US Drug Thirst, Gun Sales Must Share Blame for Monterey Casino Tragedy, Mexican President Says …..
http://www.truth-out.org
President Felipe Calderon. (Photo: Gobierno Federal / Flickr)
Mexico City – His voice cracking with emotion, President Felipe Calderon said Friday that the United States bore some blame for “an act of terror” by gangsters who doused a casino with gasoline and set a blaze that killed at least 52 people.
The attack Thursday in Monterrey, an industrial city of 4 million barely a two-hour drive from Texas, stunned Mexicans and seemed likely to mark a watershed in the country’s intensifying war against criminal syndicates.
In a 20-minute televised address to the nation, Calderon gave an unusually blunt assessment of the causes of Mexico’s surging violence before flying to Monterrey to place a wreath at the burned-out hulk of the Casino Royale.
He referred repeatedly to the attack as a terrorist act, elevating the conflict to a new level, at least linguistically, and casting it in terms of a broader struggle for control of Mexico.
He said rampant corruption within his nation’s judiciary and law enforcement bore some blame.
But in unprecedented, direct criticism of the United States, Calderon said lax U.S. gun laws and high demand for drugs stoked his nation’s violence.
He appealed to U.S. citizens “to reflect on the tragedy that we are living through in Mexico.”
“We are neighbors, allies and friends. But you, too, are responsible. This is my message,” Calderon said.
He called on the United States to “once and for all stop the criminal sale of high-powered weapons and assault rifles to criminals that operate in Mexico.”
Calderon declared three days of national mourning. The motive of Thursday’s attack wasn’t clear, but authorities indicated that it might have been part of an extortion campaign against one of many casinos that operate in Mexico on the margins of the law.
Calderon’s blast at the United States underscored frustrations here that there’s little appreciation north of the border for the role Americans have played in strengthening the cartels that are responsible for the grisly violence that’s claimed as many as 40,000 lives in the last five years.
With weapons bought in the United States, the gangs, whose roots lie in drug smuggling but which have branched out into a variety of criminal enterprises, are better armed than the police tasked with combating them.
While Calderon’s government has captured dozens of mid- and upper-level gangsters, beheadings, public executions and kidnappings are epidemic, and many Mexicans feel less safe than ever.
“Part of the tragedy that we Mexicans are living through has to do with the fact that we are next to the world’s greatest drug consumer,” Calderon said in his speech, “and also the greatest global arms vendor that pays billions of dollars each year to criminals.”
In a statement, President Barack Obama condemned “the barbaric and reprehensible attack” and lauded Mexico’s “brave fight to disrupt transnational criminal organizations that threaten both Mexico and the United States.”
Of the 52 who died in Thursday’s firebombing, 35 were women, mostly in their 40s, 50s and 60s, who were passing time in the casino on a weekday afternoon, civil defense officials said.
Ten people were injured in the blaze.
A video taken by a closed-circuit camera that overlooks the casino’s entrance showed that the attack unfolded in only two and a half minutes.
Four vehicles can be seen pulling into the driveway of the Casino Royale, on San Jeronimo Avenue in a posh area of western Monterrey, at 3:48 p.m.
Gunmen jump out of the cars and enter the casino, carrying three canisters apparently filled with gasoline.
Moments later, gamblers and employees are seen scuttling from the building.
Black smoke then pours from the casino as the assailants jump into the vehicles and drive off.
Witnesses who fled the casino said the gunmen shouted at gamblers to flee before setting the building ablaze, indicating that they didn’t seek a high casualty count.
Initial reports said the gunmen sprayed gunfire inside the casino, but Nuevo Leon Gov. Rodrigo Medina said none of the 52 victims discovered by Friday morning had bullet wounds.
“It was an indescribable scene,” said Reynaldo Ramos of Monterrey Civil Defense.
Most victims died from smoke inhalation rather than direct contact with fire, he said.
Cell phones on the bodies of victims rang constantly as rescuers removed them, he added.
He said some 300 people were in the casino at the time of the attack.
No arrests were made immediately.
The Attorney General’s Office offered a $2.5 million reward for information leading to the conviction of the attackers.
Monterrey is seen as a bellwether for Mexico’s rising chaos.
Home to some of Mexico’s biggest companies and with the highest standard of living in the nation, with a per capita income of $18,000 per year, the city has been identified with booming entrepreneurship.
As recently as early last year, Monterrey was hailed as a safe, prosperous city, a Mexican version of Dallas or Houston.
But a turf war between large criminal syndicates, the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, now unfolds in city streets daily.
Drive-by shootings, roadblocks, gangland grenade attacks and bodies hanging from overpasses are common.
Earlier this week, gangsters hung a still living victim by the neck from a pedestrian walkway in the city in broad daylight, then took potshots at the victim with weapons.
Local media said that one of the main investors in Casino Royale is a company, Atracciones y Emociones Vallarta, that operates 26 casinos across northern Mexico.
Its owners are reportedly relatives of a former mayor of Monterrey.
Gangs routinely shake down casinos for payoffs.
On Wednesday, gunmen threw a grenade at a casino in the city of Saltillo in northern Coahuila state.
Anger at Calderon, who’s in the final 15 months of his six-year term, boiled over on social media, a sign of the sagging support for his policy of direct confrontation with cartels.
Since he came to office in late 2006, Mexico has tallied around 40,000 murders.
“Sometimes I would like to leave the country but it is MY COUNTRY. Make them leave,” a Twitter post by Roduguevara said.
© 2011 McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
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U.S Government Smuggled Missles, Grenades And Other Military Grade Weapons To Mexico Drug Cartels …….
Alexander Higgins – July 23, 2011 at 2:36 am – Permalink – Source via Alexander Higgins Blog

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The U.S government weapons smuggling scandal grown from a simple gun smuggling scandal into a full blown military grade weapons smuggling scandal following the arrest of a Zetas cartel leader. Law enforcement officials report the U.S government has supplied the Zetas cartel with, among other things, “an array of military grade weapons, grenade and grenade launchers, high-powered rifles, body armor, anti-aircraft missiles, and night vision goggles.”
The nation was shocked when the U.S government was caught red handed smuggling guns to drug cartels in Mexico after government supplied guns were linked to the murders of law enforcement officials working along the U.S. Mexico border.
The scandal deepened when the hacker group ‘Anonymous’ leaked reported government documents on the Internet which appear to show that the leader of the La Familia cartel in Mexico was actually the feds point man for the gun smuggling operation. Although the revelations revealed in data release was not confirmed by the Obama administration the information became part of a congressional investigation into the scandal.
Soon after the news of La Familia cartel scandal broke, the leader of the Zetas cartel leader Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, aka El Mamito was arrested in Mexico. During an interrogation by the police, El Mamito stated the Zetas cartel was exclusively supplied guns by the U.S. government.
Critics charged that while the Obama administration was smuggling guns to criminals they were using the violence perpetrated by those same criminals as a justification to take guns away from U.S. citizens.
As the congressional investigation into the scandal continued new discovered evidence revealed the government gun smuggling operations were not limited to Mexico. In fact, congressional leaders uncovered a sister operation ran out of Florida being used to smuggle guns into Puerto Rico and Honduras.
As the Obama officials moved to distance themselves from the growing scandal Kenneth Melson, the ATF’s acting director, came forward and accused the Justice Department covering up evidence to shield officials from the scandal.
Today comes reports that a wide array of U.S. government military grade equipment is being stashed in safe houses inside of the U.S., that that controlled and owned by the Zetas drug cartel, from where they are smuggled into Mexico.
According to conservative examiner Anthony Martin, “The weapons stashes discovered b law enforcement, Border Patrol, and other agencies contain ample evidence of dozens of ‘smoking guns’–literally and symbolically–that prove the cartel is in the weapons smuggling business. However, the cartel has more than just smoking guns.”
Martin’s labeling of the weapons as ‘more than just smoking guns’ just may be the understatement of the year
“The El Paso Times reported that officials have discovered an array of military grade weapons, grenade and grenade launchers, high-powered rifles, body armor, anti-aircraft missiles, and night vision goggles,” writes Martin, “The nature of the weapons that have been discovered would seem to confirm suspicions that the cartel obtains these weapons from the U.S. Government.”
Martin quotes the El Paso Times:
“Jesús Rejón Aguilar, the number three man in the Zeta’s hierarchy, disclosed last week that the Zetas bought weapons in the United States and transported them across the Rio Grande. Mexican federal authorities captured Rejón on July 3 in the state of Mexico, and presented him to the news media the next day. His recorded video statement was uploaded on YouTube.
