Mexican drug cartels: the ISIS next door

The Mexican drug cartels are just as vicious as the Islamic State and, from the standpoint of Americans, more dangerous.   They behead people, they torture and mutilate people and they have more power than the government over vast territories.  The main difference is that the drug lords worship money.

The United States government has waged a “war on drugs” by the same means by which it has waged a “war on terror,” by treating it as a military problem instead of a crime problem, and with the same failed result.

American policy has made the drug problem worse, just as it made terrorism worse.

First drug prohibition created a market for the drug cartels, just as, in an earlier era, alcohol prohibition created a market for organized crime in American cities.

Then the U.S. encouraged the Mexican government to wage a military campaign, plus torture and warrant-less detention, against the drug-lords, which escalated the conflict and the violence but did not win.

What the drug gangs are doing is so horrible that I might be tempted to think this was all right, if it was successful.  But it wasn’t.  It just meant that Mexicans are terrorized by their own government as well as the criminals.

The Drug Enforcement Administration took to working with some of the drug cartels against others.   The “Fast and Furious” fiasco, in which the DEA actually supplied guns to a drug gang and then lost track of them, was part of this.

But unlike with ISIS, we Americans do not have the option of walking away from the problem.  The power of the Mexican drug cartels reaches deep into the United States.

Merely liberalizing U.S. drug laws or winding U.S. operations in Mexico will not solve the problem, any more than ending alcohol prohibition solved the problem of organized crime in the USA, or U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan or Iraq will solve the many problems of those countries.

I hope that a smarter person than me can see a way out.

LINKS

Can You Say “Blowback” in Spanish? by Rebecca Gordon for TomDispatch.   My post is based largely on this excellent, in depth summary of the situation.

Mexican drug cartels are worse than ISIL by Musa al-Gharbi for Al Jazeera.

Why Mexicans are saying they’ve had enough by Ioan Grillo and Simon Kholsa for the Tucson Sentinel.

 

The war on drugs and its Mexican quagmire

All the reasons that are given for drug prohibition or, for that matter, gun prohibition are reasons for prohibiting the consumption of alcohol.

The Centers for Disease Control say that alcohol abuse is the third-largest cause of preventable death in the United States.  More than 75,000 deaths a year are attributed to alcohol.  It is involved in 39 percent of highway fatalities, one-third of suicides and 37 percent of rapes and sexual assaults.   Each year there are 3 million violent crimes in which the victim says the offender was drunk.

Given these facts, it was understandable that the United States in 1919 would try prohibiting alcohol.   The prohibition laws did not stop people from consuming alcohol, but they did stimulate the growth of organized crime to a much more powerful place in American life.

But when the Noble Experiment was repealed in 1933, things did not return to the way they were in 1919.  Organized crime did not go out of business.  It sought other activities, and is an important part of American life to this day.  All the evils that Prohibition was intended to alleviate continue to this day.  But no reasonable person wants to restore Prohibition.  It is a cure that is worse than the disease, even though the disease is very real.

After reading a report in the Washington Post by Dana Priest on the current state of the war on narco-traffickers in Mexico, I think drug prohibition will end in the same way.   She told how the CIA spearheaded the drug war and developed such close ties with CISEN, the Mexican intelligence service, that it became virtually part of the Mexican government.  The George W. Bush administration stepped up arrests of drug kingpins and attempts to shut down drug smuggling routes.  The druglords responded savagely.

CISEN discovered from a captured videotape and a special analytical group it set up that some of the cartels had hired former members of the U.S.-trained Guatemalan special forces, the Kaibiles, to create sociopathic killers who could behead a man, torture a child or immerse a captive in a vat of acid.

Anxious to counterattack, the CIA proposed electronically emptying the bank accounts of drug kingpins, but was turned down by the Treasury Department and the White House, which feared unleashing chaos in the banking system.

As the Mexican death toll mounted, [President Felipe] Calderon pleaded with Bush for armed drones.  He had been impressed by the results in Iraq and Afghanistan, two former U.S. officials said.  The White House considered the request, but quickly rejected it.  It was far too likely to result in collateral damage, they said.

By 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, horrific scenes had become commonplace throughout Mexico: severed heads thrown onto a dance floor, a half-dozen bodies hanged from a bridge, bombs embedded in cadavers.  Ciudad Juarez, a stone’s throw from El Paso, was a virtual killing zone.

… … Success against the cartels’ leadership had helped incite more violence than anyone had predicted, more than 60,000 deaths and 25,000 disappearances in the past seven years alone.

Meanwhile, the drug flow into the United States continued unabated.  Mexico remains the U.S. market’s largest supplier of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine and the transshipment point for 95 percent of its cocaine.

via The Washington Post.

On Dec. 1, a new President, Enrique Pena Nieto, took office.  According to Priest, he is less interested in the U.S.-backed policy of arresting druglords and more in drug abuse prevention and keeping Mexico’s streets safe.  In other words, he cares more about Mexico’s problems and less about helping the United States solve its problems.

She reported that U.S. officials are worried about President Pena Nieto’s priorities.  I think we in the United States would be wise to adopt these priorities for ourselves.  The roots of the U.S. drug addiction problem are in the United States, not in Mexico, Colombia or any other foreign country.

I think the war on drugs is going to end in the same way as Prohibition.  I don’t think that will be a good result, but I think it will be an inevitable result.  In this, as in many other things, I will be pleased if events prove me wrong.

There are two wise sayings that apply here.  One is Stein’s Rule, by Herbert Stein, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Nixon.

If something cannot go on forever, someday it will stop.

The other is one of Rumsfeld’s Rules, by Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush.

If a problem cannot be solved, it may not be a problem, but a fact.