While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into failed drug
eradication schemes in target countries through ill-conceived programs
such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, in the bizarro world of
the "War on Drugs," corporate interests and geopolitics
always
trump law enforcement efforts to fight organized crime, particularly
when the criminals are partners in crimes perpetrated by the secret
state.
Since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón turned
the Army loose, allegedly to "dismantle" the drug cartels slowly
transforming Mexico into a killing field some 28,000 people, primarily
along Mexico's northern border with the U.S., have lost their lives.
Countless others have been wounded, forced to flee or simply
"disappeared."
Writing in
The Guardian,
journalist Simon Jenkins tells us that "cocaine supplies routed through
Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil
state."
"Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for
drugs," Jenkins writes, "rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier
countries. Never was the law of economics--demand always evokes
supply--so traduced as in Washington's drugs policy. America spends
$40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its
citizens under it."
Judging the results, one might even think the drug war solely exists as the principle means through which wealthy elites
organize crime.
Scenes from the Atrocity Exhibition• December 13, 2009:
The Observer
reported that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial
system afloat at the height of the global crisis." Antonio Maria Costa,
head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he saw evidence that
"the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment
capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He
said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was
absorbed into the economic system as a result."
The Observer
informed us that this "will raise questions about crime's influence on
the economic system at times of crisis." Costa told the British
newspaper that "in many instances, the money from drugs was the only
liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the
banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an
important factor." Although the UN's drug czar declined to identify the
countries or banks that benefited from narcotics investments, he said
that "inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the
drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some
banks were rescued that way."
• February 26, 2010: Responding to
charges by left-wing critics and academics, Mexican president Felipe
Calderón was forced to counter evidence that his government's
"offensive" against narcotraffickers has left the "largest and most
powerful of the cartels relatively unscathed," the
Los Angeles Times
disclosed. Critics accused the government of favoritism towards the
Sinaloa cartel, claiming it "has been allowed to escape most of the
government's firepower and carry on with its illegal business as usual."
During a news conference, Calderón said such charges were "absolutely
false." The president said the suggestion was "painful," and went on to
say: "I can assure you that this government has attacked without
discrimination all criminal groups in Mexico ... without taking into
consideration whether it's the cartel of so-and-so or what's-his-name.
We've fought them all." Edgardo Buscaglia, an academic expert on
organized crime challenged the president and said that arrest figures
"skew heavily" toward the other cartels. "By his calculation," the
Times
reported, "of more than 53,000 people arrested in drug-trafficking
cases in the three years since Calderón took office, fewer than 1,000
worked for the Sinaloa organization." Commanded by Joaquín "El Chapo"
Guzmán, the Sinaloa cartel crime boss placed 937 on
Forbes
2010 survey of the world's billionaires with an estimated net worth of
$1 billion. A similar modus operandi is standard practice where foreign
policy and corporate concerns of America's wealthiest clients overseas
override efforts by law enforcement to choke-off the flow of narcotics.
In Colombia, secret state agencies such as the CIA have long-favored
drug organizations that have served as intelligence assets or death
squads. Examples abound. Consider the "untouchable" status enjoyed by
the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers' Cali cartel. During the 1980s, at the
height of America's Central American interventions, cocaine shipped into
the United States as part of the U.S. government's "guns-for-drugs"
arrangement with Nicaraguan Contra rebels, was principally supplied by
Cali traffickers. When Medellín drug lord Pablo Escobar's group was
brought down, the CIA, DEA and the Pentagon's Delta Force relied on
operatives funded by the rival Cali faction and Los Pepes, a vigilante
group founded by drug lord Carlos Castaño and his brothers Fidel and
Vicente. Los Pepes had operational links to the Colombian National
Police, especially the Search Bloc (Bloque de Búsqueda) hunting Escobar,
and acted on intelligence provided by the CIA/DEA/Delta Force to
execute their missions. After Escobar's death, the Castaño brothers
launched the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a notorious
right-wing death squad. The AUC in coordination with the Colombian Army,
carried out multiple attacks and massacred thousands of leftists, trade
union organizers and peasant activists. In 2001 under pressure from
human rights groups, the U.S. State Department designated the AUC a
"Foreign Terrorist Organization." This didn't however, prevent U.S.
corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, Occidental
Petroleum, Coca-Cola or the Drummond Company from allegedly hiring out
AUC paramilitaries to murder trade union and peasant activists. In 2007,
Chiquita pled guilty in federal district court and paid a $25 million
fine under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 for funding the
AUC. Dole Food Company now faces similar charges. In 2002, the Justice
Department unsealed an indictment against Carlos Castaño and accused him
of trafficking some 17 tons of cocaine into the United States.
