The war next door

A recent glimpse of Juarez, compliments of Chuck Bowden.

An excerpt:

If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, has 225,000 employees and a budget of $42 billion, part of which is aimed at making America safe from Mexico and Mexicans. Narcotics officers in the U.S. cost at least $40 billion a year. The world's largest prison industry would collapse without the intake of drug convicts, and, in recent years, of illegal Mexican migrants. And around the republic there are big new federal courthouses rising that would be cobwebbed without the steady flow from drug busts and the Mexican poor coming north.

The border now is a bundle of issues: drugs, terrorists, violence spilling across, illegal aliens, free-trade economists insisting on open borders, humanitarians calling for no more deaths. On the ground, this hardly matters. The giant wall being slowly built across the southern flank of the U.S. hardly matters. In the Altar Valley south of Tucson, the wall was barely in place before gates were cut, the hinges facing the Mexican side.

What is happening is natural. And like some natural things, deadly.

...

It is early January as I write. This weekend, over 40 people were murdered in Juarez, a city once hailed as the poster child of free trade, the city with the lowest unemployment rate in Mexico. The killings -- three of them women -- had little touches. A double amputee was shot in the head and then left on a dirt road wrapped in a blanket. Another man was found with his severed head on his chest -- the tongue, eyes and nose had been removed. A narco-message was left on yellow cardboard and weighted down with two severed arms. Such slaughter usually goes unnoticed in the U.S. press. Should it actually come to the attention of our newspapers, it simply will be written off as part of a cartel war. This is a fiction. Almost all the dead are poor people, not drug-enriched grandees. And though we give Mexico half a billion dollars a year to encourage its army to fight drug merchants, this alleged war has a curious feature: Almost no soldiers ever die. For example, in Juarez, over 4,200 citizens have been slain in two years. In the same period, with 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers in town, the military has suffered three dead.

...

Read the rest at the link.

Don March 2, 2010 - 8:58am

Don's diary | printer friendly version |

( categories: Miscellany )

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one . . . .

A dumb gringo walks into a reputable and informative blog. One poster describes the drug violence in Mexico and says, "this is coming to your hometown soon." Another says, "guess what, the politicians in Mexico are crooked!" Another poster on the same subject says the same things, but never elaborates.

Finally, the dumb gringo shakes his head, and says, "I don't get it."

Which brings me to my question: What is the Grand Unified Theory of the drug violence phenomenon in Mexico? All I see is external evidence of something huge, something to do with money, power, and privilege, law and order, corruption, addiction, on an international scale.

We've got scads of dead peasants turning up, mutilated in the most brutal and horrifying fashion. It's like murder-as-message, abbatoir-as-art, life imitating those dreadful SAW movies. What does it signify? Seems to me like a renaissance of competing ancient death cults, directed by elites whose money, resources, and prestige are threatened. Therefore, peasants must die! Defy me and I'll flay you and dissolve you in Hydrofluoric acid. Then make a man-suit out of your skin and walk around until it rots off after the fashion of the Aztecs.

You've got a prison-industrial complex in the North and three-strikes rules for jaywalking. Okay, I understand that corruption. You've got a Mexican Army that seldom dirties its hands, and takes incredibly few losses. You've got thoroughly corrupt cops and politicians. I sort of get that corruption. A cowed local press whose journalists will end up dead like the peasants if they do much more than report on yesterday's weather.

But where are the battle lines drawn? Is this just some admixture of a Cormac McCarthy novel, a telenovela, and American horror movies, where nobody is good if everybody is bad? Why is this coming to my front door? How is all of this violence good for business if you're a local Mayor Quimby or a drug dealer? Or has it all just devolved to a point where nothing makes sense and the manipulation, torture, and murder of passersby is just par for the course? Spell it out for me.

I'm willing to entertain crazy conspiracy theories because at this point, I'm not sure that the facts on the ground could become more bizarre or horrifying. Who are the players? What are their angles? Why is this happening? Spell it out for me.