[Former CIA Agent Phil] Jordan agreed with Plumlee’s allegations that the Zetas are operating in the Columbus-Palomas border.
Plumlee, who has testified before U.S. congressional committees about arms and drug trafficking, said the roads in Southern New Mexico provide smugglers easy access to Mexico’s highway networks.
Imperialism: Bankers, Drug Wars and Genocide
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by Prof. James Petras
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Global Research, May 19, 2011
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In May 2011, Mexican investigators uncovered another mass clandestine grave with dozens of mutilated corpses; bringing the total number of victims to 40,000 killed since 2006 when the Calderon regime announced its “war on drug traffickers”. Backed by advisers, agents and arms, the White House has been the principal promotor of a ‘war’ that has totally decimated Mexico ’s society and economy.
If Washington has been the driving force for the regime’s war, Wall Street banks have been the main instruments ensuring the profits of the drug cartels. Every major US bank has been deeply involved in laundering hundreds of billions of dollars in drug profits, for the better part of the past decade. Mexico ’s descent into this inferno has been engineered by the leading US financial and political institutions, each supporting ‘one side or the other’ in the bloody “total war” which spares no one, no place and no moment in time. While the Pentagon arms the Mexican government and the US Drug Enforcement Agency enforces the “military solution”, the biggest US banks receive, launder and transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the drug lords’ accounts, who then buy modern arms, pay private armies of assassins and corrupt untold numbers of political and law enforcement officials on both sides of the border. Mexico’s Descent in the Inferno Everyday scores, if not hundreds, of corpses – appear in streets and or are found in unmarked graves; dozens are murdered in their homes, cars, public transport, offices and even hospitals; known and unknown victims in the hundreds are kidnapped and disappear; school children, parents, teachers, doctors and businesspeople are seized in broad daylight and held for ransom or murdered in retaliation. Thousands of migrant workers are kidnapped, robbed, ransomed, murdered and evidence is emerging that some are sold into the illegal ‘organ trade’. The police are barricaded in their commissaries; the military, if and when it arrives, takes out its frustration on entire cities, shooting more civilians than cartel soldiers. Everyday life revolves around surviving the daily death toll; threats are everywhere, the armed gangs and military patrols fire and kill with virtual impunity. People live in fear and anger. The Free Trade Agreement: The Sparks that lit the Inferno In the late 1980’s, Mexico was in crisis, but the people chose a legal way out: they elected a President, Cuahtemoc Cardenas, on the basis of his national program to promote the economic revitalization of agriculture and industry. The Mexican elite, led by Carlos Salinas of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) chose otherwise and subverted the election: The electorate was denied its victory; the peaceful mass protests were ignored. Salinas and subsequent Mexican presidents vigorously pursued a free trade agreement (NAFTA) with the US and Canada , which rapidly drove millions of Mexican farmers, ranchers and small business people into bankruptcy. Devastation led to the flight of millions of immigrant workers. Rural movements of debtors flourished and ebbed, were co-opted or repressed. The misery of the legal economy contrasted with the burgeoning wealth of the traffickers of drugs and people, which generated a growing demand for well-paid armed auxiliaries as soldiers for the cartels. The regional drug syndicates emerged out of the local affluence. In the new millennium, popular movements and a new electoral hope arose: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). By 2006 a vast peaceful electoral movement promised substantial social and economic reforms to ‘integrate millions of disaffected youth’. In the parallel economy, the drug cartels were expanding and benefiting from the misery of millions of workers and peasants marginalized by the Mexican elite, who had plundered the public treasury, speculated in real estate, robbed the oil industry and created enormous privatized monopolies in the communication and banking sectors. In 2006, millions of Mexican voters were once again denied their electoral victory: The last best hope for a peaceful transformation was dashed. Backed by the US Administration, Felipe Calderon stole the election and proceeded to launch the “War on Drug Traffickers” strategy dictated by Washington . The War Strategy Escalates the Drug War: The Banking Crises Deepens the Ties with Drug Traffickers The massive escalation of homicides and violence in Mexico began with the declaration of a war on the drug cartels by the fraudulently elected President Calderon, a policy pushed initially by the Bush Administration and subsequently strongly backed by the Obama – Clinton regime. Over 40,000 Mexican soldiers filled the streets, towns and barrios – violently assaulting citizens – especially young people. The cartels retaliated by escalating their armed assaults on police. The war spread to all the major cities and along the major highways and rural roads; murders multiplied and Mexico descended further into a Dantesque inferno. Meanwhile, the Obama regime ‘reaffirmed’ its support for a militarist solution on both sides of the border: Over 500,000 Mexican immigrants were seized and expelled from the US ; heavily armed border patrols multiplied. Cross border gun sales grew exponentially .The US “market” for Mexican manufactured goods and agricultural products shrank, further widening the pool for cartel recruits while the supply of high powered weapons increased. White House gun and drug policies strengthened both sides in this maniacal murderous cycle: The US government armed the Calderon regime and the American gun manufacturers sold guns to the cartels through both legal and underground arms sales. Steady or increasing demand for drugs in the US – and the grotesque profits derived from trafficking and sales— remained the primary driving force behind the tidal wave of violence and societal disintegration in Mexico . Drug profits, in the most basic sense, are secured through the ability of the cartels to launder and transfer billions of dollars through the US banking system. The scale and scope of the US banking-drug cartel alliance surpasses any other economic activity of the US private banking system. According to US Justice Department records, one bank alone, Wachovia Bank (now owned by Wells Fargo), laundered $378.3 billion dollars between May 1, 2004 and May 31, 2007 (The Guardian, May 11, 2011). Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels – including Bank of America, Citibank, and JP Morgan, as well as overseas banks operating out of New York , Miami and Los Angeles , as well as London . While the White House pays the Mexican state and army to kill Mexicans suspected of drug trafficking, the US Justice Department belatedly slaps a relatively small fine on the major US financial accomplice to the murderous drug trade, Wachovia Bank, spares its bank officials from any jail time and allows major cases to lapse into dismissal. The major agency of the US Treasury involved in investigating money laundering, the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, deliberately ignored the blatant collaboration of US banks with drug terrorists, concentrating almost their entire staff and resources on enforcing sanctions against Iran . For seven years, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey used his power as head of the Department for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence to pursue Israel ’s phony “war on terrorism” against Iran , rather than shut down Wachovia’s money-laundering operations with the Mexican drug terrorists. In this period of time an estimated 40,000 Mexican civilian have been killed by the cartels and the army. Without US arms and financial services supporting both the illegitimate Mexican regimes and the drug cartels – there could be no “drug war”, no mass killings and no state terror. The simple acts of stopping the flood of cheap subsidized US agriculture products into Mexico and de-criminalizing the use and purchase of cocaine in the US would dry up the pool of ‘cartel soldiers’ from the bankrupted Mexican peasantry and the cut back the profits and demand for illegal drugs in the US market. The Drug Traffickers, the Banks and the White House If the major US banks are the financial engines which allow the billion dollar drug empires to operate, the White House, the US Congress and the law enforcement agencies are the basic protectors of these banks. Despite the deep and pervasive involvement of the major banks in laundering hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit funds, the “court settlements” pursued by US prosecutors have led to no jail time for the bankers. One court’s settlement amounted to a fine of $50 million dollars, less than 0.5% of one of the banks (the Wachovia/Wells Fargo bank) $12.3 billion profits for 2009 (The Guardian, May 11, 2011). Despite the death of tens of thousands of Mexican civilians, US executive branch directed the DEA, the federal prosecutors and judges to impose such a laughable ‘punishment’ on Wachovia for its illegal services to the drug cartels. The most prominent economic officials of the Bush and Obama regimes, including Summers, Paulson, Geithner, Greenspan, Bernacke et al, are all long term associates, advisers and members of the leading financial houses and banks implicated in laundering the billions of drug profits. Laundering drug money is one of the most lucrative sources of profit for Wall Street; the banks charge hefty commissions on the transfer of drug profits, which they then lend to borrowing institutions at interest rates far above what – if any – they pay to drug trafficker depositors. Awash in sanitized drug profits, these US titans of the finance world can easily buy their own elected officials to perpetuate the system. Even more important and less obvious is the role of drug money in the recent financial meltdown, especially during its most critical first few weeks. According to the head of United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, “In many instances, drug money (was)… currently 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…interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities… (there were) signs that some banks were rescued in that way.” (Reuters, January 25,2009. US edition). Capital flows from the drug billionaires were key to floating Wachovia and other leading banks. In a word: the drug billionaires saved the capitalist financial system from collapse! Conclusion By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it has become clear that capital accumulation, at least in North America, is intimately linked to generalized violence and drug trafficking. Because capital accumulation is dependent on financial capital, and the latter is dependent on the industry profits from the multi-hundred-billion dollar drug trade, the entire ensemble is embedded in the ‘total war’ over drug profits. In times of deep crises the very survival of the US financial system – and through it, the world banking system – is linked to the liquidity of the drug “industry”. At the most superficial level the destruction of Mexican and Central American societies – encompassing over 100 million people – is a result of a conflict between drug cartels and the political regimes of the region. At a deeper level there is a multiplier or “ripple effect” related to their collaboration: the cartels draw on the support of the US banks to realize their profits; they spend hundreds of millions on the US arms industry and others to secure their supplies, transport and markets; they employ tens of thousands of recruits for their vast private armies and civilian networks and they purchase the compliance of political and military officials on both sides of the borders For its part, the Mexican government acts as a conduit for US Pentagon/Federal police, Homeland Security, drug enforcement and political apparatuses prosecuting the ‘war’, which has put Mexican lives, property and security at risk. The White House stands at the strategic center of operations – the Mexican regime serves as the front-line executioners. On one side of the “war on drugs” are the major Wall Street banks; on the other side, the White House and its imperial military strategists and in the ‘middle’ are 90 million Mexicans and 40,000 murder victims and counting. Relying on political fraud to impose economic deregulation in the 1990’s (neo-liberalism), the US policies led directly to the social disintegration, criminalization and militarization of the current decade. The sophisticated narco-finance economy has now become the most advanced stage of neo-liberalism. When the respectable become criminals, the criminals become respectable. The issue of genocide in Mexico has been determined by the empire and its “knowing” bankers and cynical rulers. |