• March 9, 2010: The National Security Archive published a series of
documents
linking the U.S. secret state to Mexico's dirty warriors and drug
cartel operatives under official protection by a CIA-allied intelligence
agency. Following
reporting
by Peter Dale Scott that "both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to
block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking
Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was 'an
essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,' on
matters of 'terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence'," the
National Security Archive disclosed that Nazar Haro's corrupt Dirección
Federal de Seguridad (DFS) was responsible for the disappearance,
torture and murder of left-wing activists during the 1970s and '80s. The
Archive revealed that "there is a deep connection between the former
Mexican intelligence service and the country's drug mafias. As DFS
agents took command of counterinsurgency raids in the 1970s, they often
stumbled upon narcotics safe houses and quickly took on the job of
protecting Mexico's drug cartels." Researchers Kate Doyle and Jesse
Franzblau told us although "the DFS was disbanded in 1985 following
revelations that it was behind the murder of DEA agent Enrique 'Kiki'
Camarena, and Mexican journalist Manuel Buendia," of the 1,500 agents
who suddenly found themselves unemployed, many "found their training in
covert activities and brutal counterinsurgency operations easily
adaptable to the needs of the criminal underworld." In 2006, the
National Security Archive and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley
disclosed that declassified U.S.
documents
"reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the
Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this
secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future
President Luis Echeverría." As we now know, when he served as Interior
Secretary in the Díaz government, Echeverría oversaw the 1968 Tlatelolco
massacre of student activists just days before the Summer Olympics were
staged in Mexico City. "The documents," Morley wrote, "detail the
relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of
station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret
spy network code-named 'LITEMPO.' Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in
Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide 'an unofficial
channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information
which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public
protocol exchanges'." These, and other disclosures reveal that "one of
the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which
the US helped to create," Peter Dale Scott
wrote
back in 2000. "From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other
similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with
international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card
was recognized by DEA agents as a 'license to traffic;' DFS agents rode
security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check
of signs of American police surveillance." Evidence suggests that
similar protection and management of the global drug trade persists
today.
• March 16, 2010: Wachovia Bank, a subsidiary of banking giant Wells Fargo & Co., signed a
Deferred Prosecution Agreement
with the federal government. Wells admitted in court that its unit
failed to monitor and report some $378.4 billion in suspected money
laundering transactions by narcotics traffickers between 2004-2008, "a
sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product,"
Bloomberg Markets
magazine revealed. Cash laundered by drug mafias were used to purchase a
fleet of planes that subsequently shipped some 22 tons of cocaine into
the United States. Wells paid the government $160 million to resolve the
case. American Express Bank and Western Union also agreed recently to
huge settlements with the government for similar offenses.
• May
19, 2010: Retired Mexican Army General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro was
shot and wounded in Mexico City during an alleged robbery attempt.
El Universal
reports that police claimed that a thief wanted to "steal the general's
watch" and shot him several times in the chest. In 2007, after a
six-year imprisonment on charges of providing protection to late drug
trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, chief of the Juárez cartel
and self-described "Lord of the Heavens," Acosta Chaparro was released
from custody after his conviction was overturned on appeal. According to
documents published by global whistleblowers
WikiLeaks
in 2009, the Swiss Bank Julius Baer's Cayman Islands unit, allegedly
hid "several million dollars" of funds controlled by Acosta Chaparro and
his wife, Silvia through a firm known as Symac Investments.
WikiLeaks
wondered whether Mexican authorities would "want to know whether the
several millions of USD had anything to do with the allegations that Mr
Chaparro, a former police chief from the Mexican state of Guerrero,
stopped chasing his local drug dealers and joined them in business."
