell 192,000 tons short of goal and bean production fell 6,000 tons short. Government spending on construction and other capital projects was 16.6 percent higher than in the first semester last year but 9 percent short of goal because of delays and others issues, the minister said.

Exports grew by 5 percent, Granma reported, and lower prices on imported food meant savings of $168 million. But shortcomings in Cuban farming forced the government to import an unplanned $46 million worth of food. Cuba must import more than 70 percent of the food items it consumes, at a cost of more than $1.5 billion a year.

Reforms arent real continued government control and permitted private sector activities fail Azel 11 (Jose Azel is a senior scholar at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami.
01/10/11. So Much For Cuban Economic Reform. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203418804576039640218425926.html)

The document persistently emphasizes Gen. Castro's militaristic themes of increased efficiency, discipline and control. It insists, for example, on setting prices according to the dictates of central planning.
It also insists that any new "nonstate" (private sector) economic activities not be allowed to lead to the "concentration of property" (that is, the accumulation of wealth). There is no interest in introducing the market socialism of a Deng Xiaoping, who famously told China's people in 1984 that "to get rich is glorious."

It is not surprising that Ral and his fellow generals are more comfortable with the chain of command of a centrally planned economy than with the vicissitudes of a market economy. More baffling is their failure to understand core principles of economic development. After much debate and with trepidation, the Cuban economic "reformers" have decided to permit the 500,000 to 1,300,000 Cubans being fired from state jobs to solicit permits to become selfemployed in certain activities. It is instructive to examine a handful of the 178 trades and professions that are supposed
to help rescue the economy. Trade No. 23 will be the purchase and sale of used books. Trade 29 is an attendant of public bathrooms (presumably for tips); 34 is a palm-tree pruner (apparently other trees will still be pruned by the state). Trade 49 is covering buttons with fabric; 61 is shining shoes; 62 is cleaning spark plugs; 69 is a typist; 110 is the repair of box springs (not to be confused with 116, the repair of mattresses). Trade 124 is umbrella repairs; 125 is refilling of disposable cigarette lighters; 150 is fortune-telling with tarot cards; 156 is being a dandy (technical definition unknown, maybe a male escort?); 158 is peeling natural fruit (separate from 142, selling fruit in kiosks).

This bizarre list of permitted private-sector activities will not drive economic development. But it does reveal the regime's totalitarian mindset. Here Cuban technocrats foreshadow the degree of control they intend to impose by listing the legal activities with specificity. These are not reforms to unleash the market's "invisible hand" but to reaffirm the Castros' clenched fist. One does not have to be an economist to appreciate that the refilling of disposable cigarette lighters, for example, will not contribute in any measure to economic development.
In his economic dream land of surrealist juxtapositions, Ral believes that improved state management is the way to save the communist system.

The desire for control by the military and the Communist Party of every aspect of Cuban life is antithetical to the individual liberty and empowerment necessary to bring about an economic renaissance.

Cuban Reforms are failing now - ERBD Transition Indicators prove Luis 13 (Luis R. Luis is an editor for the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. May 2013. Gauging
Cubas Economic Reforms. http://www.ascecuba.org/blog/post/Gauging-Cubas-Economic-Reforms.aspx)

The Transition Indicators gauge progress in six policy areas: 1. large scale privatization, 2. small scale privatization, 3. governance and enterprise restructuring, 4.price liberalization, 5. trade and foreign exchange system and 6. competition policy. A measurement scale of 1 to 4+ is set for these areas indicating
movement between little progress (1) and standards of advanced market economies (4 or 4+ in some areas). I used the methodology of the EBRD in gauging progress in each of the six areas. The table above shows the scoring with a succinct explanation of its meaning taken directly from the EBRD methodology.[ii]

Progress in most of these areas is slow with a score of 1 for both large scale privatization and competition policy, areas which have seen no reform policies or even aspirations of reform in theLineamientos or policy guidelines approved in 2011 by the communist party and the cuban National
Assembly. Some progress can be seen on small scale privatization with 1.5 and on governance and enterprise

restructuring with a reduction of subsidies at 1.7, though this is probably generous in view of the constrained scope of reforms on both areas. Price liberalisation at a score of 2 is one area where more progress has been made specially on retail pricing by private farmers and the self-employed. Yet state procurement takes place at controlled prices.

The sum of indicators for Cuba is 8.4 which is below any of the 34 transition countries where indicators have been calculated using the EBRD methodology. The lowest rating among those countries is Turkmenistan (10.7), followed by Belarus (13) and Uzbekistan (13.7 ).[iii]
The transition indicators are useful as a guide for policy inasmuch as one interprets Cubas updating of socialism as movement towards a partial or full market economy. The score shows how little has been done and where to

place efforts even in areas such as small scale privatization which are at the forefront of Cuban policy. A low score in the Transition Indicators denotes shortfalls in the efficiency of the economy, its insertion into international trade and finance and the effectiveness of economic policies. The pity is that Cuban policy as stated appears to aim at maintaining a low score.

Cuba Relations

1NC State Sponsors of Terrorism CP

Text: The United States federal government should Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list.
Removing Cuba from state sponsors of terrorism list solves U.S-Cuba relations- key to solving mistrust

Haven 13 (Paul, Associated Press bureau chief in Havana, 5/1/13, US keeps Cuba on state sponsors of terrorism list,
http://news.yahoo.com/us-keeps-cuba-state-sponsors-terrorism-list-203504903.html //NZ)

There had been speculation among analysts and others that the U.S. might use the report to take Cuba off the list and boost efforts to improve relations. "It's a missed opportunity. There's no doubt about it," said Philip Peters, a longtime Cuba analyst based in Washington. "It would have been an important step. It would have removed an accusation that the whole world knows is false." Peters said removing Cuba from the list would have a profound impact on relations between the two countries, but keeping it on meant that a half century of mistrust would continue . He added, however, that the wording used by the State Department left open the possibility that Cuba could be taken off in the future. Many Cuba watchers had speculated the time might be ripe for Cuba to get off the list, in large part because the Cuban government is now hosting peace talks between Colombian rebels and that country's government, while the Basque militants have announced a permanent cease-fire. The Colombian and Spanish governments have not criticized Cuba's role in their conflicts in recent years, and both countries routinely vote against U.S. economic sanctions on the island during a yearly vote at the United Nations. Several U.S. newspapers ran editorials calling for Cuba to be removed from the list. Some argued
that the Caribbean nation's inclusion undermined a list that is meant to highlight major international pariahs . One

of the requirements for getting off the list is that countries publicly renounce terrorism. Cuba did that in April when it sent its condolences both to the American people and the U.S. government over the bombings at the Boston marathon. Cuba said in its message that it "rejects and condemns unequivocally all acts of terrorism, in any place, under any circumstance, and with whatever motivation."

Exts Solvency
Removing Cuba from the list solves relations with Cuba and the region- not justified Franks 13 (Jeff, writer for Reuters, 5/31/13, Cuba says inclusion on U.S. terrorist list
'shameful', http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/31/us-cuba-usa-terrorismidUSBRE94U05020130531//NZ)
(Reuters) - In what has become an annual ritual, the

United States on Thursday kept Cuba on its list of "state sponsors of terrorism" and Havana reacted angrily, calling it a "shameful decision" based in politics, not reality. Cuba said in a statement that the U.S. government was pandering to the Cuban exile community in Miami against its own interests and the wishes of the American people. The terrorism designation comes with a number of sanctions, including a prohibition on U.S. economic assistance and financial restrictions that create problems for Cuba in international commerce, already made difficult by a U.S. trade embargo imposed against the island
since 1962.

The State Department's explanation for Cuba's inclusion on the list discounted most of the reasons from previous years and said "there was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups." Robert Muse, a Washington attorney who specializes in Cuba issues, said there is no legal basis for designating Cuba as a terrorist sponsor because of the presence of the fugitives. "The territory of Cuba has never been used and never will be to harbor terrorists of any origin, nor to organize, finance or perpetrate acts of terrorism against any country in the world, including the United States," it said. Geoff Thale, program director at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank, said President Barack Obama can take Cuba off the terrorist list at any time and should do so because it is "clear that the State Department doesn't really believe that Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism." Removing Cuba from the list would improve relations with Cuba and all of Latin America, which sees U.S. policy toward Cuba "as a reflection of U.S. attitudes toward the region as a whole," Thale said.

Inclusion on the list is the biggest obstacle of U.S-Cuban relations- unable to obtain loans, military items, and medicine Bolender 13 (Keith, Guest Scholar at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 4/22/13, The
Terrorist List, and Terrorism as Practiced Against Cuba, http://www.coha.org/22355/#sthash.7PR9MyMs.dpuf//NZ) Of all the components to the United States hostile strategy against Cuba, no thing raises the ire of the Castro government more than its inclusion on the State Departments list of states that sponsor terrorism . The designation is seen by Havana as an impediment towards improving relations and as a cruel hypocrisy that provides political cover for Washington to justify the imposition of economic penalties
along with the perpetuation of anti-revolutionary propaganda.

There are numerous reasons why the Castro government finds its insertion on the list so galling. First are the real economic consequences to the designation. By law the United States must oppose any loans to Cuba by the World Bank or other international lending institutions.

Obama administration officials have been using Cubas inclusion to make it increasingly difficult for Havana to conduct norma l banking transactions that

Furthermore, the United States has imposed an arms embargo against all parties placed on the list (which the Castro government
involve U.S. financial establishments, regardless of which currency is being used.

has experienced since the triumph of the Revolution) as well as prohibiting sales of items that could be considered to have both military and non-military dual use,
ramifications. including hospital equipment. For example, the William Soler childrens hospital in Havana was labeled a denied hospital in 2007 by the State Department, bringing with it serious

Various medicines and technology have become impossible to obtain , resulting in the deaths of children and the inability of staff to properly deal with a variety of treatable conditions. [2] For Cuba, these restrictions are additionally damaging as the island continues to suffer from the comprehensive embargo the
United States has imposed since the early 1960s.

There is no sound argument for Cubas continued description as a state sponsor of terrorism. Secretary of State Kerry has in his hands a method to end the moral duplicity and possibly help kick start engagement. Kerry, an outspoken critic of what he has called the failed Cuban policy, publicly stated his support for the end of travel restrictions and the elimination of the funding for the type of programs in which Gross was involved. [14] He now has the opportunity to put rhetoric into reality, to demonstrate to Cuba and the rest of Latin America that United States policy regarding their contentious neighbor to the south is moving into a new, more mature and constructive period.

Regime Turn NB
Turn plan strengthens the regime, kills the economy, and undermines US influence in the region Suchlicki 13 (Jaime, Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor and Director, Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, What Ifthe U.S. Ended the Cuba Travel Ban and the Embargo? 2/26/13, http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/what-if-the-u-sended-the-cuba-travel-ban-and-the-embargo/) Lifting the ban
for U.S. tourists to travel to Cuba

would be a major concession

totally out of proportion to recent changes

in the island. If the U.S. were to lift the travel ban without major reforms in Cuba, there would be significant implications:

Money from American tourists would flow into businesses owned by the Castro government thus strengthening state enterprises. The tourist industry is controlled by the military and General Raul Castro, Fidels brother.
American tourists will have limited contact with Cubans. Most Cuban resorts are built in isolated areas, are off limits to the average Cuban, and are controlled by Cubas efficient security apparatus. Most Americans dont speak Spanish, have but limited contact with ord inary Cubans, and are not interested in visiting the island to subvert its regime. Law 88 enacted in 1999 prohibits Cubans from receiving publications from tourists. Penalties include jail terms. While providing the Castro government with much needed dollars, the

economic impact of tourism on the Cuban population would be limited. Dollars will trickle down to the Cuban poor in only small quantities, while state and foreign enterprises will benefit most. Tourist dollars would be spent on products, i.e., rum,
tobacco, etc., produced by state enterprises, and tourists would stay in hotels owned partially or wholly by the Cuban government. The principal airline shuffling tourists around the island, Gaviota, is owned and operated by the Cuban military. The assumption that the Cuban leadership would allow U.S. tourists or businesses to subvert the revolution and influence internal developments is at best nave. As we have seen in other circumstances, U.S.

travelers to Cuba could be subject to harassment and imprisonment. Over the past decades hundred of
thousands of Canadian, European and Latin American tourists have visited the island. Cuba is not more democratic today. If anything, Cuba is more totalitarian, with the state and its control apparatus having been strengthened as a result of the influx of tourist dollars. As occurred in the mid-1990s, an infusion of American tourist dollars will provide the regime with a further disincentive to adopt deeper econom ic reforms. Cubas limited economic reforms were enacted in the early 1990s, when the islands economic contraction was at its worst. Once the economy began to s tabilize by 1996 as a result of foreign tourism and investments, and exile remittances, the earlier reforms were halted or rescinded by Castro. Lifting

the travel ban without major concessions from Cuba would send the wrong message to the enemies of the United States: that a foreign leader can seize U.S. properties without compensation; allow the use of his territory for the introduction of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States; espouse terrorism and
anti-U.S. causes throughout the world; and eventually the United States will forget and forgive, and reward him with tourism, in vestments and economic aid. Since the Ford/Carter era, U.S. policy toward Latin America has emphasized democracy, human rights and constitutional government. Under President Reagan the U.S. intervened in Grenada, under President Bush, Sr. the U.S. intervened in Panama and under President Clinton the U.S. landed marines in Haiti, all to restore democracy to those countries. The U.S. has prevented military coups in the region and supported the will of the people in free elections. U.S. policy has not been uniformly applied throughout the world, yet it is U.S. policy in the region. Cuba is part of Latin America. While no one is advocating military intervention, normalization

of relations with a military dictatorship in Cuba will send the wrong message to the rest of the continent. Once American tourists begin to visit Cuba, Castro
would probably restrict travel by Cuban-Americans. For the Castro regime, Cuban-Americans represent a far more subversive group because of their ability to speak to friends and relatives on the island, and to influence their views on the Castro regime and on the United States. Indeed, the return of Cuban exiles in 1979-80 precipitated the mass exodus of Cubans from Mariel in 1980. A large influx of American tourists into Cuba would have a dislocating effect on the economies of smaller Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and even Florida, highly dependent on tourism for their well-being. Careful planning must take place, lest we create significant hardships and social problems in these countries. If the embargo is lifted, limited trade with, and investments in Cuba would develop. Yet there are significant implications.

EXT Regime Turn

Ending the embargo without massive concessions will fail Suchlicki 13 (Jaime, Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor and Director, Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies,
University of Miami, What Ifthe U.S. Ended the Cuba Travel Ban and the Embargo? 2/26/13, http://interamericansecuritywatch.c om/what-if-the-u-sended-the-cuba-travel-ban-and-the-embargo/)

Trade All trade with Cuba is done with state owned businesses. Since Cuba has very little credit and is a major debtor nation, the U.S. and its businesses would have to provide credits to Cuban enterprises. There is a long history of Cuba defaulting on loans. Cuba is not likely to buy a substantial amount of products in the U.S.
In the past few years, Cuba purchased several hundred million dollars of food in the U.S. That amount is now down to $170 million per year. Cuba can buy in any other country and it is not likely to abandon its relationship with China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran to become a major trading partner of the U.S. Cuba has very little to sell in the U.S. Nickel, one of Cubas major exports , is controlled by the Canadians and exported primarily to Canada. Cuba has decimated its sugar industry and there is no appetite in the U.S. for more sugar. Cigars and rum are important Cuban exports. Yet, cigar production is mostly committed to the European market. Cuban rum could become an important export, competing with Puerto Rican and other Caribbean rums. Investments In Cuba, foreign investors cannot partner with private Cuban citizens . They can only invest in the island through minority joint ventures with the government and its state enterprises. The dominant enterprise in the Cuban economy is the Grupo GAESA, controlled by the Cuban military. Most investments are done through or with GAESA. Therefore, American

companies willing to invest in

Cuba will have to partner mostly with the Cuban military. Cuba ranks 176 out of 177 countries in the world in terms
of economic freedom. Outshined only by North Korea. It ranks as one of the most unattractive investments next to Iran, Zimbabwe, Libya, Mali, etc.

Foreign investors cannot hire, fire, or pay workers directly. They must go through the Cuban government
employment agency which selects the workers. Investors pay the government in dollars or euros and the government pays the workers a meager 10% in Cuban pesos. Corruption is pervasive, undermining equity and respect for the rule of law. Cuba does not have an independent/transparent legal system. All judges are appointed by the State and all lawyers are licensed by the State. In the last few years, European investors have had over $1 billion arbitrarily frozen by the government and several investments have been confiscated. Cuba s Law 77 allows the State to expropriate foreign-invested assets for reason of public utility or social interest. In the last year, the CEOs of three companies with extensive dealings with the Cuban government were arrested without charges. (1)

Conclusions If the travel ban is lifted unilaterally now or the embargo is ended by the U.S., what will the U.S. government have to negotiate with a future regime in Cuba and to encourage changes in the island? These policies could be an important bargaining chip with a future regime willing to provide concessions in the area of political and economic freedoms. The travel
ban and the embargo should be lifted as a result of negotiations between the U.S. and a Cuban government willing to provide meaningful and irreversible political and economic concessions or when there is a democratic government in place in the island.

Increases the regimes power and turns case Jorge 2k (Dr. Antonio, Professor of Political Economy at Florida International University, "The U.S. Embargo and
the Failure of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)
Let us ask one final time: Who

would benefit from the abrogation of the legislation enabling the U.S. embargo on Cuba? Unquestionably, such a move would be greatly advantageous to Castros
personal purposes and would also favor those who seek to obtain commercial gains from doing business in Cuba, heedless of the costs of their

a gross deception , however, would be to advance the claim, as some do, that such a policy change would contribute to Cubas freedom or to its economic development. No doubt, Cuba after Castro will experience very serious difficulties in resuming its process of economic development and rejoining the world economy. Nothing short of a complete ideological turnaround and wholesale restructuring of its political, social, and economic systems would allow the country to begin to face the arduous tasks lying ahead. The Cuban nation has suffered enormously under Castro. The reconstruction process will inevitably be costly and laborious. The last thing the Cuban people need is to be visited by another plague. Spare them the sanctimonious chicanery and
unbridled ambition to the Cuban people. What would constitute knavery of those who abuse and misuse the market for their own greed. Piatas and mafias are not the way to build free and prosperous societies. Vide Nicaragua and Russia. Let Cuba not follow suit.

Castro influence is the problem, not the embargo Jorge 2k (Dr. Antonio, Professor of Political Economy at Florida International University, "The U.S. Embargo and
the Failure of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)

It follows, from all of the above, that a lifting of the embargo at this time would only serve the purpose of facilitating to Castro desperately needed resources, mainly in the form of credit lines extended by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, and also by private banking and other financial institutions. This financial influx would serve to strengthen his 40-year stranglehold on the Cuban people. Furthermore, to those who believe that greater contacts between the United States and Cuba would further the cause of democratization, it should be pointed out that such hopes definitely have not been validated by the experience of Marxist societies from the inception of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, which followed the stage of War Communism, up to the last efforts at reforming socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. In these countries, trade, foreign investment, and loans led hermetic lives of their own, oblivious to and unaffected by the rest of society. There is no historical precedent for drawing hope from the Cuban experience. As a matter of fact, it could be realistically argued that the opposite has happened. As the Cuban regime succeeds in solidifying itself, as a result of the legitimacy conferred upon it by other nations and by an augmented flow of resources, its repressive proclivities have increased in parallel fashion. Trade and investment with totalitarian states have not weakened or eroded those states; rather, the contrary has always been the case. Castros regime is certainly no exception to the rule and, in fact, categorically confirms it. Only pressure has led Castro temporarily to implement some timid reforms that he subsequently has either partly rescinded or revoked altogether. Cuba has established for all to see a system of apartheid which is openly and vigorously enforced between foreigners and Cuban nationals.