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WikiLeaks Exposes North American Integration Plot
| http://www.thenewamerican.com
Written by Alex Newman |
| Monday, 02 May 2011 21:00 |
As early as January of 2005, high-ranking officials were discussing the best way to sell the idea of North American “integration”to the public and policymakers while getting around national constitutions. The prospect of creating a monetary unit to replace national currencies was a hot topic as well.Some details of the schemes were exposed in a secret 2005 U.S. embassy cable from Ottawa signed by then-Ambassador Paul Cellucci. The document was released by WikiLeaks on April 28. But so far, it has barely attracted any attention in the United States, Canada, or Mexico beyond a few mentions in some liberty-minded Internet forums.
Numerous topics are discussed in the leaked document — borders, currency, labor, regulation, and more. How to push the integration agenda features particularly prominently. Under the subject line “Placing a new North American Initiative in its economic policy context,” American diplomatic personnel in Canada said they believed an “incremental” path toward North American integration would probably gain the most support from policymakers. Apparently Canadian economists agreed. The cable also touts the supposed benefits of merging the three countries and even mentions what elements to “stress” in future “efforts to promote further integration.” It lists what it claims is a summary of the “consensus” among Canadian economists about the issues, too. Merging the United States, Canada, and Mexico Integration is a little-used term employed mainly by policy wonks. But while it may sound relatively harmless, it generally describes a very serious phenomenon when used in a geopolitical context — the gradual merging of separate countries under a regional authority. Similar processes are already well underway in Europe, Africa, and South America. And according to critics, the results — essentially abolishing national sovereignty in favor of supranational, unaccountable governance — have been an unmitigated disaster. But the U.S. government doesn’t think so. In North America, integration has been proceeding rapidly for years. The New American magazine was among the first to report on the efforts to erect what critics have called a “North American Union,” encompassing Canada, the United States, and Mexico. But more recently, the topic has received more attention. After the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — similar in many ways to the European Common Market that preceded the political union in Europe — the integration scheme has only accelerated. And the bipartisan efforts have been going on for years. Under President George W. Bush, integration occurred through the little-known “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.” And with the Obama administration, the process, now virtually out in the open, is only accelerating. Back in 2005, the cable released recently by WikiLeaks explained how it would be done. And looking back, the document was right on the mark. Moving Forward The best way forward, according to the cable, is via gradual steps. “An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian policymakers,” the cable states in its summary. “Our research leads us to conclude that such a package should tackle both ‘security’ and ‘prosperity’ goals,” the document claims, using the two key words that have been emphasized at every step along the way. “This fits the recommendations of Canadian economists who have assessed the options for continental integration.” Toward the end, the cable offers more advice on how to advance the integration agenda by tailoring the narrative. “When advocating [the North American Initiative to integrate the three countries], it would be better to highlight specific gains to individual firms, industries or travelers, and especially consumers,” the cable states, noting that it’s harder to “estimate the benefits” on a national or continental scale. Unsubstantiated Claims In a section headlined “North American Integration: What We Know,” the cable offers nothing but praise for the merging of the continent’s once-sovereign nations that had already been achieved. “Past integration (not just NAFTA but also many bilateral and unilateral steps) has increased trade, economic growth, and productivity,” it claims, despite the fact that countless economists disagree. Of course, true free-trade advocates also correctly point out that the thousands of pages of regulations making up the agreements should hardly be considered examples of genuine free trade. So-called “security,” the other big integration selling point, is featured prominently in the document as well. “A stronger continental ‘security perimeter’ can strengthen economic performance,“ the cable states. “It could also facilitate future steps toward trilateral economic integration, such as a common external tariff or a customs union.” And law enforcement “cooperation” is good too, the embassy and the U.S. ambassador claim matter-of-factly. “Cooperative measures on the ‘security’ side, a critical focus of current bilateral efforts, can deliver substantial, early, and widespread economic benefits,” the cable alleges, offering no evidence to substantiate the assertions. “Security and law enforcement within North America have evolved rapidly since 9/11,” it continues. “Collaboration to improve these processes could yield efficiency improvements which would automatically be spread widely across the economy, leading to general gains in trade, productivity, and incomes.” The Alleged “Consensus” According to the document, “many” economists agree with the scheme. The cable says they support the principle of “more ambitious integration goals” such as a customs union, a single market, and even a continental currency to replace the dollar. On top of that, they supposedly believe such a union should involve all three major North American countries — the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The cable cautions, however, that “most” of the economists believe the gradual approach is “most appropriate” — for now, at least. And all of them apparently agree that such an approach “helps pave the way to these goals if and when North Americans choose to pursue them.” The embassy cable also included a summary of what it calls the “professional consensus” among Canadian economists on various issues related to integration. “At this time, an ‘incremental’ approach to integration is probably better than a ‘big deal’ approach,” the document states under the “process” subheading, supposedly referring to the economists’ opinions. “However, governments should focus on choosing their objectives, and not on choosing a process.” Next in the cable is the question of “border vs. perimeter,” as the formerly secret document puts it. “Even with zero tariffs, our land borders have strong commercial effects,” the embassy said. However, “some” of the effects — such as law enforcement and “data gathering” — are described as “positive.” “Canada and the United States already share a security perimeter to some degree; it is just a question of how strong we want to make it,” the 2005 document notes. Apparently Canadians’ main reason for seeking a perimeter approach to security and borders, as opposed to a border between the two nations, is to avoid the “risk” that “discretionary” U.S. decisions to stop terror or disease might impede commerce. And evidently, the nations’ rulers did decide to make the perimeter stronger. As The New American reported in February, U.S. President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met in Washington, D.C., to hammer out a deal on solidifying the common “perimeter” around the two countries. Also part of the agreement, which conspicuously bypassed both countries’ legislatures, was a diminished role for the nations’ shared border. The development of a biometric system to track North Americans was agreed to as well, as were numerous other controversial measures. In terms of labor markets, the so-called “consensus” among the unidentified Canadian economists is also — surprise! — the pursuit of even more integration. “Many Canadian economists point to labor markets — both within and among countries — as the factor market [sic] where more liberalization would deliver the greatest economic benefits for all three countries,” the document states. Next, the cable release by WikiLeaks highlights another startling proposition about how to achieve an end-run around the Canadian Constitution. “Inter-provincial differences [in regulation] are important here, since Canada’s federal government does not have the benefit of a U.S.-style ‘interstate commerce’ clause,” the document states. “While much of the problem is domestic in nature, an international initiative could help to catalyze change.” Yes, the U.S. embassy referred to the wildly abused and misapplied “commerce clause” as a “benefit” that Canada lacks. And it actually suggested, hiding behind unnamed “economists,” that the constitutional “problem” could be minimized by foisting an “international initiative” on the Canadian people. The cable also claims the “economists” support a customs union, a feature developed in the European Union once the integration process was well established. “A common external tariff, or a customs union which eliminated NAFTA’s rules of origin (ROO), is economically desirable,” it states. And finally, the document summarizes the “consensus” on the subject of a currency union. It said the supposed economists were “split” on the issues of returning to fixed exchange rates or even abolishing Canada’s fiat dollar and replacing it with American Federal Reserve fiat currency. The cable gives the final word on the topic of a currency union to the Canadian central bank boss. He is quoted as saying that “monetary union is an issue that should be considered once we have made more progress towards establishing a single market.” Secrets, Backers The scheme to merge North America into a political unit with its own legislature and currency is largely the brainchild of the world government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations. But though documents leaked earlier this year revealed that governments were trying to keep the process under wraps, integration is now proceeding out in the open for the most part. Where the campaign will eventually end remains to be seen. But if North American Union advocates get their way, the U.S. Constitution and its Mexican and Canadian counterparts could soon be rendered irrelevant. After that, plugging the regional units into a global system would be a relatively simple matter, critics and supporters both argue. end org post…….- here a video from 2008 . |
Pentagon Fingered as a Source of Narco-Firepower in Mexico
http://narcosphere.narconews.com
The Big Clubs in Mexico’s Drug War Aren’t Slipping Through the Gun-Show Loophole
Another series of leaked State Department cables made public this week by WikiLeaks lend credence to investigative reports on gun trafficking and the drug war published by Narco News as far back as 2009.
