Is Mexico's Drug War "Calderon's Iraq"?

[ellisonz]

George Bush and Felipe Calderon

Feature: Is Mexico's Drug War "Calderon's Iraq"?
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from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #490, 6/15/07

Almost as soon as he took office late last year, incoming Mexican President Felipe Calderon tried to win public support by sending out the military to take on the country's violent and powerful drug trafficking organizations, the so-called cartels. Now, six months into Calderon's anti-drug offensive, more than 24,000 soldiers and police are operating in a number of Mexican states and cities, but the death toll keeps rising, the drugs keep flowing, and Mexicans are starting to ask if it's all worth it.

According to Mexican press estimates, more than 2,000 people died in prohibition-related violence last year. With about 1,000 killed already this year, 2007 is on track to be the bloodiest year yet in Mexico's drug war.

Most of the victims are members of the competing trafficking gangs -- the Juarez Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel -- or their enforcers, like the ex-elite soldiers who switched sides and morphed into the Zetas or the former Guatemalan soldiers and gangsters known as the Kaibiles, or a new and shadowy presence on the scene, the Gente Nueva (The New People), a group supposedly formed of former police officers to take on the Zetas.

The violence among the battling cartels, factions, and enforcers has risen to horrific levels, with bloody beheadings taped on video and released to web sites like YouTube, heads being thrown on night club dance floors, and tortured bodies left on roadsides as exemplary warnings to others. On one day last month, at least 30 people died in prohibition-related violence.

But it's not only cartel soldiers dying. Hardly a day goes by without a police officer being gunned down somewhere in Mexico. Sometimes the attacks are spectacular, as when cartel gunmen attacked Acapulco police headquarters with automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenade launchers, or when assassins killed the new head of the attorney general's national crime intelligence center in a brazen shooting in the upscale Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan last month.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/490/mexico_drug_war_calderon_iraq

[Kagemusha]

1. So, better to just let the cartels rule unchallenged?

Yeah.. that's gonna help..

[ellisonz]

2. You didn't read the article and I should have been more selective in my posting.

"I don't think it's working at all," said Alex Sanchez, a Mexico analyst for the Washington, DC-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs. "The problem is the way the cartels are structured. Taking out one guy, even a top leader, just leaves a vacuum that others fight to fill. There is a perpetual cycle of violence unless they can take down every single member of a cartel, from the top capos to the lowest drug runners," he said.

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"The problem with this sort of strategy is that when you detain these capos, like Osiel Cardenas of the Gulf Cartel, you get a power void inside the cartel and you see new violence as members of the cartel fight to replace him at the top," said Maureen Meyer, Washington Office on Latin America associate for Mexico and Central America. "You need a different strategy," Meyer argued. "They need to put a lot more emphasis on police reform, and there needs to be a lot more transparency and oversight," she said.

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[Kagemusha]

8. No, no, that's not the point at all. It's not about "it's not working"

It's that the alternative to taking out people and the vacuum being filled by others is to allow the people currently in those positions to be left unchallenged and to become permanent features of the political, economic and social landscape in the manner of warlords in failed states. I have a hard time seeing how that is much of a solution.

And police reform - police reform to do what exactly, if the police are going to have a hands-off policy against criminals? In general, I'm never one to oppose police reform but... I would think it should have a point better than making the country safe for criminality. What do you think?

[ellisonz]

9. It's US demand, baby!

End prohibition in the US and demand would be reduced or could at least be transfered to other sources. Better to have them as "warlords" than as "terrorists." They already are permanent features of the landscape! Drop your respect for Mexican police (and police in general) the one's who refuse to end this madness are tragically incorrect. Below you'll find a poster personally testifying to the corruption of the Mexican police system. The Federalis were so bad they've been disbanded.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LayaGk0TMDc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fstopthedrugwar%2Eorg%2Fvideos%2Fleap

[Kagemusha]

10. I'm going to say this very slowly and respectfully...

If the police simply cease to enforce the law, if not related to drugs themselves, then related to organized murder and other traditional criminality, what is the point of having the police... and if the government surrenders legal sovereignty over its own territory, what is the point of the existence of the Mexican government?

I'm not going to assume. I'm asking respectfully. These are fundamental questions.

[ellisonz]

11. To fight crime...murders, robberies, white collar crime...

I'm going to say this very clearly: If America legalized drugs the problem could be brought under control. In its current form America's War on Drugs will never be won. Change the law. Mexico was going to do that until we stepped in and pressured Vincente Fox. This war is wrong.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5380556&ft=1&f=1001

[Kagemusha]

12. That's a paradox. What if the cartels are doing the murders, robberies etc?

If they're off limits for drug crime, how do they become on limits for other crimes without achieving the same results?

To say nothing of Mexico legalizing drugs and the US not is not going to substantially change the economic dynamic.

[ellisonz]

14. The paradox you detect is really the cycle of violence described in the article.

Well maybe America needs a good swift kick in the ass....

Friend, it's all about capitalist competition. Reduce the need for capitalization and you reduce the competition. So maybe we don't need so many cops? You do realize we basically live in a police state?



:hi:

[Kagemusha]

16. ...Sir, I do not prefer the criminals to the police.

I'll leave it at that.

[ellisonz]

17. Sir, I do not prefer a fascist state to a liberal society...define criminal.

Goddamn pot-smoking hippies with their free thinking and love for the criminal element! :sarcasm:

"To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?— in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice." - Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

[Kagemusha]

18. Being ruled by organized crime instead of representative democracy.

How basic do I have to get for you? Too much to continue this, but that question was so striking I had to spell out the proper response to it. Solving the excess competition between criminals and police + the government, by withdrawing police + the government and leaving the resulting vacuum to criminals - people who murder, rob, extort and otherwise violate the precepts of civilization - and therefore creating stability, is no solution to me.

