Can You Say "Blowback" in
Spanish?
The Failed War on Drugs in Mexico (and the
United States)
By Rebecca Gordon
March 22, 2015 "ICH"
- They
behead people by the hundreds. They heap
headless, handless bodies along roadsides as
warnings to those who would resist their
power. They have
penetrated the local, state, and
national governments and control entire
sections of the country. They
provide employment and services to an
impoverished public, which distrusts their
actual government with its bitter record of
corruption,
repression, and
torture. They
seduce young people from several
countries, including the United States, into
their murderous activities.
Is this a description of the
heinous practices of the Islamic State (IS)
in Iraq and Syria? It could be, but as a
matter of fact it’s not. These particular
thugs exist a lot closer to home. They are
part of the multi-billion-dollar industry
known as the drug cartels of Mexico. Like
the Islamic State, the cartels' power has
increased as the result of disastrous
policies born in the U.S.A.
There are other parallels
between IS and groups like Mexico's Zetas
and its Sinaloa cartel. Just as the U.S.
wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya
fertilized the field for IS, another
U.S. war, the so-called War on Drugs, opened
new horizons for the drug cartels. Just as
Washington has worked hand-in-hand with and
also behind the backs of corrupt rulers in
Central Asia, the Middle East, and North
Africa, so it has done with the Mexican
government. Both kinds of war have resulted
in blowback -- violent consequences felt in
our own cities, whether at the finish line
of the Boston Marathon or in communities of
color across the country.
In Mexico, the U.S.
military is directly involved in the War on
Drugs. In this country, that "war" has
provided the pretext for the militarization
of local police forces and increased routine
surveillance of ordinary people going about
their ordinary lives.
And just as both the
national security state and the right wing
have used the specter of IS to create an
atmosphere of
panic and hysteria in this country, so
both have
used the drug cartels' grotesque theater
of violence to justify their demonization of
immigrants from Latin America and the
massive militarization of America’s
borderlands.
The War in Mexico
If there was an official
beginning to Mexico's war on drugs, it would
have to be considered the election of Felipe
Calderón as the country’s president in 2006.
The candidate of the right-wing Partido
Acción Nacional, the National Action Party
(PAN), Calderón was only the second Mexican
president in 70 years who did not come from
the Partido Revolucionario Institucional,
the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
His predecessor, Vicente Fox, had been the
first.
It was Calderón who, with
encouragement and assistance from the United
States, changed Mexico's war on drugs from a
metaphor into the real thing, in which guns
and grenades would fuel the deaths of more
than
60,000 Mexicans through 2012.
The current president,
Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, admits that
another 27,000 Mexicans were murdered in
the first year of his presidency. At least
another
25,000 have been disappeared since 2007.
It was Calderón who brought the Mexican
military fully into the fight against drugs,
transforming an ineffective policing policy
into a full-scale shooting war with the
cartels. At least
50,000 military personnel have been
deployed.
In addition to ordinary
citizens, journalists and politicians have
been particular targets in this war. The
Committee to Protect Journalists
reports that murders of Mexican
reporters have increased dramatically since
2006. Among those whose killers have been
positively identified, 69% died at the hands
of the drug cartels, and at least 22% were
killed by government or military personnel.
Wikipedia
lists over 100 politicians who have lost
their lives in Mexico's war on drugs. That
list does not include a woman named Aide
Nava González, whose headless body was
dumped this month on a road in Guerrero
state. Nava was contending for the Partido
Revolución Democrática, the Democratic
Revolution Party, slot on the ballot in the
town of Ahuacuotzingo. Her husband, the
former mayor, had been murdered there last
year. A note from Los Rojos, a local drug
gang, was left with Nava's body. "This is
what will happen," it read, "to anyone who
does not fall in line, fucking turncoats."
Guerrero is the home of
Ayotzinapa, a town where 43
teachers-in-training once attended a rural
teachers college. All 43 “disappeared”
last September during a demonstration in the
neighboring town of Iguala. Their arrest by
police, and apparent subsequent murder at
the hands of a local drug gang, Guerreros
Unidos, was one of the few stories of
Mexican suffering to break into
the U.S. mainstream media last year. The
mayor of Iguala has since admitted that he
instructed the police to hand the students
over to the gang and has been arrested,
along with his wife. The town’s police chief
is still on the run.
Like the "war on terror"
globally, Mexico’s war on drugs has created
endless new pretexts for government
repression, which has its own lengthy
history in that country. That history
includes the long-remembered police
murders of some 300 students, among the
thousands protesting in Mexico City's Plaza
de las Tres Culturas a couple of weeks
before the Summer Olympics began in 1968.
Juan Méndez, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur
on Torture, wrote in his 2014
mission report on Mexico:
"The National Human Rights
Commission recorded an increase in the
number of complaints of torture and
ill-treatment since 2007 and reported a peak
of 2,020 complaints in 2011 and 2,113 in
2012, compared with an annual average of 320
in the six years prior to 2007. Between
December 2012 and July 2014, the Commission
received 1,148 complaints of violations
attributable to the armed forces alone."
