The authorities were boasting that all flights
were on time as I landed at Mexico City’s international airport on June
26 to cover the country’s national election. Terminal 2 bustled with
travelers; the duty-free shops gleamed with jewelry and alcohol, and the
food courts were in full service mode. Only twenty-four hours earlier,
however, travelers were crawling on the same terminal floor during
a shootout that killed three federal police.
The shooters escaped in broad daylight. The dead officers were not shot
by narcotraffickers but by other police who apparently were working for
the narcos. It turned out that AeroMexico stewardesses were helping
export cocaine on flights to Spain. Bienvenidos to the Mexican
labyrinth, where nothing is transparent, including elections.
has played an active role in American politics and...
There’s no use sugar-coating this defeat—or the sorry state of the Democratic Party.
As I write this account, the election winner has not been certified.
Serious irregularities in voting are being challenged. Over half of all
ballots are being recounted by federal officials. Yet it is certain that
the conservative party (Partido Accion Nacional) was massively rejected
after a decade of rule. It also seems certain that the winner is
Enrique Peña Nieto of the traditional PRI (Partido Revolucionario
Institutional), commonly criticized as the “dinosaurs” in Mexico’s
political culture. Peña Nieto’s mandate, however, rests on a mediocre 38
percent showing. Manuel López Obrador, twice the candidate of the
left-populist PRD (Partido Revoiutionario Democratica) won 32 percent in
an election he says was fraudulent.
Assuming the outcome is sustained, the election proved that dinosaurs
are not extinct in Mexico’s politics. The PRI, which governed Mexico
from the revolution until 2000, is a patronage-based coalition with
support from traditional sectors. The new president, Peña Nieto is the
most mediagenic of dinosaurs, and married to Angélica Rivera, a
glamorous soap opera star on Televisa, the media giant that covered the
story as a Mexican Camelot. The decisive vote margin was achieved by a
cosmetic makeover of the dinosaur, to rephrase Sarah Palin’s 2008
rhetoric about lipstick on pigs.
This was far more than a personality contest, however. As the
New York Times clearly
noted
a week before the election, the outcome would be a voter mandate to end
the drug war that has claimed over 60,000 lives since the outgoing
president, Felipe Calderón, sent the state’s armed forces against his
own people in 2007. The dilemma for the US and Mexican military
establishments was how to continue, even intensify, their drug war in
spite of public rejection. Could they circumvent public opinion and
continue business-as-usual? The handsome, smiling Peña Nieto was their
man. His image was that of a modern man from the fashion covers, not an
oligarch in shades. López Obrador had to be stopped at all costs. In
2006, his opposition to NAFTA provoked American and Mexican corporations
to spend millions on scary television ads describing him as another
Castro, Chávez and Lula rolled into one. They barely defeated him, by
less than 1 percent, in an election process in which the vote count was
terminated arbitrarily with thousands of ballots uncounted. In response,
López Obrador’s followers protested, shutting down access to Mexico
City for several weeks.
This time, López Obrador went to great lengths to erase the image of a
Mexican Chávez. He and the PRD made a radiant sunflower the image of
their campaign, and he promised a new violence-reduction policy based on
“abrazos, no balazos.” The English-language media translated “abrazos”
to mean “hugs,” as if López Obrador was reinventing himself an elderly
flower child. But López Obrador said on many occasions he was calling
for economic aid from the United States instead of attack helicopters.
He remained a dire threat to both NAFTA and the drug war, at least in
the eyes of the corporate and military elites.
Complicating matters further, the Mexican Right also was soured on
the drug war that they had so much to do with launching. For example,
the former PAN president, Vicente Fox, who governed from 2000 to 2006,
denounced the drug war as useless and a fraud only weeks before the July
1 election. This meant that any consensus in support of continuing the
drug war was shredded even before the election. So how to overcome the
democratic result and soldier on? It was clear before the election that
US officials had a secret agreement with Peña Nieto to continue the
military policy, though attempting to lessen civilian casualties. Three
weeks before the election, one confident United States official told the
New York Times that, from backroom discussions, “what we
basically get is that [Peña Nieto] fully appreciates and understands
that when/if he wins, he is going to keep working with us.“ It was a
classic assertion of continued US dominance over the political process
in Mexico, exercised from the shadows. Peña Nieto demonstrated his
subservience by quiet trips to Washington, where he reassured
Congressional leaders there would be no deals or truces with the
cartels.
