Header Photo Will Rotate With Browser Refresh, Or View Photos With Image Info In The Gallery Using The Link Above
"And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." The Beatles "Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see" My Father
If you’re interested in sober, informed commentary on Mexico President Calderón’s war on organized crime, and the debunking of media narrative myths, you’ll want to read Castañeda’s “What’s Spanish for Quagmire?” published in the Jan/Feb edition of Foreign Policy Magazine.
Jorge G. Castañeda, former Mexican foreign minister [during the Fox administration], is senior fellow at the New America Foundation and global distinguished professor of politics and Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University.
Esther, one of my twelve readers, informed me that Castañeda and Rubén Aguilar have written “El Narco: La Guerra Fallida” which is currently available only in Spanish. The Foreign Policy commentary, to which Esther’s comment led me, provides a condensed version in English.
You’ve probably noticed in recent months the proliferation of the media narrative that Mexican organized crime violence has spread across the border into the USA. Uninformed and/or demagogic politicians, as seems to be the style these days, have initiated and proliferated a narrative which lap dog media outlets report uncritically as fact, and whose reports the politicians then utilize to support their erroneous contentions. It’s the standard politician/media circle jerk, if I might utilize such an analogy.
Now comes The Arizona Republic to inform us that the narrative is complete BS, and that “Violence is not up on Arizona border”. Nor is it up in Texas border cities.
A few excerpts.
NOGALES, Ariz. – Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.
“We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico,” Bermudez says emphatically. “You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America.”
——
FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics provided by police agencies, in fact, show that the crime rates in Nogales, Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade, even as drug-related violence has spiraled out of control on the other side of the international line. Statewide, rates of violent crime also are down.
While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns.
In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years.
——
In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years.
——
Cochise County’s crime rate has been “flat” for at least 10 years, the sheriff added. Even in 2000, when record numbers of undocumented immigrants were detained in the area, just 4 percent of the area’s violent crimes were committed by illegal aliens.
Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said his town suffers from home invasions and kidnappings involving marijuana smugglers who are undoubtedly tied to Mexican organizations. However, he added, most of those committing the rip-offs are American citizens.
“I think the border-influenced violence is getting worse,” Villasenor said. “But is it a spillover of Mexican cartel members? No, I don’t buy that.”
——
While the nation’s illegal-immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2004, according to federal records, the violent-crime rate declined 35 percent.
More recently, Arizona’s violent-crime rate dropped from 512 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 447 incidents in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available.
——
Aguilar said that Juarez, Mexico, is widely regarded as the “deadliest city in the world” because of an estimated 5,000 murders in recent years. Yet right across the border, El Paso, Texas, is listed among the safest towns in America.
A review of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports suggests that Arizona’s border towns share El Paso’s good fortune. Douglas and Nogales are about the same size as Florence but have significantly lower violent-crime rates. Likewise, Yuma has a population greater than Avondale’s but a lower rate of violent offenses.
In Nogales, Ariz., residents seem bemused and annoyed by their town’s perilous reputation. Yes, they sometimes hear the gunfire across the border. No, they don’t feel safe visiting the sister city across the line. But with cops and federal agents everywhere, they see no danger on their streets.
“There’s no violence here,” said Francisco Hernandez, 31, who works in a sign shop and lives on a ranch along the border. “It doesn’t drain over, like people are saying.”
Leo Federico, 61, a retired teacher, said he has been amazed to hear members of Congress call for National Guard troops in the area.
“That’s politics,” he said, shrugging. “It’s all about votes. . . . We have plenty of law enforcement.”
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.
In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.
“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”
Every day, recently, the USA herd media echo chamber carries reports that Mexico is falling apart, descending into an “an epidemic of drug-related violence“, as this McClatchey piece puts it. This ABC story, citing a “a confidential federal law enforcement assessment obtained by ABC News”, even goes so absurdly far as to ask, in its headline, “Mexico: The Next Iraq or Afghanistan?”
The reports are largely nonsense, but the ABC comparison of Mexico to Iraq or Afghanistan is just utter silliness, the suggestion of Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s that drug gangs have taken control of portions of Mexico notwithstanding. Enrique Krauze explains in his NYT commentary just how silly the comparison to Iraq or Afghanistan is.
AMERICA’S distorted views can have costly consequences, especially for us in Latin America. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Mexico this week is a good time to examine the misconception that Mexico is, or is on the point of becoming, a “failed state.”
This notion appears to be increasingly widespread. The Joint Forces Command recently issued a study saying that Mexico — along with Pakistan — could be in danger of a rapid and sudden collapse. President Obama is considering sending National Guard troops to the Mexican border to stop the flow of drugs and violence into the United States. The opinion that Mexico is breaking down seems to be shared by much of the American news media, not to mention the Americans I meet by chance and who, at the first opportunity, ask me whether Mexico will “fall apart.”