The big battles in the drug war in Mexico are “not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns,” Narco News reported in March 2009, against the grain, at a time when the mainstream media was pushing a narrative that assigned the blame for the rising tide of weapons flowing into Mexico to U.S. gun stores and gun shows.
Rather, we reported at the time, “the drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.”
Those weapons, found in stashes seized by Mexican law enforcers and military over the past several years, include U.S.-military issued rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and explosives.
The State Department cables released recently by WikiLeaks support Narco News’ reporting and also confirm that our government is very aware of the fact that U.S military munitions are finding their way into Mexico, and into the hands of narco-trafficking organizations, via a multi-billion dollar stream of private-sector and Pentagon arms exports.
Narco News, in a report in December 2008 [“Juarez murders shine a light on an emerging Military Cartel”] examined the increasing militarization of narco-trafficking groups in Mexico and pointed out that U.S. military-issued ammunition popped up in an arms cache seized in Reynosa, Mexico, in November 2008 that was linked to the Zetas, a mercenary group that provides enforcement services to Mexican narco-trafficking organizations.
Tosh Plumlee, a former CIA asset who still has deep connections in the covert world, told Narco News recently that a special-operations task force under Pentagon command, which has provided training to Mexican troops south of the border, has previously “… found [in Mexico] hundreds of [U.S.-made] M-67s [grenades] as well as thousands of rounds of machine gun-type ammo, .50 [and] .30 [caliber] and the famous [U.S.-made] M-16 — most later confirmed as being shipped from Guatemala into Mexico as well as from USA vendors. …”
Similarly, an AP video report from May 2009 confirms that “M16 machine guns” have been seized from Mexican criminal groups engaged in the drug war.
“It’s unclear how cartels are getting military grade weapons,” the AP report states.
Narco News offered an answer to that question in March 2009, when it reported that the deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars.
Those exports are approved through the State Department, under a program known as Direct Commercial Sales. A sister program, called Foreign Military Sales, is overseen by the Pentagon and also taps U.S. contractors to manufacture weapons (such as machine guns and grenades) for export to foreign entities, including companies and governments.
Between 2005 and 2009, a total of $41 billion worth of U.S. defense articles were exported under the FMS program and a total of nearly $60 billion via the DCS program, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The bulk of those exports went to seven nations, including South Korea, but Mexico, too, was a receiving nation, with some $204 million in military arms shipments approved for export in fiscal year 2008 alone, according to the most recently available DCS report.
So, based on that evidence, it is clear that there is a grand river of military-grade munitions flowing out of major gun factories in the U.S. and being exported globally — completely bypassing the mom-and-pop gun store. That river of doom, however, does not bypass the drug war in Mexico.
The WikiLeaks Cables
Two separate diplomatic cables that came out of the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, in early 2009 discuss drug war-related attacks on the U.S. consulate in that city as well as on a Monterrey TV station — with each incident involving the use of U.S. military grenades.
From a State Department cable created on Jan. 12, 2009, by the American Consul General in Monterrey and sent to the Secretary of State, U.S. Northcom and other U.S. consulates:
On January 6 the Televisa TV station in Monterrey was attacked by unknown assailants, who shot eight .40 caliber rounds into the station wall and threw a grenade over a fence into the parking lot, which exploded but did not injure anyone.
… The Consulate [in Monterrey] was attacked in a similar manner on October 11, 2008, and is located approximately one mile from the Televisa station.
… The investigators recovered the grenade fuse spoon, which appears to be from a US military M67 fragmentation grenade. ATF is investigating if any M67 grenades from this lot were exported to foreign militaries. The M67 grenade is different than the M26 grenade [an older U.S.-made grenade from the Vietnam era] used to attack the Consulate on October 11, but five M67 grenades were recovered during a raid several days after the Consulate attack in a Gulf Cartel warehouse. [Emphasis added.]
So the State Department cable makes clear that the attacks on the TV station and on the consulate itself involved military grade explosives made in the USA that somehow found their way to Mexico. A second cable issued in March 2009 lays out the plausible path those grenades followed on their journey to Mexico’s drug war.
From a cable issued by the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey on March 3, 2009, and sent to the Secretary of State, the FBI as well as various other consulates:
AmConsulate General Monterrey’s ATF Office, the ATF Explosives Technology Branch, and AmEmbassy Mexico DAO have been working with Mexican law enforcement authorities to identify the origin of various grenades and other explosive devices recovered locally over the past few months, including the unexploded M26A2 fragmentation grenade hurled at the Consulate itself during the October 11, 2008 attack. Other ordnance recovered includes 21 grenades recovered by Mexican law enforcement on October 16, 2008 after a raid at a narco-warehouse in Guadalupe (a working class suburb of Monterrey), and twenty-five 40mm explosive projectiles, a U.S. M203 40mm grenade launcher, and three South Korean K400 fragmentation grenades recovered the same day in an abandoned armored vehicle that suspected narco-traffickers used to escape apprehension.
Local Mexican law enforcement has recovered a Grenade spoon and pull ring from an exploded hand grenade used in a January 6, 2009 attack on Televisa Monterrey, a Monterrey television station. Based upon ATF examination, it appears that the grenade used in the attack on the Consulate has the same lot number, and is of similar design and style, as the three of the grenades found at the narco-warehouse in Guadalupe. On January 7, 2009, the Mexican Army recovered 14 [U.S.-made] M-67 fragmentation grenades and 1 K400 fragmentation grenade in Durango City, Durango. ….
The lot numbers of some of the grenades recovered, including the grenade used in the attack on Televisa, indicate that previously ordnance with these same lot numbers may have been sold by the USG [U.S. Government] to the El Salvadoran military in the early 1990s via the Foreign Military Sales program. We would like to thank AmEmbassy San Salvador for its ongoing efforts to query the Government of El Salvador as whether any of its stocks of grenades and other munitions have been diverted or are otherwise unaccounted for. [Emphasis added.]
Again, this is the U.S. state Department confirming that it suspects U.S. military munitions sold in the 1990s to a foreign military were subsequently diverted to Mexican narco-traffickers.
Narco News sources indicate that it is likely some of the U.S. military weapons now being used by Mexican narco-trafficking groups may be from a past era, but they also contend it is likely a number of those weapons, such as the guns, have been rebuilt for the current drug war.
Former CIA asset Plumlee told Narco News:
There was some talk among [U.S.] task force members about a … gun-making operation ongoing in or around Oaxaca, Mexico, more like a “refurbish” type operation from old stored weapons from the old Contra days (1980-‘90 era). [There’s] a lot of those weapons still around Panama and El Salvador. I was told most of those old weapons were “burned out” and of not much value. However, if there was a supplier or someone who could retrofit these weapons [they] could be fixed and moved just about anywhere….
