UN General Assembly
2012

sufficient to bend the will of the authorities to their own. I want to stress that all that money builds in them such overweening confidence that they abandon all scruples and commit the worst atrocities and acts of cruelty that humankind has ever seen. Drug users’ money causes the deaths of many thousands of young people in Latin America and the Caribbean as a consequence of drug trade violence. The countries that suffer most acutely the devastating effects of the situation are countries like ours that lie between the production zones in the Andes and the largest consumption market, the United States: Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and, in the Caribbean, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and all other countries in that path. I would like to report that in December of last year the heads of State and Government of Central America and of Mexico, Colombia and Chile met for what we called the Tuxtla cooperation mechanism and issued a very important statement, the Mérida Declaration. It proclaims the urgent need to make a tangible reduction