It most assuredly will not. First, let’s take a quick inventory of the problems that we don’t have. Mexico is a tolerant and secular state, without the religious tensions of Pakistan or Iraq. It is an inclusive society, without the racial hatreds of the Balkans. It has no serious prospects of regional secession or disputed territories, unlike the Middle East. Guerrilla movements have never been a real threat to the state, in stark contrast to Colombia.
Most important, Mexico is a young democracy that eliminated an essentially one-party political system, controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, that lasted more than 70 years. And with all its defects, the domination of the party, known as the P.R.I., never even approached the same level of virtually absolute dictatorship as that of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or even of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.
Further, Bloomberg.com reports that Moody’s investor’s Services has declared that “Mexico’s investment-grade credit rating is safe….”, saying in its report.
“Despite heightened anxiety about the escalation of violence and organized crime activity, Mexico does not fit the general profile of countries identified as failed states,” Moody’s said in a report released today. “The general foundations of its investment-grade rating remain solid.”
Look, Mexico is a nation of 111 million folks, the eleventh most populous nation on earth. Likewise, Mexico represents the eleventh largest economy in the world. Mexico has a literacy rate of 91% amongst those over fifteen years of age and 95% of the population enjoys electrical service. Mexico has a political system that every six years results in an orderly election for president and an orderly transition from one administration to the next. Mexico is a modern nation.
Every breathless news report of Mexico’s dire straights will tell you that there have been “7,000 drug-related murders in Mexico since January 2008″. There is no doubt that the drug gang killings of competitors and of police officials hunting them is a serious affront to both Mexican and USA domestic tranquility which must be addressed. But the murder in Mexico statistic must be taken in perspective, in terms of both its magnitude and its causes.
The aggregate murder rate in Mexico, as of 2006, was almost 11 per 100,000 population. The murder rates in the larger border cities are considerably higher. For comparison purposes the murder rate in Chicago during the alcohol prohibition years of 1920-1933 was 10.5 per 100,000 in 1920; 14.6 per 100,000 in 1930; and by 1940, seven years after the end of prohibition, the rate had dropped to 7.1 per 100,000.
What must be remembered when reading USA media reports of violence in Mexico is that it is largely confined to those working in the black market, trafficking in drugs and/or Cubans hoping to place a “dry foot” on USA territory so they may stay. Most, by far, of those 7,000 Mexican murders occurred in cities abutting, or adjacent to, the USA border; and, to a much lesser extent, in the Yucatan peninsula where the Mexican branch of the Cuban mafia is headquartered.
Black marketeers, prohibition era bootleggers, modern day Mexico drug gangs, and the Cuban mafia human/drug traffickers for instance, are not nearly so reluctant to eliminate their commercial competition with “extreme prejudice” as are their legitimate counterparts.
What also must be remembered is that the Mexican drug gangs are armed primarily with weapons obtained in the USA. The gangs run drugs North and bring cash and guns South, a fact I was pleased to see Obama acknowledge during his press conference yesterday. Secretary of State Clinton also acknowledged that which Mexican officials have long maintained in a statement during her trip to Mexico City today.
“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the death of police officers, soldiers and civilians,” Clinton told reporters during her flight to Mexico City.
“I feel very strongly we have a co-responsibility.”
The USA market demand for drugs is immense, valued in the tens of billions of dollars per year. Market forces can not be resisted, a demand will be supplied whether legally or otherwise, as was amply demonstrated during the days of USA alcohol prohibition. All prohibition really accomplishes is to raise the value of the prohibited product to a level so as to enable black marketeers. That is, the value of the prohibited product becomes so great that to some folks the attraction of lucrative returns out weighs the risk of the legal consequences of detection.
So what can be done? It’s pretty simple, really. Scrap the wet foot, dry foot policy and accept Cuban immigrants upon the same conditions required of the residents of every other nation on earth. And, since, reportedly, 60% of the Mexican drug gangs’ revenue derives from smuggling marijuana to to the USA, the USA must legalize the personal production and use of marijuana. USA marijuana users with green thumbs may grow enough in the backyard to supply their personal needs and the less intrepid may buy their personal stash at the same place they now buy their alcoholic libations.
USA legalization would almost immediately reduce the price of marijuana so as to put the black marketeers out of the marijuana trafficking business, as it would no longer be a profitable enterprise. The reduction in the gangs’ revenues would reduce the numbers of weapons purchased in and smuggled from the USA.
Then, adopt the Swiss model and provide for government distribution of pharmaceutical heroin and cocaine at cost to users.
If significant numbers of folks insist upon using heroin or cocaine, whether prohibited or not, (the Harrison Act of 1914 has had little effect upon the rate of heroin use) shouldn’t we see that they are provided in a manner that ensures the users’ safety, greatly reduces the need for users to steal to support their habits of over priced black market product, reduces disease transmission, and which doesn’t involve criminal gang distribution networks and the crime attendant thereto?
