Letter from Mexico

In a media blitz led by the compliant San Antonio Express News, our citizens are being told that Mexico—particularly the Texas border cities of Nuevo Laredo (opposite Laredo) and Ciudad Juarez (opposite El Paso) are free fire zones; that armies of commando-trained mercenaries in the employ of rival drug lordshave created anarchy; that nobody is safe from being shot, kidnapped or robbed.
The drumbeat, led by current ambassador Tony Garza, is part of an old song.

Mexico, it goes, is a dangerous and lawless country, full of starving people who will stop at nothing in their desperation. They all long to cross the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo, to them) to look for work, or, if work is not available, to live off welfare and / or rob and steal. They breed like rabbits, clog the school systems and the emergency rooms, and of course they deal—and use—drugs.

The latest refrain is the result of a few high-profile killings, mostly among the local police, who are—as they are in every country where U.S. demand for drugs has built a “shadow economy” with big payoffs to officials—just about as corrupt as they can be. Here’s the dirty secret, folks: when you’re dealing with billions of dollars in profits, just about everyone is on the take, from the highest executive levels on down. And I don’t mean just in Mexico. Many U.S. customs officials, national guardsmen and immigration officers have been caught with their fingers in the Narco jar. President Bush the First was seriously implicated in the Iran-Contra drugs-for-guns scandal when he was veep. Raul Salinas, whose brother was the President of Mexico, will soon get out of prison after serving almost 10 years for the murder of his brother-in-law, the then-head of the ruling PRI party, who was implicated in the drug trade (Raul had millions of unaccountable-for money in Swiss bank accounts, and who knows how much elsewhere). The head of the nation’s biggest bank, Banamex, was implicated in a major ongoing drug smuggling operation for which the governor of Quintana Roo state went to prison while the banker has not so much as been questioned. CitiBank and other U.S. banks have been convicted of laundering money for the cartels.

Nobody down here believes that the corruption will end—or the violence—until the United States stops following its tragically unsuccessful policy of drug interdiction and punishment. President Fox, when he first took office, said as much, until his arm was twisted so badly that he has now become complicit in the charade. Until the profit motive is removed from the equation, the drugs will continue to be more plentiful and less expensive on the streets of our country. Think of this:
It used to be that methamphetamine, now—according to the DEA—the most popular illegal drug (and, one suspects, one of the most popular in the pharmacies as well), was mostly a home-grown product. Small labs in the United States, most prominently in the San Joaquin valley of California, churned out the nation’s supply, mostly on kitchen stoves, for a relatively small community of users, mostly truckers and bikers.

Over the last several years, plagued with raids on drug making facilities from the local Sheriff, and suffering—from a business standpoint—from a loosely organized distribution system, wholesale suppliers switched to imported speed. The Mexican smuggling system was so much more reliable than the local pipeline, and the quantity so much greater, that the price came down and the drug’s popularity rose. Get it? Our current policy encourages drug flows, and no matter how many nonviolent drug traffickers—and users—are serving ever longer sentences in our prisons, the flow goes on at a record pace.

Of course, legalization—or decriminalization—or even treatment rather than prison—for drug offenders, won’t meet our government’s need to use the “war on drugs” as an excuse for doing things which we might otherwise not care for: using the “war on drugs” as an excuse for making war on anti-globalist resistance, and attempts to organize reform of energy sectors (also justified by the “war on terrorism”); building more anti-drug, anti-migrant hysteria in the U.S. in order to reduce our civil liberties even further; and field-testing ways to control movements of civilian populations (a technology that could be turned against us some day).
Just a few days ago, on the 28th of June, the following lead was written in the Mexican version of the Miami Herald:

“OTTAWA. The U.S. government is waiting to hear from its counterpart in Mexico City as to how it can help to re-establish law and order in the nation’s crimeridden northern border areas, said Robert Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

The story goes on to detail the “problem” as well as the “solution” being offered: very similar to what is going on with “plan Columbia”: a U.S. financed and led “crackdown,” one result of which will be the attempt to undermine the candidacy of Mexico City mayor and 2006 presidential front runner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has made his anti-globalist stance very clear—a position which strikes fear into the hearts of many a U.S. corporate CEO. History (our own, foremost) clearly shows that voters tend to go for more conservative candidates in times of crisis. The more crisis the United States can create, the longer the radical right—in the United States and Mexico—will hold power.

Is there a gang war going on along Mexico’s northern border? Yep. Are the police powerless to stop it, or complicit in the drug trade? You bet. Just recently, a police contingent got into a fire-fight with a detail of Federales; the police were defending a drug shipment. Will the U.S. sponsored and supervised plan “restore law and order” in the region? Doubtful. It hasn’t worked in Columbia. It hasn’t worked in Peru. It hasn’t worked in the United States Only removing the profit motive will work. Our government knows this.

What has happened as a result of the media blitz is that U.S. citizens have become more racist (brown peril): Ask any border vigilante what he thinks (off camera). Vital tourism in the border area has been greatly reduced (Texas has also suffered as it becomes more difficult for honest citizens to cross over); school children who for years had been attending U.S. schools are now forced to remain at home—thus breeding more crime through poorer education which will mean reduced employment opportunities; and the Mexicans are reacting to the insulting images and the interference of the United States in their internal affairs through the weakness of current president Fox by an increasing nationalism that is likely to have the opposite effect from what our government wants, and sweep Lopez Obrador into power.