Failed Drug War in Mexico and the U.S.

Can You Say "Blowback" in Spanish? 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175971/

Portside Date: 

March 30, 2015

Author: 

Rebecca Gordon

 Sunday, 

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.

Mexico 2014/2015 Who are the terrorists ?

1. The Mexican and U.S. tax payers pay billions of dollars for the drug war, mainly to military contractors, to no avail and creating no improvement for either country’s national security. As Musa al-Gharbi wrote for Al Jazeera:

“In 2013 drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in Mexico alone, and another 60,000 from 2006 to 2012 — a rate of more than one killing every half hour for the last seven years. What is worse, these are estimates from the Mexican government, which is known to deflate the actual death toll by about 50 percent.”

  Alfredo Estrella, Agence France-Presse/GETTY IMAGES

2. The U.S. military and intelligence communities collaborate with and empower acorrupt narco-state in Mexico.

1                                             Daniel Aguilar/GETTY IMAGES

3. The DEA collaborated with the Sinaloa Cartel, providing them with support such asvisas and legal access to move drugs into the U.S., including inside of a cocaine-packed 747 cargo plane, in exchange for “intel” on the other cartels.

Refugee Crisis on Our Border - What Should We Do Now ?

By Duane Campbell

Over the past several years and in particular since February of 2014, the number of children and families fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and arriving on the U.S. southwestern border has grown significantly.  More than 57,000 children have arrived already this year. The majority of unaccompanied children and families come from a region of Central America known as the “Northern Triangle.”

The rise in violence in the sending countries has been significantly increased by U.S. policy, including tacit support for the coup in Honduras in 2009, direct military support for the war in El Salvador in the 1980’s and indirect support for the genocidal war by the Guatemalan oligarchy and the military against its own people in the 1980’s and 90’s, as well as the current uncontrolled U.S. drug market and the U.S.-directed drug war.   The U.S. continues to contribute significantly to creating the crisis through our military and economic policies, creating more violence and narco-terrorism, as well as poverty and exploitation.