The escalation was confirmed further when Peña Nieto, on the eve of
the election, made an extraordinary announcement that he would appoint a
retired foreign military leader, Colombia’s Gen. Oscar Naranjo, as top
adviser to Mexico’s drug war approach. Gen. Naranjo is famous for
implementing Colombia’s military strategy of killing leaders of the
Medellín and Cali cocaine cartels in a dirty war that involved
ultra-right paramilitaries along with US ground troops, advisers and
special forces. The appointment of Naranjo confirmed the 2010 prediction
of former US drug czar Robert Bonner that Mexico would be the next
Colombia, the scene of the next war against the cartels (which in many
cases had shifted their operations out of Colombia to Mexico and Central
America). Writing in
Foreign Affairs,
Bonner warned that otherwise Mexico would become an intolerably
dangerous narco-state on the US border. Bonner also wrote blithely that
Mexico’s “increase in the number of drug-related homicides, although
unfortunate, is a sign of progress.”
Sure enough, two days after the election, Peña Nieto published
a New York Times op-ed
that vaguely promising to “re-examine” the drug war, but specifically
promised to create a 40,000-member “gendarmerie” like Colombia’s and
expand Mexico’s federal police by at least 35,000 officers. Unnamed
“analysts” predicted a “surge” like that in Iraq in 2007, then led by
Gen. David Petraeus, now CIA director.
The public can expect sensational headlines if Mexico captures or
kills one or more “kingpins” in the new phase, on the model of killing
Pablo Escobar in Colombia or Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideaway.
While the kingpin strategy reaps media and political benefits, it is far
from clear that stability or democratic reforms are the results. The
kingpin strategy typically results in even greater violence as new
actors do battle in a brutal turf competition. While homicides in
Colombia did fall by a slender 2 percent last year, there was a 25
percent jump in the number of kidnapping and massacre victims, and
the defense minister was forced to resign.
The killing of Colombian labor and human rights leaders continues, and
according to Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern, there is a
“consolidation of paramilitary and criminal networks in many parts of
the country.”
If he intends to continue the drug war without a democratic mandate,
Peña Nieto will have to face down powerful and newly energized
opposition at home, where there is increased resistance not only to the
violence but also the neoliberal economic policies that leave millions
of unemployed young people ripe for cartel recruitment. This year
brought increased public anger against the Mexican media duopoly of
Televisa and Azteca. First, there are the one-third of Mexican voters
who supported López Obrador, denied Peña Nieto a majority in parliament
and maintained their popular majority in Mexico City. These are loyal
voters who know that politics matters. As a result of PRD leadership,
Mexico City is a viable municipality within what many believe is a
failed state. Mexico City has a great public university, cultural
treasures, a working transit system, subsidized healthcare, abortion
services and permits same-sex marriage. There is no public threat from
the cartels, the airport shootout being an exception to the norm.
The PRD, which broke from the PRI more than a decade ago, believes
with significant evidence that it has been robbed of the presidency
twice since 1988, first, when its presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas was denied by egregious computer-driven fraud, and second, when
López Obrador lost by 0.58 percent in 2006. Otherwise, Mexico would
have joined the new populist left that took power through elections in
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay,
Honduras and Paraguay (the latter two countries, along with Haiti, have
suffered coups since the progressive victories). Instead of moving left,
Mexico
moved towards neoliberalism, resulting in greater inequality, unemployment, poverty and dependency on El Norte.