AT: Rubio
The reality is that Cuba shouldnt be on the list- Rubio doesnt matter, removal does not require Congress Thale and Boggs 13 (Geoff, authored Forging New Ties, M.S. Industrial Relations, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Clay, worked at
Casa de los Amigos, in Mexico City, first as a volunteer and later as Peace Programs Coordinator, B.A. History, Temple Uni versity, 3/28/13, Three Harbingers of Change in U.S. Cuba Policy, http://www.wola.org/commentary/three_harbingers_of_change_in_us_cuba_policy // NZ)

News reports continued to indicate that the State Department is considering removing Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. U.S. Cuba policy has been codified into law, and ending the U.S. embargo or the travel ban requires congressional action. But there are many steps that the President and the
Secretary of State can take on their own (both President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have previously expressed and demonstrated their commitment to changing U.S. policy toward Cuba). Removing

Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism is one of the most significant changes that do not require congressional approval . It would reflect the reality that Cuba is not a sponsor of terrorist groups, thus helping to improve relations, and it would deprive congressional hardliners of a powerful tool in their efforts to harden U.S. policy toward Cuba. At a time when Cuba is playing a key role in the Colombia peace talks (which are making real progress), taking Cuba off the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism would also send a message throughout the Western Hemisphere that the United States is serious about improving its relationship with Latin America.

AT Removal Undermines U.S Credibility

Including Cuba undermines the lists credibility- no substantial evidence to justify Levy 13 (Arturo, Lecturer and Doctoral Candidate, University of Denver, 5/8/13, It's Time to Delist Cuba, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arturo-lopez-levy/itstime-to-delist-cuba_b_3232766.html//NZ)
Each spring, the U.S. State Department releases a report indicating which countries the United States considers "State Sponsors of Terrorism." Currently the list consists of four countries: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. This year, John Kerry's ascent to U.S. Secretary of State generated a discussion about taking Cuba off the list. Given Kerry's generally reasonable position on Cuba in the past, it was perhaps not surprising that he considered this option. Nonetheless, on May 1, the U.S. State Department announced that Cuba would remain on its list. It's a serious mistake. State Department reports from the last decade have provided no substantive evidence to justify keeping Cuba on the list. In fact, the country's inclusion is based on dubious allegations . The reports allege that Cuba has provided medical treatment and refuge for terrorist groups from the FARC in Colombia to the ETA in Spain. However, the reports do not acknowledge that the governments of both countries have expressed appreciation for Cuba's cooperation in this arena. Confronted with this double standard and the lack of evidence for keeping Cuba on the list, some defenders of the Obama administration's decision to keep Cuba on the list simply reply that Cuba is not as important economically or strategically as South Florida is electorally. Yet these self-proclaimed political realists miss an important reality. The Cuban-American community, including the majority of those who oppose Castro, has changed. For most Cubans who came to the United States in the last two decades, the inclusion of their country of origin in the terrorism list is not only unfair, but also an obstacle to promoting changes on the island that could take place through exchanges between Cuba and the United States. The misuse of an otherwise effective foreign policy tool should give pause to responsible members of Congress and the Washington intelligence community. First, it dilutes America's multilateral anti-terrorist efforts by taking eyes and dollars away from where the real threats are. Second, it sends the wrong message to countries such as Iran and Syria and the groups they sponsor by diminishing both the substantive and political impact of being listed. Third, it weakens the case for monitoring countries such as Iran, whose presence on the list is more easily justified. In short, including Cuba undermines the credibility of the list itself , and has a corrosive effect on U.S. leadership in world.

Cubas unjustified listing undermines U.S credibility- all connections have been cut Lullo and Rueckert 6/28 (Rebecca and Phineas, Research Associates at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 6/28/13, Shakur, Snowden, and the State Department: Is Cuba a State Sponsor of Terrorism?, http://www.coha.org/shakursnowden-and-the-state-department-is-cuba-a-state-sponsor-of-terror // NZ)

On May 30, the State Department submitted its annual report on terrorism (Country Reports on Terrorism 2012) to Congress, notably maintaining Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism along with Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Cuba was designated as a state sponsor of terrorism on March 1, 1982. It has remained ever since on the list of states that Washington accuses of repeatedly providing support for international acts of terrorism. The justification for Cubas presence on the listthat it is providing a safe haven for wanted fugitives and particularly for Assata Shakuris flimsy at best. [1] Upon closer examination this assertion fails to be convincing. Cubas unfounded listing as a state sponsor of terrorism undermines U.S. credibility abroad , hampering its efforts to counteract authentic terrorism around the world. As to the most common criteria for determining state sponsors of terrorism, the State Department has had to openly acknowledge that Cuba is not providing weapons or training to terrorist groups and is cooperating with the international communitys efforts to combat money laundering. Cuba is currently hosting peace talks between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), calling into question claims that Cuba is harboring FARC members. Nevertheless, the assertion that Cuba is a safe haven for terrorists provides the main justification for its classification as a state sponsor of terrorism and is entirely duplicitous in its argument.

Cuba on the list undermines credibility of the list- corrodes U.S leadership and hinders strategic vision Lopez-Levy 13 (Arturo, Lecturer and Doctoral Candidate, University of Denver, 5/7/13, It's
Time to Delist Cuba, http://www.fpif.org/articles/its_time_to_delist_cuba) Each spring, the U.S. State Department releases a report indicating which countries the United States considers State Sponsors of Terrorism. Currently the list consists of four countries: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. This year, John Kerrys ascent to U.S. Secretary of State generated a discussion about taking Cuba off the list. Given Kerrys generally reasonable position on Cuba in the past, it was perhaps not surprising that he considered this option. State Department reports from the last decade have provided no substantive evidence to justify keeping Cuba on the list. In fact, the countrys inclusion is based on dubious allegations. The reports allege that Cuba has provided medical treatment and refuge for terrorist groups from the FARC in Colombia to the ETA in Spain. However, the reports do not acknowledge that the governments of both countries have expressed appreciation for Cubas cooperation in this arena. If the goal is to provide anti-Castro militants a venue for psychological catharsis, there are other ways for them to vent their frustrations. The State Department already has a mechanism for reporting human rights violations all over the world. The UN Human Rights Council is in the process of evaluating Cuba this year, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has indicated that the Gross arrest is unfair. The misuse of an otherwise effective foreign policy tool should give pause to responsible members of Congress and the Washington intelligence community. First, it dilutes Americas multilateral anti-terrorist efforts by taking eyes and dollars away from where the real threats are. Second, it sends the wrong message to countries such as Iran and Syria and the groups they sponsor by diminishing both the substantive and political impact of being listed. Third, it weakens the case for monitoring countries such as Iran, whose presence on the list is more

easily justified . In short, including Cuba undermines the credibility of the list itself, and has a corrosive effect on U.S. leadership in world. Characterizing Cuba as a terrorist stateand more generally implying that the island in any way poses any threat to U.S. securityhinders the United States ability to develop a strategic vision for post-Fidel Cuba. The list encourages hostile actions against Cuba in American courts, thereby aggravating conflicts and blocking new exchanges. The island is a country in transition that is carrying out market-oriented economic reforms without changing its centralized, one party system. This situation calls for policies of engagement completely different from those required for dealing with a terrorist threat.

Aff Answers
Removing Cuba from the list damages credibility- makes a huge concession Metzker 13 (Jared, reporter for the Inter Press Service News Agency, 6/13/13, Pressure Building for U.S. to Remove Cuba from Terror Sponsor List, http://www.globalissues.org/news/2013/06/13/16803//NZ)
According to Robert L. Muse, a specialist on the legality of U.S. policy toward Cuba, there are currently three ostensible reasons for Cuba's inclusion in the most recent list: that it has allowed Basque separatists to reside within its borders, that it has dealings with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and that it harbours fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the United States. Muse, who spoke Tuesday at CSIS, claimed the first two reasons were void because the countries concerned actually condone Cuba's relationship with their adversaries. Cuba is currently host to negotiations between FARC and the Colombian government, and Spanish leaders prefer that Basque rebels remain in Cuba and out of Spain. These interactions with rebel groups, in Muse's opinion, "can hardly be a basis even for criticism". It is only the third justification, that Cuba harbours U.S. fugitives, which he says "could fairly bear description as a reason" for keeping Cuba on the list. Cuba has harboured a number of fugitives seeking refuge from the U.S. justice system. The most prominent is Assata Shakur, an African-American poet and participant in 1970s black liberation movements who was allegedly involved in the killing of a police officer. She was convicted for the murder but escaped and in 1984 gained political asylum in Cuba, where she has been ever since. Proponents of the status quo argue the opposite, saying that by removing Cuba the United States would damage its credibility by effectively making a concession. Bilbao explained to IPS that those such views focus on the "spin" of the Cuban government rather than on the actual consequences of taking Cuba off the list, which he believes would ultimately benefit the United States.

Cuba deserves to be on the list- evidence and Rubio back it Hudson 13 (John, reports on national security and foreign policy from the Pentagon to Foggy
Bottom, the White House to Embassy Row, for The Cable, 6/3/13, Rubio: Cuba belongs on the state sponsors of terrorism' list, http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/03/rubio_cuba_belongs_on_the_state_spons or_of_terror_list) In the face of mounting calls to remove Cuba from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FLA) defended Foggy Bottom's recent decision to keep Cuba on the list, in a statement to The Cable. "The Castro regime sponsors terrorism abroad and against their own people, and removing a country from the list of nations that sponsor terrorism requires evidence of reform," Rubio said. "We have not seen such evidence in Cuba." In its annual Country Reports on Terrorism released last week, the State Department acknowledged that some conditions on the island were improving, but maintained three reasons for keeping Cuba on the list: Providing a safe haven for some two dozen members of

Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA), a Spanish rebel group charged with terrorist activity; providing aid to Colombia's rebel group the FARC "in past years" -- Cuba no longer supports the group today; and providing harbor to "fugitives wanted in the United States." "It remains clear that Cuba is the same totalitarian state today that it has been for decades," Rubio told The Cable. "This totalitarian state continues to have close ties to terrorist organizations."

Cuba should be on the list- repeatedly provides support, such as food and care Hughes 13 (Dana, covering the State Department and Foreign Affairs for ABC News, 2/28/13, U.S. Says Cuba Still a Global Sponsor of Terror,
http://news.yahoo.com/u-says-cuba-still-global-sponsor-terror-072949042.html // NZ)

These four countries are considered "state sponsors of terrorism" that, according to the United States, have "repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism." They are subject to the harshest sanctions the U.S. can impose, including travel bans, financial transactions and trade. "This department has no current plans to remove Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list," said Nuland. "We review this every year, and at the current moment we -- when the last review was done in 2012 --didn't see cause to remove them." But the Cubans argue that Gross's imprisonment should not have any bearing on whether the country is considered a sponsor of terrorism. According to U.S. law, "in order for any country to be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, the Secretary of State must determine that the government of that country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism." Cuba was placed on the list in 1982 for harboring members of the Spanish terror group ETA and members of Columbia's FARC. In last year's annual Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department said that Cuba continues "to permit fugitives wanted in the United States to reside in Cuba a nd also provided support such as housing, food ration books, and medical care for these individuals." A look at the report's explanation for the other three countries listed shows that they contrast sharply with Cuba. Iran, Sudan and Syria all are considered "active" sponsors of terrorist acts, according to the report, which cites as evidence funding and harboring members of Hezbollah, Al Qaeda-backed groups, and other extremist groups currently engaged in terrorist activity.

Idea: Cuba Cooperation CP

US can increase relations with Cuba collaboration through science, judicial factors, disaster relief, and government officers Haven 13 (Paul Haven is the bureau chief at the Associated Press. 4/10/13. Under the radar, Cuba and US often
work together. http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S2993416.shtml?cat=646) HAVANA (AP) Cuba

and the United States may be longtime enemies with a bucket overflowing with grievances, but the fast return of a Florida couple who fled U.S. authorities with their two kidnapped children in tow shows the Cold War enemies are capable of remarkable cooperation on many issues. Indeed, diplomats and observers on both sides of the Florida Straits say American and Cuban law enforcement officers, scientists, disaster relief workers, Coast Guard officials and other experts work together on a daily basis, and invariably express professional admiration for each other.
"I don't think the story has been told, but there is a real warmth in just the sort of day-to-day relations between U.S. and Cuban government officials," said Dan Whittle, who frequently brings scientific groups to the island in his role as Cuba program director for the Environmental Defense Fund. "Nearly every time I talk to American officials they say they were impressed by their Cuban counterparts. There really is a high level of mutual respect."

Almost none of these technical-level interactions make the headlines, but examples are endless.

Just last week, Cuba's top environmental official Ulises Fernandez and several island oil experts attended a conference in New York of the International Association of Drilling Contractors after the State Department expedited their visas. And in March, Cuba's leading weatherman, Jose Rubiera, traveled to North Carolina on a fast-track visa to give a talk about hurricane evacuation procedures. Last year's Hurricane Sandy, which slammed Cuba's eastern city of Santiago before devastating the northeastern United States, was a cruel reminder that nature cares not about man's political squabbles. The American government maintains a Coast Guard representative in Cuba, and the two countries work together to interdict suspicious boats. A U.S. diplomat involved in the process told The Associated Press that security officials on both sides are on a first-name basis, and that the Cubans happily accept FBI and Coast Guard baseball caps as gifts.

He and other diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss bilateral issues publicly, but all said they had noticed a thaw in daily interactions that belies the subzero temperatures that characterize official relations.

The two countries have been at odds since shortly after Fidel Castro's bearded rebels marched into Havana in January 1959 and began to set up a Communist state. Washington has maintained an economic embargo on the island for 51 years. More recently, the countries have been locked in confrontation over the fate of jailed American contractor Alan Gross, who the Cubans want to exchange for five of their intelligence agents sentenced to long jail terms in the U.S. Angry barbs between Havana and Washington on issues such as democracy, human rights and sovereignty are still the norm, and even delivering each other's mail is a challenge. The countries, separated by just 90 miles of warm Caribbean seas, long-ago ended direct service. "There are so many weird and abnormal aspects of the relationship between Cuba and the United States, things that don't occur between other countries, that when something normal happens it is a surprise," said Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat.

He said Cuba has in recent years taken a pragmatic approach, more often than not cooperating on drug enforcement and judicial issues, something he hoped would one day lead to better ties. "It is important to highlight ... that in judicial matters there is a willingness to cooperate and that could open a path to other types of cooperation," he said, citing the return of Joshua Michael Hakken and his wife, Sharyn, as a case in point.

Cuba is believed to harbor dozens of American fugitives from the 1960s and 1970s, many of them veterans of domestic militant groups like the Black Panthers. But Havana has clearly shown in recent years that it has no interest in becoming a refuge for common criminals deporting suspected murderers, child molesters and kidnappers who were foolish enough to think they would be beyond U.S. law enforcement's reach. The Hakkens are accused of kidnapping their young sons from the custody of Sharyn's parents and sailing with them and his wife to Havana. Cuba promptly informed the State Department of the couple's weekend arrival on the island, and worked with U.S. officials to send the family home swiftly. Both sides praised the joint effort. "We would like to express our appreciation to the Cuban authorities for their extensive cooperation to resolve this dangerous situation quickly," the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which Washington maintains instead of an embassy, wrote in a Wednesday statement. In Washington, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell termed cooperation as "extensive," but said the case should not be taken as a sign of political opening. "I'm not sure I would read into it one way or another," he said. "This was cooperation on a specific law enforcement matter." Diplomats agree, and point to less dramatic examples of cooperation as more germane.

U.S. and Cuban diplomats must get authorization to travel outside each other's capitals, something that was once used as a cudgel by both sides to get revenge for political slights. Lately, they say, permission has been granted on an almost routine basis. American diplomats have travelled increasingly throughout the island, for work and play. For its part, Cuba's top envoy in Washington, Jose Cabanas, recently visited Georgia, Houston
and New Orleans, among other places. At times, diplomatic cooperation has reached levels that would be surprising even between friendly nations. During last month's World Baseball Classic, a U.S. Interests Section official personally carried emergency visas for several Cuban coaches and support staff on a trip to Guam and handed them off to a Tokyo-based colleague, a U.S. official told AP. At the time, Cuba was playing its early round games in Japan and would have needed the visas if the team had advanced to the semifinals in San Francisco. Several weeks ago, U.S. Consul General Timothy Roche spoke with Cuba's Communist Party daily Granma about American immigration policy, believed to be the first time in 10 years that state-media carried such an interview with U.S. diplomatic staff. Even on thornier issues like the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay which Cuba has denounced as a torture camp the two militaries hold occasional joint exercises to prepare for brush fires and other emergencies.

Jorge Pinon, a leading expert on Cuba's oil industry and research fellow at the University of Texas, said American and Cuban energy and environmental officials have for years worked past the political morass and established strong working bonds.
When politics allows, he said, those ties could be the basis for something bigger. "Just like ping pong opened China and the U.S. relationship," Pinon said. "The environment,

working on drugs and other subjects of common interest could certainly be those bridges which will make us trust each other and be able to have a civil conversation on other topics."

Collaboration on science will improve US-Cuba Relations Lempinen 12 (Edward W. Lempinen is a public information officer at The World Academy of Sciences.
5/1/12. Oceans, Weather, Health-U.S. Researchers Explore Potential Collaboration with Cuban Colleagues. http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2012/0501cuba.shtml)
They are next-door neighbors, sharing all the amenities and challenges of the neighborhoodoceans teeming with life, the risk of tropical diseases, a changing climate that may be giving rise to bigger and more frequent hurricanes. And yet, because the neighbors are barely on speaking terms, they cannot share the opportunities and the responsibilities that come with solving the challenges.

Today, however, scientists in both Cuba and the United States are exploring whether a thaw in relations between the two nations could allow for a range of new or expanded joint research projects that could bring benefits to both nations and others in the Caribbean Basin. Recent visits and consultations facilitated by AAAS and the Academia de Ciencias
de Cuba (Academy of Sciences of Cuba) underscored that both sides see potential for substantive science collaboration.

The recent visits showed that the Cuban mindset is really ready to reach out, said Peter Agre, a Nobel laureate in chemistr y and a former president of AAAS, who returned in March from his third visit to the nation. The scientists would have no

trouble working together... The Cubans are understandably proud of their science, and they see us very positively. I would anticipate if we could normalize relations and do science as a starting point, then really good things could happen.
The possibility of open scientific exchange between researchers in Cuba and the U.S. can only bring increased benefits for both scientific communities, and of course, for the people in their respective countries, said Sergio Jorge Pastrana, foreign secretary of the Academia de Ciencias de Cuba.
The kind of scientific development that took place in Cuba for the last half-century has produced original results that have been internationally recognized as being in the frontiers of knowledge in several fields. Science, along with technology

and innovation, has produced outcomes that are important for societies not only in Cuba and the United States, but in neighboring countries of the Caribbean, and for sustainable development everywhere.
Vaughan C. Turekian, director of the AAAS Center for Science Diplomacy, said that researchers from both nations have focused on science, not on the politics that have divided the two nations for a half-century.

Especially on the environmental side, there is not an issue that we discussed that doesnt have direct implications and impact both on Cuba and the United States , said

Turekian, who also serves as AAASs chief international officer. Given the proximity, when youre talking about atmospheric or marine science, if it travels to Cuba, it travels to the Southeast coast of United States, too. If it spawns off the coast of Cuba, it is caught or affected by currents that go into the United States. The AAAS Center for Science Diplomacy organized an initial three-day visit to Cuba in November 2009, with Agre, then the AAAS president, and seven other U.S. science leaders. AAAS helped to facilitate a second visit last December, with 18 independent scientists traveling to the island for informal talks centered on marine science, atmospheric science, environmental change, conserving biodiversity at large scales, sustainable fisheries, and capacity-building. Agre, who heads the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, returned to Cuba in March to speak at Biotechnology Havana 2012, an international congress that focused on medical applications of biotech. Since the early 1960s, just after the Cuban revolution, the two neighbors have been locked in a Caribbean cold war; though they are just 90 miles apart, the relationship has been characterized by economic and cultural barriers, sometimes sharp political conflict, and broad dimensions of mistrust. Advocates see science diplomacy as a way to do important research with value for all sides, and to build constructive engagement in a non-political environment. History dating back well over 100 years suggests that Cuba and the United States are natural scientific partners, Pastrana said in an April email interview.

