Stop Subsidizing Mexican Drug Gangs

The horrifying drug-war violence south of our border with Mexico continues to worsen, and we're the ones subsidizing it.

By Bruce Mirken, AlterNet.

The horrifying drug-war violence south of our border with Mexico continues to worsen: beheadings, killings that now number several thousand at least, honest officials in fear for their lives. It's time to put an end to U.S. policies that subsidize these murderous drug gangs.According to U.S. and Mexican officials, some 60 percent of the profits that fuel these thugs come from just one drug, marijuana. While much is smuggled over the border, an increasing amount is produced in the U.S. by foreign gangs operating on American soil -- often in remote corners of national parks and wilderness areas.Every year, we read more headlines about clandestine marijuana farms being uncovered on these precious, environmentally sensitive public lands. These rogue farms not only pose a threat to hikers and the environment, they cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars each year in eradication and clean-up efforts.This appalling situation, which now carries a real risk of destabilizing Mexico, is not just happenstance. It is the direct result of U.S. policies.Like it or not, marijuana is a massive industry. Some 100 million Americans admit to government survey-takers that they've used it, with nearly 15 million acknowledging use in the past month.That's a huge market -- more Americans than will buy a new car or truck this year, or that bought one last year. Estimates based on U.S. government figures have pegged marijuana as the number one cash crop in America, with a value exceeding corn and wheat combined.Our current policies are based on the fantasy that we can somehow make this massive industry go away. That's about as likely as the Tooth Fairy paying off the national debt.We haven't stopped marijuana use -- indeed, federal statistics show a roughly 4,000 percent rise since the first national ban took effect in 1937 -- but we have handed a virtual monopoly on production and distribution to criminals, including those brutal Mexican gangs.There is a better way. After all, there's a reason these gangs aren't smuggling wine grapes.We've seen this movie before. During the 13 dark years of alcohol Prohibition, ruthless gangsters like Al Capone and “Bugs” Moran had a monopoly on the lucrative booze market. So lucrative, in fact, that these scoundrels would routinely gun each other down rather than let a competitor share their territory. Sound familiar?Today, the bloodbath is taking place in cities like Tijuana and Juarez, Mexico, but it's beginning to spill across our border. Prohibition simply doesn’t work – not in the 1930s and not now.The chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Mexico and Central America Section recently told the New York Times that marijuana is the “king crop” for Mexican cartels. He added that the plant “consistently sustains its marketability and profitability.”The situation is so intolerable that three former presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil have recently joined the chorus calling for a shift in U.S. marijuana policy.There is no reason to believe that our nation’s current marijuana policies are reducing the use and availability of marijuana. Indeed, in the Netherlands -- where, since the mid 1970s, adults have been permitted to possess and purchase small amounts of marijuana from regulated businesses -- the rate of marijuana use is less than half of ours, according to a recent World Health Organization study. More importantly, the percentage of teens trying marijuana by age 15 in the Netherlands is roughly one-third the U.S. rate.By taking marijuana out of the criminal underground and regulating and taxing it as we do beer, wine and liquor, we can cut the lifeline that makes these Mexican drug gangs so large and powerful. And at the same time we'll have a level of control over marijuana production and distribution that is impossible under prohibition.

Concern Grows in the U.S. That the Drug War Is Destablizing Mexico

By Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle.

AlterNet

45,000 Mexican military personnel have been dispatched to centers of drug violence across the country to stamp out the growing violence.

