Beckley Foundation Inagurated at Guatemalan Palace

President Otto Pérez Molina has launched our Latin American Chapter in Guatemala at a ceremony at the Presidential Palace, in the presence of senior members of the Government and Judiciary. The President also signed our Public Letter calling for an end to the War on Drugs (photo). He is the first incumbent Head of Government to sign the Public Letter, and joins an array of world figures including seven former Presidents, twelve Nobel Laureates and many others.

The Beckley Foundation has been asked to convene an international Board of Experts and to write reports which will i) analyse the impact of the current prohibitionist policies and ii) propose a sophisticated range of alternative policy solutions for Guatemala and the wider region, with a view to reducing violence and corruption and allowing resources to be re-allocated for health, development and education.

President Pérez Molina said, “It is evident that the strategy that has been followed in the fight against drug trafficking in the past 40 or 50 years has failed… with the support of the Beckley Foundation, the Government will be able to make decisions based genuinely on scientific studies… We want to leave behind the dichotomy between liberalisation and prohibitionism. We believe that there are third options, and that one of them is regulation.”

Click here for an article on the launch (in Spanish) from the Guatemalan media.