According to reports cited by
WikiLeaks,
Acosta Chaparro was "already the subject of multiple allegations not
only that he was a narcotrafficker but also that he had played a leading
role in the dirty war of police and army against rural guerillas on his
patch between 1975 and 1981. He was accused of organising the seizure,
torture and murder of peasants who were suspected of helping the rebels
and, with particular persistence of overseeing 'flights of death' in
which well-tortured detainees were taken up in helicopters and pushed
out over the ocean while still alive." Despite these serious charges,
WikiLeaks
informs us that "no action was taken at all [and] Chaparro's funds
might still be managed by the former representative of Julius Baer,
Mexico Curtis Lowell Jun in Zurich."
• June 7, 2010: Guerrero
State Attorney General Albertico Guinto announced that 55 bodies were
found deep in an abandoned silver mine outside Taxco,
The Christian Science Monitor
reported. In various states of decomposition, the victims showed signs
of torture before being killed. "It was like a quicksand, but filled
with bodies," Luis Rivera, the chief criminologist investigating the
scene told
The Washington Post.
The recovery of the remains took nearly a week, "a task made more
difficult" by the fact that some cadavers were mummified, others were
dismembered by the fall and at least four of the victims had been
decapitated. "There are headless bodies, but some of the heads don't
match the bodies," Rivera said. Based on wound analysis of the corpses,
investigators theorized that "many of the victims were alive when they
were thrown down the mine shaft."
• June 12, 2010:
The Narco News Bulletin
reports "a special operations task force under the command of the
Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and
training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating
and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking
organizations." A "former U.S. government official who has experience
dealing with covert operations," told journalist Bill Conroy that "black
operations have been going on forever. The recent [mainstream] media
reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it
sound like it's a big scoop, but it's nothing new for those who
understand how things really work." Perhaps we should recall how
"things" have worked in the recent past. Back in 2003, the
Brownsville Herald
reported that Los Zetas, formerly the enforcement arm of the Gulf
cartel, "feature 31 ex-soldiers once part of an elite division of the
Mexican army, the Special Air Mobile Force Group. At least one-third of
this battalion's deserters was trained at the School of the Americas in
Fort Benning, Ga., according to documents from the Mexican secretary of
defense." According to the U.S. Defense Department, some 513 Mexican
Special Forces soldiers received training at the School of the Americas,
and about 120 "graduates" joined the Special Air Mobile Force. Luis
Astorga, a drug trafficking expert at the National Autonomous University
in Mexico City told the
Herald:
"There is a higher level of danger with the type of knowledge that
these people have, their arms capacity, their knowledge of techniques
and specialization in (drug) traffic operations. Traffickers
traditionally don't have that; they pay other people for those
services." Is history repeating itself under the Mérida Initiative? A
former DEA official told
Narco News
in 2005 that "A lot of the Zetas came from former Mexican police
offices or the military ... So they come from a diverse background. Some
of them have prior training from the DEA, FBI and the U.S. military, as
well as other agencies."
• June 28, 2010: Rodolfo Torre Cantu,
the leading candidate for governor in the state of Tamaulipas was gunned
down in one of the highest profile assassinations since a presidential
candidate was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1994. Four
others, including local lawmaker Enrique Blackmore, were also killed
when their campaign van was sprayed with machine gun fire by unknown
assailants. Cantu had vowed to crack down on drug gangs if elected.
•
July 15, 2010: A powerful car bomb explodes on a crowded street near a
federal police headquarters in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El
Paso, Texas. Four are killed, including a police officer and doctor
lured to the scene.
• July 15, 2010: Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker
revealed
that the pilot "of the American-registered DC-9 (N900SA) from St.
Petersburg, FL caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico's Yucatan
several years ago," Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, "had been released from
prison less than two years after being arrested." Readers will recall
that the DC-9 and another American-registered plane, a Gulfstream II
business jet (N987SA) that spilled "4 tons of cocaine across a muddy
field," Hopsicker
reported,
were used in CIA "rendition" (torture) flights and had been purchased
by Mexican drug gangs with funds laundered through Wachovia Bank. "The
shocking news was delivered via an international headline stating that a
pilot named Carmelo Vasquez Guerra had been arrested in the West
African nation of Guinea Bissau on a twin-engine Gulfstream II
carrying...
what else? 550
kilos--a half-ton--of cocaine." According to Hopsicker, the drug pilot
was arrested--and released--from three countries "under mysterious and
unexplained circumstances." Seeking answers to the pilot's series of
seemingly miraculous escapes, Hopsicker drolly observed: "Maybe there
is
an innocent explanation for everything. Maybe drugs just show up,
unbidden, like unwanted guests. And maybe Carmelo Vasquez Guerra
didn't escape each time he got busted. Maybe he just '
released himself on his own recognizance'."