As both science communities were establishing their own scientific institutions during the 19th century, many scientists and scholars from both countries started links of exchange, discussion and cooperation, he said. The relations of Cuban scientific research centers, as well as of many scientists and scholars, with the Smithsonian Institution, universities like Harvard, Columbia or Yale, go way back and, in many ways, have been important for both sides for a very long time.

Some of those links have never disappeared, and have continued over particularly difficult moments, overcoming political hurdles, to produce important publications, collections, and scientific results that are of benefit to the peoples in both countries. The recent engagements have allowed AAAS and other scientists to further develop their ties with Pastrana and Fidel ngel Castro Daz-BalartFidel Castros oldest sona nuclear physicist and leader in his nations science policy community. The December trip also included a special side event: Agre and Alan Robock, a Rutgers atmospheric scientist, were invited to a three-hour meeting with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Castros wife, and his sons Fidel and Antonio, an orthopedic surgeon. The meeting with Fidel was really interesting, Agre said. It was about the past. He spoke about his family, growing up... He described the Revolution, the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis. It was a much different perspective than I expected. I mostly listened. If I meet him againand I dont know if I willhe asked me to bring him my research papers. But the fact that he and I sat in the same roomhe didnt see me as an enemy. Im a scientist, born the same year as his son. But the central focus of the Cuban meetings was science, and informal scientist-to-scientist consultations and discussions. They focused on common interests and on the prospectsand challengesof working together.

Theres a definite pride in the work they do there, and the research they do, said Joanne Carney, director of the AAAS Office of Government Relations. When we talk about collaboration, they really want honest collaboration and partnership, as opposed to funding or resources. They definitely are interested in pursuing areas of mutual interest.
Malaria and the Caribbean

Both Turekian and Agre cited malaria as one area where the U.S. scientists might learn much from Cuba. And that might tie in to an interest shared by both countries in working to support health and human development in the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti.
Malaria is endemic in Haiti, Agre said. It was endemic in Cuba, but one of the objectives of the revolution was to elimina te malariaand they achieved that. How did they do it? Thats something I would like to pursue.... In Cuba, vaccinations and prevention are a high priority. Unchecked malaria or other diseases in Haiti can be a destabilizing factor even for neighboring nations, Turekian said. It l eads to a lot of people moving back and forth, and it reduces Haitis internal strength and stability, he explained. So Cuba and the United States could have mutual interests in working on this.

So too with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), added Agre. Because of hurricanes, earthquakes, crime and other human disasters, PTSD is widespread in Haiti. The Cubans have an interest in that, and we have an interest in that, he said. We could work on it together.

Atmospheric Science

Atmospheric research is another area where Cuba and the United States share tangible common interests. Hurricanes and other storms go over Cuba en route to the United States. Clues gained from atmospheric conditions over the Caribbean can give insightsand perhaps early warningabout tornados in Oklahoma and Arkansas, or storms in Chicago and New York.
It is an area of particular interest for Turekian, an atmospheric geochemist. There is no doubt that real atmospheric scienc e involving Cubameasurements, understanding of atmospheric conditionsis important not only for better understanding of transport of African dust, but also for getting a handle on how atmospheric conditions and dynamics affect the Gulf of Mexico and the southeastern United States, he said. Given that tornadoes are driven by really complicated dynamics that involve large amounts of warm air coming up through the Gulf and interacting with cold fronts, any data we can gain can mean lives saved.... But you cant hope to understand things like storms as they affect the Southeast Coast of the United States without having better joint cooperation between scientists in the U.S. and Cuba, and without research, instruments, and calibration to measure dynamics that affect us both. Still, both Turekian and Robock suggested that official mistrust and the trade embargo combine to make such collaboration on climate research difficult, if not impossible. Robock, in an interview, outlined efforts by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder to install global positioning system devices in the central Cuban city of Camaguey. The GPS devices receive signals from satellites; microwave signals are affected by transmission through the atmosphere, and depending on the density of the atmosphere, that allows for insights on weather and climate change. There are nearly 100 such devices in the Caribbean, Robock explained, but Cuba, though one of the largest land masses in the Caribbean, hosts none of them. Basic weather data are already shared by all the countries of the world, he said. But taking specific measurements there with the GPS would be useful to Cubans and to the larger community. It gives you better information about the state of the atmosphere temperature, humidity, soil moisture. Thats what you need to start a weather forecast model. But the Cuban military is wary of the GPS devices, and the nation has not approved the installation. At the same time, the U.S. embargo of Cuba makes it impossible for Cuban scientists to come to the United States for even a week-long course in how to use a computer climate model. Scientists from both countries want to work together, Robock said. Well do the best we can... but there are significant limitations.

From the scientific standpoint, Turekian added, this is about the ability to go to a place to make measurements so that we can better understand hurricanes and other conditions that affect the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. To do that, we need relationships and protocols so that Americans and the Cubans together can benefit from measurements in Cuba.
Marine Science

Coral reefs in much of the Caribbean have sustained significant damage from human activityover-fishing, climate change, oil spills, and other pollution. But off of Cubas coasts, says marine scientist Nancy Knowlton, the reefs have been less exposed to development, and theyre in better health.
Knowlton is the Sant Chair for Marine Science at Smithsonian Institution and senior scientist emeritus at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Shes worked in fields of marine biodiversity and ecology; coral reefs are her specialty. Save for a cruise that stopped in Guantanamo, shed never been to Cuba, but on her visit in December, she was deeply impressed with opportunities for research in the Cuban reefs and by the marine science already underway there. There are amazing habitats, much less impacted by people than most places in Caribbean, in terms of over-fishing and that sort of thing, she said. And theres a large community of marine biologists there, many with shared interest in biodiversity and conservation. For Knowlton, the Cuban reefs are like a window in time, allowing researchers a view of what healthy reefs looked like in a n era past. They give you a baseline as to what a healthy fish community should look like, she explained. And that gives greater insight into other Caribbean reefs where damage is more pronounced.

So there are a lot of things to learn from Cuban marine scientists, she said. A nd there are a lot of reasons for Cubans to come here, or for Cubans to come and work at the Smithsonian. Theres a huge potential for interchange because there are so many shared interests.
Small Steps, Significant Potential

Those shared interests appear to extend across many fields. Carney, whose parents were born in Cuba, met in December with Cuban counterparts who study and help shape government science and technology policy. From my own perspective in talking to their scientists, I was struck by some of the similarities between our communities, Carney said. The Cubans face challenges in policy decisions regarding research priorities, and how to balance between basic research and applied research. They provide universal health care, and so life

science research is a bit more targeted, a bit more applied. But looking forward, you want to balance the applied portion with the basic research.
Its interesting that were both faced with similar issues, even though our systems are different. Scientists from both countries are aware, of course, of the considerable obstacles that stand in the way of full collaboration. Visas and the U.S. embargo are obvious problems. But where scientists in a wealthy nation like the United States take digital and Internet resources for granted, bandwidth in Cuba can be so limited that its difficult or impossible to exchange data. Given those constraints, the immediate prospects for full, constructive engagement between science communities are slender at best. And yet Robock, Carney, and others said the visits have made clear that working with Cuban scientists is easier than it might appear.

Any academic can go to Cuba and spend money without restriction, Robock explained. You need a license from the U.S. Treasury Department to spend money, but as a researcher, you are subject to the existing general license. So many more Americans could go to Cuba and start doing science with thembut they dont know that they can.
One of the ideas to emerge from the discussions, Carney said, was a Web resource page that would provide such practical information to both scientific communities.

These may be small steps, but they have a significant value in helping to build the foundation for collaboration among researchers in Cuba and the United States. Though the formal relationship between the two nations has long been strained, the scientists are betting on better times ahead, even if they dont know exactly when.
While its been the same for 50 years, it will changepolitical relationships always do, said Turekian. Whenever that relationship changes, you want to be in place where you have the groundwork laid and relationships built so you can take advantage of areas where science cooperation can actually contribute to both countries. In the meantime, efforts will continue, building on the collegiality that visitors to the island have shared with their hosts. Everyone who was there was a pretty good science diplomat, said Knowlton. There was no uneasinessthere was a lot of curiosity on both sides to meet people and find out what people are doing.... Everyone was going out of their way to be gracious. Thats importantyou have to be willing to listen as well as to talk. It was lovely. Id really like to go back. Added Agre: Non-governmental science and AAAS have a tremendously important role to play. More than ever, science is a way for us to break barriers between adversaries. Its a constructive way for the world to move ahead. Pastrana, too, sounded an ambitious note for the future.

Any hurdle that comes in the way of international exchange in science is limiting its capacity to be of help for increasing the resilience of this worlds environments, he said. Only the knowledge, technologies, and products that come from scientific developments could provide the tools for societies to be able to continue human development in harmony with the only planet that sustains them so far, which has been abused for the last half-century far beyond its capacity to cope with such abuse. Let us be in favor of scientists and their open communication everywhere. In this way, they would be able to contribute to the sustainability of human societies on planet Earth.

Venezuela

Venezuela Relations

1NC Boston Group CP

The United States federal government should create a bipartisan legislative exchange group between the United States and Venezuela modeled on the Boston Group. Recreation of the Boston Group fosters diplomatic relations between the US and Venezuela
Wyss 6/26 (Jim Wyss, South America bureau chief for The Miami Herald who has a master degree in science from Columbia University and a
bachelor degree in journalism from the American University, Decade -old defunct group may be the key to better US-Venezuela ties, 26 June 2013, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/194987/decade-old-defunct-group-may-be.html#.Uc3f_BZGuXA)

Decade-old defunct group may be the key to better US-Venezuela ties

"It shows that relationships built and conversations that took place 10 or 15 years earlier can make a difference down the road," said Meeks, who founded the group with Delahunt and former Rep. Cass Ballinger, R-N.C. "No one ever knows who will become secretary of state or president of a country."

The Boston Group brought together Democrats, Republicans, communists, socialists and capitalists and forced them to find common ground, said Pedro Diaz-Blum, a former Venezuelan lawmaker and the group's coordinator. A conflict resolution expert was brought in to bring civility to the sometimes heated encounters. "A lot of people from both sides of the political spectrum thought that trying to engage in dialogue was naive," said Diaz-Blum, who has been trying to revive the group. "But today, I think our work was justified."
The idea of closer Venezuela-U.S. ties is anathema to some. Factions within Venezuela's opposition have been lobbying the region not to recognize Maduro's presidency. When Kerry

and Jaua met this month - on the sidelines of an Organization of American States meeting in Guatemala - some saw it as betrayal. And the rhetoric has been particularly divisive. Maduro has accused former U.S. diplomats of plotting to assassinate him and has suggested that the CIA "inoculated" Chavez with the cancer that killed him in March. But the Boston Group was born amid just such tensions, said Saul Ortega, a ruling-party deputy and a former member of the group. The initiative came together in the wake of a 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chavez, and which the socialist firebrand blamed on the opposition and the United States. "It was, perhaps, the most difficult time for the relationship between our two countries," Ortega said. "But we managed to start a dialogue and a debate about common interests ... we managed to do a lot of good things." Through those meetings, Venezuela offered subsidized heating oil to poor families in the northeastern United States, and the U.S. promoted what it hoped would become Venezuela's answer to C-SPAN. But most of the activity took place behind the scenes, Diaz-Blum said. Venezuelan members of the Boston Group, including Maduro, helped take some of the sharper edges off a media-muzzling law known as the Ley Resorte and worked to keep back-channel communications open. "At its height, the Boston Group was the only entity in Venezuela where the opposition and the ruling party could reach agreements that involved national interests," Diaz-Blum wrote.

The group fell apart in 2005, when the opposition handed over every seat in the National Assembly by boycotting the election. Since the Boston Group was designed to bring rival factions together, it was moot
amid political homogeneity.

But many of the relationships survived. Even after Chavez ejected the U.S. ambassador in 2008, and then refused to accept his replacement, Larry Palmer, in 2010, El Comandante would meet with Delahunt. The congressman, who left office in 2011, said those encounters went beyond diplomatic courtesy. He recalled that after one hourslong meeting with Maduro and Chavez, the three men agreed they would make an announcement about drug cooperation.
"Unfortunately, contemporaneously, the then Drug Czar John Walters was in Bogota describing Chavez as a drug trafficker, so that didn't go forward," he said. "But

you have to build up a level of trust and confidence, and the only way you can do that is talk ... like we did with the Grupo de Boston." Delahunt won't give details about how he won Tracy's release, but he admits that personal relationships were vital. "Calixto Garcia, it should be noted, played a significant role and opened up doors," Delahunt said.
Chavez, despite his anti-American outbursts, was also an advocate for the Boston Group, according to a 2009 State Department cable published by WikiLeaks. Both

Delahunt and Meeks attended Chavez's funeral in March, and Meeks said it was almost a "mini reunion," as the two men met with their former Boston Group colleagues, many of whom have risen to positions of power. Cilia Flores, the former attorney general and
current first lady, was a member, so is the head of the Central Bank and the governor of Sucre.

Meeks and Delahunt said the time may be right to revive the group. Last week, Jacobson, from the U.S. State Department, called that idea of a re-launch "useful and interesting."

Solves Relations
Solves relations
Pecquet 3/26 (Julian Pecquet, foreign affairs reporter/blogger for The Hill, Dem lawmaker seeks to med fences with postChavez Venezuela, 26 March 2013, http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/americas/290225-us-lawmaker-seeks-rapprochementwith-post-chavez-venezuela-)

Meeks said he's waiting to see if the April 14 election is free and fair. If that's the case, he hopes to revive a bipartisan legislative exchange group that was disbanded after the Venezuelan opposition boycotted the 2005 elections, losing their seats. The now-defunct Boston Group brought together a handful of U.S. lawmakers including Meeks and former Reps. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.) alongside Chavistas and opposition members. The meetings paved the way for deals through which the Venezuelan oil company provided cheap heating oil to low-income people in
the northeastern United States.

The group once met for a week in former Sen. Ted Kennedy's (D-Mass.) compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. as well as at Ballenger's home, Meeks said. It included Nicols Maduro, the acting president who's largely expected to win next month. Meeks faces an uphill battle. Last week, Maduro's government broke off talks with U.S. diplomats to renew full diplomatic relations, which have been suspended since 2010, accusing the Obama administration of meddling in next month's election. This line of communication is now suspended, postponed until the United States gives a clear message about what kind of relationship they want, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elas Jaua said. And several Republicans openly welcomed Chavez's death. The former chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), for her part called Obama's decision to send a delegation weak and irresponsible.

Meeks countered that it was a perfect opportunity to meet with top government officials including Maduro as well as
members of the opposition. He said almost every leader from the Americas and the Caribbean paid their respects, and several urged him to press for better relations between the United States and Venezuela.

We had a good opportunity while we were there to tal k to other conversation with Colombian President [Juan Manuel] Santos all

Latin American leaders, who are our allies I had a of whom are hoping that they can be helpful and we can have a window of opportunity where we can improve the relationship between Venezuela and the United States going forward, Meeks said. Whoever it is, our allies are hopeful we'll have a better relationship, because it's good
for them. And I'm hopeful that we can have a better relationship, because it's good for our hemisphere .

Chavez allies and the opposition also urged a restart to the Boston Group in meetings with Meeks and Delahunt, who was also part of the delegation. Meeks said he had a particularly good exchange with Maduro, who thanked Obama for sending them despite accusing the United States of poisoning Chavez and expelling two U.S. diplomats just days before. I think that was a signal to Venezuela that, look we want a better relationship, we're not cutting you off, Meeks said. And I think his comments of thanks we re a signal back that we maybe can have a better relationship.
My feeling is that it has something to do with campaigning and trying to get ready to run for another election. And it's my hope and it's the message that I left and Delahunt left that we don't have that kind of rhetoric going on because it can only poison the water and doesn't help. And vice-versa on our side, I hope that we tone down some of the rhetoric, allow the Venezuelan people to elect, in a democratic manner, their next president. Meeks said the United States wasn't blameless, from the Bush administration's premature recognition of coup leaders who briefly overthrew Chavez in 2002 to the constant criticism aimed at Chavez. Instead of helping, Meeks said, breaking off ties has empowered U.S. foes such as Iran, which has grown closer to Venezuela in recent years.

AT: Say No
Even Chavez wanted Boston Group
Lawton 9 (Daniel Lawton, Venezuelan political counselor for the Caracas Embassy, CODEL DELAHAUNT MEETINGS WITH CHAVEZ AND FOREIGN MINISTRY MARCH 19, 20 March 2009, http://www.semana.com/documents/Doc-2218_2011628.pdf)
1. (C) Summary: After a briefing by the Charge', Congressman

Delahunt discussed bilateral relations alone with Foreign Ministry (MFA) officials and ALBA Bank President and former Ambassador to the United States Bernie Alvarez on March 19. He also met alone with President Chavez and Minister of Foreign Affairs Nicholas Maduro during the night of March 19. Delahunt told the Charge afterward that he encouraged Chavez to push the "reset" button on bilateral relations. Chavez told Delahunt he would mention this idea during his March 22 "Alo, Presidente" broadcast and would like an "appropriate" USG response. Chavez and MFA officials reportedly expressed interest in renewing counternarcotics cooperation, but did not specify a way forward. Chavez is interested in restarting informal interparliamentary dialogue (the "Boston Group"), to which Delahunt responded that members of Venezuela's opposition need to be included. Delahunt said he also urged that the Venezuelan government cease
harassing U.S. Embassy operations and fire the problematic MFA Protocol Director. End Summary.

Idea: Designation CP
Removing designations is key to reviving US-Venezuela relations and counternarcotics cooperation Ford et. al. 9 [Tess, Director of International Affairs and Trade for the Government Accountability Office, July 2009, Report to the Ranking
Member, Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate Drug Control: U.S. Counternarcotics Cooperation with Venezuela has Declined page 21 -22, LZ]

As required by law, the U.S. government annually publishes several reports in which it designates, or identifies, countries failing to comply with certain international standards governing narcotics trafficking, support for terrorism, and regard for human rights. Designations can be a tool for persuading countries to change their policies and practices, as sanctions often accompany designations. For example, in 2006, State designated Venezuela as a country that had virtually ceased its cooperation in the global war 33 on terror. As a result, the U.S. government imposedas required by lawa military equipment embargo against Venezuela, prohibiting the sale or license of 34 defense articles and services. The United States has renewed both the designation and the embargo every year since 2006. As figure 4 shows, in addition to the annual designation for not cooperating with the United States on antiterrorism efforts, State has also annually designated Venezuela as failing to comply with 35 minimum human trafficking standards since 2003 and with human rights standards, since at least 2002. Furthermore, every year since 2005, the President has designated Venezuela as a major drug transit country that has failed demonstrably to meet its international counternarcotics obligations and responsibilities by taking sufficient action against the rising drug trafficking problem both within and along its borders. Venezuelan officials have questioned the accuracy of these various reports. In particular, they maintain the narcotics designation is not a technical assessment and that the United States has politicized drug trafficking in Venezuela. In addition, Venezuelan officials said these multiple annual designations hinder not only an improved bilateral relationship with the United States, but also the resumption of counternarcotics cooperation. Both U.S. and Venezuelan officials pointed out that the sanctions from designations, particularly the embargo on defense articles 36 and services, hinders Venezuela from cooperating on counternarcotics even if it desired to do so. This embargo not only prohibits Venezuela from procuring defense articles and services directly from the United States, but it also prevents Venezuela from buying defense articles from a third country if they have U.S.-origin content. For example, the head of ONA told us Venezuela wanted to buy Super Tucano airplanes from Brazil to intercept suspicious drug trafficking aircraft, but it was unable to do so because the planes contain U.S.-origin parts. Instead, Venezuela is in the
process of buying 18 Chinese-made K8 planes.

