President Barack Obama traveled to Mexico this week, rounding off nearly a month traveling in Europe and the Middle East. On March 24, he announced his plan to send $700 million to aid the Mexican government and tighten security along the U.S.-Mexico border.

While the Obama administration acknowledged the role that the United States plays in providing a market for narcotics, as well as providing the AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons preferred by the cartel assassins, he promised only more of the same to address the violence: guns, surveillance equipment, cash and more police on the beat.

Thus the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge the failure of the so-called “war on drugs” or to initiate a real change in U.S. drug policy. It has always preferred to export the perception of violence, corruption and chaos to other countries: In the 1980s and 1990s it was Colombia, now it is Mexico.

The plan is to give hundreds of millions of dollars to weapons contractors to militarize the border and aid the Mexican military and police forces, which have been found time and time again to support one or the other of the various cartels battling over territory and trafficking routes in Mexico. The untouchable policy continues to be that of legalization and regulation.

In 2006, the Mexican Congress tried to regulate small possession of many drugs in order to stop the explosion of drug killings, but then-President Vicente Fox quashed the bill after Bush administration condemnation. Soon thereafter, Felipe Calderón took the presidency and sent 20,000 federal troops into the streets to fight the cartels. Has that policy worked? Since Calderón took office, over 10,000 people have been slain in the streets.

When former President Bill Clinton militarized the U.S.-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana, did he stop the flow of illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants? No, instead he pushed them both into the desert, subjecting the immigrants to the territorial control of the drug traffickers. The recent explosion of kidnappings in Phoenix is the result: human traffickers working for the cartels began to kidnap and hold for ransom their own customers.

Now even the Economist magazine and a coalition of former presidents from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, grouped together in the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, have called for various legalization proposals.

The issue is not one of violence “spilling over” from Mexico to the U.S., but of the transnational violence that will always accompany a multibillion dollar illegal industry. And yet the U.S. government continues only to blame others. At least in Mexico, the national media keep count of the annual number of drug executions. Do we even know how many people were executed on the streets in the United States last year in drug-related homicides? Here the government and the major media have failed to develop a national consciousness of slayings that are a product of the underground drug war, not just the bad luck of “rough” neighborhoods.

If the current administration advertises change one can believe in, it should address the economic reality of the drug war — Forbes just included Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in its list of billionaires and listed his industry as: “shipping” — and attack its social roots through regulation, decriminalization, treatment and community development.

Obama campaigned on his promise to end the war in Iraq; it is time to end that other failed and wrong war, the war on drugs.

John Gibler is the author of "Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt" (City Lights Books, 2009). He wrote this article for the Mercury News.