And as food for thought on that front, a former U.S. Customs Inspector, who asked that his name not be used, brought to Narco News’ attention a federal criminal case now pending in U.S. court in Nashville.
In that case, five top officials with a gun manufacturer called Sabre Defence Industries LLC stand accused of illegally trafficking gun parts, such as gun barrels and components, on an international scale. Sabre, now shut down in the wake of its run-in with the feds, made and marketed assault rifles and machine-gun components for military, law enforcement and civilian use worldwide.
In fact, its biggest client was the U.S. military, which had awarded it contracts worth up to $120 million “for the manufacture of, among other things, M16 rifles and .50 caliber machine gun barrels,” according to the indictment returned in mid-January of this year against the company and its officers.
“The indictment unsealed today alleges a nearly decade-long scheme to thwart U.S. import/export restrictions on firearms and their components,” said Lanny A. Breuer, an assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, in a press statement released on Feb. 8. “The defendants allegedly went to great lengths to conceal their activities and evade U.S. laws – mislabeling packages, falsifying shipping records, and maintaining a fictitious set of books and records, among other things. The illegal trade of firearms and their components poses serious risks and, as this case shows, we cannot and will not tolerate it.”
Federal authorities have not released any details on where the Sabre-made gun parts ended up, though the indictment alleges many of the parts were shipped overseas.
As a note of caution, however, the former Customs inspector points out that once a criminal group has a supply of parts, setting up a gun-making operation is not a complicated matter.
“For the small arms, and I would include, for simplicity, everything up to and including M2 .50 BMG machine guns, and even the 40 mm grenade launcher, M19, you can put them together on the kitchen table, or on the workbench in the garage,” the former inspector says.
For now, though, it simply is not known whether any of Sabre’s weapons parts ended up in gun-making chop shops south of the U.S. border, or elsewhere, or whether any of the M16s it made for the U.S. military were later provided to the Mexican government — via the FMS or DCS programs — and subsequently diverted by corrupt officials to narco-trafficking groups.
But the State Department cables recently made public by WikiLeaks do seem to confirm that the U.S. government is very aware that much of the heavy firepower now in the hands of Mexican criminal organizations isn’t linked to mom-and-pop gun stores, but rather the result of blowback from U.S. arms-trading policies (both current and dating back to the Iran/Contra era) that put billions of dollars of deadly munitions into global trade stream annually.
As the death toll mounts in the drug war now raging in Mexico, it pays to remember that weapons trafficking, both government-sponsored and illegal, is a big business that feeds and profits off that carnage. Bellicose government policies, such as the U.S.-sponsored Merida Initiative, that are premised on further militarizing the effort to impose prohibition on civil society only serve to expand the profit margin on the bloodshed.
Stay tuned….
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US : House votes to prevent reporting system for assault-weapon sales
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http://www.washingtonpost.com
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 19, 2011; 8:06 PM
The House voted overwhelmingly Friday to block the Obama administration from implementing a controversial proposal meant to give federal authorities a new tool to catch gunrunners to Mexico.
The measure passed with bipartisan support, 277 to 149, which added it to a massive spending bill that would keep the federal government running through September.
The amendment by Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using federal money to require licensed firearm dealers to report multiple sales of assault weapons.
Under the proposed rule, 8,500 gun dealers near the U.S.-Mexico border would be required to alert authorities when they sell within five consecutive business days two or more semiautomatic rifles greater than .22 caliber with detachable magazines.
Semiautomatic rifles such as AK-47s and AR-15s are favored by drug-trafficking organizations fighting the Mexican government.
On his Twitter account, Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican ambassador to the United States, called the vote “unfortunate.”
More than 34,000 people have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 and launched a sustained effort to eliminate violent drug-trafficking cartels. More than 65,000 guns recovered in Mexico have been traced back to the United States.
But NRA officials said the rule hurt gun rights.
“Any proposal that only burdens law-aiding gun owners and retailers – as this proposal does – is a non-starter with the NRA,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action. “To put it very simply, if someone is breaking the law, go after them full-bore. If they aren’t, leave them alone.”
Cox praised Boren and Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) for driving the amendment to passage.
To take effect, the spending bill and its amendments must pass the Senate and be signed by President Obama, who has threatened a veto. John Feinblatt, a chief aide to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), who has urged more restrictions on gun sales, called on senators to block the Boren amendment from taking effect, saying it was a “dangerous, anti-police measure.”
Nearly 20 senators, including three Democrats from Western states, have written letters opposing the proposed rule.
ATF had asked the White House to approve the rule last month on an emergency basis, but 17 senators objected to that tactic, saying, “We are especially alarmed by ATF’s attempt to regulate the sale of firearms through an emergency notice such as this, which has not been properly vetted by Congress or by the affected public.”
Last week, the White House budget office rejected the emergency procedure and said the proposal would go through the usual process, lasting through March. In the meantime, NRA lobbyists took the battle to Capitol Hill, where in recent decades the NRA has used appropriations bills to prevent increased gun control. In 2003, Congress passed the Tiahrt amendment to prevent public access to a database of guns used in crimes.
Comments on the proposed rule, which would affect dealers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, closed Monday.
The reports from dealers were expected to give leads to ATF investigators seeking to catch gunrunners to Mexico. However, the NRA opposed the proposal because “this reporting scheme would create a registry of owners of many of today’s most popular rifles – firearms owned by millions of Americans for self-defense, hunting and other lawful purposes,” the NRA said in a statement released Friday night.
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Pentagon official: US could send troops to fight Mexican “insurgency”
The remarks, made by US Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal at a security forum in Utah, drew an immediate rebuke from the Mexican government. Mexico’s Interior Department issued a statement Tuesday saying it “categorically rejects” the US official’s assertions.
“It is regrettable that this official makes statements … that do not reflect the cooperation that the two governments have been building,” the statement added.
The statement disputed the characterization of the armed conflict in Mexico as an “insurgency,” stressing, “Organized crime is seeking to increase its illegal economic benefits through trafficking of drugs and people, homicide, kidnapping, robbery, extortion and other crimes. They are not groups that are promoting a political agenda.”
In his remarks at the University of Utah’s Hinkley Institute of Politics, Westphal described Latin America and Mexico in particular as one of Washington’s “blind spots” in terms of national security. “As all of you know, there is a form of insurgency in Mexico with the drug cartels that are right on our border,” he said.
He added, “This isn’t just about drugs and about illegal immigrants. This is about, potentially a takeover of a government by individuals who are corrupt.”
While terming his remarks a personal opinion, Westphal said that he had shared them with the Obama White House. He added that he was concerned that “armed and fighting” US troops would have to be deployed on the US-Mexican border “in violation of our Constitution”, or sent “across the border” into Mexico to fight the supposed “insurgency”.
The Army undersecretary was compelled to issue a “clarification” of his remarks within 24 hours of making them. He said in a statement issued Tuesday that he had “mistakenly characterized the challenge posed by drug cartels to Mexico,” adding that his comments “were not, and have never been the policy of the Department of Defense of the US Government toward Latin America.”
While the strongly worded retraction reflects the concerns within the US political establishment over the popular hostility that Westphal’s remarks will provoke in Mexico, the undersecretary’s perspective was hardly unique.
Secretary of State Clinton delivered a similar analysis of Mexico’s crisis just last September. “We face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency, in Mexico and in Central America,” Clinton told a meeting organized by the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago.”
The implications of the comparison were clear. In Colombia, Washington concluded a military pact – Plan Colombia – with the government in Bogotá. The pact saw the deployment of hundreds of US “advisors” and military contractors, and the establishment of American military bases in Colombia, in the name of waging a “drug war” and counterinsurgency campaign.
Then, as now, the Mexican government sharply criticized Clinton’s remarks, and President Barack Obama subsequently issued a statement repudiating them.
Westphal’s statements are seen as going somewhat further in explicitly stating the logical conclusion: direct US military intervention.
The Pentagon, however, has previously pointed to such military action. The Joint Operating Environment report issued by the military’s Joint Operating Command in 2008 warned of the potential for a “rapid and sudden collapse” of the Mexican state under pressure from the drug cartels (comparing the country’s crisis to that of Pakistan). It added, “Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”
Under the so-called Merida Initiative, also known as “Plan Mexico”, the US has allocated over $1.4 billion to Mexico’s armed forces and police to fight a “drug war” that has seen the deployment of more than 50,000 troops and the deaths of some 35,000 Mexicans since the end of 2006. More than 15,000 were killed in 2010 alone, a 60 percent increase over the previous year.