• July 18, 2010: In the wake of the massacre of 17 people attending a birthday party in the northern city of Torreon,
The Christian Science Monitor
revealed that inmates from a prison in the nearby city of Gomez Palacio
were the authors of the crime. "According to witnesses, the inmates
were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to
carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and
using guards' weapons for executions," said Ricardo Najera, a spokesman
from the attorney general's office. After the atrocity, inmates drove
back to their cells.
• July 20, 2010: Following the Juárez car
bomb blast that killed four, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Arturo Sarukhan,
downplayed it's significance and claimed, though disturbing, violence
"has not yet reached the level of terrorism,"
The Washington Post
reported. "Terrorism," the U.S. ambassador said, "refers to the acts by
groups with political objectives that seek to control the government."
But what if those with "political objectives" and limitless funds from
the illicit trade
already control the state's security apparatus?
•
July 25, 2010: Of the more than 28,000 people killed since December
2006 when President Felipe Calderón "hurled the Mexican Army into the
anti-cartel battle," nearly 6,300 (a quarter of the total) were murdered
in Ciudad Juárez,
The Nation
reports. Under a three year deal, the United States has bankrolled the
Army offensive with some $1.4 billion in funds under the Mérida
Initiative. Journalists Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy wrote in
response to Ambassador Sarukhan's statement: "We are supposed to believe
in their evidence that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, but that
they have no evidence at all of narco-terrorism?" Bowden and Molloy
aver, "This, despite numerous incidents of grenades and other explosives
being used in recent attacks in the states of Michoacan, Nuevo León,
Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sonora and many other places in Mexico. And that
'armed commandos' dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered
machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres
documented since 2008." According to expert Diego Valle, the steep rise
in homicide rates correlate directly to increased military operations
against
some cartels. In his recent study,
Statistical Analysis and Visualisation of the Drug War in Mexico,
Valle writes that "military operations in Chihuahua, Nuevo León,
Veracruz and Durango have coincided with increases in homicides and
attempts by the Sinaloa cartel to take over drug trafficking routes from
rival cartels. After the army took control of Ciudad Juárez it became
the most violent city in the world."
• July 27, 2010: Building on
alliances forged during the Cold War amongst right-wing political gangs
and drug traffickers, cartel operations in Central America have soared,
The Washington Post
informs us. Since 2006, drug networks in Guatemala, El Salvador and
Honduras "are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder
rates in the world." According to United Nations data, cocaine seizures
in Central America "nearly quadrupled" between 2004 and 2007. "Over the
past two years," the
Post
reports, "two national police chiefs and the former president have been
arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two
former interior ministers are fugitives." In Honduras, where a
U.S.-sponsored coup toppled a democratically elected president in 2009,
Mexican cartels have established "command-and-control" centers to
coordinate cocaine shipments by sea and air to North America and Europe.
In El Salvador, that country's leftist president has said that the
violent street gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), have forged a working
relationship with drug cartels that could eventually help the group
mature into "an international syndicate."
• August 22, 2010: Journalist Bill Conroy reports in
The Narco News Bulletin
that despite surging violence in Ciudad Juárez, the murder-plagued city
"where some 10,000 small businesses have closed their doors since 2008
due, in large part, to a wave of burglaries, kidnappings, extortion and
murders that has washed over the city during the past two and a half
years," why is the violence not affecting the entire city? Conroy writes
"there is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Juárez,
the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are
home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000
people." According to a report obtained by
Narco News from the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, or
REDCO,
"there was only one homicide carried out in the maquila industrial
zones" since 2008. "That's right," Conroy avers, "just one murder in
this huge swath of Juárez that is dotted with maquila plants operated by
huge corporations such as General Motors, Delphi, Motorola, Visteon,
TECMA and Honeywell. Maquiladoras, also known as twin plants, are
Mexico-based factories owned and/or operated by foreign companies that
benefit from the cheap labor and favorable tax treatment." REDCO
officials refused to comment to
Narco News.