Concern about a potential failed state -- not Pakistan, not Somalia, but California's neighbor Mexico - is mounting in Washington as an all-out war involving 45,000 Mexican military personnel fails to quell rising drug violence that is spilling from such Mexican cities as Tijuana into the United States.
An estimated 6,290 drug-related murders occurred in Mexico last year, six times the standard definition of a civil war, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a leading scholar on the issue at the Brookings Institution.
Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, described beheadings of Mexican mayors and police chiefs and said Mexican drug gangs have infiltrated the cannabis fields on both public and private lands in Northern California. He said Mexican villagers are kidnapped and smuggled into the northern coastal forests to grow pot, leaving environmental wreckage in their wake.
He said a timber company employee had been held at gunpoint by a Mexican gang, and he worried that hikers could be threatened. There also have been gang confrontations with firefighters.
"This isn't your '60s hippie growing a little pot on the back 40 to get through winter," Thompson said.
Two House committees will hold hearings today, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has scheduled a Senate hearing for Tuesday to determine how to respond. Ideas range from building a stronger border fence to decriminalizing marijuana.
Mexico "is in the paradoxical situation where the more it intervenes against the drug cartels, the more it destabilizes the drug market, which is the reason it's so violent," said Felbab-Brown. "Drug markets are normally not this violent. This is an aberration. The analogy is Colombia in the 1980s and early 1990s."
Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands (San Bernardino County), told the Associated Press this week that the violence in Mexico is "a lot more important, in my own judgment, than Afghanistan at this moment."
Mexico and Pakistan
The U.S. Joint Forces Command called Mexico and Pakistan the world's two most critical states in danger of failing. While cautioning that Mexico has not reached Pakistan's level of instability, it reported that Mexico's "government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels."
The State Department issued a travel warning in February based on rising violence and kidnappings, especially along the border. It said innocent bystanders have been killed in attacks across the country.
Many, not least the Mexican government itself, take strong issue with labeling Mexico anything close to a failed state, though they acknowledge that the violence is serious and spreading.
"I'm in the heart of Mexico City as we speak, and the buses are full of people, the metros are running, the shops are open and people are walking freely," said George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William and Mary. "I don't see anything that looks like a failed state."
He said, however, that some areas have been overrun by drug cartels, including Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas, and municipalities in the states of Michoacan and Guerrero.
Others contend that Mexico is in danger of becoming a "narco state" where drug cartels control large parts of the country and the government cannot perform its most essential task, ensuring the safety of its citizens.
"There are different forms of weakening," said Felbab-Brown. Rather than a collapse of the government, she said, "I am more worried that you will have internal pressures within the elite and from the larger society for accommodations with the cartels."
Police corruption remains rampant in Mexico, and she warned that the government could retreat to what she called the "corporatist" model of the 1960s and 1970s, when police regulated and protected drug traffickers.
She said what worries her even more is that the government can neither defeat nor accommodate the drug cartels, and so "simply retreats, gives up territory." In that scenario, she said, state presence in parts of the country would be limited, and the government "abdicates its responsibility to be the sole purveyor of coercive force. That is very consistent with the historic trend in many Latin American countries."
Unlike past battles over immigration, Mexico's current problems are blamed increasingly on the United States: its enormous demand for illegal drugs and its availability of military-style weapons, including bazookas and grenade launchers, that are smuggled to Mexico and used to match or overwhelm the Mexican military.
Mexico also let the drug problem fester for decades, tolerating police corruption. Once established, police corruption is difficult to eradicate; matters have only grown worse with the rise in the drug trade. Well-funded gangs make offers of a "bullet or a bribe" and kill the few who choose the former, along with their relatives.
Drugs and assassinations
Grayson said the notorious Los Zetas group has diversified into assassinations and has begun to target army officers.
Retired army Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello was found tortured and shot last month near the popular spring-break resort town of Cancun. Tello had been hired to clean up the Cancun police force, whose chief has been arrested in connection with the murder.
The former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico recently called the nearly 40-year U.S. "war on drugs," begun in the Nixon administration, not only a failure but a threat to civil society in Latin America.
"My personal view is, it's us who is more responsible than Mexico," said Sidney Weintraub, a leading Latin American scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We're providing profits of about $25 billion to the drug cartels. That's a lot of money."
About 40 percent of the drug sales are marijuana, he said. "We imprison more people for marijuana than any other drug. What we have to do is change our policy and decriminalize marijuana. I don't think we can do much unless we cut back on the money. As long as they have all that money, Mexico is in a largely hopeless situation."
Weapons from U.S.
Moreover, Weintraub said, more than 90 percent of the weapons smuggled into Mexico "are sold by our gun dealers to people they know are sending the guns to Mexico. Against this array of money, violence, ability to bribe, being able to outgun the military on any occasion, it's hard for them to do anything. ... Our policy has to change."
There is almost no chance that either Congress or the Obama administration will decriminalize marijuana any time soon. Former President George W. Bush, at a meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Merida, Mexico, in March 2007, promised $1.4 billion over three years to provide technology and training to Mexico. The first $197 million was allocated last year, but many describe the sum as a pittance next to drug revenue and say it has focused mainly on high-tech gadgets such as surveillance planes that are helpful but no solution.
Some say strengthening the border is a priority, but the cartels have even resorted to using submarines to evade land barriers.