President has authority to waiver Venezuela Haiti Libre 12 [Haiti Libre is a Haitian news organization, Haiti - USA: Obama keeps Haiti on the "black list" of drug trafficking, Sept 19
2012, http://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-6681-haiti-usa-obama-keeps-haiti-on-the-black-list-of-drug-trafficking.html, LZ]

Under the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (FAA), the President is required each year to notify Congress of those countries he determines to be major illicit drug-producing countries or major transit countries that "significantly affect the United States." A countrys presence on the list does not necessarily reflect its counternarco tics efforts or its
level of cooperation on illegal drug control with the United States. The designation can reflect a combination of geographic, commercial, and economic factors that allow narcotics to be produced and/or trafficked through a country. When

a country on the list does not fulfill its obligations under international counternarcotics agreements and conventions, the President determines that the country has "failed demonstrably" to meet its counterdrug obligations. Such a designation can lead to sanctions. However, the President may also execute a waiver when he determines there is a vital national interest in continuing U.S. assistance. Even without such a

waiver, humanitarian assistance and counternarcotics assistance may continue. List

of countries on the black-list. This year the President has identified 22 countries as major producing or transit countries: Afghanistan, the
Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. Belize and El Salvador are new to the list this year.

Venezuelan Econ

1NC Pressure Diversification CP

Text: The United States federal government should diplomatically pressure Venezuela to diversify its economy. Maduro will say yes solves Venezuelas economy
Roberts and Daga 13 [James Roberts, Research Fellow For Economic Freedom and Growth Center for International Trade and Economics
(CITE), and Sergio Daga, director of research and a founding board member of Politicas Publicas para la Libertad and Visiting Senior Policy Analyst for CITE, Venezuela: U.S. Should Push President Maduro Toward Economic Freedom April 15 2013, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/04/venezuela-us-should-push-president-maduro-toward-economic-freedom, LZ] Hugo Chavezs hand-picked successor, former trade union boss Nicols Maduro, appears to have defeated Governor Henrique Capriles by a narrow margin in a contentious and hard-fought special election on April 14. Venezuela seat-of-the-pants mismanagement that

is in such shambles after 14 years of Maduroassuming his victory is confirmedmay ultimately be forced to pursue more moderate policies and seek help from the U.S. to restore stability. The Obama Administration and Congress should exploit this opening by using U.S. leverage to push Venezuela to turn from Chavezs failed experiment in oil-cursed[1] 21st-century socialism toward economic freedom. An Economy in Ruins The foundations of economic freedom in Venezuela have crumbled. When Chavez took office in 1999,
Venezuela scored 54 out of 100 possible points in The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journals annualIndex of Economic Freedom. Today, however, after 14 years of Chavezs soft authoritarian populism, Venezuela merits a score of just 36 points. This nearly 20-point plunge is among the most severe ever recorded by a country in the history of the Index. Its 2013 rank174th out of 179 countriesplaces Venezuela among the most repressed nations in the world.[2]

Venezuelas dismal economic freedom score is reflected in statistics that translate into real -time hardship for Venezuelans, who must spend more of their incomes on higher prices for necessitiesif they can find them on empty store shelves. There are scarcities of nearly all staple food and fuel products. In fact, according to the Banco Central of Venezuelas (BCV) shortages index, Venezuela faces the most severe food shortages in four years.[3] And what food is available comes at a price: Mary OGrady reports in The Wall Street Journal that over the past 10 years inflation in food and nonalcoholic beverages is 1,284% .[4] Financial disequilibrium in Venezuela is the result of a sharply widening fiscal deficit that reached almost 15 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) last year.[5] Government control of the formerly independent BCV also contributed to a massive expansion of the money supply. There are anecdotal reports in Caracas of people paying as much as 23 bolvars for one U.S. dollar in the black market as of early April. The official rate is just 6.3 bolvars per dollarand that is after a significant 32 percent devaluation in February.[6] These problems were aggravated by Chavezs foreign adventurismwhich drained billions of petrodollars from the economy to keep afloat the failed economy in Fidel Castros Cuba as well as
generous subsidies to his Chavista cronies in the region through such schemes as ALBA and PetroCaribe.

AT: Inevitable
Venezuela wont expand its industries in time on its own a US push is key Nation 5 The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the US and is devoted to politics and culture, April
11 2005, Hugo Ch vez and Petro Populism, L Finally an old friend gets me an interview with his boss, Jorge Giordani, during the rebellious paratroopers stint in jail and is

a former academic who befriended Ch vez now the planning and development minister. On matters of economic development, Giordani is the revolutions brain. We meet in his office near the top of South Americas
tallest building, one of a pair of towers, the other of which stands half-burned, its gold-tinted, mirrored windows blown out and black, the result of a recent accident caused by bad maintenance. Giordani is tall, gray and hunched. He wears big glasses, a tie, a brown cardigan sweater and has a short white Abe Lincoln beard. He evades most specific questions. As for corruption, he says simply: We are not doing enough. It is a very serious problem. Mostly he offers a long but interesting explanation of Venezuelas historical development and its lack of internal economic integration. We move from map to map as he explicates the economic geography of various regions.

Many Chavistas hope that investing in physical infrastructure, health and education will open new, nonpetroleum industries in high technology, business services, healthcare and agriculture. When I ask Giordani how the country plans to wean itself from oil, about land reform and about the many so-called endogenous development projects being promoted, he sighs and shakes his head as if I am na ve. Weve been fighting political battles for most of our time in office. Many people have learned to read in the last few years, but how long will it take for them to work in high technology, or medicine, or services? Ten years? A generation? We are fighting a very individualistic, rentier culture. Everything has been Mama state, Papa state, give me oil money. To organize people is extremely hard. After a long, roundabout discussion in which I press him on the question of import substitution and new industrialization, he settles on one key point: Venezuelas only real hope lies in regional economic integration. Only then will internal markets be big enough to nurture alternative technologies and new industries that might otherwise threaten current multinational monopolies. Giordani seems weary and cynical. No, I am just practical, he says with a chuckle. Development in Venezuela will take at least fifty years. And how long will the oil last?

Maybe twenty years, maybe thirty.

US push solves economic and political instability in Venezuela

Pagano 13 *James, writer for Truman Doctrine Security Project, Moving Venezuela to the Center Mar
18 2013, http://trumanproject.org/doctrine-blog/moving-venezuela-to-the-center/] Meanwhile, Chavez became an increasingly authoritarian leader, consolidating power in the executive. He blacklisted opposition figures, altered the constitution and unevenly enforced laws for personal benefit. By creating a steeply slanted playing field, Chavez was able to retain power.

Venezuelas next president will have to decide whether to reverse these trends, or continue the slide to outright authoritarianism. The United States can and should influence this decision. The United States must support the democratic process and engage the likely winner of Aprils election, Chavezs chosen successor, Nicols Maduro. He will have a real opportunity to put Venezuela back on the path to a free-market democracy.
The next president will face an extremely politicized Supreme Court and military and reforms are likely more palatable if made by Maduro. Changes to apportionment, food subsidies or tax rates coming from Enrique Capriles (the opposition candidate) could spark a legal challenge from the supreme court; or worse, opposition from the military.

What should the U.S. role be? It must work with its Latin American allies in the region, Chile, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico to gently pressure Maduro into making the types of institutional and economic changes necessary for Venezuela to prosper. Failure to do so could lead to the reemergence of authoritarianism in Latin America, instability in world oil markets and serious regional security repercussions.
Chavez was infamous for his anti-American tirades. George W. Bushs poor global standing gave Chavez an easy target. With a more positive global image, the most important step President Obama can take is to normalize relations with Cuba. As Venezuelas closest ally, Cuba has remained a persistent problem in U.S.-Latin American relations. By normalizing relations, Obama would take a huge step in reducing anti-Americanism in Venezuela. Simultaneously, Obama would ingratiate himself to the rest of the region by ending the dated embargo. Perhaps most importantly, eliminating this issue would give Venezuelas next president the political cover necessary to mend relations with the United States.

The U.S. should push for economic reform with the help of Brazil which seeks a greater role in international and regional politics. Former Brazilian President Lula da Silva has close ties to Venezuela, and touting the recent successes of his center-left government in Brazil could help persuade Maduro to moderate his government. Brazil has made huge societal gains without suffering the kind of economic setbacks seen in Venezuela. Friendly cajoling, along with the promise of closer economic ties could help lead Maduro onto a path of economic reform necessary to extend certain Chavista social programs.
Colombia, Brazil and the U.S. also have a shared interest in improving Venezuelan security. Under Chavez, Venezuela became on the most violent countries in Latin America, as drug related crimes skyrocketed.

Idea: Venezuela Ptx Diversification

Oil liberalization causes political backlash, but expansion of other industries would go under the radar that solves oil dependence Villarreal 13
[Ryan reports on foreign affairs with a focus on Latin America for International Business Times, March 5 2013, With Chavez Gone, Will Venezuela's Economy Open Up? http://www.ibtimes.com/chavez-gonewill-venezuelas-economy-open-1113008, LZ] During his campaign, Capriles laid out a new economic vision characterized by moderate reforms and diversification. Venezuelas nationalized oil industry accounts for some 94 percent of its foreign revenue, leaving the economy highly vulnerable to fluctuations in global oil prices, as well as to the tapering off of production. With a significant portion of oil revenues being funneled into social programs, little has gone back into the industry, leading to criticism from the opposition that safety standards and productivity are suffering. The state oil company Petrleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, set out in 2005 to produce 5.8 million barrels of oil per day by 2012, but actual production is between 2.8 to 3 million barrels, according to the Economist. The opposition has been careful not to push privatizing the oil industry or divesting from the countrys popular social programs and risk a political backlash, but it has suggested opening up other sectors of the economy such as tourism, energy, agriculture and telecommunications. These sectors remain relatively underdeveloped in terms of foreign investment, but such economic reforms are unlikely to occur under a socialist-led government. The opposition will have little time to launch a new presidential campaign, but the higher-than-average support they received in October -- even with the state media working against them -- indicates that stagnant economic conditions may be pushing more Venezuelans toward market reforms.

1NC Election Reform CP

Text: The United States federal government should
Pressure Caracas to implement election reforms Demand free, fair and verifiable elections

Engagement cant solve elections reform and expanding industries are necessary to solve relations and corruption
Christy 13
Patrick, senior policy analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative, March 15 2013, Obama Must Stand Up for Democracy in Post-Chavez Venezuela http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/worldreport/2013/03/15/after-chavez-us-must-encourage-democratic-venezuela, LZ] Washington must realize that a strategy of engagement alone will not ensure a renewed and improved partnership with Caracas. Failure to realize this will not only undermine whatever influence America has in the months ahead, but also send a troubling signal to Venezuela's increasingly united political opposition. The Obama administration should instead pursue a more principled policy towards a post-Chavez Venezuela. In particular, it should: Pressure Caracas to implement key election reforms . Venezuela's opposition faces formidable obstacles.
Interim President Maduro will use the government's near-monopoly control of public airwaves, its established networks of political patronage and last-minute public spending programs to bolster his populist agenda.

Washington should stress publicly and privately that any attempts to suppress or intimidate the opposition runs contrary to Venezuela's constitution and the principles defined in the InterAmerican Democratic Charter, which was adopted by Venezuela in 2001. To this point, Jos Crdenas, a former USAID acting
assistant administrator for Latin America, writes,

The Venezuelan opposition continues to insist that the constitution be followed and have drawn up a list of simple electoral reforms that would level the playing field
(which is of Chavez's own writing) chart their own future free of chavista and foreign interference.

and better allow the Venezuelan people to

Demand free, fair and verifiable elections. Although Venezuela announced that a special election to replace Chavez will be held next month, it is important to remember that elections alone do not make a democracy. Indeed, Chavez long embraced the rhetoric of democracy as he, in reality, consolidated executive power, undermined Venezuela's previously democratic political system and altered the outcomes of election through corruption, fraud and intimidation. The Obama administration should make clear that free and fair elections, properly monitored by respected international election observers, are essential to Venezuela's future standing in the hemisphere and the world. Likewise, Secretary of State John Kerry should work with regional partners including (but not limited to) Brazil, Canada, Colombia and Mexico to firmly encourage Maduro's interim government. A unified regional voice would send a powerful signal to Chavez's cronies in Caracas and longtime enablers in China, Iran and Russia.
Condition future diplomatic and economic relations. Corruption and criminality were widespread under the Chavez regime, as high-level government and military officials benefited from close ties to corrupt businesses and international drug traffickers. Yet to date, the Obama administration has done little to hold Venezuela's leaders accountable. Washington should make clear that full diplomatic relations with the United States will be contingent upon Venezuela ending ties to international terrorist groups and rogue regimes like Iran. If Venezuela takes meaningful steps to end these ties and ensure future elections, the United States should work with Caracas and the private sector to reform Venezuela's energy industry and identify key development projects and reforms to improve the country's economic future.

The United States can play an important role in shaping Venezuela's post-Chavez future. But to do so, the Obama administration will need to stand with the people of Venezuela by publicly defending democratic principles and the impartial rule of law in Latin America.

Corruption causes high crime rates and ruins the economy

Roberts and Daga 13 [James Roberts, Research Fellow For Economic Freedom and Growth Center for
International Trade and Economics (CITE), and Sergio Daga, director of research and a founding board member of Politicas Publicas para la Libertad and Visiting Senior Policy Analyst for CITE, Venezuela: U.S.

Should Push President Maduro Toward Economic Freedom April 15 2013, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/04/venezuela-us-should-push-president-madurotoward-economic-freedom]
As reported in the Index, political

interference in Venezuelas judicial system has become routine, and corruption is rampant. The landscape in Caracas and elsewhere in the country is littered with half-finished, publicly funded infrastructure and housing projects. The government funds needed to complete them often disappear. As government expanded under Chavez, corruption became institutionalized. Chavez doubled the size of the public sector, many of whose 2.4 million [7] employees have no real job other than to work to keep the regime in power. A World Economic Forum (WEF) survey found little trust among businesses, politicians, the judicial system, and the police in Venezuela. [8] The tragic result is that Venezuela is now one of the most dangerous countries of the world. According to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, in 2012 nearly 22,000 people were murdered. [9] An inefficient and non-transparent regulatory environment that is hostile to private foreign direct investment obstructs long-term development and hampers entrepreneurial growth.
The investment regime is tightly controlled by the state and favors investors from China, Russia, Iran, and other democracy-challenged countries. [10]

Investor protection in Venezuela is ranked at 140 out of 144 countries, according to the WEF report.[11] In 1998, before Chavez took power, there were more than 14,000 private industrial companies in Venezuela; in 2011, after 13 years of extensive nationalizations and expropriations, only about 9,000 remained. [12]

AT: Fair Elections Now

High voter turnout is actually a sign of secret vote buying Schaffer 8
[Frederic Schaffer, associate professor of political science at MIT, chair of the International Political Science Associations Concepts and Methods research committee, i nterim chair and graduate program director and chair of the graduate studies committee at UMass, The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform pages 107-109, LZ] Observers of Taiwanese politics are in general agreement that vote buying is more important to local elections than to national ones. (This may be because the total number of votes cast in local elections is typically smaller, and thus each vote and each vote bought carries more weight.) It is thus not surprising that prior to the 1995 crackdown, as figure 2 shows, turnout in local elections was higher than in national elections. Vote buying, after all, was a more effective mobilization tool in local elections than in national elections. Local elections, in which candidates rely on face-to-face networks of vote-buying brokers, had a higher turnout than national elections, in which candidates relied more heavily on mass media campaigning. After 1994, the situation reversed: turnout for national elections exceeded turnout for local elections. This reversal, I suggest, was due in part to a decline in vote buying that affected turnout in local elections than in national ones and in part to the novelty and drama of presidential elections (1996 was the first), which drew turnouts of 76 percent in 1996, 83 percent in 2000, and 80 percent in 2004. Both the timing of the decline in turnout and differences in turnout trends between local and national elections map closely onto patterns of vote buying, efforts to curb it, and the rise of mass media political advertising. Still, it is worth considering other possible explanations for the drop in turnout, the most compelling of which is that elections lost their novelty. Just as turnout has declined in established democracies over time, turnout in Taiwan was bound to decline as elections became routine. There are two problems with this explanation. First, it assumes that the decline in established democracies is the natural result of a long experience of voting. But there are other factors involved, among them changes in how elections have been administered and how parties have campaigned. The imposition of cumbersome registration procedures in some places and the rise of impersonal strategies of mobilization almost everywhere have both helped to generate apathy (Rosenstone and Wolfinger 1978; Piven and Cloward 1988; Wattenberg 2000). Second, the explanation fails to account for the timing of the turnout decline in Taiwan. Voters have been going to the polls since the 1950s. Multiparty competition emerged in the late 1980s and reached a plateau in 2000 with the election of a non-KMT president. The 1990s was thus a decade of intense political change and rising partisan competition. It seems unlikely that apathy would set in, suddenly, in the middle years of this transformation. One final comment on the relationship between turnout and vote buying is in order. It would be wrong to assume that most Taiwanese who accept money go to polls to uphold their end of a vote-buying contract, for many people who accept money do not vote as instructed. As early as 1977, one anthropologist proclaims the decline on honest bribery when he observed that 30 percent of the people in the village he was studying did not vote for the candidates who gave them money (Jordan 1977, 13). A survey of 1,263 people in Kaohsiung City following the 1992 legislative elections found that of the 45 percent of the respondents who accepted money, only 10 percent voted for the candidate on whose behalf it was given (Ho 1995, tables 7, 23). Similarly, Wang (2001, 37, 54) compared the number of votes garnered by the KMT candidate in the rural township he studied to the number of voters who received money from KMT vote brokers (which Wang was able to determine by gaining access to the actual lists of names used by the vote brokers themselves). Sixty-seven percent of the eligible voters in the township received money from KMT brokers in the 1993 elections, but a full 45 percent of the people who received money did not vote for the KMT candidate.

Still, turnout for the election was over 73 percent. Turnout was heavy even though almost half the people who received money did not vote for the candidate on whose behalf it was given. A high turnout of people who accept material rewards can be explained by a combination of factors. For sure, some people may feel compelled to vote for the candidate who pays them , but not all payment-accepting voters go to the polls simply to uphold their end of a vote-buying contract. Recall that 45 percent of the people in the township studied by Wang did not vote for the KMT candidate on whose behalf money was given. For these people, going to the polls may have instead provided cover. If they had stayed home, vote buyers would have known for sure that they did not vote for the candidate on whose behalf they were given money. By going to the polls, the recipients at a minimum kept vote buyers guessing, since vote secrecy is by and large respected. Face-to-face invitations probably mattered as well, as they did in the field experiments conducted by Gerber and Green. In Taiwan, offers of money are made personally by neighborhood vote brokers. Material offers, in other words, are not simply monetary incentives; their individualized disbursement also constitutes a form of personal, face-to-face canvassing. To conclude, available evidence suggests that the post-1994 decline in Taiwanese voter turnout is most directly attributable to the crackdown on vote buying and the concomitant rise of impersonal, mas mediacovered campaigning.