Besides the thriving PRD base, Peña Nieto faces additional challenges
from a new student movement composed of tomorrow’s likely leaders,
known as #YoSoy132 (#IAm132). The hashtag comes from an incident during
the presidential campaign when many students disrupted a speech by Peña
Nieto, reminding him of the brutal repression he inflicted in 2006 as
governor of Mexico State, against hundreds of people in the town of San
Salvador Atenco. In response to the protest, Peña Nieto and the PRI
accused the students of being agitators paid by the PRD and AMLO. In
rage, 131 students quickly posted a YouTube video showing their official
student ID cards and denied they were paid by anyone. Thousands more
then adopted the hashtag #YoSoy132, and began a succession of marches
and vigils up through election day.
In this spring protest, the students turned their wrath against the
Mexican media monopolies as well, and even forced a publicly televised
debate with two of the presidential candidates. Peña Nieto refused to
participate, and the debate went forward, a direct result of the
student’s action. The students also had some effect on the electoral
outcome, since most of them voted for López Obrador while staying
independent and beyond the limits of campaign politics. I met several of
them in Mexico City, and they left the clear impression that their new
spirit will not fade away. They engaged in animated debates over whether
their demands for political and media reform went far enough, with
several telling me they aspired to be more like the Dream Act students
in the US who risked deportation to force Barack Obama to recognize
their demands.
In 1968, hundreds of similar students protesting in the center of
Mexico City were shot, killed or “disappeared” by the security forces,
their bodies taken away and their stories covered up. That era of state
repression led to guerrilla insurgencies in several parts of Mexico,
including the Zapatista uprising in 1994, which was led in part by
former students who immersed themselves within indigenous communities in
Chiapas state. The new generation of #YoSoy132 shares the legacy of
1968, but it completely different in basic ways. Instead of facing a
military dictatorship posing as a democracy, they see themselves living
under a de facto media dictatorship that defines a delusional reality
for a majority of Mexicans. Instead of bullets aimed at their backs,
they face media images targeting their minds. Instead of the face of
fascism, they have a televised celebrity presidency. It’s therefore
logical that the new insurgency is based on Facebook and Twitter, de
facto guerrilla tools for breaking a media monopoly.
The other immediate challenge to Peña Nieto is from the rapid and
spontaneous rise of a new peace movement against the drug war led by the
poet Javier Sicilia, whose son Juanelo was killed on March 28, 2011,
sparking a surprising outpouring of support for ending the violence.
This May 23, five weeks before the election, Sicilia came to a rally at
Estela de Luz (the Pillar of Light), to speak in solidarity with
thousands of the Mexican students. Sicilia told the #YoSoy132 rally that
“I would want to see my son here. I can’t see him, but I see him in the
thousands of youth here.” He went on to say “we are at a historical
breaking point, a crisis of the world’s civilization” and, he envisioned
“coming through the cracks in the state and crumbling economy to build
something new.” Sicilia’s poetic cry, under Mexico’s own Pillar of
Light, seemed to echo Leonard Cohen’s lyrical vision of change in
Anthem, that “there’s a crack/ a crack in everything/ that’s how the
light gets in.”
Sicilia is planning to lead a caravan of Mexican families victimized
by the drug war, and their US supporters, through the United States,
beginning in Los Angeles August 17, and marching all the way to the
White House.
There is another question that remains obscure in Mexico’s new
political situation, that of whether Subcommandante Marcos and the
Zapatistas will be heard from again. In 2001, after a nationwide
mobilization similar to the 1963 March on Washington, Mexico’s political
establishment rejected the 1996 San Andreas Accords, which would have
provided rights and autonomy to Mexico’s indigenous. Thus excluded,
Marcos and the Zapatistas eventually launched The Other Campaign (La
Otra Campaña) in 2006, campaigning against the PAN, the PRI and PRD and
even López Obrador, who may have lost the election as a result of
Zapatista abstentions. The Zapatistas remained entirely silent during
this year’s election period, not an unusual habit for them, but one
giving rise to wild rumors, ranging from Marcos’ having “health
problems” to one claim I heard, from a longtime supporter, that the
Subcommandante had been displaced in an internal struggle. Since the
conditions of Mexico’s indigenous and small farmers will be perpetuated
by Peña Nieto’s neoliberal policies, renewed insurgencies are always a
threat to the elite.