According to Méndez, it’s
difficult to pinpoint the exact number of
torture cases in the country in any year,
because there is no national registry that
records such complaints. Nor is everyone who
was tortured by representatives of the
government likely to report their suffering
to that same government.
What is not difficult to
pinpoint is the nature of the torture.
Méndez notes the "disturbing similarities"
in the complaints of those tortured. The
police and the military are regularly
reported to use a combination of "punches,
kicks, and beatings with sticks; electric
shocks through the application of electrical
devices such as cattle prods to their
bodies, usually their genitals; asphyxiation
with plastic bags; waterboarding; forced
nudity; suspension by their limbs; [and]
threats and insults."
The purpose of such
torture is clear as well. As Mendez
reports, it’s "to punish and to extract
confessions or incriminating information." A
2008
change to the Mexican constitution makes
it easier to do this: under this policy of
pre-trial detention (arraigo in
Spanish), suspected drug traffickers can be
held for up to 80 days without charge.
According to the Mexican Commission for
the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights,
"Supposedly, arraigo is used as a
means to investigate suspected criminals,
but in practice, it is used as a kind of
public scrutiny that allows more time for
the authorities to determine whether the
detained is guilty or innocent." It's much
easier to extract a confession when you have
electric cattle prods and waterboarding at
your disposal.
Washington Fights
a “War” in Mexico
Who pays for Mexico's war
on drugs? You won’t perhaps be too surprised
to learn that the United States foots a
major part of the bill. Between 2008 and
2014, Congress has
appropriated $2.4 billion dollars to
fight the cartels, as part of the
Mérida Initiative, a "security
cooperation agreement" between the U.S. and
Mexican governments. That money supports a
failed war in which tens of thousands have
been killed and thousands more tortured.
U.S. involvement, however,
goes far beyond money. Along with the
publicly acknowledged Mérida Initiative, the
Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) signed
secret agreements with the Fox and
Calderón administrations without the
knowledge or consent of the Mexican
congress. These openly violated the Mexican
constitution, which reserves to that
congress the right to approve agreements
with foreign governments, as well as the
U.N. Convention Against Transnational Crime,
which requires that activities carried out
by one country inside another be approved by
the appropriate agency in the country where
those activities take place.
Under these secret
agreements, U.S. DEA agents met repeatedly
with high-level members of particular drug
cartels, especially the Sinaloa group, to
obtain information about rival
organizations. Informants served as
go-betweens in contacts between the DEA and
"El Chapo" Guzmán, the head of that cartel.
Guzmán was arrested in 2014 by the Mexican
government. The newspaper El Universal
conducted a year-long investigation in
which its reporters documented the extent
and effects of this illegal cooperation. The
DEA arranged to dismiss drug trafficking
charges that were pending in the United
States against some of their Sinoloa Cartel
informants. In other words, it allowed the
cartels with which it worked to continue
business -- and murder -- as usual.
In at least one case, U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
issued multiple re-entry visas to
informants, allowing them to bring
significant quantities of drugs into the
United States with impunity. In fact, it
appears that, in order to maintain the flow
of information, U.S. officials took sides in
the drug war that devastated the Mexican
city of Ciudad Juárez,
killing an estimated 10,500 people. With
tacit U.S. permission, the Sinaloa Cartel
was able to defeat the rival Juárez Cartel.
Seventy percent of the
guns used in Mexico's drug wars also come
from this country. Most are purchased at
one or another of the
6,700 licensed firearms sales outlets
along the U.S.-Mexico border. The University
of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute
estimates that, between 2010 and 2012,
about 253,000 firearms were bought each
year for transfer to Mexico. And most
of them made it across the border. The
Institute reports that "Mexican authorities
have seized roughly 12.7% of the total
annual trade" in weapons. U.S. interdiction
efforts account for a measly 2% of those
seized.
And not all of the weapons
that ended up in Mexico did so against the
wishes of the U.S. government. In the
debacle known as "Fast and Furious," the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and
Explosives (ATF)
allowed "more than 2,000 weapons,
including hundreds of AK-47-type
semi-automatic rifles and .50 caliber
rifles," to "walk" across the border and
into the hands of the Mexican cartels. Its
ostensible purpose was to follow the guns in
hopes that they would lead to the arrest of
high-level cartel leaders. But relevant
agencies of the Mexican government were
never informed about the operation, and it
seems that there was no actual effort to
track the weapons once they crossed the
Mexican border. The weapons turned up at
crime scenes in both Mexico and the United
States. On December 14, 2010, near the
Mexican border in Arizona, one of them
killed
Brian Terry, a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
ATF wasn't the only agency
involved in "Fast and Furious." Personnel
from ICE, the Department of Homeland
Security, the DEA, and the U.S. Attorney's
Office in Arizona also participated, along
with the FBI and the IRS.