However, Conroy writes, TECMA executive vice president Toby Spoon told
ABC's El Paso affiliate KVIA that "If they [the narco-trafficking
organizations] got the maquila industry, or American companies or
foreign companies, if they became targets of this, it would just take it
to a whole different level, and nobody wants that." Isn't
that
an interesting statement! "So it would appear, based on that comment,"
Conroy writes, "that the narco-trafficking organizations, the Mexican
government and the maquila factory owners have some sort of unspoken
alliance of convenience that assures protection for the maquila
factories and their professional employees." Indeed,
Narco News
discovered that "at last three security zones have been set up in
Juárez that are guarded by Mexican soldiers who assure safe passage for
Maquila executives commuting from El Paso to the Juárez factory sites.
In addition, the maquila industrial zones themselves, according to media
reports, are under the close watch of Mexican state police as well as
private security guards employed by the maquilas." This is the same Army
and federal police force that is seemingly "powerless" to halt the
slaughter of Juárez citizens by ubiquitous, yet invisible, drug gangs
which have transformed that city, and northern Mexico, into a free-fire
zone. Curious indeed!
• August 25, 2010: A wounded Ecuadorean
migrant stumbled to a Mexican Marine checkpoint in the northern state of
Tamaulipas and leads officials to a blood-splashed room. Inside,
authorities discover the bodies of 58 men and 14 women, allegedly
murdered by Los Zetas, or another cartel seeking to discredit their
rivals. "Years ago,"
IPS
reported, "Los Zetas found a gold mine: kidnapping undocumented
migrants." The UN estimates that some half million undocumented migrants
from Central and South America "cross Mexico from south to north every
year in their attempt to reach the United States." And more than 10,000
were kidnapped between September 2009 and February 2010 according to
Mexico's National Human Rights Commission. According to multiple press
reports, the migrants were killed after they refused to serve as forced
labor for Los Zetas.
• August 26, 2010: A veteran officer with
the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service (CBP), a satrapy within
the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, Martha Alicia Garnica,
43, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking, human
smuggling and bribery. "Three other defendants," the
Center for Investigative Reporting
disclosed, received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a
little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February
in Juárez."
• August 27, 2010: "Federal prosecutors,"
The Nation
revealed, "have used top leaders of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), known as
the most violent gang in the US and Central America, as secret
informants over a decade of murders, drug-trafficking and car-jackings
across a dozen US states and several Central American countries." Former
California state senator Tom Hayden told us that "the informants are
identified as Nelson Comandari, described by law enforcement as 'the CEO
of Mara Salvatrucha,' and his self described 'right hand man,' Jorge
Pineda, nicknamed 'Dopey' because of his drug-dealing background."
According to
The Nation,
Comandari's grandfather "was Col. Agustin Martinez Varela, a powerful
right-wing Salvadoran who served as an interior minister during El
Salvador's civil wars. Comandari's uncle, Franklin Varela, was a central
informant in the Reagan administration's scandalous investigation into
the activist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
[CISPES]." In his 1998 written
testimony
to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, retired DEA
Special Agent Celerino Castillo III told Congress that "while our
government shouted 'Just Say No !', entire Central and South American
nations fell into what are now known as, 'Cocaine democracies'."
Castillo testified: "On Jan. 18, 1985, [retired CIA officer Felix]
Rodriguez allegedly met with money-launderer Ramon Milan-Rodriguez, who
had moved $1.5 billion for the Medellin cartel. Milan testified before a
Senate Investigation on the Contras' drug smuggling, that before this
1985 meeting, he had granted Felix Rodriguez's request and given $10
million from the cocaine for the Contras." Contra drug operations were
coordinated by the CIA out of El Salvador's Ilopango airport and
protected from prying eyes, and U.S. law enforcement investigators, by
troops drawn from by Col. Varela's interior ministry. According to the
National Security Archive's
Oliver North File,
"Mr. North's diary entries, from the reporter's notebooks he kept in
those years, noted multiple reports of drug smuggling among the contras.
A Washington Post investigation published on 22 October 1994 found no
evidence he had relayed these reports to the DEA or other law
enforcement authorities."
• August 28, 2010: The bullet-ridden
body of Roberto Suarez Vasquez, the lead investigator probing the murder
of 72 Central- and South American migrants was found on a highway not
far from where the massacre took place.
• August 31, 2010: The
entire 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border will be monitored by Predator
drones. Part of a $600 million package passed by Congress earlier this
year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the border was
now "safer than ever."