It is noteworthy that a serious peace movement has not brought much
public attention to the drug war until the recent efforts spearheaded
recently by Sicilia. There was a movement known as “No Mas Sangre”
before Sicilia, but Sicilia catalyzed a larger movement and services for
victims.
In the United States, the work to legitimize medical marijuana,
pushed by such groups as the Soros-supported Drug Policy Alliance, have
made gains in several states, only to be opposed by the Obama
administration and domestic drug warriors. Such campaigns, however,
tended to aim at ending the grossest irrationalities of the domestic
prohibition on pot, not the greater horrors of the militarized drug war.
In past decades, however, tens of thousands of Americans, including
members of Congress, protested the dirty wars in Central America where
secret operatives smuggled weapons and money to paramilitaries
coordinated out of the CIA. But the political threat of being
marginalized as “soft on narcotraffickers” has stifled the potential of
protest until now (just as liberals rarely have opposed the drug wars at
home for fear of being depicted as “soft on gangs”).
Before a new peace movement against the drug war can take root, at
least two illusions have to be pierced. The first is that it’s largely a
Mexican affair, with the United States playing only an inexpensive
advisory role. This narrative plays on the unspoken racial assumption
that Mexicans are inherently savage, a variation of the imperial theme
that dark-skinned people care little about individual life. As one
example among many, a very good article by William Finnegan in
the New Yorker
describes the violent Mexican cartels penetrating the placid world of
the Guadalajara International Book Fair, “a civilized place where life
goes on unmarked by the violence that disfigures large parts of Mexico.”
On May 9, Finnegan writes, this dream world was disrupted by the sight
of eighteen headless and dismembered bodies left on the road by a
popular restaurant. The ruthless narco-terrorists known as Los Zetas
were blamed. The victims were innocent citizens and students, not
unsavory terrorists. The Zetas were planning even more beheadings and
massacres.
Finnegan neglects to mention that Los Zetas are rogue special forces
units trained largely by the United States. In what must be more than an
oversight, Finnegan describes them as “deserters from the Mexican
military’s elite special forces, recruited in the late nineteen-nineties
as bodyguards and enforcers for the leader of the then formidable Gulf
cartel.” In fact, the Zetas—originally known as the Grupo Aeromovil de
Fuerzes Especiales, “went through an intensive, six-month
counterinsurgency and urban warfare training course from American,
French and Israeli specialists,” according to crime reporter Jerry
Langton, whose sources include the US Embassy in Mexico, the Department
of Homeland Security and the FBI.
The second distortion in public understanding is that the 60,000 dead
Mexicans were all involved in the drug trade, and therefore deserved to
die. In short, good riddance. But as
El Universal noted in
an October 2010 headline, the killings are at least as much a case of “social cleansing” (
limpieza social)
than a drug war between combatants. Outgoing Mexican president Felipe
Calderón often proclaimed that 90 percent of the dead were mere
criminals, but fewer than 5 percent of the homicides have ever been
investigated. Based on newspaper accounts from Juárez, an epicenter of
the violence, Molly Molloy and Charles Bowden concluded in their book
El Sicario
that “the overwhelming majority of the victims are ordinary people,
small business proprietors who refused to pay extortion demands,
mechanics, bus drivers, a woman selling burritos from a cart on the
street, a clown juggling at an intersection, boys selling news papers,
gum and perhaps nickel bags of cocaine or heroin on a street corner…”
To be clear, this is a war in which American forces are directly, if
discreetly, engaged and where civilians are a huge proportion of the
casualties. Immediately after Calderón launched his military offensive
in December of 2006, President Bush initiated the $1.7 billion Plan
Mexico, modeled on the earlier Plan Colombia, with the major emphasis on
Bell and Black Hawk helicopters, military transport planes, gamma ray
and X-ray scanners, telecommunications software, sniffing dogs and all
the rest. Ginger Thompson, one of the best
New York Times
reporters on the region, has written recently of the US military’s
“expanding its role. Sending new CIA operatives and retired military
personnel…[and] considering private security contractors” to Mexico, in
an effort that she says has shown few results. For the first time, she
writes, the CIA and US military personnel are working side by side to
plan operations, which are “devised to get around Mexican laws that
prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil.” The
Obama administration is sending aerial drones deep into Mexican
territory to track the traffickers and coordinate de facto
counterterrorism efforts. One US official at the Northern Command says,
“the military is trying to take what it did in Afghanistan and do the
same in Mexico.” This isn’t hyperbole; the US ambassador to Mexico is
Earl Anthony Wayne, who was America’s deputy ambassador in Kabul from
2009 through 2011.