Last month in a visit to Mexico City, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the Obama administration would seek to dispense at least $500 million worth of the aid in the form of military hardware and training programs this year. While the State Department briefly froze some aid in the face of documented reports that Mexican security forces are carrying out extra-judicial executions, torture and other systematic abuse of the civilian population, Clinton declared her full support for the country’s armed forces and its President Felipe Calderon.
During her visit, Clinton called the murderous violence in Mexico “messy,” noting that it “causes lots of terrible things to be on the news.” She nonetheless urged the Mexican government to continue the militarized campaign against drug trafficking. The state crackdown and the growing death toll are bitterly unpopular with the Mexican public, even as the flow of US guns into the country and the consumption of illegal drugs in the US itself continue unabated.
The secretary of state’s visit to Mexico was seen by many as an exercise in damage control following the release by WikiLeaks of a number of confidential diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Mexico City. The documents pointed to the growing US dominance over Mexico’s security apparatus as well as Washington’s contempt for the Mexican government.
One of the cables, from May 2008, revealed that the Mexican government has given US intelligence agencies unrestricted access to undocumented immigrants detained on Mexican soil while en route to the US. The majority of these migrants are Central American, but included workers from other countries as well. The cable states that the Mexican Center for Investigation and National Security had given US intelligence the authority to “interview foreign nationals detained at Mexican immigration detention centers dispersed around the country for potential CT [counter-terrorism] information of interest.”
The same embassy cable states, “Rampant lawlessness, widespread corruption and the government’s long-standing inability to confront either had been seen as troubling threat indicators to those watching our southern border for signs of potential terrorist infiltration.”
A secret cable from November 2009 describes the Mexican state intelligence apparatus as “fractured, ad hoc, and reliant on US support”, while asserting that “Sustained US assistance can help shape and fortify” the Mexican agencies.
Money makes the killing world go around : Interview with a Mexican hitman
| http://blogs.aljazeera.netBy Mariana Sanchez in | on November 23rd, 2010. |
He sits in front of me, crosses his legs and places the Israeli-made 50-calibre handgun on his lap – the cannon pointing at me.
“Does it make you uncomfortable?” he asks, smiling sarcastically.
I thought to myself that it wasn’t the first time I’ve had guns pointing at me, but it was the first time I was interviewing a Mexican hitman with a gun on his lap. A chilling thought crossed my mind: perhaps in a few hours someone would be killed with that same weapon.
The lights are on, the cameras ready to roll. It’s hot in the basement and the hitman sweats profusely. He’s never been interviewed before and says he’s nervous.
“My boss told me to come and talk to you,” I tell him. “It’s OK,” he says, but under one condition: we won’t go over details about the organisation he works for, who his boss is or any information that could put his life at risk. I agree, for his sake, and for my own team’s security.
We agree to not reveal his real name. He wants me to call him George, but he slips some information about his identity, boasting that everyone on the streets of Culiacan calls him “Diablillo” or Little Devil. It’s a nickname that actually suits him well after having spent the last 11 years of his life going all over Mexico on a killing rampage … or so he says.
‘I really don’t know’
“How many people have you killed?” I ask. “I really don’t know, 80? 100?” It could be many more. He says he stopped counting years ago.
George is a 26-year-old hitman, a “sicario”, as hitmen are called in Mexico. Since he was 15, when he began killing people for money, he’s had a clear agenda: to protect his boss and collect debts owed to the powerful drug trafficking organisation he professes loyalty to.
George was born and raised in a small town known as Badiraguato, the cradle of most of Mexico’s drug cartels. Our contact says he belongs to a family of a “legendary” drug lord from the state of Sinaloa. Guns and narcotics were commonly found around the ranch house, as rice on a kitchen’s counter.
“I was raised in a ranch where we ‘grow’ drugs – everything from poppy to marijuana. That brings in a lot of money and power,” he says. And, it’s implied, killing people is part of the family tradition; it runs in his blood.
George says he’ll do anything to show his loyalty to his boss. “I have killed friends, family members. You see, this is a business and they failed to comply with the business; they failed our boss and orders are orders. In the end, we don’t have a heart.”
One would think that George is a typical mean-looking criminal, the type authorities usually parade for a press photo-op. But he’s not. He’s a bit short, chubby and smiles easily – he almost resembles a child having fun with his toy gun.
As I was watching him, I turned to the door where a man in his early 30s was standing still, looking at each one of us in the room, vigilant. His eyes were cold, impenetrable. I have seen that look before in other conflict areas … death is written on them. He is George’s zealous bodyguard. He moves slowly, with his right hand always inside a blue sac hanging from his shoulder. He’s holding his gun, ready to shoot, I believe. He knows that if something happens to George, he’s dead.
‘Third-tier kingpins’
In this world of Mexican “mafiosos”, loyalty is leveraged by money. And money is what gives “third-tier kingpins” like George, power.
Money not only buys allies among traffickers and corrupt authorities; it buys what criminals like George are willing to die for: expensive SUVs, gold chains, women or turtle boots, like the white ones George is wearing for the interview.
For killers like George, business is good these days. The turf war in Mexico gets bloodier every day. Drug lords are showering their hitmen with so much money they can be confident that anyone who interferes with their businesses will likely become a lethal target.
“I got paid $100 to kill a general and $70,000 for a senator,” says George. I can’t verify if this is true. But I am curious to know how much a journalist like me is worth in Mexico. So I ask the question: How much would you charge to kill a reporter? He pauses, looking at me straight in the eyes and replies: “About $1,000.”
Life in Mexico has no value. George assures me that he no longer charges for killing policemen. He just does it because it will win him the respect of his boss and that of 18 young hitmen who follow him, protect him and kill for him. Among them, two 12-year-olds, who by the way, he says, have already killed four people altogether.
Many of these kids, or sicarios, are poor young Mexicans who didn’t have many choices in life. Unemployment is high and poverty affects millions of people in this country. Before settling at a job for less than $1 a day, like millions of Mexicans, many of these youngsters prefer to join the ranks of the drug cartels and get enough pocket money to get them through the day.
But George’s case is different. He tells me he has $1.5m divided among bank accounts in the United States and hidden safes. And he says wants to make more because “it’s not about having money anymore, its about power. How much power do I want to have? All the power necessary to live my life however I want”.
Always on the run
This statement, however, is a fantasy. George cannot live the life he really wants “in peace”, as he says. For months he’s been sleeping between three and five hours each day. Never on the same bed. Always on the run.
I ask him how long does he think he will live? “I hope for long, but right now I live day by day, perhaps I go out now and get killed,’ he says. “My life is pending from a string because I have a lot of problems.” He has sowed many enemies.
He takes a sip of water and wipes his head. “It’s hot here in Culiacan, the streets are very hot”. He means dangerous, violent. Fighting has become vicious, there is no compassion and no space for remorse.
The violence is at an unprecedented peak and George is one of thousands of Mexico’s violence masterminds. “That’s what I do. That’s my job, I go after debtors. I kill them.”
And you torture people, too, right? “Of course,” he answers cooly.
I ask him if he’s not tormented by his victims’ pleas for compassion. “If you can believe me, no. I get energetic, I get like adrenaline, and when they start to shout I feel anger,” he says.
“The more suffering I inflict on them, the stronger the adrenaline. It’s like an adventure. Torturing people takes the stress away from me.” Really? I can’t help feeling my own words tripping and I can’t help asking him why doesn’t he go jogging instead. No joke.
I can tell that he really feels no remorse. “It’s too late. At this point in my life there is no way I could go for another job,” he says. “I am confined to it. I am only waiting to get killed and when the day comes there won’t be any compassion for my life because I’ve done a lot of damage.”
The only way George says he can stay alive for a while longer is if he maintains his hitmen’s loyalty, if he feeds their appetite for a fast life, providing them with women and drugs … if he can make sure he won’t miss a shot. It’s either live by the gun or die.
And he can only do this with money. Lots of it. There is a saying in Mexico: “Even a dog dances for money … but without it, one dances like a dog.”
In the end he looks uneasy. It’s not the heat. We’ve talked for over an hour. “You are torturing me with your questions,” he says. “And the person who actually tortures people here is me.” By then I thought … lets just leave it at that.