Aff Answers
International observers agree Venezuelas elections are fair US media is biased Kovalik 13
[Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer with extensive experience in South America who teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, April 30 2013, Honor Venezuela's Election; Maduro Won Fair and Square http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/8940, LZ] I just returned from Venezuela where I was one of 170 international election observers from around the world, including India, Brazil, Great Britain, Argentina, South Korea and France. Among the observers were two former presidents (of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic), judges, lawyers and high-ranking officials of national electoral councils. What we found was a transparent, reliable, well-run and thoroughly audited electoral system . Two unique and endearing features of the Venezuelan process is that both campaigning and alcohol sales are forbidden in the final two days before an election. What has been barely mentioned by the U.S. mainstream press is that over 54 percent of the voting machines in the April 14 election have been audited to ensure that the electronic votes match the backup paper receipts. This was done in the presence of witnesses from both the governing and opposition parties right in the local polling places. I witnessed such an audit, and the Venezuelan electoral commission has since agreed to audit 100 percent of the ballots. An election observer and former president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, called the vote "secure" and easily verifiable. All told, the experience of this year's observers aligns with that of former President Jimmy Carter, who observed last year's elections and called Venezuela's electoral system "the best in the world." What were the results? With an impressive 79 percent of registered voters going to the polls, Nicolas Maduro, heir to Hugo Chavez, won by more than 260,000 votes -- 1.8 percent -- over opposition leader Henrique Capriles. While this was certainly a close race, 260,000 votes is a comfortable margin. Recall that John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in 1960 by only 0.1 percent. George W. Bush became president in 2000 after losing the popular vote to Al Gore but winning by only a few hundred votes in Florida -- where a recount was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. In none of these U.S. elections did any other nation insist upon a recount or hesitate in recognizing the declared winner. Had a country like Venezuela done so, we would have found such a position absurd.

Idea: Venezuela Ptx Elections

CP is popular and Maduro will say yes, but economic reform like the plan costs him political capital that he doesnt have hed say no Roth 13
[Charles Roth is the lead writer for the Latin America section of Wall Street Journal, April 16 2013, Venezuelas Election Downshifts Views on Economy, Debt http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/04/16/venezuelas-election-downshifts-views-oneconomy-debt/, LZ] We hear elections have consequences, which are usually obvious if the winners mandate is strong. Venezuelas snap election over the weekend has major implications for the economy and the oil-rich nations debt, thinking on which is changing fast. The anointed heir of Venezuelas defunct leader, Hugo Chavez, eked out a wafer-thin majority of votes in Sundays snap presidential election, a surprise given that President-elect Nicolas Maduro held a double-digit lead in most pre-election polling. But the race tightened sharply toward the end, and Henrique Capriles lost by less than two percentage points. Mr. Capriles camp alleges vote irregularities, demands a full recount and wont recognize Mr. Maduros government-sanctioned victory. Supporters of both camps have taken to the street, with post-election violence claiming seven lives so far. Tensions have rapidly escalated. A recount doesnt look likely. But Mr. Maduro doesnt have much of a mandate. Market consensus had congealed around a Maduro victory, and saw in Mr. Chavezs long-time foreign minister and last vice-president a more pragmatic and conciliatory politician. Although closely allied with Cuba, Mr. Maduro would be open to some reform of the statist system that his mentor had built. Such thinking contributed to Venezuelas 47% return last year and 3.4% gain this year to Friday on a widely followed JP Morgan emerging market sovereign bond index. But the closeness of the balloting has rattled the market. Mr. Maduro now looks quite weak, JP Morgan said in a note, and will have little mandate to adjust policies and difficulty managing internal rivalries. The investment bank added that economic pragmatism may still be in the cards as a survival technique, (but) in the near term, radicalism may be in store for (Mr.) Maduro to project strength and rally his base. The countrys 2023 dollar bond has sunk to 94.29 bid, yielding 9.907%, from Fridays 97.53 to yield 9.381%, while the cost of credit default insurance for five years has jumped to 742 basis points from 699 basis points. It could still be a long way down: Fund flow data suggest emerging market investors are still overweight Venezuela debt. J.P. Morgan Monday cut its recommendation on Venezuela debt in its model portfolio to marketweight from overweight, noting that Venezuelas high yields still compensate investors for the risky outlook. Perhaps, but the near-term challenges facing Venezuela are enormous. Profligate government spending over Mr. Chavezs era have dramatically expanded Venezuelas debt load and fiscal deficit, despite record high oil revenues Citigroup C +1.58% reckons Venezuelas budget gap this year at 17%, slightly more than it was last year. Public foreign debt maturities this year total almost $5 billion, but then run double that in both 2015 and 2016, including the quasi-sovereign state oil companys maturities. Nationalizations across sundry sectors of the economy, including in the key oil industry, have undercut investment and caused output to stall. Oil production is nearly three-quarters of its level in early 1999, when Mr. Chavez, who died of cancer early last month, first took office. Capital controls and an overvalued official exchange rate have led to a dearth of dollars for vital imports, leading to both domestic food shortages and inflation thats slated to hit an annual 30% this year. Power outages are frequent. Oil prices have been drifting lower, which is potentially disastrous for Venezuela, as oil accounts for over a third of its gross domestic product, at least three-fifths of public spending and over

nine-tenths of its export receipts. Thanks to the U.S. shale oil boom, its natural export market is fast becoming less dependent on oil imports. The election was supposed to pave the way toward reforming some of the populist social programsheavily subsidized food, fuels, health care and housingand making life a little easier on the private sector. But that doesnt look likely now. We suspect that the political gridlock can delay the implementation of the economic measures and could accelerate the deterioration of Venezuelas already fragile fundamentals, Barclays said Tuesday. While high oil prices give the country a strong capacity to pay, the country could remain on an unsustainable path, especially if the recent correction in the oil prices continues. Barclays, which cut its view on Venezuelas debt to neutral from overweight, says the problems are likely to push the economy into recession this year. Given Venezuelas history of social unrest and entrenched entitlements, Mr. Maduro doesnt have the political capital to implement painful structural reforms. Instead, he may just double down on the populist programs to shore up his support. But that wont be easy with ugly debt dynamics and a failing economy. It will be a very difficult task keeping people who voted for them happy, said Munir Jalil, Ciitgroups debt strategist for Venezuela. Citi, he says, is seriously underweight Venezuelas debt in its model portfolio.

CP supported by Venezuela Congress plan undermines democracy Noriega 13

[Roger F. Noriega held senior positions in the State Department in the administration of President George W. Bush and is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Post -Chvez Crisis an Opportunity for Venezuela March 5 2013, http://www.american.com/archive/2013/march/post -chavez-crisis-anopportunity-for-venezuela/] Alas, Hugo Chvez will not live long enough to atone for his abuse of millions of Venezuelans nor to correct the corrupt and destructive policies that have wrecked the country he leaves behind. Moreover, although his cronies and their Cuban handlers are maneuvering to hold on to power, a Chavista succession is neither stable nor sustainable. With more audacious leadership among Venezuelas democrats and intelligent solidarity from abroad, Chvezs legacy might be buried with him. The foundations of Chavismo are being shaken by an impending socioeconomic meltdown, a faltering oil sector, bitter in-fighting in his own movement, complicity with drug-trafficking and terrorism, rampant street crime, the inept performance by Chvezs anointed successor, and growing popular rejection of Cuban interference, corrupt institutions, and rigged elections. Beset by these challenges and with Chvez no longer at the top of the ballot, the regime will use every advantage to engineer a victory in a special election to choose a new president. A currency devaluation last month was too little and too late to break the fall of a Venezuelan economy that has been decimated by gross mismanagement, staggering corruption, and policies that were meant to strangle the independent private sector. The Chavista economic team is scrambling to stabilize the economy in advance of the election, but its incompetence is evident as it ratchets up restrictions that will stifle production and commerce. Inflation, food shortages, power outages, and crumbling infrastructure are taking a terrible toll on the quality of life of all Venezuelans. Inflation, food shortages, power outages, and crumbling infrastructure are taking a terrible toll on the quality of life of all Venezuelans. Unlike in the past, Venezuela will not be saved by a windfall of oil revenues, because production is greatly diminished and oversubscribed. Contrary to official numbers, actual production is 2.4 million barrels per day, far below a peak of 3.3 million before Chvez. And sweetheart deals with China, Russia, and Iran as well as giveaways to Cuba and other client states in the Caribbean and Central America are bleeding Venezuela dry. Although China loaned about $28 billion to Chvez in the last 18 months, Beijing has closed its checkbook because of the questionable legality of the interim regime and the simple fact that Venezuela has no crude oil left to sell. As a result of this mess, there are reports that Venezuela is actually

importing gasoline to satisfy domestic demand. In short, Chvez politicized the state-run oil company and treated its revenue as his petty cash fund now the company is ruined and the till is empty. Several months ago, it seemed logical that rival factions within Chavismo a civilian group loyal to Havana and a military cadre implicated in narcotrafficking would close ranks behind Vice President Nicolas Maduro as a figurehead. However, since taking center stage after Chvez disappeared three months ago, Maduro has failed to convince even his supporters that he can wage a winning presidential campaign to succeed Chvez. Maduros lackluster performance has led narcogenerals to conclude that their leader, National Assembly president and military veteran Diosdado Cabello, is more capable of holding on to power. According to Venezuelan sources, Cabellos alleged links to drug trafficking have alienated some professional officers who are wary of being targeted by U.S. law enforcement. Moreover, many Venezuelan military officers are uneasy about a constitutionally dubious succession that is being micromanaged by Cuba. Consequently, some have begun to court alternative leaders in their ranks who will reject Havanas interference as well as criminality. So, Chavismo and its control of the military may be disintegrating. State governor Henrique Capriles Radonski is behaving as the de facto leader of the opposition, based on the fact that he was the unity candidate who waged an unsuccessful campaign against Chvez last year. However, with so much riding on snap elections and some disappointed by Capriless accommodating style, independent actors are seizing the initiative. Key democratic members of Venezuelas congress are demanding simple but significant reforms in the rigged electoral system , and throngs of university students have been rallying against corruption and Cuban interference. Capriles can demonstrate his leadership by refusing to play by the corrupt rules imposed by a criminal regime. Americans need to know that a struggle is underway right now in Venezuela that could replace an antiU.S. narcostate with a friendly, democratic, and prosperous ally. Remarkably, in the midst of this tumultuous power struggle, the State Departments first instinct was to open talks with the corrupt and hostile Chvez regime to normalize relations a move that would legitimize a criminal regime, undermine Venezuelan democrats, and hobble ongoing law enforcement investigations. For the sake of Venezuela and its people, this is the time for good people to do what they know is right urgently, intelligently, and boldly.

Mexico

Mexico Relations + Econ

1NC Legalize Marijuana CP

Text: The United States federal government should legalize and regulate marijuana in the United States.

Decriminalization now but that doesnt stop the violence- only legalization solves Sarachan 12(Sydney Sarachan, PBS, November 19 2012, Legalizing marijuana,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/ask-the-experts/ask-the-experts-legalizingmarijuana/15474/,PS) NF: Decriminalization is a step in the right direction because it prevents people from the shackling of criminal
records for simply possessing marijuana and also allows the criminal justice system to focus more of its limited resources on stopping and solving violent crimes. However,

it does nothing to reduce the violent underground drug trade. Only legalized regulation of the market can do that. Lets remember that during alcohol prohibition, personal possession and use of booze was essentially decriminalized. It wasnt until the prohibition on manufacture and sales was lifted that gangsters stopped killing each other and the police over black market alcohol profits. This is because legalizing and regulating a product
means people will purchase it through the proper channels and therefore the lucrative illegal market all but disappears. MT: Simply removing the criminal penalties for marijuana does nothing to eliminate the underground market, which produces the only real violence associated with marijuana. By

keeping marijuana illegal, we are forcing those who seek it into an underground market where it is sold exclusively by individuals who are willing to break the law. Naturally, some of these individuals will have other illegal products available, including drugs that are far more harmful than marijuana. Amendment 64 would regulate marijuana and restrict its sale to
licensed stores, as we currently do with alcohol. In doing so, it will dramatically reduce consumers exposure to harder drugs and the temptation to experiment with them. Regulating

marijuana will also ensure that consumers know what they are getting when they purchase marijuana. Illegal marijuana dealers are not subject to quality standards, and are not testing or labeling their products.

Drug war undermines US-Mexico relations- only the CP can solve that Rosenblum 11(Marc R. Rosenblum, Senior Policy Analyst at the Migration Policy Institute
(MPI), where he works on the Labor Markets Initiative, April 2011, pg 17, US immigration policy, and Mexico-US migration issues, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/usmexicocooperation.pdf,PS)
On the other hand, the obstacles to cooperation that emerged after the 9/11 attacks generally remain in place, and in some respects are even more daunting than before. The prospects for a large-scale legalization or a new temporary worker program core elements of the whole enchilada framework are more doubtful in light of the weak US economy and Republican gains in the 2010 congressional elections. And while

US and Mexican officials see their campaign against Mexican drug-trafficking organizations as an important example of bilateral cooperation, continued high levels of drug-related violence, concentrated in Mexican border cities and in important migrantsending states such as Michoacn, threaten to overwhelm other aspects of the bilateral relationship. The drug war in Mexico undermines US trust in Mexicos ability to be a reliable partner for migration cooperation, and causes many Mexicans to question whether the United States is willing to take on the costs of reform at home, including by reducing demand for drugs and the supply of weapons fueling Mexican violence With these constraints in mind, episodic
cooperation during World War II and the 1990s suggests three principles for successful migration cooperation. First, cooperative institutions should respond to market failures by promoting policy outcomes that benefit both countries and the recognition that neither the market nor the unilateral policies of either country can bring this about on their own. Cooperation is not an end in itself, but may be a means to accomplish concrete policy goals that depend on coordination or joint enforcement. Second, cooperative policy approaches may become easier when the United States and Mexico find linkages across related issue areas. During the early stages of the Bracero Program, for example, Mexico made concessions on visa numbers in exchange for a greater say in how

guestworker visas were enforced; collaboration at this time and during the 1990s was also based on the recognition that the United States and Mexico have broader common interests, and fundamentally linked fates. Third, building collaborative mechanisms may also require an incremental approach. In the 1990s, border-level cooperation on enforcement and human rights emerged out of long-term investments in bilateral forums for discussing migration issues and became stepping stones for building mutual trust through which a comprehensive immigration reform framework began to emerge.

Legalization Solves Drug Cartels

Legalizing solves Hagerty 10(Talia Hagerty, Perspectives on Global Issues, completed her master's degree in
Global Affairs at New York University, with a concentration in peacebuilding and peace economics, September 12 2010, Legalizing the Marijuana Market: A Prescription for Peace on the US-Mexico Border, http://www.perspectivesonglobalissues.com/archives/fall-2010conflict/legalizing-the-marijuana-market/,PS) The Solution As more money is spent and more lives are lost, it becomes increasingly clear that the most cost effective and least violent way to handle the market for marijuana is legalization. The economic logic associated with prohibition predicts that the current policy will make things worse, not better. And the interrelated causes of violence that cannot be solved by legalization can be better addressed with the resulting reallocation of resources. In order to implement a successful policy, lawmakers from both governments will
have to be open minded, carefully examine the impact of existing decriminalization plans, and proceed with caution, so as to avoid further distorting the market. Policymakers will also have to be prepared for a certain amount of civilian and cartel backlash. However, a

long term approach intended to truly legitimize and certify nonviolent, lawful suppliers of marijuana and eliminate opportunity for black market profits can promote a lasting peace in both nations. Steps toward legalization have already been taken in both the US and Mexico. Most notably, Mexico has decriminalized small amounts of narcotics (Grillo). However, the Drug Policy Forum
of Texas provides the principal reasons why decriminalization policies will fall short in addressing the full social costs of the illicit marijuana market, as decriminalization

fails to remove the illegal supplier from the market, entails law regulated legalization plan advocated in this study would still incur enforcement costs, but those costs would be directed toward illegal and violent cartel suppliers instead of nonviolent individual consumers. Furthermore, it would remove profit opportunities for illegal suppliers, generate tax revenue for both governments (an estimated $10 to 14 billion in new revenues and savings for the United States), and would keep marijuana use at or below current levels.
enforcement costs, deprives the state of tax revenue, and does not make a significant difference in use. The

CP solves- legalization of marijuana is the only practical way to weaken the Mexican drug cartels Johnson 10(Gary Johnson, Former governor of New Mexico, Huffington Post Politics, August
26 2010, Legalize Marijuana to Stop the Drug Cartels, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/garyjohnson/legalize-marijuana-to-sto_b_696430.html,PS) Mexican drug cartels make at least 60 percent of their revenue from selling marijuana in the United States, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The FBI estimates that the cartels now
control distribution in more than 230 American cities, from the Southwest to New England. How are they able to do this? Because America's policy for nearly 70 years has been to keep marijuana -- arguably no more harmful than alcohol and used by 15 million Americans every month -- confined to the illicit market, meaning

we've given criminals a virtual monopoly on something that U.S. researcher Jon Gettman estimates is a $36 billion a year industry, greater than corn and wheat combined. We have implemented laws that are not enforceable, which has thereby created a thriving black market. By denying reality and not regulating and taxing marijuana, we are fueling not only this massive illicit economy, but a war that we are clearly losing. In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderon
announced a new military offensive against his country's drug cartels. Since then, more than 28,000 people have been killed in prohibition-fueled violence, and the

cartels are more powerful than ever, financed primarily by marijuana sales. Realizing that his hard-line approach has not worked, earlier this month Calderon said the time has come for Mexico to have an open debate about regulating drugs as a way to combat the cartels. Ignoring this problem, Mr. Calderon said, "is an unacceptable option." Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox, went even further, writing on his blog that "we should consider legalizing the production, sale and distribution of drugs" as a way to "weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits... Radical prohibition strategies have never worked." Fox is not alone. His predecessor, as well as former

presidents of Brazil and Colombia, has also spoken out for the need to end prohibition. And they're right. Crime

was rampant during alcohol prohibition as well. Back then it was led by gangsters like Al Capone. Now it's lead by cartels. The violence in Mexico is out of control and is destroying the country. Journalists fear reporting
the daily shootouts because of threats from the cartels. Some schools are even teaching their students to duck and cover in order to avoid the crossfire. Politicians are being targeted for assassination. The havoc has spread into the United States. In March, hit men executed three people linked to the U.S. Consulate in Juarez, an act that President Obama condemned. And the same cartels that are selling marijuana in the United States are destroying treasured environmental resources by growing marijuana illegally in protected park lands. By regulating marijuana, such illegal grows would cease to exist. The problem has been out of hand for quite some time, and a new approach is desperately needed. Sadly, U.S. officials refuse to even acknowledge that such a debate is taking place. Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske has said repeatedly that the Obama administration is not open to a debate on ending marijuana prohibition. Even worse, we've continued to fund Mexico's horribly failed drug war (to the tune of $1.4 billion through the Merida Initiative), while refusing to be honest with our neighbors who are urgently seeking a new direction. This November, Californians will decide whether to legalize marijuana for adults 21 and older. U.S. officials need to welcome the debate on marijuana regulation.

It's probably the only practical way to weaken the drug cartels -- something both the U.S. and Mexico would benefit from immeasurably. We need a new solution to stop this violence.

