"They come across and kidnap, murder and carry out assassinations. They do not respect the border."
So said
Drug Czar John Walters of Mexico's drug cartels, regarding their encroachment on U.S. territory to make attacks.
Violence in Mexico is making headlines every other day, it seems, and increasingly U.S. news outlets are reporting on how that violence is crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. Does anyone else see something wrong with that phrasing?
Let's not even get into what these particular borders once were, or how exactly it was decided where they ought to be. What's even more outrageous is that today's news headlines show no recognition of the structural violence that has been crossing that border since NAFTA was brought into existence Jan. 1, 1994 (and let's face it - well before then, too); no questioning of why it is so many people risk life and limb to cross that border every day; and an illogical refusal to consider even the basic premise of supply and demand when it comes to the drug war.
Amazing how Walters' quote sounds just like what folks all across Latin America have been always been saying of the School of Assassins (the US Army School of the Americas, renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or SOA/WHINSEC). The SOA for the last sixty plus years has trained Latin American soldiers and police (many from Mexico) in counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics efforts, relying on curricula themed around the use of torture (as manuals released twelve years ago proved), extortion, kidnapping, and selective assassination - all tactics graduates would use against their own populations. All tactics now being used, to horrific effect, by drug cartels in Mexico.
And gosh, these American military techniques sure are working, huh? Colombia - which under Plan Colombia has received a more than $5 billion dose of the United States cure for its drug problem - produces as much coca as ever, just in different places than before. In the past two weeks alone, Mexico, which is preparing to receive the
first Merida initiative funds (modeled after Plan Colombia's huge success), almost
400 people have been killed in violence surrounding the drug trade as traffickers journey north through the country from the producing region to our great nation of consumers. There have been more than 3700 drug trade/organized crime-related deaths this year in Mexico.
So, no, exporting the U.S. drug prohibition strategy is not working, not so much. It's no wonder Mexican President Calderon recently introduced legislation essentially decriminalizing drug possession for personal use. Drug prohibition doesn't work, and has disastrous "side effects" that make money for arms dealers, cartels, drug czars at home and repressive militaries around the world.
Posted by Vera Leone