Nor was the Mexican
government entirely informed, although it
seems clear that one man, Eduardo Medina
Mora, knew about it. A former director of
Mexico's equivalent of the CIA, Medina is
considered the "legal architect" of that
country’s drug war. He was Mexico's attorney
general when Fast and Furious got underway.
By 2010, he'd been removed from that post
(possibly because one of his top deputies
was
arrested for taking bribes from the
cartels) and appointed ambassador to the
United Kingdom. Later, he served as
ambassador to the U.S. until, in early March
2015, President Peña Nieto barely won Senate
approval of Medina's appointment to a
15-year term as head of Mexico's Supreme
Court. Mexicans who still remember Fast and
Furious were outraged.
The
Pentagon and
CIA are also involved in Mexico in
significant ways. Since at least 2011, the
Pentagon has deployed both piloted aircraft
and drones in the Mexican war on drugs. The
CIA has also sent operatives to do
intelligence gathering. And without
specifying which agencies are responsible
for such activities, the New York Times reports that
"the United States has trained nearly 4,500
new [Mexican] federal police agents and
assisted in conducting wiretaps, running
informants, and interrogating suspects.”
Furthermore, the "Pentagon has provided
sophisticated equipment, including Black
Hawk helicopters.”
In 2011, the State
Department recalled
career diplomat Earl Anthony Wayne from
Kabul. He was then serving as deputy
ambassador to Afghanistan and coordinating
with the NATO-led occupation forces there.
His new assignment based on his
counterinsurgency experience? Ambassador to
Mexico. In 2013, the U.S. Army opened a
special-ops center in Colorado,
according to the El Paso Times, "to
teach Mexican security forces how to hunt
drug cartels the same way special operations
teams hunt al-Qaida." Because that worked
out so well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Drug War Comes
Home (Along With Plenty of Blowback)
All in all, the U.S. drug
war in Mexico has been an abject failure. In
spite of high-profile
arrests, including in 2014 Joaquín "El
Chapo” Guzmán, who ran the Sinaloa group,
and in 2015 Servando "La Tuta" Gómez, head
of the Knights Templar Cartel in Michoacán,
the cartels seem as strong as ever. They may
occasionally split and reassemble, but they
are still able to move plenty of product,
and
reap at least $20 billion a year in
sales in the United States. In fact, this
country remains the world's premier market
for illegal drugs.
The cartels are
responsible for the majority of the
methamphetamine sold in the United States
today. Since 2006, when a federal law made
it much harder to buy ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine in this country, the cartels
have
replaced small-time U.S.-based meth
cookers. The meth they produce is purer than
the U.S. product, apparently because it's
made with purer precursor chemicals
available
from China. The other big product is
heroin, whose quickly rising consumption
seems to be replacing the demand for cocaine
in the United States. On the other hand,
marijuana legalization appears to be cutting
into the cross-border traffic in that drug.
The Washington Post
reports that almost 9% of Americans “age
12 or older -- 22.6 million people -- are
current users of illegal drugs, according to
the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration." That represents a
one-third increase over the 6.2% in 1998. It
takes a lot of infrastructure to move that
much product.
And that's where
U.S.-based gangs come in. Urban gangs in the
United States today are not the Sharks and
Jets of
West Side Story. Certainly, there
are still some small local groups formed by
young people looking for family and
solidarity on the streets. All too often,
however, today's gangs represent the
well-run distribution arm of the
international drug trade. In Chicago alone,
100,000 people
work in illegal drug distribution,
selling mostly into that city's
African-American community. Gang membership
is skewing older every year, as gangs
transform from local associations to
organized, powerfully armed criminal
enterprises. Well
over half of present gang members are
adults now. The communities where they
operate live in fear, caught between the
gangs that offer them employment while
threatening their safety and militarized
police forces they do not trust.
Just like U.S. military
adventures in the Middle East and
Afghanistan, the U.S.-Mexico war on drugs
has only left a larger problem in place,
while producing blowback here at home. A
particularly nasty example is the cartels'
use of serving U.S. military personnel and
veterans as
hit men here in the United States. But
the effects are far bigger than that.
The DEA
told the Washington Post that
Mexican cartels are operating in more than
1,200 U.S. cities. In all those cities, the
failed war on drugs has
put in prison 2.3 million people -- in
vastly disproportionate numbers from
communities of color -- without cutting
demand by one single kilo. And yet, though
that war has only visibly increased the drug
problem in the same way that the war on
terror has generated ever more terror
organizations, in both cases there’s no
evidence that any other course than war is
being considered in Washington.
Rebecca Gordon, a
TomDispatch regular, is the
author of
Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in
the Post-9/11 United States. She
teaches in the philosophy department at the
University of San Francisco. She is a member
of the
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras
collective. You can contact her through the
Mainstreaming Torture
website.
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Copyright 2015 Rebecca
Gordon