Only federal legalization solves Wilkinson 12(Tracy Wilkinson, LA Times, November 1 2012, Study: Pot legalization in U.S.
states could hurt Mexican cartels, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/11/potlegalization-in-us-states-could-hurt-mexicos-cartels-study-suggests.html,PS)
MEXICO CITY -- This may not weigh heavily on the minds of voters in Seattle, but if Washington and two other U.S. states decide to

legalize marijuana in next week's election, the effect on drug traffickers in Mexico could be enormous. Such is the suggestion of a new study by a Mexican think tank. "It could be the biggest structural blow that [Mexican] drug trafficking has experienced in a generation," Alejandro Hope, security expert with the Mexican Competitiveness Institute, said in presenting the report. Producing and distributing marijuana inside the U.S. would supply a less expensive and better quality drug to the millions of American who smoke it, Hope said. Demand for Mexican pot would decline, cutting into cartels' profits by 22% to 30%, the study calculates. The consequences would be most dramatic, Hope added, for the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, which is based in western Mexico and controls most of the marijuana production. It is estimated that around one-third of Mexican drug gangs' income is from marijuana, surpassed only and narrowly by cocaine. Washington, Oregon
and Colorado have legalization initiatives on their ballots. Hope cited polls that showed likely approval for the measure in Washington and Colorado and defeat in Oregon. Taking into account taxes, markups, transportation costs and other factors, U.S.-

produced marijuana would retail at a little more than half the cost of illegally shipped Mexican pot, Hope's study indicated. However, he acknowledged that legalization in one or more U.S. states would create an illicit contraband of the drug to other states -- precisely one of the main arguments used by
opponents of the ballot measures. One unpredictable fallout is how the cartels would react. Would the thousands of people employed in marijuana production turn to other illegal -- and possibly more violent -- activities like kidnapping and extortion? Also, Hope said, the study does not consider what will happen in the likely event that the U.S. federal government acts to impede or challenge legalization measures approved by state voters. But any

legalization in the U.S. is an exciting prospect, he said, because it would probably cut illegal production in Mexico and change the debate over drug use worldwide.

CP is the only economical solution to the war on drugs Luhnow 9(David Luhnow, The Wall Street Journal, December 26 2009, Saving Mexico,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704254604574614230731506644.html,PS) Growing numbers of Mexican and U.S. officials sayat least privatelythat the biggest step in hurting the business operations of Mexican cartels would be simply to legalize their main product: marijuana. Long the world's most popular illegal drug, marijuana accounts for more than half the revenues of Mexican cartels. "Economically, there is no argument or solution other than legalization, at least of marijuana," said the top Mexican official matter-of-factly. The official said such a move would likely shift marijuana production entirely to places like California, where the drug can be grown more efficiently and closer to consumers. "Mexico's objective should be to make the U.S. self-

sufficient in marijuana ," he added with a grin. He is not alone in his views. Earlier this year, three former Latin American
presidents known for their free-market and conservative credentialsErnesto Zedillo of Mexico, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazilsaid governments should seriously consider legalizing marijuana as an effective tool against murderous drug gangs. If the war

on drugs has failed, analysts say it is partly because it has been waged almost entirely as a la w-and-order issue, without understanding of how cartels work as a business. For instance, U.S. anti-drug policy inadvertently helped Mexican gangs gain power. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. government cracked down on the transport of cocaine from Colombia to U.S.
shores through the Caribbean, the lowest-cost supply route. But that simply diverted the flow to the next lowest-cost route: through Mexico. In 1991, 50% of the U.S.-bound cocaine came through Mexico. By 2004, 90% did. Mexico became the FedEx of the cocaine business. That change in the supply chain came as Colombia waged a successful war to break up the country's Cali and Medellin cartels into dozens of smaller suppliers. Both moves helped the Mexican gangs, who gained pricing power in the market. Before, the Colombian cartels told Mexicans what price they would pay for wholesale cocaine. Now, Mexican gangs play smaller Colombian suppliers off of each other to get the best price. Mexican gangs are "price setters" instead of "price takers." Some Mexican officials say privately that the U.S. should seriously consider allowing cocaine to pass more easily through the Caribbean again in order to squeeze Mexican gangs. "Would you rather destabilize small countries in the Caribbean or Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile border with the U.S., is your third-biggest trading partner and has 100 million people?" one official said. Today, the world's most successful drug trafficking organizations are found in Mexico. Unlike Colombian drug gangs in the 1980s, who relied almost entirely on cocaine, Mexican drug gangs are a one-stop shop for four big-time illicit drugs: marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines and heroin. Mexico is the world's second biggest producer of marijuana (the U.S. is No. 1), the major supplier of methamphetamines to the U.S., the key transit point for U.S.-bound cocaine from South America and the hemisphere's biggest producer of heroin. This diversification helps them absorb shocks from the business. Sales of cocaine in the U.S., for instance, slipped slightly from 2006 to 2008. But that decline was more than made up for by growing sales of methamphetamines. In many ways, illegal

drugs are the most successful Mexican multinational enterprise, employing some 450,000 Mexicans and generating about $20 billion
in sales, second only behind the country's oil industry and automotive industry exports. This year, Forbes magazine put Mexican drug lord Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman as No. 701 on the world's list of billionaires. Unlike their rough-hewn parents and uncles,

today's young traffickers wear Armani suits, carry BlackBerrys and hit the gym for exercise. One
drug lord's accountant who was arrested in 2006 had a mid-level job at Mexico's central bank for 15 years. Recently, Mexico's deputy agriculture minister, Jeffrey Jones, told some of the country's leading farmers that they could learn a thing or two from Mexican drug traffickers. "It's

a sector that has learned to identify markets and create the logistics to reach them," he said. Days later, Mr. Jones was forced to resign. "He may be right," one top Mexican official confided, "but you can't say things like that publicly." Mr. Jones says he stands by his comments. Because governments make drugs illegal, the risk associated with transporting them translates to high rewards for those willing to take that risk. The wholesale price of a single kilo of cocaine, for instance, costs $1,200 in Colombia, $2,300 in Panama,
$8,300 in Mexico, and between $15,000 and $25,000 in the U.S., depending on how close you are to the Mexican border. At a retail level on the streets of New York, it can run close to $80,000. With markups like that, the business is bound to keep attracting new entrants, no matter what governments do to stop it. Governments also have a hard time stopping the drugs trade because, like any good business, trafficking organizations innovate and adapt. Mexican customs has stumbled upon a long list of ingenious methods to transport cocaine, including one shipment of liquefied cocaine smuggled in red wine bottles. Another recent bust yielded 800 kilos of cocaineworth an estimated $40 millionstuffed inside a batch of frozen sharks. After Mexico restricted the importation of pseudoephedrine to slow the manufacture of methamphetamines, drug gangs found another way to make the drug using different, unrestricted chemicals widely used in the perfume industry. "I've always thought these guys had a good research and development arm," says one exasperated Mexican official. Advocates for drug legalization say making

marijuana legal would cut

the economic clout of Mexican cartels by half. Marijuana accounts for anywhere between 50% to 65% of Mexican cartel revenues, say Mexican and U.S. officials. While cocaine has higher profit margins, marijuana is a steady source of income that allows cartels to meet payroll and fund other activities. Marijuana is also less risky to a drug gang's balance sheet. If a cocaine shipment is seized, the Mexican gang has to write off the expected
profits from the shipment and the cost of paying Colombian suppliers, meaning they lose twice. But because gangs here grow their own marijuana, it's easier to absorb the losses from a seizure. Cartels

also own the land where the marijuana is grown, meaning they can cheaply grow more supply rather than have to fork over more money to the
Colombians for the next shipment of cocaine. Several U.S. states like California and Oregon have decriminalized marijuana, making possession of small quantities a misdemeanor, like a parking ticket. Decriminalization falls short of legalization because the sale and distribution remain a serious felony. One of the big reasons for the move is to reduce the problem of overcrowded and costly prisons. While this strategy may make sense domestically for the U.S., Mexican officials say it is the worst possible outcome for Mexico, because it guarantees demand for the drug by eliminating the risk that if you buy you go to jail. But it keeps the supply chain illegal, ensuring that organized crime will be the drug's supplier. Making pot legal might actually increase violence south of the border even more in the short term, with drug gangs fighting over a smaller economic pie of the remaining illegal drugs. But it would eventually reduce the overall financial clout of cartels.

Legalizing marijuana in only 3 states would take billions out of the cartels revenue T.W. 12(T.W. , The Economist, November 2nd 2012, The view from Mexico,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/legalising-marijuana,PS)
AMERICAN elections are watched closely in Mexico, which sends most of its exports and about a tenth of its citizens north of the border. But Tuesdays presidential contest is not the only poll thats sparking interest south of the Rio Grande. On the same day, voters in Colorado, Oregon and Washington will vote on whether to legalise marijuananot just for medical use, but for fun and profit. Polls suggest that the initiatives have a decent chance of passing in Washington and Colorado (Oregon is a longer shot). The

impact on Mexico could be profound. Between 40% and 70% of American pot is reckoned to be grown in Mexico. According to a recent study (in Spanish) by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), a thinktank in Mexico City, the American marijuana business brings in about $2 billion a y ear to Mexicos drug traffickers. That makes it almost as important to their business as the cocaine trade, which is worth about $2.4 billion. In
Mexico relatively few people take drugs. But many are murdered as a result of the export business. About 60,000 have been killed by organised crime during the past six years. Thousands more have disappeared. Many Mexicans therefore wonder if America might consider a new approach. Felipe Calderon, the president, has said that if

Americans cannot bring themselves to stop buying drugs, they ought to consider market alternatives, by which he means legalisation. Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, the two previous presidents of Mexico, have reached the same conclusion. What would happen if Colorado, Oregon or Washington were to vote for such a market alternative on Tuesday? None of those states is a very big drug market in itself. But if it were legal to grow pot in, say,
Washington, its not hard to imagine that a certain amount of it would illegally leak out into neighbouring states. Would Mexicos bandits find themselves undercut by El Crtel de Seattle? IMCO reckons they could be. It calculates that the cost of growing marijuana legally is about $880 per kilo. Adding on a decent mark-up, plus the taxes that would be applied, it puts the wholesale price of Washington marijuana at just over $2,000 per kilo. The cost of illegally transporting the drug adds about $500 per kilo for every thousand kilometres that the drug is hauled, it calculates, based on the fact that pot gets pricier the further you get from the Mexican border. So smuggling legal Washington dope to New York, for instance, would add about $1,900 to the cost of a kilo, giving a total wholesale price not much below $4,000. That would make it more expensive than imported Mexican pot. But home-grown marijuana is much better quality than the Mexican sort. The content of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the part that gives you the giggles, is between 10% and 18%, whereas in Mexican pot it is only about 4% to 6%. Once you adjust for quality, Washington pot would be about half the price of the Mexican stuff, even after it had made its expensive illegal journey to New York. IMCO reckons that home-grown

marijuana from Colorado, Oregon or Washington would be cheaper than the Mexican stuff virtually everywhere in the country, with the exception of a few border states where the Mexican variety would still come in a bit cheaper. As a result, it estimates that Mexicos traffickers would lose about $1.4 billion of their $2 billion revenues from marijuana. The effect on some groups would be severe: the
Sinaloa cartel would lose up to half its total income, IMCO reckons. Exports of other drugs, from cocaine to methamphetamine, would become less competitive, as the traffickers fixed costs (from torturing rivals to bribing American and Mexican border officials) would remain unchanged, even as marijuana revenues fell. Legalisation

could, in short, deal a blow to Mexicos traffickers of a magnitude that no current policy has got close to achieving. The stoned
and sober alike should bear that in mind when they cast their votes on Tuesday.

AT: Mexico Doesnt Do it

Prohibition will only fuel the cartels- only legalizing marijuana and leads other countries to follow suit Sarachan 12(Sydney Sarachan, PBS, November 19 2012, Legalizing marijuana,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/ask-the-experts/ask-the-experts-legalizingmarijuana/15474/,PS) Paul Armentano: U.S. drug policy drives international drug policy and not vice-versa. In fact, Mexican lawmakers are ready to pursue alternative approaches to drug prohibition. Former Mexican President Vincente Fox has
publicly called the global drug war an absolute failure and has called for replacing criminal prohibition with regulatory alternatives both in Mexico and in the United States. In 2009, Mexicos Congress approved legislation decriminalizing the possession of personal use of illicit substances, including cannabis. Mexicos ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, has said that legalizing the marijuana trade is a legitimate option for both the Mexican and U.S. governments. President Felipe Calderon has publically called for market alternatives to address the growing level drug prohibition-inspired violence in Mexico and along the U.S. southern border. Just this week, a Mexican lawmaker announced intentions to introduce legislation to legalize the production, sale and consumption of cannabis. Mexican officials understand that the U.S. demand for cannabis, combined with its illegality, is fueling violence and empowering criminal traffickers. Mexico today has a growing body count ( anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 dead citizens) to attest to this. Yet our own DEA administrator, Michelle Leonhart, has publicly described this bloodshed as a signpost of success. Hardly. It is a tragic yet predictable failure of U.S. drug policy. When

the U.S. finally begins to address the failure of this policy and embrace alternatives, much of the world, particularly Mexico, will no doubt follow suit. Neill Franklin: Bringing marijuana aboveground and out of the illegal market can only improve security in our communities both here in the U.S. and in Mexico. As long as marijuana is prohibited, 100% of its profits (and all the decisions about where, how and to whom it is sold) are controlled by gangs and drug cartels. It is clear that Mexican leaders have been waiting for the U.S. to move away from prohibition for some time now. More than 60,000 people have died
there over the past six years because drugs are sold only in the illegal, unregulated market. Outgoing President Felipe Calderon has talked about the need for market alternatives if a prohibition approach continues to be unsuccessful in reducing demand for drugs. Mexican

ambassador to the U.S. Arturo Sarukhan has said that those who are pushing for legalization understand the dynamics of the drug trade. Former President Vicente Fox has repeatedly said it is time for legalization, and incoming President Enrique Pena Nieto has said hes open to
considering legalization as a way forward. Now that two U.S. states have voted to legalize marijuana, expect to see more sitting officials talking about the need for policy change even more clearly and frequently. The U.S. cant credibly bully other countries into maintaining a prohibitionist approach while states within its own borders are recognizing the senselessness of this approach and embracing legalization. Mason Tvert: Marijuana

prohibition in the U.S. is steering profits from marijuana sales toward cartels and gangs instead of legitimate, tax-paying businesses. In doing so, it is propping up these criminal enterprises and subsidizing their other illegal activities, including human
trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, and the sale of other drugs. Much of the violence escalating on the Mexican border revolves around the actions of Mexican drug cartels who fight over profits from marijuana sales. Whether they are large-scale drug cartels or small-town street gangs, the vast supply and demand surrounding marijuana will ensure they have a constant stream of profits to subsidize other illegal activities. Regulating

marijuana like alcohol would eliminate this income source and, in turn, eliminate the violence and turf battles associated with the illegal marijuana market. Millions of Americans use marijuana. They should be able to do so without being made criminals and without supporting violent criminals.

AT: Mexico Cant Do It

Mexico would be able to run a marijuana industry Wilkinson 6-6(Tracy Wilkinson, LA Times, June 6 2013, Mexico's Vicente Fox says he would
grow marijuana if legalized, http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-mexicovicente-fox-marijuana-20130606,0,1969366.story,PS) Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, was one of the earliest and most prominent voices in favor of legalizing marijuana here. Now he says he would also become a grower. Fox, who is known for provocative statements,
argues that legalizing and regulating marijuana production would deprive violent drug traffickers of their profits. And then legitimate growers would naturally take over production, he says. I

am a farmer, Fox told reporters this week at his Fox Center in central Mexicos Guanajuato state. Once marijuana is legitimate and legal, I can do it. The millions of dollars that marijuana production generates should be going to business entrepreneurs and the Mexican tax base, the former president added, and not to the likes of Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel and one of the worlds top fugitive drug lords. Marijuana with adequate controls and with legalization can perfectly well be an operating, legal industry [in Mexico] that would take millions of dollars away from the criminals, said Fox, who was president from 2000 to 2006 for the conservative National Action Party. At
least three years ago, Fox became one of a number of former Latin American leaders to advocate some form of decriminalization of marijuana and possibly other drugs -- a position adamantly opposed by the U.S. government. His latest statements, which were carried in the Mexican media Thursday, came as the Organization of American States debated at its annual general assembly alternative approaches to a drug war that many member nations feel has become too violent with little progress. Several countries were advocating a shift in emphasis to public health measures rather than jailing and police action. The meeting in Antigua, Guatemala, winds up Thursday, but it was not clear there would be consensus on final recommendations regarding drug policies.

Cartels K2 Relations
War on drugs is the main source of US-Mexico relations Shoichet and Rodriguez 5-1(Catherine E. Shoichet and Cindy Y. Rodriguez, CNN News, May
1 2013, Key issues on Obama's Mexico trip: Trade, immigration and drug war, http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/01/world/americas/mexico-obama-visit,PS) 3. Security and the drug war The situation: The battle against drug cartels has played a dominant role in U.S.-Mexican relations in recent years. Officials on both sides of the border have said that drugs traveling north from
Mexico to consumers in the United States and weapons traveling south from the United States to cartels in Mexico are an increasingly deadly combination. High-profile cartel takedowns were a hallmark of former President Felipe Calderon's tenure.

Pea Nieto has vowed to take a different approach, focusing more on education problems and social inequality that he says fuel drug violence. The details of his policies are still coming into focus, and analysts say his government has deliberately tried to shift drug violence out of the spotlight. Critics have expressed concerns that Pea
Nieto's government will turn a blind eye to cartels or negotiate with them -- something he repeatedly denied on the campaign trail last year. On Tuesday -- two days before Obama's arrival -- his government arrested the father-in-law of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel and one of the country's most-wanted drug lords. While

both Obama and Pea Nieto have said they're committed to working together on security issues, it's unclear whether the U.S. role will change as Mexico's government shifts its strategy.

Mexicans are tired of US anti-drugs policies- undermines relations UPenn 12(Wharton University, July 11 2012, Who Is Enrique Pea Nieto, and How Will He
Govern Mexico?, http://www.wharton.universia.net/index.cfm?fa=viewfeature&id=2232&language=english,PS)
Finally, the goal should be to achieve permanent economic growth that manages to alleviate a problem that Mexico shares with other countries of Latin America: poverty and social inequality. Forty-two percent of Mexicos population lives in poverty, and the countrys wealth is concentrated in just 10% of its population. In this sense, Pea Nieto has also turned toward Brazil in search of solutions. He has talked with that countrys officials about its successes, with the goal of emulating the significant movement of its population into the middle class in recent years. Another area that Pea

Nieto will focus on is the problem of violence and insecurity. In 2006 President Felipe Caldern declared war on the drug trafficking cartels, and the ensuing conflict has resulted in prolonged violence. The effort has left 55,000 people
dead, and thousands of people have disappeared or have been uprooted from their homes. Malamud notes that the subject of violence has strong social connotations. Mexican

society is sick and tired of this, and it needs answers, but there are obviously no short cuts or easy solutions to a subject this complicated and controversial. Many Mexicans wonder if this war is useless because no one is winning and so many people are dying. Yet Garland notes that, based on the declarations made by Pea Nieto, it seems that he is going to continue the policy *of Caldern+. Recently, Pea Nieto declared that the war against crime is going to continue with a new strategy to reduce the violence and to protect, above all, the lives of Mexicans. It must be made very clear that there will be no agreement or truce with organized crime. Experts note that the United States is going to play a key role in this war. Without the U.S., Mexican authorities have a much more limited scope of action, especially taking into account that the main market for the drugs that the Mexican cartels manage
is in the United States, and a large part of the arms that they provide also come from the U.S. For many cartels, the U.S. also functions as an area to which they can retreat when pressured by attacks from the Mexican military. Malamud notes, The

U.S. has to have a much more active attitude when it comes to fighting drug trafficking. According to Nichols, Mexico desperately needs the U.S. to rationalize its drug policy, because the appetite for Mexican drugs is destroying Mexico. The criminalization of drugs patently hasnt worked, says Nichols, adding that while the U.S. has coordinated policy with countries like Colombia and Peru, it has yet to do
the same with Mexico. Nichols suggests that Pea Nietos first two priorities should be to work with the U.S. on a clear drug policy, and to inculcate a culture in which the entire country is united in standing up to the violence.