Could a Sudden Collapse of Mexico Be Obama's Surprise Foreign Policy Challenge?

By Bill Weinberg, AlterNet.

Free-trade politics and the drug war created a social crisis in Mexico, and a militarized response to it may push events to an explosion.

A year-end report by the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command names two countries as likely candidates for a "rapid and sudden collapse" -- Pakistan and Mexico.
The report, named "JOE 2008" (for Joint Operating Environment), states:
"In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force, and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state."
Mexican officials were quick to deny the ominous claim. Exterior Secretary Patricia Espinosa told reporters that the fast-escalating violence mostly affects the narco gangs themselves, and "Mexico is not a failed state."
Enrique Hubbard Urrea, Mexico's consul general in Dallas, actually boasted improvement, asserting that the government has won the war against the drug cartels in certain areas, such as Nuevo Laredo -- one of the border cities that has been the scene of recent nightmarish violence.
But U.S. political figures were also quick to react -- using the Pentagon's lurid findings to argue for increased military aid to Mexico. As President-elect Barack Obama met in Washington with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Jan. 12, the former U.S. drug czar, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, just back from a meeting in Mexico of the International Forum of Intelligence and Security Specialists, told a Washington press conference: "Mexico is on the edge of the abyss -- it could become a narco state in the coming decade." He praised Calderon, who he said has "launched a serious attempt to reclaim the rule of law from the chaos of the drug cartels." The International Forum of Intelligence and Security Specialists is an advisory body to Mexican federal law enforcement.
Also weighing in was Joel Kurtzman, senior fellow at the Milken Institute, who warned in a Wall Street Journal editorial: "It may only be a matter of time before the drug war spills across the border and into the U.S." He hailed Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for his "plan to 'surge' civilian, and possibly, military law-enforcement personnel to the border should that be necessary…" He also lauded Calderon's deployment of 45,000 military troops to fight the drug cartels -- but raised the possibility of a tide of refugees flooding the U.S. Southwest. "Unless the violence can be reversed, the U.S. can anticipate that the flow across the border will continue."
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., joined the chorus. On Jan. 11, the day before Calderon arrived in Washington, Gingrich told ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos: "There is a war under way in Mexico. More people were killed in Mexico in 2008 than were killed in Iraq. It is grossly undercovered by the American media. It's is on our border. It has the potential to extend into our country side. … The illegal narcotics teams in Mexico are in a direct civil war with the government in which they are killing the police, killing judges, killing the army ... [I'm] surprised that no one in the American system is looking at it very much. It's a very serious problem."
Gingrich doesn't have his facts quite right. The Iraq Body Count Web site puts the number of just Iraqi civilian deaths last year at a maximum of 9,028 (compared to 24,295 in 2007). The Mexican daily El Universal reports that according to its tally, there were 5,612 killings related to organized crime in Mexico last year -- more than double the 2007 figure, and the highest since it started keeping track four years ago.
Yet even if Gingrich is exaggerating, and the Pentagon is paranoid, there is definitely cause for concern. The violence -- at its worst in the border cities of Juarez and Tijuana -- is reaching spectacular levels redolent of Colombia.
In Juarez (and elsewhere across Mexico), severed heads are left outside police stations in chilling numbers; mutilated, decapitated corpses left outside schools and shopping centers -- or hanging from overpasses as a warning to the populace.
A man recently arrested in Tijuana -- charmingly nicknamed the "Stew-maker" -- confessed to disposing of hundreds of bodies by dissolving them in chemicals, for which he was paid $600 a week. A barrel with partially dissolved human remains was left outside a popular seafood restaurant.