• August 31, 2010: Some 3,200 Mexican
federal police, "nearly a tenth of the force," have been fired this year
"under new rules designed to weed out crooked cops and modernize law
enforcement," the
Los Angeles Times
reports. Amongst the 465 cops arrested in early August, federal
authorities took four commanders into custody after 250 subordinates in
violence-plagued Ciudad Juárez publicly accused them of corruption.
• September 6, 2010: The
Los Angeles Times
reports that "drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and
even crude, rob the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars
annually." The newspaper disclosed that "the cartels have taken
sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the
Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields."
Times'
journalist Tracy Wilkinson writes that "the world's seventh-largest oil
producer has become another casualty of the drug war." A series of
kidnappings and murders in the gas-rich region has curtailed production.
Pemex officials refused to comment and have sought to "repress
information on the kidnappings." Despite a massive outcry by Mexico's
citizens against moves by the Calderón administration to privatize
Pemex, which generates some $77 billion in annual revenue, Chevron's
Latin American operations chief Ali Moshiri told the
Houston Chronicle
that the company wants to make Mexico "a big part of our portfolio." In
this light, violence against Pemex workers and crippled production is
nothing more than an odd coincidence, right?
• September 8, 2010:
Speaking at the elite Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed that Mexico's drug
cartels "increasingly resemble an insurgency with the power to challenge
the government's control of wide swaths of its own soil," the
Los Angeles Times
reported. Comparing Mexico to Colombia, Clinton's comments reflect past
U.S. claims that Colombia's well-entrenched drug mafias were part of a
leftist "narcoguerrilla" strategy to topple the government. This is a
mendacious comparison given rich evidence that for decades Colombia's
leading mafia groups are allied with extreme right-wing forces in that
country's political establishment. Declassified U.S. documents revealed
that former President Álvaro Uribe, enjoyed close ties to drug-linked
paramilitary organizations. A darling of the Pentagon and the American
secret state, according to multiple press reports and
documents
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security
Archive, when Uribe was mayor of Medellín, the epicenter of Pablo
Escobar's narcoempire, the now-dead mafia boss's former lover Virginia
Vallejo, told the Spanish paper
El País:
"Pablo used to say, that if it weren't for that blessed little boy
[Uribe], we would have to swim to Miami to get drugs to the gringos."
According to Vallejo, when Uribe was the director of Colombia's Civil
Aviation authority, he granted dozens of licenses for runways and
hundreds of permits for planes and helicopters, on which the drug
trade's infrastructure was built. The 1991
document
by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency noted that Uribe was a
"close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" who was "dedicated to
collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government
levels."
• September 9, 2010: 25 people, including women and
teenagers ranging in age from 15 to 60, were murdered in Ciudad Juárez
by Juárez cartel gunmen, the
El Paso Times
reports. The operation was allegedly mounted against their rivals in
the Sinaloa drugs organization, apparently in retaliation for a
kidnapping. The well-coordinated attacks took place in different parts
of the city. Despite thousands of Mexican Army troops and federal police
stationed in the city, the attacks took place with impunity. Since
2008, more than 6,400 Juárez citizens have been killed. While President
Calderón claims that 90 percent of victims are connected to drug
organizations, evidence suggests that like the 72 migrant workers
slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August, most of the victims had no ties to
the murderous trade.
• September 10, 2010: Seeking to calm a
"diplomatic furor" over recent comments by Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton that Mexico "resembled Colombia" during the heyday of cartel
power, President Obama disputed Clinton's assertion, the
Los Angeles Times
reported. In what could generously be described as a replay of
President Ronald Reagan's repeated denials that right-wing Nicaraguan
Contra "rebels" were deeply mired in cocaine trafficking, Obama said
that "Mexico is a great democracy, vibrant, with a growing economy," the
president told the Spanish-language
La Opinion
newspaper. "And as a result, what is happening there can't be compared
with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago." Human rights abuses are
widespread. According to
Amnesty International,
political dissidents, environmentalists, trade union activists and
indigenous human rights defenders are routinely disappeared, tortured or
murdered with impunity.