US failed coordination with Calderon on the drug war means that Nieto wants to monitor what the two countries cooperate on more closely- solving the war would open up more opportunities for cooperation Shirk 5-4(David Shirk, NPR, Host Scott Simon speaking with David Shirk, associate professor of
political science at the University of San Diego and recently finished his tenure as director of the Trans-Border Institute at USD; he is also the author of The Drug War in Mexico: Confronting a Shared Threat, May 4 2013,U.S.-Mexico Relations Complicated, Conditioned By Drug War, http://www.npr.org/2013/05/04/181053775/u-s-mexico-relations-complicated-conditioned-bydrug-war,PS)
SIMON: And has U.S. involvement been helpful? SHIRK: That's a great question. I think it has been, depending on what you consider to be success. We

have not seen violence go down. We have not necessarily seen the flow of drugs diminish. We have not seen necessarily an overall reduction in corruption in Mexico. But you can
look at tactical successes. The dismantling of major organized crime groups, the target of specific organized crime figures has been accomplished over the last several years, thanks to this very high level of collaboration. SIMON: So, why would President Enrique Pena Nieto be eager to reduce that cooperation? SHIRK: Well, I'm not sure that the idea is necessarily to reduce collaboration so much as to reshape the dynamics of collaboration. I think that's probably how the Pena Nieto administration would portray this. For one thing, the

Pena Nieto administration is trying to move away from the security policies that were employed by the Calderon administration. So, these efforts to go after high-level targets and to dismantle
drug-trafficking organizations is diminishing as a priority of the Mexican government. And what they have emphasized instead is promoting citizen security. I think that the Pena Nieto administration thinks

that you had a real problem with the lack of coordination under the Calderon administration. And their idea, in the Pena Nieto government, is to try to tighten up and centralized the mechanisms of coordination and cooperation with the United States. And I think that's a deliberate attempt to vet and control whatever types of cooperation we're going to see between the U.S. and Mexican government. SIMON: Well, that raises an issue that I think you've even touched on in some of your writings. Has this been, in
many ways, a drug war that's been an American war conducted over the border? SHIRK: I think that there are a lot of people who would agree with that idea. And in some ways, you can see that the drug war, as it's played out over the last 34 years, in particular as a U.S. proxy war. That said, over the last six years, working with Mexico, U.S. officials have consistently tried to let Mexico set the agenda. U.S. officials that I spoke to, repeatedly - and Mexican officials - repeatedly expressed the understanding that Mexico and the United States were working together because they had a shared responsibility to deal with the problem of drug trafficking and organized crime. But I think U.S. officials are really waiting to see whether they will be able to cooperate with the Pena Nieto administration and in what areas. Because there is some sense that the trust and collaboration that was built up over the last six years is at least on hold, if not in recession. SIMON: It seems to me - I've spoken with Mexicans, who, to deal in shorthand, are sick of the drug wars and sick of the cartels and blame them for thousands of deaths, and yet at the same time, in some ways, they blame Americans for being the market for those drugs. SHIRK: Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, first of all, I think many Mexicans are tired of having their country portrayed as a lawless, violent and corrupt place. That said, I also think that, for many Mexicans, this

incredible fight that they've made over the last six years to try to take on organized crime has not yielded major gains in stopping the flow of drugs in even necessarily breaking down some of the major cartels that operate in Mexico. So, there is a sense that they've made all of this effort and it's primarily
to prevent U.S. drug consumers in engaging in an illicit market activity. I think some Mexicans may simply say this is not worth the effort. This is not our fight. Let's let the drug traffickers get back to business as usual and we can get on with our lives.

Security is still the biggest issue for bilaterial relations Kovac 12(Ivan Kovac, PhD. in International Relations at the Faculty of Political Science and
International Relations of Matej Bel University in Bansk Bystrica, Center for European and North Atlantic Affairs, 2012, Drug Cartel War as the Major Security Challenge in the US-Mexican Relations, http://cenaa.org/analysis/drug-cartel-war-as-the-major-security-challenge-in-the-usmexican-relations/,PS) US and Mexico have very close bilateral relations. Economic and demographic interconnection and the density of cross-border interaction have In previous years, security has become the leading topic of mutual interaction. Due to increasing drug-cartel violence, the security situation in Mexico has

shaped mutual relations for a long time.

significantly deteriorated which now poses the major security threat for both countries . The
contribution focuses on analyzing the security implications of the drug cartel war for US-Mexican relations. The goal is to examine the recent development and focus on bilateral US-Mexican security cooperation in this regard. I look at the cooperation under Mrida Initiative and aims to identify major areas but also limits of interaction. Finally, the analysis aspires to provide a comprehensive outline of future prospects arising from the recent development and the results of presidential elections held in both countries in 2012.

Solves Mexican Econ

Long term growth is difficult when the biggest market is illegal Boesler and Lutz 12(Matthew Boesler and Ashley Lutz, Business Insider, July 12 2012, 32
Reasons Why We Need To End The War On Drugs, http://www.businessinsider.com/32-reasonswhy-we-need-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-2012-7?op=1,PS) It is difficult to to have a functioning democratic system when drug cartels have the means to buy protection, political support, or votes at every level of government and society. The economic distortions caused by the illegal drug trade stunt long term growth and development As profits grow in the unregulated, black market for illegal drugs, it attracts more labor and capital investment, drawing it away from legitimate, regulated, and taxable sectors of the economy. On the flip side, the businesses that make up the legitimate economic activity in the same country have to shoulder more of the tax and regulatory burden. These macroeconomic distortions severely hamper the competitiveness of an economy.

Marijuana legalization would allow for a marijuana industry in Mexico and reduced war costs Shoichet 5-31(Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN, May 31 2013, Former Mexican president pushing
for pot legalization, http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/30/us/washington-marijuana-fox,PS) (CNN) -- A former Mexican president who once led a military crackdown on drug cartels now has a new pitch: creating a legal system to produce, distribute and tax marijuana. Vicente Fox is joining
a group of entrepreneurs in Seattle this week to discuss that possibility, six months after voters in Washington state approved a ballot measure allowing recreational marijuana use. As president, Fox launched Operation Safe Mexico, which sent soldiers and federal police to eight cities across the country in 2005 as drug cartels expanded their reach. But

since leaving office in 2006, he's taken a significantly softer stance. For years, he's pushed for drug legalization. Using military force to fight cartels doesn't work, he argues, but legalization would. "With this we will avoid the violence," Fox told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday. "We will control the criminals and reduce their income, and at the same time it would become a transparent, accountable business in the hands of businessmen." Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, Fox praised Washington state's efforts to legalize marijuana and "change the paradigm." "In Mexico we welcome this initiative," he said, "because the cost of the war in the case of Mexico is becoming unbearable, too high for Mexico, Latin America and the rest of the world." Legalization measures, he argued, ultimately topple the foundations of organized crime. "We must
get out of this trap, and here is the opportunity,' Fox said. "Now this group here is moving accordingly from words into plans, and from plans into action, and from action into the arena. To play the real game this group must understand the need to make good, safe, and legal use of these new laws, for the benefit of the people and the common good." As Fox spoke, Jamen Shively nodded in agreement. The former Microsoft executive is heading up a new business venture that aims to create the first national brand of retail cannabis in the United States. Fox told CNN he was not involved in Shively's venture, but sat beside him because he supports the push to move to put the drug trade in the hands of businessmen, not criminals. "By

making cannabis illegal, we have instead turned it into a tool for violence, exploited by criminals and organized crime, spanning many countries," Shively said. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a unique moment in history. The Berlin Wall of the
prohibition of cannabis is weak, and it is crumbling as we speak. And just as happened in Berlin in 1989, the old guards who used to protect the wall of cannabis prohibition are laying down their weapons and walking away."

Solves US Econ
CP solves the US economy Erb 12(Kelly Phillips Erb, JD and LL.M Taxation, Forbes, Stirring the Pot: Could Legalizing
Marijuana Save the Economy?, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2012/04/20/stirring-the-pot-could-legalizingmarijuana-save-the-economy/2/,PS)
Whats the basis for the crackdown? States are getting cheeky, it seems. And apparently, the feds dont care for that very much. Under federal law, marijuana is still classed as a Schedule I drug which means that it is not legal in any form, including for medical purposes. Despite popular belief, it cannot actually be prescribed (to get it in most states where its legal, you need a note, not a prescription, from a doctor). That hasnt stopped states moving to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. Sixteen states and D.C. have done so: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Twelve more have similar legislation pending: Alabama, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. States

that have moved to legalize marijuana for medical reasons have done so for quite logical reasons: legalizing the drug (like nicotine and alcohol) means that it can be regulated. Regulations mean control. And control is directly linked to the almighty dollar. The drug industry both legal and illegal is quite a lucrative market. Keeping it illegal, the argument goes, means that the most benefit flows to illegitimate members of society: dealers and cartels. On the other hand, taxpayers and government bear the burden of chasing those dragons as incarcerations for what are basically petty drug crimes continue to rise: $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence. Its estimated that the legalization of marijuana (not just for medical purposes) could take as much as $10 billion away from the cartels and dealers. And thats not limited to the Colombian or Mexican drug trades. Domestically grown marijuana is thought to be the second most profitable cash crop in the United States: only corn is considered to be more lucrative. To think about the kind of impact that could have on our economy, you need only look to the U.S. beverage alcohol industry. Making alcohol legal again has paid off. Just last year, the industry generated $91 billion in wages and over 3.9 million jobs for U.S. workers. In 2008, alcohol contributed
over $40 billion to state and local revenues; nearly half of that came from corporate, personal income, property and other taxes.

State and local governments arent stupid. They see those numbers as positives. Take San Jose, for example. According to the Sacramento Bee, taxing legal medical marijuana collectives brought the city $290,000 in the first month the tax was imposed. Annualized, thats nearly $3.5 million. At the same time, decriminalizing the use of marijuana could reduce the amount of resources that states and municipalities are now forced to spend on enforcement and incarcerations.

AT: Perm only some states

Only legalizing marijuana in certain states doesnt solve Wyatt 12(E. Eduardo Castillokristen Wyatt, Bloomberg Business News, November 01 2013,
Mexico study: US legalization cuts cartel profits, http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-1101/mexico-study-us-legalization-cuts-cartel-profits,PS) "If I were a cartel member and I knew Colorado and Washington had it legal, I'd get a couple front people and do my business out of those states. Why would I not?" said Thomas J. Gorman, head of the
Rocky Mountain High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a government agency that coordinates anti-drug efforts by local, state and federal agencies in four Western states. The

Mexican government has said that drug legalization in some U.S. states could make it harder to prosecute growers and dealers in Mexico, because they would be producing a product potentially destined for a place where it is legal.

AT: Drug War Good

The War on Drugs isnt practical A. The economy Boesler and Lutz 12(Matthew Boesler and Ashley Lutz, Business Insider, July 12 2012, 32
Reasons Why We Need To End The War On Drugs, http://www.businessinsider.com/32-reasonswhy-we-need-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-2012-7?op=1,PS)
The global war on drugs began in 1961, when the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was established in order to create a "drug-free world." The

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime puts out an annual "World Drug Report" wherein they examine trends in drug use and production. However, the report never cares to assess the costs created by the war on drugs itself, which are the real problem to begin with. A new organization, Count the Costs, has decided it's time for an assessment. To this end, they have compiled a comprehensive report
detailing the death and destruction the war on drugs has directly caused around the world over the past 50 years. Unfortunately, as Count the Costs points out, the saddest effect of the war on drugs is that "the

centrality of criminalizing users means that in reality a war on drugs is to a significant degree, a war on drug users a war on people." The 'war on drugs' is insanely expensive In the past 40 years, The US has spent more than $1 trillion enforcing drug laws. Annually, the US spends at least $15 billion a year on drug law enforcement. Globally, over $100 billion is spent fighting the war on drugs every single year. All that money is in practice a complete and total waste Since the global war on drugs began, drug use has expanded steadily, the exact opposite outcome the war is meant to effect. There have been nearly no official cost benefit analyses of the war on drugs, leaving the door wide open for all kinds of unexpected harm caused and little accountability. That wasted money could be spent on programs that actually matter Governments around the world are enduring brutal austerity measures to balance budgets in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. Taxpayer money squandered on drug enforcement is diverted from other social spending measures that actually benefit citizens. Mass imprisonment of drug users sacrifices economic productivity Forty years ago, 38,000 people were imprisoned in the US for drug-related offenses. Today, that
number stands at over 500,000, over 13 times the amount 40 years. The Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates resulting productivity losses of around $40 billion a year. And get this: the U.S. has more people in prison for drug-related crimes than the entire EU has prisoners. This is despite the fact that the population of the U.S. is 40 percent smaller than that of the EU.

B. Criminal rates are higher than ever Boesler and Lutz 12(Matthew Boesler and Ashley Lutz, Business Insider, July 12 2012, 32
Reasons Why We Need To End The War On Drugs, http://www.businessinsider.com/32-reasonswhy-we-need-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-2012-7?op=1,PS) Becoming a criminal has never been more profitable This is basic supply and demand. Not only do criminals get paid to take on more risk, but the completely unregulated playing field allows for insane price markups. The Alternative World Drug Report illustrates how ridiculous this can get: So while there is a 413% mark-up from farm gate to consumer in the price of a legal drug, coffee, the percentage price mark-up for an illegal drug such as heroin can run into multiple thousands. Expensive drugs cause more people to commit crimes in order to fund their habits For example, cigarette smokers typically don't have to commit felonies just to fund their lifestyles. However, due to insane mark-ups of unsafe, unregulated, and therefore highly addicting products, many users of illegal drugs often do. A comparison of illegal drug users with medicinal users of the same drugs shows dramatic decreases in the level of crime being committed to fund drug addictions. The costs to the public health system
of unsafe, unregulated drugs are exorbitant There is simply no way to vouch for the safety of products in a completely unregulated market like that for illegal drugs. The Alternative World Drug Report puts it

Drugs bought through criminal networks are often cut with contaminants; dealers sell more potent and risky products; and high-risk behaviors such as injecting and needle sharing in unsupervised and unhygienic environments are commonplace. The resulting increases in hospital visits and emergency room
this way: admissions for infections, overdose, and poisonings, combined with increased treatment requirement for HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and tuberculosis, can place a substantial additional burden on already squeezed healthcare budgets.

C. Dutch disease Boesler and Lutz 12(Matthew Boesler and Ashley Lutz, Business Insider, July 12 2012, 32
Reasons Why We Need To End The War On Drugs, http://www.businessinsider.com/32-reasonswhy-we-need-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-2012-7?op=1,PS) The 'war on drugs' distorts entire economies when the drug trade is bigger than anything else It's called "Dutch disease." It's when so much drug money flows in to the economy that it causes the currency to appreciate, which in turn decreases exports and makes the economy less competitive. Many low-income countries where drug cartels thrive are so small to begin with that this can be a serious problem. It has serious implications for policymakers, who therefore don't have sufficient data on important economic issues to
make informed policy decisions.

D. Terrorism Boesler and Lutz 12(Matthew Boesler and Ashley Lutz, Business Insider, July 12 2012, 32
Reasons Why We Need To End The War On Drugs, http://www.businessinsider.com/32-reasonswhy-we-need-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-2012-7?op=1,PS)
The violence perpetrated by both criminals and governments to control the illegal drug trade is devastating Cartels in major trafficking countries actively employ private armies that often have more powerful arsenals than law enforcement. Insurgent

and terrorist groups take advantage of the insane profits of the illegal drug trade to raise money to fund acts of mass violence. In the unregulated, illegal drug trade, cartels use violence as a major tactic to disrupt competitors and increase market share.

Aff Answers
Perm solves best- cutting off income from marijuana isnt enough Grillo 12(Ioan Grillo, Author of El Narco: Inside Mexicos Criminal Insurgency, The New York
Times, November 1 2012, Hit Mexicos Cartels With Legalization, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/opinion/hit-mexicos-cartels-with-legalization.html, PS) Again, nobody knows exactly how much the whole Mexico-U.S. marijuana trade is worth, with estimates ranging from $2 billion to $20 billion annually. But even if you believe the lowest numbers, legal marijuana would take billions of dollars a year away from organized crime. This
would inflict more financial damage than soldiers or drug agents have managed in years and substantially weaken cartels. It is also argued that Mexican gangsters have expanded to a portfolio of crimes that includes kidnapping, extortion, human smuggling and theft from oil pipelines. This is a terrifying truth. But this does not take away from the fact that the marijuana

trade provides the crime groups with major resources. That they are committing crimes such as kidnapping, which have a horrific effect on innocent people, makes cutting off their financing all the more urgent. The cartels will not disappear overnight. U.S. agents and the Mexican police need to continue battling hit squads that wield rocket-propelled grenades and belt-driven machine guns. Killers who hack off heads still have to be locked away. Mexico needs to clean up corruption among the police and build a valid justice system. And young men in the barrios have to be given a better option than signing up as killers. All these tasks will be easier if the flow of money to the cartels is dramatically slowed down. Do we really want to hand them another trillion dollars over the next three decades? It is always hard to deal with these
global issues in a world where all politics is local. Mexico was not even featured in the presidential debate on foreign policy, despite that fact that the United States has supported Calderns war on drugs with more than $1.3 billion worth of hardware, including Black Hawk helicopters, and that cartels have attacked and killed U.S. agents.

CP doesnt solve- marijuana only a small portion of cartel profit Kilmer 5-23(Beau Kilmer, co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center and co-author
of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know. He is also on the team helping the Washington State Liquor Control Board estimate the size of Washingtons marijuana market, The NY Times, Legalization in the U.S. and Crime in Mexico, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/22/how-can-marijuana-be-sold-safely/whymarijuana-legalization-wouldnt-end-drug-crime,PS)
Much of the marijuana consumed in the U.S. comes from Mexico. Its impossible to know exactly, but my colleagues and I put the range at 40 to 67 percent for 2008. Our research also suggests that legalizing commercial marijuana production at the national level could drive out most of the marijuana imported from Mexico. With marijuana legalization at the state level, imports from Mexico would depend on several factors, like how taxes influenced the market price, whether legally sold marijuana were illegally diverted to other states, and the severity of the federal response. We dont expect the passage of legalization in a few states to significantly affect demand for Mexican marijuana. But what would happen to Mexican drug trafficking organizations if many states legalized marijuana or if there were national legalization? These

drug trafficking organizations do more than export drugs to the United States. Indeed, they sell drugs within Mexico and generate revenue from extortion, kidnapping and theft. We estimated that exporting drugs to the U.S. earned these organizations $6 billion to
$8 billion in 2008, of which 15 to 26 percent came from marijuana (the rest was from cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine).

While marijuanas share of drug export revenue has most likely grown in the past five years, it is still nowhere near the mythical 60 percent figure sometimes cited. Smuggling marijuana into the U.S. is not the main revenue source for most of these organizations. Driving Mexican marijuana out of the U.S. would probably reduce the traffickers export revenue by a few billion dollars a year. But would reducing that revenue lead to a corresponding decrease in trafficker violence? Much depends on which organizations are affected, whether these groups fight over the shrinking
market, and the level of violence associated with whatever activities replace marijuana smuggling in their portfolios.

Legalization would not stamp out the drug trade- drug cartels no longer operation like they did before Dickinson 11(Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy News, June 22 2011, Legalizing Drugs Won't
Stop Mexico's Brutal Cartels,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/22/legalizing_drugs_wont_stop_mexicos_bruta l_cartels,PS)
In other words, the war on drugs may be taking its toll on the narcotics trade, but it hasn't done anything to end the violence -- a stubborn fact that runs counter to an emerging consensus about the drug war. Across Latin America, intellectuals, scholars, and even policymakers are increasingly arguing that there is just one thing that can bring an end to the narco-troubles: the decriminalization of the drug trade in the United States. Legalize and regulate use, proponents argue, and prices would drop and the illicit trade would disappear overnight. Cartels would be starved of their piece of the global illicit drug pie, which the UNODC has estimated at some $320 billion per year. But

would legalization really work? With each day that passes, it looks like it wouldn't be enough , for one overarching reason: The cartels are becoming less like traffickers and more like mafias. Their currency is no longer just cocaine, methamphetamines, or heroin, though they earn revenue from
each of these products. As they have grown in size and ambition, like so many big multinational corporations, they have diversified.