Despite the US administration’s rationale that violence must be
prevented from “spilling over the border,” the Mexican cartels already
operate in more than 200 American cities. On American television one can
watch heavily camouflaged, heavily armed US forces hunting down young
Mexican immigrants in the redwood “jungles” of Northern California.
These hard-working immigrants have not only slipped into US cities but
those of British Columbia as well, where several thousand new Mexican
indocumentados, including Zeta operatives, are carving roles in the
multibillion-dollar harvest and distribution of “BC Bud.” Up to 90
percent of 30,000 illegal firearms seized in Mexico—in 2008 alone—were
bought with cartel money and smuggled south from Arizona and Texas,
according to an ATF official. To complete the vicious circle,
the New York Times reported last December 4 that
“so far there are few signs that laundering the money has disrupted the
cartel’s operations and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers
are feeling any serious pain.” In 2010, the DEA seized $1 billion in
drug cash assets, and Mexico took an additional $26 million, out of an
estimated flow of $17–39 billion.
Meanwhile, President Obama, in a 2010 atmosphere of political
hysteria, spent $600 million to deploy an additional 1,500 border agents
and surveillance drones to supplement some 18,000 American troops
defending a multibillion-dollar wall against apparently very slippery
Mexicans.
All these realities seem like scenes taken directly out of the popular—and darkly prophetic—Showtime series
Weeds,
starring Mary-Louise Parker as a widower who sells marijuana to make a
living, commutes through underground tunnels from San Diego to Mexico,
falls in love and has a baby with a Mexican narco-mayor, is pressured to
become a DEA informant and is chased through North America by Mexican
Sicarios. (
Weeds is a favored alternative to the mainstream news around my house.)
It is more than forty years since the 1971 US Commission on Marijuana
and Drug Abuse recommended decriminalization of marijuana and Richard
Nixon chose to start the “war on drugs” instead. Nixon’s first budget
for this war, $100 million, has grown thirty-fold, to over $15 billion,
adjusted for inflation, with little sign of reduced imports or
consumption. This, not Afghanistan, would be America’s longest war, if
it was recognized or admitted. Over these four decades, according to the
AP, Americans have spent $49 billion to secure our borders, $33 billion
on “Just Say No” advertisements, and $450 billion on federal prisoners
where half the inmates are drug offenders. The total cost has been $1
trillion and our national drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, conceded in 2010
that “it has not been successful.”
Can America just say no to the drug war addiction?
The answer is far from clear, though the drug war’s failures are
manifest. Political cowardice combined with pressure from drug war
interest groups will sustain it for a time. But the pressures from south
of the border, symbolized by Mexico’s voter mandate, may be decisive in
finally forcing the madness to end. Last year the Global Commission on
Drug Policy issued a report demanding alternatives, including
responsible plans for legalization. The commission included former
presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, Kofi Annan, George Schultz,
Paul Volcker and other world leaders. Jimmy Carter joined with Jesse
Jackson in publishing an op-ed calling for the US government to adopt
the commission’s recommendations. Moises Naim, the editor of
Foreign Policy,
wrote that “2012 will go down in history as the year when the pillars of Washington’s drug policy began to erode.”