Jonathryn March 2, 2010 - 10:57am

I'm just an amateur,

but the closest to a Grand Unifying Theory I can offer is that in black markets, there can be no recourse to courts, to laws, to police forces or any kind of organized authority or dispensation of justice. Every conflict, from a trivial fight over a certain street corner to a massive confrontation between cartels, has to be resolved through violence or an extremely credible threat of violence. Hence both the general devolution to violence as drugs have captured the Mexican economy, and the horrific flourishes that are now being added to some of the slayings. They're meant to shock the conscience, or more accurately to scare the shit out of you.

This need for violence can be contained to a greater or lesser extent. Italian mafiosi supposedly confined violence to only their own criminal underworld, and whomever from the clean world might try to threaten them (journalists, judges, etc). The surprising thing about Juarez is that that restraint has broken down. But when the authorities are as fully captured as the Mexican government is, what member of the police force, the judiciary, the media is going to make any drug-criminal suffer for the murder of an ordinary peasant? And if there's wealth to extract through kidnapping one-year-olds from peasants, then isn't it just a new growth sector, a way to suck money out of the Mexican middle and working classes as well as the American drug consumer?

What I wonder is, who in Mexico is still untouchable according to social norms? Would a whole gathering of grandmothers be immune from violence? Would they have to be nuns? Would a madres de los desaparecidos kindof strategy work to restore some social norms as to who ought to be untouchable even by criminals trying to flaunt how deadly and ruthless they are? Who can draw a line around the spiraling violence and say "this far, and no further?" Because a society that has become the canvas on which criminals compete to establish how violent they can be is a society in danger of simply disintegrating.

(Incidentally, there's a parallel argument, I forget from whom exactly, that herding societies like the old Scots and modern Afghans are confrontational, tribal, and violent because they faced a similar quandary: the most important property, sheep, were numerous, mobile, and identical, so theft was an almost impossible allegation to prove or be properly restituted for after the fact. The only way to protect your herded wealth was to develop a reputation as a scary, aggressive badass, and to rely on your extended family as your posse. Deterrence and exaggerated revenge cycles characterize these societies because it's hard to find a "civilized," non-violent system of adjudicating disputes.)

texas dem March 5, 2010 - 4:52am

The Invasion of Public Lands by Mexican Drug Cartels

by Charles Lemos, Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 12:02:52 PM EST

Last year, a wildfire in Santa Barbara's Los Padres National Park consumed more than 136 square miles. That fire was sparked by a cooking fire started by the employees of a Mexican drug cartel tending to some 30,000 marijuana plants in the remote and rather inaccessible canyons of central California. It was far from an isolated incident according to US law enforcement agents and the fire highlighted an alarming trend: the unseen invasion of California wilderness and public lands by Mexico's ruthless drug cartels that has taken place underneath our very noses over the past two decades.

more at MYDD

Tina March 2, 2010 - 11:03am

Capitalism at its finest, ridiculous Authoritarianism

is the Drug Trade with its prohibitions. All prohibition does is to change the risk/reward ratio.

From that point of view, the Drug Barons are Mexico greatest entrepreneurs, They have build a large business, employed many people, and delivered a product to meet a market need, all in a very short time.

The Drug business gets continuous free publicity, if one believe the saying "There is no such thing as bad PR". It gets TV coverage that would cost billions if actually bought.

Finally if one replaces "DHS or DEA" in the article with "DoD" it illustrates another large government department that achieves the opposite of its mission, making us secure, while enriching many.

Personally I believe in the Darwinian approach. So called "illicit" drugs should be legal, and taxed. Making "drugs" illegal is as effective as making teen sex or sex outside of marriage illegal, hilarious.

As measures of effectiveness of the authoritarian mindset, I'd have to ask the authoritarians: how's that abstinence thingy working out for your states, as measured by teen pregnancy and divorces? You got a winner there?

Synoia March 2, 2010 - 12:30pm

Alright debunkers, where's the drug money?!

I mainly would like JPD to explain **where the hell is all the drug money**?! Who is "serious" in this equation? And who has a reasonable conclusion to reach?

