C OV ER S T ORY
THE BULLETIN • Sunday, July 25, 2010 A5
Mass graves unearthed in Mexico Drivers on prescription drugs: New York Times News Service MEXICO CITY — In one of the more macabre discoveries of Mexico’s drug wars, soldiers have found at least 51 bodies dumped in mass graves after what appeared to be a series of executions by drug gangs in northern Mexico. The bodies were buried in several graves scattered over an area
the size of three soccer fields in an isolated zone east of the city of Monterrey. Soldiers received an anonymous tip Thursday. Alejandro Garza y Garza, prosecutor for the state of Nuevo Leon, told local news media Saturday that investigators were nearing the end of their search. Many of the dead, he said, appeared to
have been burned or tortured. Officials said it appeared the victims — 48 men and three women — had been dead about 15 days. The area around Monterrey, Mexico’s industrial capital and an important site for American investors, has become a central battleground in the country’s drug wars over the past 18 months.
Anjan Sundaram / The Associated Press file photo
A miner sifts through sand and smashed rocks, searching for gold, in Mongbwalu, Congo, in 2005. A new U.S. law requires companies to certify whether their products contain minerals from rebel-controlled mines in several African countries.
Electronics Continued from A1 At issue are three industrial metals — tin, tantalum and tungsten — and gold. Tin is used in the solder that joins electronic components together. Tantalum’s main use is in capacitors, a vital component in electronics. Tungsten has many uses, including light-bulb filaments and the heavy, compact mass that makes cell phones vibrate. Exports of these metals from eastern Congo have been the subject of a campaign by nonprofit advocacy groups for a few years, one that’s borne fruit with the addition of a “Conflict Minerals” provision to the financial overhaul that President Barack Obama signed into law Wednesday. A recent YouTube video modeled after Apple Inc.’s well-known ads is titled “I’m a Mac ... and I’ve Got a Dirty Secret.” (The video says “a lot” of the world production of the four metals comes from Congo, though the contribution is relatively small.) While Congo has vast reserves, poverty and war mean most of the mining and processing is done by hand, so production is slow. The country produced 5 percent of the world’s tin supply in 2008, according to metal research institute ITRI. The figure for tantalum ore, a rarer mineral, is higher, but the main sources for world supply are in Brazil and Australia. Even though Congo’s production is small by world standards, the minerals constitute much of the economic activity in eastern Congo.
How much is mining to blame? Advocacy groups, the United Nations and academic researchers such as Geenen agree the mines fund rebel groups, homegrown militias and rogue elements of the Congolese army. But the academics say the advocacy groups have been overselling the link between the mines and violence, such as when John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, told “60 Minutes” last year that minerals are the “root cause” of the fighting. “The fight is not a fight over the minerals,” said Laura Seay, an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who studies and visits Con-
go. “The minerals are used to fund some of the fighting, but it’s not a fight for control of the mines.” More important causes of the fighting, she said, are land rights and the status of the refugees and militias from neighboring Rwanda who flooded into eastern Congo in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. About 5 million people, mainly civilians, have died in off-and-on fighting in Congo since then, and armed groups have been accused of systematic mass rape. Sasha Lezhnev, a consultant to the Enough Project and the director of an organization that tries to rehabilitate child soldiers, agrees the fighting wasn’t originally about the minerals. But Lezhnev said that has changed. “The minerals are the chief driver and fuel for feeding the flames out in the East now. One of the main results of the military operations over the last year has been for one armed group to take control of minerals from the other armed group,” Lezhnev said. “You have many people displaced from their homes because mines are being set up.”
The new U.S. law The U.S. law doesn’t ban the minerals trade with the area, something the United Nations has avoided doing as well. Instead, it forces companies to report annually whether their products contain any of the four “conflict minerals” from Congo. The nine surrounding countries are included as well, out of concern that minerals might be smuggled out of the Congo to obfuscate their origin. If companies find they use minerals from any of the 10 countries, they need to have an audit done to determine “with the greatest possible specificity” which mine they’re from. Companies can label their products as “conflict free” if they manage to prove their products don’t contain minerals that directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups in any of the 10 countries. Nicholas Garrett, a consultant who’s studied the issue with funding from the British and Dutch governments, worries that companies will take the easy way out and avoid buying minerals from the region entirely — even if they are conflict free. He estimates that 1 million people are dependent on
the mining industry in eastern Congo. John Kanyoni, who represents minerals exporters in Congo’s North Kivu province, said business is already down because two major buyers of tin ore, Britain’s Amalgamated Metal Corp. and Belgium’s Traxys, have pulled out because of the “conflict minerals” campaign. That means miners, traders and the Congolese government’s tax receipts are suffering, Kanyoni said.