The economic meltdown once again has illustrated that there are folks who will do anything in their pursuit of self enrichment, bring the world economy to its knees or murder and behead a drug or human trafficking competitor. It is time to remove the drug trafficking profit incentive. Once the drug gangs are out of business we may turn our attention to reigning in the pirates of Wall Street.
A group of gringos in the Yucatan, by the way, have put together The Truth About Mexico web site where gringos living in all parts of Mexico report their perspectives of Mexico. Check it out.
Mark L. Schneider, “senior vice president and special adviser on Latin America at the International Crisis Group, an international conflict prevention organization”, chronicles the failure of Plan Colombia, the USA military aid plan intended, ostensibly, to eradicate the Colombian production and trafficking of cocaine.
The New York Times today includes a report of corruption in the Customs and Border Protection division of the Fatherland Security Department. Yesterday’s edition carried a report of corruption within Mexican police agencies wrought by the war on drugs destined for the immense, and growing, USA market.
The reports, it seems, provide further evidence that the prohibition of drugs and denial of visas to poorer Mexicans and other Latin Americans whose labor is in demand in the USA enables a lucrative smuggling industry, the proceeds of which a growing number of law enforcement personnel, in both Mexico and the USA, find hard to resist.
The Washington Post reports that “Mexico’s Police Chief Is Killed In Brazen Attack by Gunmen”, as in the “national police chief.” The report indicates that Mexican based “drug cartels [are] blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years…”
Given that USA consumers provide the chief market for the products moved by the Mexican based drug cartels, most of the six thousand killings in Mexico may be directly attributed to the misguided USA prohibition of now illegal drugs. Prohibition, as was learned during the prohibition of alcohol in the USA from 1920 to 1933, accomplishes nothing except to raise the price of a product to the point of enabling black market entrepreneurs, who are often not reluctant to eliminate their competitors with extreme prejudice.
The rates of prohibited drug use have not been materially changed through prohibition. Prohibition has made criminals of millions of otherwise law abiding folks, increased police corruption, increased the USA prison population by millions, and spawned an industry engaged in the promotion of the construction and filling of prisons. And it has created a situation where police agencies are essentially working on commission, seizing property and selling the property to further militarizing policing in the USA and the consequent increase in “Botched Paramilitary Police Raids” which have resulted in the killing and destruction of the property of innocent citizens.
The drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, the Bahamas, and elsewhere would be put out of business in short order, and those countries returned to civil rule, if USA drug policy was changed to return the price of now illegal drugs to their true market prices.
It is perfectly permissible in the USA for one to be whacked out daily on legal psychotropic drugs, such as Prozac, Valium, and etc., so long as one pays the doctors and pharmaceutical companies; but one goes to prison for growing marijuana in the back yard. The policy makes no sense, unless, of course, you one of the folks enriched by it.
“In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. . .”
So exclaimed Barack Obama in a recent “foreign policy” address, necessitated in his presidential campaign, I think, by the persistent media criticism that Obama lacks foreign policy experience.
Aside from the fact that such media criticism is nothing more than obedient stenographic reproduction of Obama’s opponents’ talking points, and that only one of our last five presidents had any foreign policy experience entering office, Obama is wrong.
Obama is correct that “narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America” and it is the USA prohibition of illegal drugs that enables the black market within which the narco-traffickers operate.It is the USA drug policy and appetite for drugs that lies at the root of the narco-trafficking”.
Legalize drugs and the narco-traffickers would be out of business almost instantly, as would the corruption inevitably associated with drug wars.I presume that Obama, like most other politicians, understand this fact but lack the political courage to say so.
I have more than once noted that the only rational that comes to my mind as to why it is legal to be whacked out on legal psychotropic drugs and illegal to be whacked out on illegal drugs is the protection of drug manufacturer profits.
The photos above are pulled at random from the Gallery and will change with each visit or browser refresh. Clicking a thumbnail will take you to the Gallery album which includes the photo.
All photos are the property of, and copyrighted by me @expatriateruminations.com.
You Know Me
John Lennon and me in an Havana park. He didn't have much to say.
Iraqi Sculpture
The sculpture erected at an Iraqi orphanage honoring an Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, who threw his shoes at former President George W. Bush.
Acknowledgements
I suppose I should acknowledge WordPress.org whose blogging software I use, and that I use the PressRow theme which I have extensively modified.
![[Bloglines]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
![[BlogMarks]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/blogmarks.png)
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[MySpace]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myspace.png)
![[MyWeb]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myweb.png)
![[Newsvine]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/newsvine.png)
![[Rojo]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/rojo.png)
![[Slashdot]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/slashdot.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Windows Live]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/windowslive.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://www.expatriateruminations.com/Blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