The cartels are now active in all types of illicit markets, not just drugs. "Mexico is experiencing a change with the emergence of criminal organizations that, rather than being product-oriented -- drug trafficking -- are territorial based," says Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the UNODC
office in Mexico City. They now specialize in running protection rackets of all kinds, he says, which might explain why the violence has gotten so bad: Mafias

enforce their territorial control by force, killing anyone who resists or

gets in the way. "Before, we had organized crime, but operating strictly in narcotrafficking," adds Eduardo Guerrero
Gutirrez, a consultant and former advisor to the Mexican presidency. "Now we have a type of mafia violence ... and they are extorting from the people at levels that are incredibly high -- from the rich, from businesses." For this reason, Mazzitelli says,

legalization would have "little effect."

At best legalizing marijuana will only deal a short term blow to Mexican drug cartels Longmire 11(Sylvia Longmire, a former officer and investigative special agent in the Air Force,
is the author of the forthcoming book Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexicos Drug Wars, The New York Times, June 18 2011, Legalization Wont Kill the Cartels, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opinion/19longmire.html?_r=0,PS) FOR a growing number of American policy makers, politicians and activists, the best answer to the spiraling violence in Mexico is to legalize the marijuana that, they argue, fuels the countrys vicious cartels and smugglers. After all, according to official estimates, marijuana constitutes 60 percent of cartels drug profits. Legalization would
move that trade into the open market, driving down the price and undermining the cartels power and influence. Unfortunately, its not that easy. Marijuana legalization has many merits, but

it would do little to hinder the long-term economics of the cartels and the violent toll they take on Mexican society. For one thing, if marijuana makes up 60 percent of the cartels profits, that still leaves another 40 percent, which includes the sale of methamphetamine, cocaine, and brown-powder and black-tar heroin. If marijuana were legalized, the cartels would still make huge profits from the sale of these other drugs. Plus, theres no reason the cartels couldnt enter the legal market for the sale of marijuana, as organized crime groups did in the
United States after the repeal of Prohibition.

No solvency- legalizing marijuana wont affect cartels Hamilton 12(Keegan Hamilton, The Atlantic, December 3 2012, Why Legalizing Pot Won't
Curb the Drug War, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/why-legalizingpot-wont-curb-the-drug-war/265729/,PS)
The bust netted an impressive haul, including 20 pounds of heroin, 30 pounds of methamphetamine, $190,000 in cash, and 31 guns, including 10 assault rifles. One illicit substance was notably absent from the evidence locker: marijuana. The

notion that legalizing marijuana will cripple Mexico's brutal drug cartels has gained steam in recent years,
and finally boiled over last month when Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Adults 21 and over in both states will be allowed to possess up to an ounce of processed pot, reversing a prohibition policy that stood for the better part of a century. It's unclear whether the federal government will tolerate the repeal, but if

legal pot remains the law of the land, it is widely assumed that Mexican drug cartels will be out several billion dollars in annual revenue. But talk to entrepreneurs familiar with the existing marijuana industry in Washington and Colorado -- and to law enforcement agents who deal with gang crime -- and there is reason for skepticism. Not only have the

cartels diversified their portfolios (to borrow language applied to other multinational, multibillion dollar operations); the Mexican suppliers have already been edged out of the local markets in the two new green states. Prior to the election, the Mexican Center for Competitiveness, a respected think tank based in Mexico City, issued a
report estimating that legalization in Washington alone could cut the cartels' annual marijuana profits up to $1.37 billion by eliminating the black market for pot. Legalization proponents (and numerous media outlets, including The Atlantic) seized on the figure, trumpeting about the opportunity to hit organized crime in the pocketbook as yet another reason to end America's disastrous war on drugs. The campaign in Washington featured endorsements by the FBI's former field division chief in Seattle, as well as former U.S. Attorney John McKay, a George W. Bush-appointee who had become an outspoken advocate of drug law reform. Pitching the measure, McKay often invoked beheadings in Mexico and emphasized the negative impact that legal weed might have on the vicious narcos. "I enforced our marijuana laws," McKay said in a campaign ad. "I've come to believe they don't work. Filling our courts and jails has failed to reduce marijuana use. And drug cartels are pocketing all the profits. It's time for a new approach." Both Colorado and Washington, however, have booming medical marijuana industries that aid legitimate pain patients in need of extremely potent hybrid strains and also indirectly supply an untold number of connoisseur stoners. Mexican marijuana, typically grown outdoors on large plantations, contains little more than 5 percent THC -- the compound responsible for marijuana highs -compared to the 15 percent or more found on the top shelf of a U.S. dispensary. Josh Berman, cofounder of the 4Evergreen Group, an organization that bills itself as Washington's "premier medical cannabis patient network," says the shrink-wrapped Mexican schwag is looked upon with scorn. "It's such a flooded market they can't sell that Mexican brick weed here," Berman said. "We have more weed being grown here than anywhere else in the world, probably by three-fold. Every gangster I know is already in the soup line because of medical cannabis." Mexican drug traffickers are undoubtedly active in Washington and Colorado. The latest National Gang Threat Assessment published by the FBI says the Sinaloa Cartel, for instance, has ties to various Sureo factions and the Mara Salvatrucha, street gangs with an established presence in both states. The FBI writes that these groups that "traditionally served as the primary organized retail or mid-level distributor of drugs in most major U.S. cities are now purchasing drugs directly from the cartels, thereby eliminating the mid-level wholesale dealer." Joe Gagliardi, a gang-unit detective in Seattle's county sheriff's office, says product from local growhouses has largely replaced the once-coveted "BC Bud" imported from neighboring Canada. Gangs, he says, will sometimes trade Washington pot to get discounts on meth shipments that originate in Mexican labs. The detective foresees gangsters buying out weed stores' inventory and selling it in other states, or perhaps using the black market to undercut the heavily regulated legal one, which levies a 25-percent tax at each step of the way from grower to smoker. (The duty adds an estimated $500 million to Washington state coffers every year.) "I

just don't see the legislation of marijuana causing any problems for the criminals," Gagliardi said. "The gangs are still going to grow marijuana and they're still going to sell marijuana, only now it will be legal for them to walk around with an ounce supply individually packaged and not have any repercussions."

Marijuana decreases the quality of life for users Barger 12(Allan Barger, Recovery Today, Research Analyst at Prevention Research Institute
who reviews peer-re- viewed research on drugs, brain and behavior and trains profes- sionals working with drug clients. Barger is a member of the Nation- al Association of Social Workers, the Research Society on Alcohol- ism and the New York Academy of Sciences, Legalization is Clear, Simple and Wrong, http://www.recoverytoday.net/articles/478-legalization-is-clearsimple-and-wrong,PS)
The journalist H.L. Mencken once observed, For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. Several clear, simple arguments for legalizing marijuana have gained traction with the public. Marijuana proponents assert it is less harmful than alcohol and, since alcohol is legal, it is hypocritical to market alcohol while marijuana remains illegal. They

argue marijuana is already widely available, so legalization will have no impact on use or problems. Moreover, they predict legalization will unburden enforcement, court and penal systems while creating new tax revenues, providing a productive fix for the budget woes faced in many states. This argument for legalization is attractive but is legalization the right answer? As one who has spent
the past 15 years following the published cannabis research, I am dubious. Half of winning a debate is getting to frame the context. Those advocating marijuana legalization frame it as a fairness issue by comparing marijuana to alcohol. This can be stated as, You drink your glass of wine, why cant I smoke my weed? This is a false analogy equating alcohol, in any amount, to using in marijuana but the two are not equivalent. Most adults are not impaired on a standard drink consumed in an hour with a meal,1,2 This type of drinking can be readily observed in many restaurants. The majority of drinkers in the United States consume alcohol in small quantities for most of their adult life with negligible negative effects.3 A more accurate analogy compares marijuana use to drinking for a high. A

person may have a cold beer after mowing the lawn to enjoy the taste and cool off with no intention to get even tipsy; the purpose of using marijuana is to get buzzed or high. There is no other reason to use it. Occasions of use are actually bouts of impairment. This distinguishes it from typical
alcohol use and from a public health perspective is problematic. To frame the debate as marijuana versus alcohol ignores the actual question that must be asked: Is marijuana harmful to those using it? Legalization

proponents argue marijuana

causes fewer problems than alcohol but this is partly because far fewer people use it. The latest
figures from SAMHSAs National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) show 4.6 million marijuana users were daily or near daily users, using 300 or more days in the past year, while those binge drinking alcohol at least once in just the past 30 days is a rate twelve times higher at 58.6 million people.4 Proponents note marijuana use has not greatly increased in states with medical marijuana laws but overt legalization communicates social approval of casual use. Many

individuals wont break the law to use a substance or lie to a physician to get a prescription so current availability is not a good proxy measure of what happens with increased social acceptance. With legalization, use rates are likely to shoot up,
especially in our advertising-driven society where billions in corporate profits can be made by promoting its use. This is supported in a study of California legalization effects done by the Rand Drug Policy Research Center in 2010. Their studies suggest use rates would likely increase by 25% among adults with more new initiates, more regular users and people using for longer periods of time.5,6 With this rise in use comes increased financial and human costs. They would not speculate on what might happen among youth consumption except to say it would likely rise. No one aware of alcohols links to high-speed driving, fights, assaults and suicide, believes it is harmless; marijuanas effects are not so dramatic but marijuana is not benign. Comparing it to alcohol masks marijuana-specific problems. Marijuana users report it helps them to focus attention but this is really a loss of ability to rapidly shift attention among multiple things. This diminished ability to shift attention is a problem when driving. Research finds those

acutely under cannabis influence lose capacity to rapidly attend to the multiple factors required in driving, can impair perception and slow response times.7,8
Theseeffectsimpairdrivingandcreate an increased risk for both crashes and fatalities.9,10 Its lingering effects include memory problems, impaired executive brain functions of problem- solving, prioritizing, planning and persistence to task completion and inflexible thinking, with persistence in erroneous problem-solving.11,12 Longitudinal studies found compared

to non-users, marijuana users have poorer life outcomes including an increased probability of using other illicit drugs, being depressed, spending more time unemployed, with lower income and more likely to be single or divorced. With or without pre-existing psychopathology, the most powerful predictor of cannabis dependence at age 21 is the quantity and frequency of use at age 18.13-16 Long-term heavy marijuana users show reduced brain hippocampus and amygdala volume with increased sub threshold psychotic symptoms. These can include flat emotional affect, delusions, anhedonia, being more asocial or experiencing amotivation.
Heavy users also exhibit a decreased capacity for verbal learning and more memory impairment. Cannabis also appears to act as an environmental risk factor for triggering schizophrenia in genetically predisposed individuals. 17-19 Legalization would likely increase these public health burdens due to increased use. While legalization might decrease some social costs, particularly in the legal system, it is likely to increase other costs. Those favoring legalization often point out alcohol prohibition caused the rise of organized crime but fail to note organized crime did not vanish when prohibition ended. It simply moved to other businesses. We may see reduced costs in police, court and detention systems for prosecuting mostly misdemeanor possession charges, and yes, taxes could create new revenue. However, as noted from studies already cited, these benefits are likely to be significantly offset by increased regulatory bureaucracy, black market sales, increased healthcare costs, more demand for treatment of cannabis dependence and greater losses in economic productivity. We

are also likely to see some enforcement and court costs increase with more impaired driving and more marijuana- related traffic fatalities.20 The latter is
especially costly because not only does it incur the emotional loss to family and friends, it also robs society of all of the productive years of the individual who dies. These are frequently young adults, so the number of lost years can be enormous. Marijuana carries its own risks as a significant public health and public safety issue. To argue it does less harm than something else is a faint reason to legalize it. Our two legal substances alcohol and tobacco already incur more costs than they generate public revenue. Choosing to add another substance to that list, one that serves no function but getting high, invites still more social costs. Like its predecessors, legal marijuana is unlikely to pay its bills and monetary gains will not undo the health, cognitive and relationship problems it incurs. Our current problem is not with marijuana laws but with marijuana use. Increased public awareness of the risks more recently clarified in the research along with tailored prevention and treatment efforts to reduce use are likely to be more cost-effective. Since it would further damage public health, burden healthcare and treatment systems with preventable problems and undermine individual well-being, legalization

is an answer that is clear, simple and

wrong.

Idea: End the Cartels Addenum

Text: The United States federal government should - Substantially increase drug treatment, prevention, and enforcement measures. - Label the Mexican drug cartels as international terrorist organizations - Substantially increase support for the Merida Initiative

CP solves drug cartels and leads to US-Mexico relations Dean et al 12(Dean et al, Final Report of the Institute of Politics, Harvard Institute of Politics,
THE WAR ON MEXICAN CARTELS OPTIONS FOR U.S. AND MEXICAN POLICY-MAKERS, pg 3234, http://www.iop.harvard.edu/sites/default/files_new/research-policypapers/TheWarOnMexicanCartels.pdf,PS)
Despite current efforts by the United States to assist with the Mexican Drug War, the violence is increasing and the cartels are gaining ground. The

United States must reassert its efforts in order to roll back the influence of the cartels and end their reign. We advise a two front approach to combatting the cartels: reducing the lar ge demand for drugs in the U.S., and collaborate with the Mexican government to target the cartels in Mexico. In order to address the large demand of drugs in the United States, which fuels much of the sale of drugs from Mexico, domestic policy should conti nue to include treatment, prevention, and enforcement measures. Studies have shown that treatment is cost-effective and can be cost- reducing, especially when targeted to specific and at -risk populations, because
it can reduce individual drug use and reduce drug-related risks from crime, overdose, and HIV infection. These measures, notably the reduction in crime, increa se the social good and support the implementation of treatment programs aimed at drug u sers, particularly drug-related offenders. However, while treatment greatly reduces drug use in drug users, treatment

alone is not significantly effective in reducing the number of drug users in the U.S. 91 Broad prevention programs
that target common r isk factors associated with unhealthy and antisocial behaviors (which may lead youth to engage in substance abuse) have been shown to reduce drug initiation and also have positive effects on youth health and wellbeing. Such prevention programs can have great success when enacte d in school settings because of the benefits they may bring to students, as long as

Efforts should also be put into studying secondary and tertiary prevention programs and their effectiveness. Enforcement programs are a necessary component of drug use reduction, but the
qualit y is ascertained. 92 scope of and effectiveness of these programs must be scrutiniz ed and researched. A 2007 study has shown that the effectiveness of enforcement techniques depends greatly on the stage of the drug epidemic and that enforcement is most fruitfu l (in use reduction) when the drug epidemic is in its early stages. 93 Specifically, more research should be done into the effectiveness of interdiction and when it ceases to be useful, seeing as one 1993 study has shown that interdiction is unlikely to reduce consump tion by raising drug prices and reducing drug availability. 94 A prime area for expansion is greater coordination between low-level enforcers and treatment providers: when arresting of fenders, treatment as an alternative to penal punishment would serve as a form of secondary or tertiary prevention and could lead to use reduction. It is necessary to examine the effectiveness of us e reduction techniques (prevention, treatment, and enforcement) in relation to how much is spent on each method and subsequently strike a balance between the three. It is also necessary to realize that, due to the natural variations in drug use, each main method of r educing drug use is most useful at a certain stage in a drug epidemic: enforcement in the earl y stages, treatment as the epidemic matures, and non-specific prevention can occur consistently. The

current administration has made large efforts to increase funds aimed at treatment and the consolidation of funds for programs and methods which have proven to be effective. However, there must be objective scrutiny of each method in relation to its effectiveness and how cooper ation between methods can be increased to form a dynamic domestic drug policy. On the front of assisting the Mexican government, two measures could be taken by the U.S. government to improve the efforts of combatting the cartel. Firstly, the passing of a bill to label the Mexican drug cartels international terrorist organizations. This act would allow all those caught assisting the cartels by
any means in the Unite d States could be tried for supporting terrorism. This would dramatically increase the puni shment for perpetrators. Also, such a move would require U.S. financial institutions to freeze

the U.S. would be able to deter cartel affiliates through stronger penalties and better counter-financing. Secondly, the U.S. should continue to support the Merida Initiative, with an increased emphasis on the training and advisement of Mexican law enforcement and military personnel. The cartel situation is
suspected cartel assets in their possession and report them to the Department of Treasury. By declar ing the cartels foreign terrorist organizations,

one that is similar to that o f an insurgency. The Mexican government is at war with organizations seeking geographic control of the country. The

counter-insurgency experience of American personnel in the civilian an d military sector can be used to Mexican advantage. Counter-insurgency requires well-trained forces, which the U.S. can help provide to the Mexican government, along with the equipment an d technology allocated in the Merida Initiative. The combination of attacking both the cartels and the demand for their drugs will help burn the stick from both ends, reducing their market and their structure to a point where it is much less profitable for them to operate.

Mexico Econ

Idea: Mexico Education CP

Text: The United States federal government should develop a public/private partnership for educational exchange that helps Mexico Solves Mexicos economy Wilson Center no date cited (Wilson Center, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, established by Congress in 1968 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., is a living national memorial to President Wilson, A Stronger Future: Policy Recommendations for U.S.Mexico Relations, No date, http://sunnylands.org/files/posts/159/stronger_f.pdf) One opportunity is to pursue an educational partnership between the two countries to bring graduate students to each others country at a much higher level than is currently occurring. Indeed, despite proximity, Mexico is now ninth among countries with graduate students studying in the United States. The U.S. is sending fewer and fewer students at all levels to Mexico. A partnership for education, funded as a joint public/private initiative with universities and businesses, would contribute significantly to Mexicos long-term development and U.S. competitiveness while strengthening intercultural understanding.

Mexican education system needs reform Alper and Diaz 2/26 (Alexandra Alper and Lizabeth Diaz, Analysis: Mexicos much-needed education reform faces hurdles, 26 February 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/26/us-mexico-education-idUSBRE91P0WU20130226) The overhaul, if successful, will wrest oversight of teacher hiring and competency exams away from a powerful union, and make all promotions based on merit. It would also help address some of the scams that are rife in Mexico's public education system. Some teachers often skip class themselves, while final year students doing social service are sent in as substitutes for teachers who take jobs within the union and continue to receive their wages. Teaching positions can be passed down through families even in the absence of qualifications, or are simply sold under the table or bartered for cars or other assets. A new law, signed by President Enrique Pena Nieto on Monday, aims to clean up the mess and is one of a wider raft of economic reforms that he is seeking to push through. "Our children deserve responsible, trained teachers," Pena Nieto said. "The reform contains clear rules so that professional merit is the only way to become, remain and advance as a teacher." But as with government efforts to push through key reforms in telecoms, energy and the tax system, the devil is in the details. The majority of Mexico's state legislatures have approved the reform, but it leaves some important issues up in the air. It does not specify who will oversee the policing of teaching standards, nor does it say how teachers will be assessed. Although lawmakers approved it two months ago and Pena Nieto signed it on Monday, the education law will not have an impact until a separate implementing law is drawn up and passed by lawmakers over the next six months.

That gives Mexico's biggest teacher's union, the National Union of Education Workers, and its combative leader, Elba Esther Gordillo, a window to lobby against changes that would weaken its power. Ricardo Raphael, an expert at the Center for Investigation and Economic Teaching (CIDE) institute, said the reform would be doomed without strong accompanying regulatory measures. "The key is not to buckle to the powers of the union, whose interests are different from advancing education," he said. The stakes are high. Mexico ranks among the weakest countries in student achievement in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, despite dedicating more than a fifth of its budget to education. Economists say that if the reform is properly implemented, improved standards that reduce the number of poorly educated people in the workforce could help boost long-term growth in Latin America's No. 2 economy.