I have never gotten any so-called "debunker" or "serious person" to cough up a damn bit of anything about drug money that made any sense at all, let alone a government or law enforcement official. Frankly this issue is deeply linked with 9-11 because the Islamic militants out there are frequently part of patronage networks shielded by the CIA, year after year, and tens of billions of dollars get laundered around without ever 'spilling into the open.'

There is no way to dispute this general geopolitical pattern, which took place thru much of the 20th century and even before, across many regions and ethnicities with Chinese Opium wars & the Boxer Rebellion, the Hmong, KMT, Burma, Laos, Contras, Turks, Panama, Honduras, etc.

That's the big question, the multi-billion dollar question. It's obvious the Federal Reserve System and the NY Fed in particular never give a damn about drug money; as long as the cashflow keeps operating then a magnified bubble (P/E 25 or 30 etc) can be sustained in stock prices of laundering corporations.

So yes, JPD in particular, if you're going to go around debunking anyone who thinks covert ops are a corrupt racket then you damn well better explain where the drug money is. Is it fake? Is it a racket? These are really yes/no questions. Thanx :-D
--
Hongpong.com

HongPong March 2, 2010 - 5:26pm

Yes. For your consideration

Illegal drug sales are estimated to be between 500 billion and 1 trillion dollars a year. 65% of the world's currency is denominated in dollars. All drug deals I ever was involved with are transacted in cash. 100% of them.

So if you use the lower number, 500 billion in illicit drugs, and assign 65% to dollars (although I am certain dollars probably get more than a 65% share of the trade), that's 325 billion dollars in cash money a year spent on drugs.

According to the fed balance sheet, there is only slightly over 800 billion dollars of currency in circulation. So in less than three years, even at the lowest estimate, every cash dollar in circulation would have gone through the hands of drug dealers.

At the high end of the estimates, it'd take just over a year for every cash dollar in existence to go through the hands of dope dealers.

All this money ends up back in circulation. It has to end up back in circulation or there would be no currency left. But every bank in the land is forced under the law to report any transaction over $10,000 involving currency.

So how does a guy like the late Amado Carrillo, or his brother Vicente spend 200 million dollars a week, every week?

And how does that money find its way back into circulation? I'd submit it cannot be done without the help of "legitimate" banks and corporations.

I did inhale.

Don March 2, 2010 - 6:50pm

Puritanism is the original sin here...

I'm becoming convinced that the only real sins are proselytizing and Puritanism.

Think of all the evil that comes from these ridiculous and unworkable laws created to make 'nice' people feel good about themselves and their government.

When Puritans rule, people pay with their lives.

KingElvis March 2, 2010 - 5:28pm

Manuel Noriega

The real crime Manuel Noriega that was his downfall, was taking and messing with the flow of all that loot. Banks in Panama were a great choice to recycle those greenbacks. Mess with the flow and the U.S. military will arive on your backdoor step.

"There are two types of folk music:
quiet folk music and loud folk music.
I play both."

Dave Alvin

Peter C March 3, 2010 - 10:44am

No No Noriega

Sentence has been up for years but he's still in the slammer. Seems like nobody wants to hear that canary singing.

He's a "prisoner of war", see? Ain't going nowhere anytime soon. Let him out and the next thing you know he'll be conspiring with Bin Laden (or the ghost thereof) and that Ahmadinejad character and probably Kim Il-sung too and tall buildings will be toppling all over the free world. The horror! Worse yet, he could show up at the bank with a withdrawal slip in hand. Oh noes!

Talk about yer new world order!

Noriega's Wiki

Chickadee March 3, 2010 - 11:35am

Loco

No wonder the facile War on Drugs so easily morphed into the facile War on Terror. Aside from the overuse of Hollywood special effects in the latter enterprise, was there ever any real difference except for their names?

Webb

The link is to the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2

"The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations"

An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb's series, "The Dark Alliance," has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.

This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.

""If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?" - Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Chickadee March 3, 2010 - 11:23am

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