Bombs hurled into a crowd celebrating Mexico's independence day in Michoacn on Sept. 15 left seven dead.
The mysterious wave of femicide, which has haunted Juarez for more than 15 years, has spiraled hideously. Authorities report that 81 women were killed in the city this year, breaking all previous records -- in fact, more than doubling 2001's record and bringing the total since 1993 to 508.
And the cartels' agents have penetrated the highest levels of Mexican federal power. Several high-ranking law-enforcement officials were detained last year in Operacion Limpieza ("Operation House Cleaning"), aimed at weeding out officials suspected of collaborating with the warring drug lords.
Cartel hit squads operate in the uniforms of Mexican federal police agents, and in towns such as Nuevo Laredo, the local police became so thoroughly co-opted that the federal government dissolved their powers. It is questionable whether the Mexican bloodletting is really a war of the cartels against the state or among cartels for control of the state.
State security forces are hardly less brutal than the drug gangs they battle (and overlap with). Mexico's National Human Rights Commission issued several recommendations last year calling on the defense secretary to punish those responsible for torture and gratuitous killings. Up until now, those recommendations have been ignored.
Despite the blatant corruption, the U.S. is pouring guns into Mexico -- an illicit trade from north of the border arming the cartels (and their paramilitary units like the notorious "Zetas," made up of military veterans) with assault rifles and rocket-launchers, while Washington is beefing up the Mexican army and federal police over the table. "Mexican law enforcement and soldiers face heavily armed drug gangs with high-powered military automatic weapons," warns McCaffrey, oblivious to the incestuous interpenetration of these seeming opponents.
McCaffrey, who was an architect of Plan Colombia 10 years ago, is today a booster of its new Mexican counterpart -- the $1.4 billion, multiyear Merida Initiative. At his Washington press conference, he decried that this is "a drop in the bucket compared to what was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. … We cannot afford to have a narco-state as a neighbor."
The first $400 million Merida Initiative package was approved by Congress in June, and the first $197 million of mostly military aid sent south in December. Although it differs in not actually introducing U.S. military advisors, the Merida Initiative is clearly modeled on Plan Colombia, and is dubbed "Plan Mexico" by its critics.
It has moved apace with the Homeland Security's ambitious plans to seal the border. And indeed, Plan Colombia's supposed success in bringing a tenuous "stability" to Colombia has done nothing to dethrone the nation from the dubious honor of both the hemisphere's worst rights abuser and biggest humanitarian crisis -- nearly 3 million internally displaced by political violence, with the rate of displacement growing since the intensive U.S. military aid program began in 2000.
With all eyes on Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, this is the grim situation that Obama inherits on the nation's southern border. But he also faces an active resistance to the "Plan Mexico" model and concomitant border militarization -- both sides of the line.
Obama, who was famously made an honorary member of Montana's Crow Indian nation last year, received a letter just before he took office from women elders of the Lipan Apache, whose small south Texas reservation is to be bisected by Homeland Security's border wall. The letter calls the land seizure unlawful, and urges Obama to call a halt to the wall. Texas ranchers also have litigation pending against the seizure of their lands for the wall.
Environmentalists are incensed at the border wall's exemption from EPA regulations, and one -- Judy Ackerman of El Paso, Texas -- was arrested in December for blocking Homeland Security's construction equipment in an act of civil disobedience.
Elvira Arellano, a deported Mexican woman, who in 2006 took sanctuary for weeks in a church in Obama's hometown of Chicago to highlight immigrants' rights, held a press conference at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City two days after he took office to ask the new president to call a halt to Homeland Security's coast-to-coast immigration raids.

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