More harm than good? Lezhnev acknowledges that a complete pullout by minerals buyers would do more harm than good. What the Enough Project really wants, he said, is reliable tracing of the supply chain and certification of the origin of minerals. That way, buyers could still do business with legitimate mines. “We don’t want (buyers) to disengage,” he said. “We want them to take a hard look at where their materials are coming from, but also contribute to positive change out in the region.” Various groups have already started projects to trace the minerals back to their sources. The process is hampered by the lack of government control in parts of the region and by corruption where there is government control. Congolese Information Minister Lambert Mende said the government welcomes the U.S. law. It encourages the country to put in place the proper tracing mechanisms, he said. Two years ago, chip-maker Intel Corp. started to alert its tantalum smelters, who turn the ore into the metal, that they will have to start certifying that their ores don’t come from “conflict mines.” The process will add some minor costs to the supply chain, spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, on the order of a penny per part. Tin industry organization ITRI is running a pilot project to see whether the ores can be traced, but much remains to be done, especially because U.S. companies could need to certify the origin of their metals as early as next year. “It’s obviously a very difficult environment to work in,” ITRI spokeswoman Kay Nimmo said. “We need to have enough time to put the system into place. Otherwise, it essentially will be an embargo on the trade.”
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dangerous, but hard to convict By Abby Goodnough and Katie Zezima New York Times News Service
The accident that killed Kathryn Underdown had all the markings of a drunken-driving case. The car that hit her as she rode her bicycle one May evening in Miller Place, N.Y., did not stop, the police said, until it crashed into another vehicle farther down the road. The driver could not keep her eyes open during an interview with investigators, according to the complaint against her, and her speech was slow and slurred. But the driver told the police she had not been drinking; instead, the complaint said, she had taken several prescription medications, including a sedative and a muscle relaxant. She was charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence — an increasingly common offense, law enforcement officials say, at a time when drunken-driving deaths are dropping and when prescriptions for narcotic painkillers, anti-anxiety medications, sleep aids and other powerful drugs are commonplace. The issue is vexing police officials because, unlike with alcohol, there is no agreement on what level of drugs in the blood impairs driving. The behavioral effects of prescription medication vary widely, depending not just on the drug but on the person taking it. Some, like anti-anxiety drugs, can dull alertness and slow reaction time; others, like stimulants, can encourage risk-taking and hurt the ability to judge distances. Mixing prescriptions, or taking them with alcohol or illicit drugs, can exacerbate impairment and sharply increase the risk of crashing, researchers say. “In the past, it was cocaine, it was PCP, it was marijuana,” said Chuck Hayes of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “Now we’re into this prescription drug era that is giving us a whole new challenge.” The police also struggle with the challenge of prosecuting someone who was taking valid prescriptions. “How do
“How do we balance between people who legitimately need their prescriptions and protecting the public?” — Mark Neil, National Traffic Law Center we balance between people who legitimately need their prescriptions and protecting the public?” said Mark Neil, senior lawyer at the National Traffic Law Center, which works with prosecutors. “It becomes a very delicate balance.”
that states are putting hundreds of police officers through special training to spot signs of drug impairment and clamoring for better technology to detect it. In interviews, law enforcement officials around the country said anyone who drives while taking prescription drugs is at risk of arrest, not only those who drive recklessly. Defense lawyers, meanwhile, say that in their zeal to make a statement about drug-impaired driving, the police are casting too wide a net and unfairly punishing people who are taking prescriptions as directed. And persuading a jury to convict someone of impaired driving due to prescription drugs remains difficult, except for the most egregious cases.
Chemical complexities Some states have made it illegal to drive with any detectable level of prohibited drugs in the blood. But setting any kind of limit for prescription medications is far more complicated, partly because the complex chemistry of drugs makes their effects more difficult to predict than alcohol’s. And determining whether a driver took drugs soon before getting on the road can be tricky, since some linger in the body for days or weeks. Many states are confronting the problem as part of a broader effort to keep so-called drugged drivers, including those under the influence of marijuana and other illegal drugs, off the road. “We have a pretty clear message in this country that you don’t drink and drive,” said R. Gil Kerlikowske, President Barack Obama’s top drug policy adviser, who wants to reduce druggeddriving accidents by 10 percent over the next five years. “We need very much to have a similar message when it comes to drugs.” Reliable data on how many drivers are impaired by prescription drugs does not exist, but law enforcement officials say the problem is growing so quickly
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