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Oil Companies and Banks Will Profit From UN Forest Protection Scheme
http://www.commondreams.org
Redd scheme designed to prevent deforestation but critics call it ‘privatisation’ of natural resources
by John Vidal, environment editor, in Cancun
Some of the world’s largest oil, mining, car and gas corporations will make hundreds of millions of dollars from a UN-backed forest protection scheme, according to a new report from the Friends of the Earth International.
![oilcompaniesandbanks_unforest.jpg [An aerial view of trees at a forest on Sumatra, Indonesia where millions are being spent to fight deforestation. (Beawiharta/Reuters)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/oilcompaniesandbanks_unforest.jpg)
The group’s new report – launched on the first day of the global climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, where 193 countries hope to thrash out a new agreement – is the first major assessment of the several hundred, large-scale Redd (Reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation) pilot schemes. It shows that banks, airlines, charitable foundations, carbon traders, conservation groups, gas companies and palm plantation companies have also scrambled into forestry protection.While forestry is billed as one issue where significant progress could be made at the talks, over the weekend David Cameron, Chris Huhne, the climate change secretary, and the government’s chief scientists all played down the prospect of a global deal to cut carbon emissions.
“British ministers are going to Mexico this week with an approach that is both realistic and optimistic,” the prime minister wrote in the Observer . “Realistic, because we don’t expect a global deal to be struck in Cancun, but optimistic too, because we are viewing this as a stepping stone to future agreement.”
Huhne, who will attend the second week of the talks, was more blunt: “No one expects a binding deal on climate change in Cancun.” But he said deforestation and longer-term climate finance were areas where progress could be made.
The Redd scheme is central to slowing, or halting, deforestation, which causes huge releases of carbon dioxide. But critics say that the scheme amounts to privatisation of natural resources.
FoE’s report shows, for example that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm Shell has linked with Russian gas giant Gazprom and the Clinton Foundation to invest in the Rimba Rey project, 100,000ha of peat swamp in Indonesia. The project is expecting to prevent 75m tonnes of carbon being emitted over 30 years, which could earn the three groups $750m at a modest carbon price of $10 a tonne.
It also says that an investment of little more than $10m by the bank Merrill Lynch, the conservation group Flora and Fauna International and an Australian carbon trading company could generate more than $430m, over 30 years, from a project to protect 750,000ha of forest in Aceh province, Indonesia.
The “Redd rush” is limited to voluntary carbon offsets for now but is expected to become a stampede if the 193 countries meeting this week reach an outline forestry protection agreement that would allow governments to offset national emissions against forest conservation. It could result in eventual cash flows of $30bn a year from rich countries – who need to offset emissions – to poor countries, where most of the world’s endangered forests are.
But the report’s authors say great social risks attached to the schemes must be addressed. “There are significant risks that Redd will lead to the privatisation of the world’s forests, transferring them out of the hands of indigenous peoples and local communities and into the hands of bankers and carbon traders,” they say.
Many of the world’s greatest stretches of forests are the traditional home of indigenous peoples, and millions of others may be dependent on access to forests, say the authors, who urge that ownership of land and carbon rights must be resolved. “Many Redd-related disputes are now unfolding. Respect for indigenous peoples’ rights seems to be a missing element,” says the report. “A Redd race is under way. Redd is emerging as a mechanism that has the potential to exacerbate inequality, reaping huge rewards for corporate investors whilst bringing considerably fewer benefits or even serious disadvantages to forest dependent communities. It could become a dangerous distraction from the business of implementing real climate change cuts.”
One major concern is that the weak legal definitions of “forest” and “degraded land” would let the powerful logging and palm companies carry on business as usual by persuading governments to redefine what constitutes a forests.
Greenpeace claimed last week that Indonesia planned to class large areas of its remaining natural forests as “degraded land” in order to cut them down and receive $1bn of climate aid for replanting them with palm trees and biofuel crops.
However some observers, including Lord Stern, say the Redd schemes offer the best opportunity for cost-effective and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. They say thatmore technologically sophisticated options, such as carbon capture and storage, could take several years to come into large-scale operation, and they are more expensive.
A spokesperson for Shell said the company could not yet comment on the Friends of the Earth report.
North American Union – “U.S. Super Spy Center” Uncovered in Mexico
-Megaplex includes offices for the CIA, FBI, DEA, Defense Intelligence, BATF, Department of Treasury and others.
- U.S. Intelligence Operatives will no longer have to disguise themselves as diplomats.
- Mexico will now have a Military ‘Liaison’ for NORTHCOM.
- U.S. is now in charge of all tactical efforts against the drug war, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism in Mexico.
- Obama and Hillary Clinton are credited for the creation of the Office of Bi-lateral Intelligence in Mexico (OBI).
With the approval of Felipe Calderón’s Administration, the U.S. Government finally got what it always wanted: To set up a super spy center in Mexico City. It was the escalation of the drug war in the country what opened the door to all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the military, to operate out of the Federal District without having to disguise their agents as diplomats.
The establishment of the Office of Bi-national Intelligence (OBI) was authorized by Calderon, after negotiations with Washington, which began under the government of his predecessor, Vicente Fox Quesada. The creation of the super spy center was authorized by the director of the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN), Guillermo Valdés Castellanos, without taking into account any objections from the Mexican military.
Through the OBI, Calderon has given the green light to U.S. Intelligence agents to spy on organized crime syndicates and drug cartels. They can also spy on Mexican government agencies, including the Secretariat of National Defense, Navy, and the diplomatic missions in Mexico.
The building headquarters, which includes offices from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Treasury is located at 265 Paseo de la Reforma Avenue, approximately 250 meters from the U.S. embassy.
The most significant presence at the OBI building is that of the Pentagon, which includes the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Security Agency (NSA). It is followed by the U.S. Department of Justice, also with three agencies: the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
With two services, there is the Department of Homeland Security: Coast Guard Intelligence (CGI) and the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), while the Treasury Department has officers of the Bureau of Intelligence on Terrorism and Financial Affairs (TFI) .
In addition, the OBI opened two remote offices: one in Ciudad Juarez and one in Tijuana, housing U.S. agents and “task force commanders” who coordinate operations against drug trafficking with the support of Mexican Government personnel.
It is not known how many intelligence agents from the U.S. are operating in Mexico with the authorization of the Mexican Federal Government, since the creation of this center was announced on August 31st. The maintain that the exact number is “classified.”
The building occupied by the OBI in the Federal District is right next to the Mexican Stock Exchange and is part of what the security and intelligence services in Mexico define as a “soft target area” in reference to the possibility of an attack on U.S. interests in Mexico.
At this strategic point for Washington in the Mexican Federal District, there are also facilities for transnational corporations such as Ford, American Airlines, as well as Marriott and Sheraton hotels, among others.
The building where the OBI is located gives the impression of an ordinary business facility, with banks, insurance, telecommunications, commercial offices and private offices. The only thing that stands out is the entry and departure of U.S. citizens.
The building directory lists the names of the occupants all the way up to the 21st floor. However, after the 22nd floor, there are three penthouses that are only listed as “occupied.” And on the roof there is a dozen satellite dishes placed just above the logo of the telecommunications company Axtel.
“It’s the best covert location for the agencies to operate,” said the source that provided the location of the OBI. The ordinary appearance of the building is the way in which the United States often disguise intelligence centers around the world.
The reception and parking are guarded by private security services, while Federal District Police provide outside support.
Furthermore, the city government has installed special surveillance cameras with sirens to observe the movement of pedestrians and vehicles outside the building.
The scope and power of the OBI in Mexico is similar to the El Paso Intelligence Center, in Texas (EPIC), which dates back to 1974 and operates exclusively to combat drug trafficking, weapons and money laundering on the border between Mexico and United States.
EPIC has been credited for creating the strategies launched against drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico. Among the most successful are Operation White Tiger, which was used to investigate the activities of the Hank Rhon family in 1997, the capture and extradition, a year earlier, of Gulf Drug Cartel Leader Juan Garcia Abrego, and the discovery of narco-graves in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in 1998.
Subordination
Overrun by drug trafficking, the government of Felipe Calderón agreed to the establishment of the OBI in Mexico a proposal of the then head of National Intelligence in the United States, Admiral Dennis Blair, who last March was accompanied by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, during his working visit to Mexico.
