Having set a new — and unwanted — record for “drug war deaths” here in Sinaloa last month (the cartoon is from El Debate) and reeling from a sudden uptick in mass murder (16 in Juarez, ten or so in a shootout in Torreon today), Congress has finally started to ask what it’s all about.
Porfiro Muñoz Ledo, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today called the Merida Plan a “foreign war by the United States against narcotics traffickers.” He adds that the highest narcotics consumption in the world is on U.S. soil, and has resulted in no deaths, while Mexico has seen 15,000 casualties.
Of course, there are the occasional shootouts between U.S. narcotics dealers and police, and sometimes people get killed, but the thrust of Muñoz Ledo’s argument is correct. The only “winners” so far in the “war on drugs” have been the U.S. arms industry, which supplies both the Mexican police and military (the presumed good guys) and the narcos (the black hats).
Muñoz Ledo, being a PRD Senator might be dismissed as just an anti-Calderonista, but the highly respected “mainstream” El Universal notes that “Merida Plan” funding went, not to Mexico (as I’ve noted time and time again) but to U.S. military contractors: Bell Helicopter, Dyncorp, Harris, Northrup-Grumman receiving the bulk of the funds. And, to a shadowy Washington “training insitutute” referred to in the article as the “Proyecto de la Cultura de la Legalidad”. Though a Mexican subsidiary, México Unidos Contra la Delicuencia there is a link to the U.S. group’s site, a group called, “Culture of Lawfulness”. Which apparently spent its money, among other things on this website, reproduced in full below:
Meanwhile, although the Calderón Administration continues to defend its “war on drugs” (most recently in the Japan Times, of all places), the sense that this “war” serves either to benefit the United States (as Senator Muñoz Ledo says), or the Sinaloa Cartel (as many — especially in Sinaloa – tend to believe without firm proof, though some intriguing suggestions of influence) is leading to serious discussion of what the meaning of the “drug war” is — and whether there is even a Calderón strategy to win it… and whether a new strategy (assuming there is one now) is necessary.
I have been reading about the Mafia Wars of the 1980s and 90s in Italy lately. I’ll have more to say about that later, but it strikes me that in Italy, you had competing bands of traditional gangsters — both rural and urban — suddenly flush with cash when they eschewed their usual mayhem and mischief for the more lucrative field of narcotics smuggling – and whose new-found cash (and their organizational skills) made them useful to political groups. The violence against agents of the state was often worse than anything we’ve seen here, and, in the end, it turned out that a good number of the outrages were perpetrated on behalf of the state’s political leadership. Salvador Riina, starting as a minor Sicilian mobster, waged war on his rivals and became “boss of bosses” not just of the Sicilian Mafia, but of all South Italian gangsters (and a major player in government contracts to boot) with the help of the Christian Democratic Part. And, in turn, helped the Christian Democrats to maintain control of Italy.
I don’t say that what happened in Italy then is analogous to what is going on now in Mexico, but it’s undeniable that, in looking at a new paradigm of fighting crime, it might be worthwhile to consider our own criminals in a different light, not just as simple “enemies of the state”, but as an integral part of the political culture and economy that need to be dealt with in a more complex and creative fashion than the reductionist (and deadly) methods employed by the Calderón , Bush and Obama Administrations.
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