That is what warlordism is. It's trading government by legislator and by police officer for government by cartel. If you haven't noticed, they don't exactly run their affairs like democracies.

That is why I respectfully disagree that ending the drug war by abandoning the battlefield to organized crime is not a positive solution.

[ellisonz]

19. It wouldn't work unless we end prohibition.

You phrase it as an either/or when I'm saying both/and. Do you see the fear? The fact is that militarizing the drug war hasn't ended the flow of illegal drugs. Might it be time to try something new? No one is saying abandon "the battlefield," we're just saying that trying to crush an insurgency with a heavy hand never works. We need to shorten the stick and grow some carrots. Legalize good ol'American marijuana, less hard drug use. The cartels use the MJ capital to finance the high-capital cocaine trade. It's that simple. I have to go to work.

:smoke: :smoke: I wish...ha.

[Edweird]

3. The money is too damn good.

These guys are able to become multi-millionaires quickly with very little overhead expense and no education. Good luck with that.
Legalize certain drugs and the profit motive disappears along with the related violence.

[Jim Warren]

4. Puhleeze!

Good analogy but for the wrong reasons.

It's appropriate in that like Bush in Iraq, both offer solely lip service about it, both are complicit in the lies and propaganda that perpetuate it, both will redeem considerable financial gain from it, neither will do any real thing to end it.

When I lived in Mx the best drugs I knew about came from socializing with a colonel from the local exercito or military base, and those informed in that sort of thing would refer to "army coke" or "army mota" when indicating the highest quality.

[ellisonz]

5. Interesting anecdote on police corruption in Mexico.

"While the Mexican government claims the offensive is working, pointing to nearly a thousand arrests and numerous drug shipment seizures, the chorus is critics is growing. The popular left-leaning news weekly Proceso recently called the campaign "Calderon's Iraq." It isn't alone, on either side of the border."

I don't think the intent is to make a one-to-one analogy beyond the simple fact that unnecessary militarization is occurring in the name of a false ideology (interventionism and prohibition). Both are also interesting examples of what a number of scholars have termed "New War;" a few sources to show that I'm not entirely talking out of my ass:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wars
http://www.amazon.com/New-Old-Wars-Organized-Violence/dp/0745638643/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-6375967-7925217?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181896173&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Global-Governance-New-Wars-Development/dp/1856497496/ref=pd_sim_b_2/105-6375967-7925217
http://www.amazon.com/New-Wars-Herfried-Munkler/dp/0745633374/ref=pd_bbs_1/105-6375967-7925217?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181896553&sr=1-1

[ellisonz]

6. I would add that if one wants a dead on analogy to Iraq 2...

...it is the Philippines War.

Dewey = Shock and Awe
McKinley = G.W. Bush
TR = Cheney
In both wars the initial conflict was disingenuous and a conventional war became an insurgency conflict that ended only after massive bloodshed (250,000 dead Filipinos); I don't think we're leaving Iraq anytime soon, sadly. And especially if Hillary is the nominee...

[Peace Patriot]

7. It sounds a lot like Colombia, another country that Bush has larded with military

aid ($4 billion). Those guns and bullets and tanks and helicopters then breed the need for MORE guns and bullets and tanks and helicopters, as the "war on drugs" fails, chronically, to stop the drug trade. More billions. More violence. More prisons. More prison guards. More armed men in Darth Vader costumes whose job it is to kick in doors and beat people up and shoot people. More militarization. It is all just one great charade. And all this violent power came in handy when Calderon wanted to bash heads and squash a democracy movement in Oaxaca, where the local governor's paramilitaries kidnap, torture, rape and 'disappear' union organizers and teachers.

In Colombia, a huge scandal has broken out, involving rightwing paramilitaries--all trained by the U.S.--with very close ties to Bush's pal Uribe (the chief of the military, the former head of intelligence, and many Uribe politicians), and revelations of their slaughter of thousands union organizers, peasants and leftists, dumped in mass graves, and their large-scale drug trafficking.

The murderous "war on drugs" is lark for war profiteers. And with the Iraq War lost, they need a "cause" by which to drain your hard-earned dollars out of your wallet and into theirs.

It's the same bullshit, year after year, decade after decade. The phonied up, exaggerated menace--communism, "terrorism," Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda, drug dealers--and the billions and billions and billions of dollars needed to "defeat" them. But they never are defeated. They are the essential boogeymen needed to steal your money and keep YOU in line.

Legalize drugs. Release about 75% of the people in prison. And we'd all be better off--a whole lot safer, a whole lot healthier, and with a lot more money to try to make ends meet in their Corporate-thieving economy.

If they just GAVE the money away to the poor, it would do a lot more good.

I'm so sick of these people and their militarized, gitmoized world.

[BlooInBloo]

13. ANNOUNCEMENT! In an effort to relieve Americans of their thinking duties...

... light as they may be, the word "Iraq" now just means "something bad". Henceforth, anything that has a bad aspect may be treated as analogous with Iraq.

[ellisonz]

15. Umm...no.

The quotation is from a Mexican newspaper so it's not American's making the analogy. The fact of the matter is that the ideology at play in the public sphere is very simple "war on drugs" = "war on terrorism," whatever happened to that war on communism? Could it possibly be that it was over-hyped? Perestroika brought down the Soviet Union and by God it will bring down fascism in the United States. Nice jab at the potheads by the way but studies have repeatedly shown that diminished memory function is minimal and that on average we do just as good if not better than our "sober" peers.