• September 12, 2010: An in-depth
Washington Post
profile of convicted U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer Martha
Garnica, sentenced in August for drug smuggling and human trafficking
along the border, revealed that "the number of CBP corruption
investigations opened by the inspector general climbed from 245 in 2006
to more than 770 this year." The
Post
reports that "corruption cases at its sister agency, U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same
period." The vast majority of cases involve "illegal trafficking of
drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the Southwest border." Although
Garnica received a 20-year sentence for her crimes, not a
single
criminal indictment has been issued by the U.S. Justice Department for
crimes committed by top corporate officers of Wells Fargo-owned Wachovia
Bank, who admitted earlier this year to laundering hundreds of billions
of dollars for Mexico's ultra-violent drug mafias. Aside from
Bloomberg Markets magazine's comprehensive investigation, neither the
Post, nor other U.S. "newspaper of record" reported on the bank's "deferred prosecution agreement" with the federal government.
• September 15, 2010: Writing in
The Nation,
investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill revealed that the private
security firm Blackwater "have provided intelligence, training and
security services to US and foreign governments as well as several
multinational corporations." According to Scahill, "former CIA
paramilitary officer Enrique 'Ric' Prado, set up a global network of
foreign operatives, offering their 'deniability' as a 'big plus' for
potential Blackwater customers." While Blackwater's mercenary network
was originally created to service CIA black ops, Prado wrote an email to
a Total Intelligence executive (a Blackwater cut-out) with the subject
line, "Possible Opportunity in DEA-Read and Delete," a pitch to the Drug
Enforcement Administration.
The Nation
reports "that executive was an eighteen-year DEA veteran with extensive
government connections." Prado explained that Blackwater "has developed
'a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything
from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.' He added,
'These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US
persons are the conduit but no longer 'play' on the street), so
deniability is built in and should be a big plus'." According to
Scahill, the executive wrote back and suggested that "one of the best
places to start may be the Special Operations Division, (SOD)." Scahill
writes that "the SOD is a secretive joint command within the U.S.
Justice Department, run by the DEA" and serves "as the
command-and-control center for some of the most sensitive
counternarcotics and law enforcement operations conducted by federal
forces." As we have seen with other clandestine operations run amok in
the drug war, "deniable" assets, especially when they are "foreign
nationals" with no direct ties to the U.S. government, have a funny
habit of lending their well-compensated "expertise" to drug traffickers.
One is reminded of the case of Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, a former
IDF lieutenant colonel. Klein's private security firm, Spearhead Ltd.,
produced training videos and tutored drug lord Carlos Castaño's AUC in
the fine art of murder. In 2001, Klein was convicted by a Colombian
court for his firm's work with right-wing death squads and the
enforcement arms of several drug trafficking organizations. According to
Democracy Now!,
Klein was "accused of training Mafia assassins" and "suspected of
involvement in the explosion of a Colombian airliner in November 1989."
Given Blackwater's sensitivity to human rights (just ask Baghdad
residents!) one can be certain that the mercenary firm's interest in the
drug war will assure Mexico's citizens that help is on the way!
The Grim Road AheadIt
should be clear: the "War on Drugs" like the "War on Terror" is a
colossal, multibillion dollar fraud perpetrated on the American people.
North
Americans consume drugs and line the pockets of state-connected
killers; Latin Americans do the dying. Low-level dealers and the poor
who buy their illicit products are rewarded with wrecked lives,
devastated communities and one-way tickets to prison.
U.S.
banking and financial elites reap whirlwind profits and are handed
virtual get-out-of-jail-free cards by federal prosecutors and courts
that levy fines regarded as little more than chump change by the banks.
The CIA and their far-flung network of private contractors siphon-off
illegal proceeds from the grim trade laundered through U.S. and European
financial institutions.
The U.S. secret state, seeking
geopolitical advantage over their imperialist rivals deploy drug mafias
and right-wing terrorists as plausibly deniable intelligence assets,
just as they have for decades.
Congressional
banking and intelligence probes are killed. Black operations in areas
of strategic interest to U.S. policy planners spread death and
destruction, particularly where rich petrochemical and mineral reserves
owned by other people are lusted after by American multinationals.
Corporate media collaborate in this charade; pointing the finger at black and brown citizens,
white
elites on both sides of the border escape scrutiny. It is far easier to
demonize black and brown youth as "predators" than to take a hard look
in the mirror at a ruling class that are the real
American drug lords.
And still we wonder
why Mexico is slowly transformed into a killing field.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research,
an independent research and media group of writers, scholars,
journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, Rowan's Avenger, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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