A critical moment was the US-sponsored Summit of the Americas in
Cartegena, Colombia, best-known in this country as the place where
Obama’s secret service agents went on a spree with prostitutes and
alcohol. (It is still unknown whether drugs were involved.) Allies of
the United States, including the presidents of Colombia, Costa Rica and
Guatemala, vocally opposed the US policy and demanded steps towards
legalization, or at least decriminalization, of marijuana. Both Obama
and Vice President Joe Biden flatly rejected legalization, but, for the
first time, welcomed the discussion itself as legitimate. The two
American leaders attempted to cover themselves politically by boasting,
in Biden’s words, that “the reason it warrants a discussion is, on
examination you realize there are more problems with legalization than
with non-legalization.”
It was a classic high point in the history of official doublespeak.
Obama and Biden hid the fact that they had been forced into the
discussion by Latin American leaders (even Calderón, then still Mexico’s
president, called for “market alternatives” to the drug war). More
importantly, declaring the acceptability of discussing legalization
lifted an irrational prohibition of many decades—not a prohibition on
drug use but on the very discussion of the subject in respectable
company.
One must assume that Obama and Biden knew what they were doing by
their coordinated remarks. While continuing to support the drug war they
were inviting the public opposition into mainstream dialogue, what Naim
meant by the pillars’ beginning to erode.
A conversation may be the ideal place to begin. Just as the US
anti-war movement has discovered that the slogan “Out Now” is not
sufficient to convince the undecided public or policy makers to end a
foreign war, calls to simply legalize drugs fail to answer important
questions and cause the continued marginalization of opponents. The
process of defining an alternative needs research, debate and consensus
on questions such as:
whether to form an official bi-national commission to hold
hearings on a plan to demilitarize and medicalize the current war;
whether to begin the new regulatory regime with marijuana, and
next consider cocaine and methamphetamines, the main three
narcotics in the Mexico-US traffic;
whether to limit the drugs to certified medical use at first;
whether substitutes like methodone are feasible for other drugs;
how to legalize and rationalize production and distribution in the face of certain cartel opposition;
whether tax revenues should be reinvested in treatment and advertising the dangers of drug addiction;
whether sales to minors should be criminalized;
whether pro-drug advertising should be banned;
whether campaign contributions from the legalized drug industry should be banned.
In considering whether and how to lift the prohibition on drugs, any
new policies should be far more effective than those of the 1930s
policies which ended the prohibitions on alcohol only to enact new laws
and regulations that promoted alcoholism. Any drug policy reversal would
have to be linked, in policy and politics, to reductions in mass
incarceration and greater investments in treatment and education.
Free-market advocates of legalization (the right to become an addict)
will have to compromise and coexist with advocates of regulation and
government social programs. Law enforcement will have to be persuaded
that the present “war” is a failure based on cost-benefit analysis, and
that safer alternatives exist. Insurmountable obstacles? If so, the
costs and suffering will mount. But building a peace movement against
the Vietnam War seemed insurmountable at first too.
The White House tantalizingly hinted at its future intentions
in the magazine GQ only this week.
“According to ongoing discussions with Obama aides and associates, if
the president wins a second term, he plans to tackle another American
war that has so far been successful only in perpetuating more misery:
the four decades of the drug war.… from his days as a state senator in
Illinois, Obama has considered the drug war to be a failure.” Apparently
this was one leak the White House positively approved.
Whether Obama is re-elected or not, the Mexican election provides new
momentum to end the drug war. But it cannot be ended without a
significant shift in American public opinion and priorities. Mexico and
Central America have carried nearly all the burden so far. Dismantling
the institutions of the drug war will take cross-border solidarity
between social movements, political leaders, clergy, public health
professionals, journalists and elements of the establishment who simply
have had enough.