According to the formal agreement, the new U.S. office workers interact with their Mexican counterparts, under the coordination of the State Department and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE).
For the Pentagon, the strong presence of its agents in Mexico is intended to merge the intelligence and espionage services of both countries to identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of drug trafficking organizations and organized crime gangs.
Under this directive, issued on 18 March by Gen. Victor Eugene Renuart, then head of Northern Command (NORTHCOM), Mexico has carried out several operations against drug traffickers.
Since then, among some of the actions taken the drug lords have been the killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva, (aka El Barbas), Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, and Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (aka Tony Tormenta), in addition to the arrests of other drug lords, such as Edgar ‘Barbie’ Valdez Villarreal.
Since the killing of Beltran Leyva in December of 2009, U.S. intelligence services, mainly the DEA, have mentioned their participation in various operations, against the very Arturo Beltran Leyva, Barbie Valdez, Teodoro Garcia Simental (aka El Teo), Jose Gerardo Alvarez Vazquez (aka El Indio or El Chayán), operator of the Beltran Leyva organization and Carlos Ramon Castro, a drug dealer who worked for several organizations.
As part of the Mexican government’s need to justify the militarization of the fight against drug trafficking, the Pentagon has strengthened its cooperation with the Mexican military. In early 2009, just as the Department of State and the Mexican Exterior Relations Secretariat (SRE) fine-tuned the details for the establishment of the OBI, the U.S. Department of Defense stepped up military training for Mexicans in Mexico and in several U.S. military bases.
The training has been an unprecedented event in the history of military relations between the two countries. For the first time, the Pentagon has brought counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism expertise from Iraq and Afghanistan to their offices in central Mexico.
In the case of Mexico, the training courses are developed and run by the Defense Department, and are focused on intelligence and tactical operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and the implementation of counterinsurgency tactics.
In addition to the courses offered in Mexico, the Mexican military has significantly increased the number of special forces troops in the Army, Air Force and the Navy to attend specialized intelligence training in U.S. military bases.
Liaisons
The main example of this cooperation is the presence -for the first time in the bilateral relationship- a member of the Mexican Army as a “liaison” between the Mexican military (Central Command) and the Northern Command in Colorado (NORTHCOM), according to a military source who spoke to the Mexican magazine Proceso.
On Wednesday 10, The Washington Post published on its front page a note informing that the liaison will also serve as deputy commander of the Institute for Security and Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere at Fort Benning, Georgia. From the sixties to the eighties, these facilities housed in the so-called School of the Americas, which went down in history as a supplying center for Latin American dictators, which are characterized by the systematic violation of human rights.
A U.S. official, who told the Post on condition of anonymity, said that given the seriousness of the drug violence in Mexico, “we have received direct instruction from the President (Barack Obama) and the highest levels in government, to really examine what more can be done in this counter-narcotics cooperation with Mexico.”
The establishment of the Office of Bi-national Intelligence (OBI) implies that for the first time in the history of Mexico, surveillance, supervision and qualification of work against organized crime between federal government agencies, including the military, rests in part on foreign officials.
According to the document unveiled by the White House on March 25, 2009 on the establishment of the OBI, the office is also responsible for overseeing the proper use of resources that Washington provides the Calderon administration in combating drug trafficking through the ‘Merida Initiative.’
“We will be coordinating our efforts with the government of Mexico through high-level contacts, which in part are related to the new intelligence services responsible for overseeing the implementation of Merida Initiative,” according to the document released by the White House (published by Proceso).
A year later, on March 23, 2010, Hillary Clinton announced during her working visit to the Federal District, in the context of the implementation of Plan Merida, the establishment of two “pilot programs” in the Tijuana-San Diego and Ciudad Juárez-El Paso corridors.
The two governments declared in a joint statement, that in the case of Ciudad Juárez, the program considers the development of “a model for the Mexican Government to collect and analyze tactical intelligence” as well as to “take action against drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and other criminal activities.”
However, the actual operations of the OBI in security and intelligence services, Mexicans will be subordinates of the U.S.. Agencies of the U.S. Government will play the role as experts in intelligence work, apart from previous advisory roles in order to increase Mexico’s ability to use information resources against drug cartel operations.
Link to Original Article in Spanish
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related Art .
U.S. squirm in Scandinavian spying row
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Partners in Crime: The U.S. Secret State and Mexico’s “War on Drugs”
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by Tom Burghardt
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Global Research, September 19, 2010
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For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationships forged amongst international drug syndicates, neofascists and U.S. intelligence agencies, documenting the long and bloody history of U.S. complicity in the global drugs trade.
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.”
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 Ahead It 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, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.
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Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt
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Mexico’s Troubled 200th Anniversary
For Mexico, 2010 is a deeply symbolic year. Mexicans celebrate 200 years of independence from Spain and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. Their government will spend $300 million on the party, but no amount of fireworks or revolutionary nostalgia can overcome the inescapable sensation that Mexico is sinking into crisis.
Drug gang assassins recently massacred 72 Central and South American migrants. The two local and state investigators who first arrived at the crime scene disappeared and were found dead two weeks later. Gunmen killed three Mexican mayors in the past month.
In the first four years of President Felipe Calderon’s drug war, more than 28,000 people have been slain, according to the government’s own count. Yet there have been few prosecutions: less than 5 percent of these murders have been investigated. But even those who are inured to corruption and incompetence are sickened by news of a prison warden who let a death squad out at night over a period of months — driving official vehicles and armed with prison guard assault rifles — to massacre innocent people in a neighboring state.
Headlines from Mexico bleed with news of such brutal killings and government ineptitude. And even as the violence continues to build, a recession — spreading south from the United States — cuts to the economic bones of an already vulnerable Mexican population. Growing economic desperation and shocking violence have undermined Mexicans’ faith in the ability of their government to manage the economy, control the country’s streets, mete out justice, or even to remain neutral among the warring cartels seeking to control North America’s drug trade corridors.
It sounds bad and thus tempting to turn our gaze away from the news of mayhem and sadistic acts of violence coming out of Mexico. But we must not, and cannot afford to, turn away. The well-being of Mexico is vital to the well-being of the United States. We are neighbors and economic partners who share a continent and a common destiny. Any effective prescription to pull Mexico back from the abyss will require cooperation — as well as introspection and substantive policy changes — from the United States.
The U.S. should openly join the conversation on strategic and selective decriminalization of drugs like marijuana and impose strict controls on gun sales along the US side of our common border. Clearly, most of Mexico’s problems need to be solved in Mexico, by Mexicans, but these are two crucial steps we can take on the our side of the border to reduce the flow of money and guns fueling Mexico’s drug mafias. This one-two punch would deliver a damaging blow to the criminal organizations terrorizing Mexico.
A consensus is gelling on both sides of the border that it is time to move beyond the prohibitionist dogmas that have shaped — and doomed — the drug “war” since its declaration by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. In Mexico a chorus of opinion leaders including former President Vicente Fox have forced open a long pent-up debate on drug legalization. Mexican President Calderon recently made news by endorsing debate on this topic, even as he reassured Washington of his own continued allegiance to the prohibition camp.
Americans are the prime customers for the narcotics produced in and shipped through Mexico. Despite 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the drug war’s eradication and interdiction plans, prohibited drugs are easily available across the United States today. Their illegality assures the inflated profits that sustain criminal organizations.
This fall, Californians may pass a ballot measure to end marijuana prohibition. That would be an important step, but irrespective of California’s choice, it is our Federal drug and gun policies that must evolve to aid Mexicans fighting to preserve the soul of their country.
Mexicans often ask why the U.S. doesn’t ban the assault weapons that can still be legally purchased on our side of the border. The lamentable answer: powerful gun lobbyists successfully defend the legal sale of “single-shot” assault rifles even as they are routinely smuggled into Mexico where a simple tweak renders them fully automatic and ready to fire hundreds of rounds per minute in the hands of drug cartel assassins.
Eighty percent of the 75,000 guns Mexican authorities seized from criminals during the last three years came from the U.S. This fact underscores the need to reclassify control of gun sales along our frontier as a matter of national security.
Putting the squeeze on the pipeline of money and weapons that feed Mexico’s inferno would be the best Independence gift we could give Mexico. It would help more than any amount of guns, money, training, and electronic spy data we might provide to Mexico’s unreliable Army and police.

As early as January of 2005, high-ranking officials were 























