War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby American Dream » Thu Jan 05, 2012 2:39 pm

http://www.fpif.org/articles/mexicos_di ... ts_dirtier

Mexico"s Dirty War Gets Dirtier

By Kent Paterson, January 3, 2012


Originally published in cipamericas



The images conjured up sordid memories of decades ago. Two young people laying dead on the ground, shot to death while heavily-armed state policemen were breaking up a public protest. The Dec. 11 slayings of education students Jorge Alexis Herrera and Gabriel Echeverria de Jesus outside the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo not only revived scenes from the First Dirty War of the 1960s and 1970s, but also added more names to a growing, modern-day list of dead, disappeared, tortured and wounded activists across Mexico.

“They used to repress with audits and the tax department,” Raymundo Ramos, president of Nuevo Laredo’s Human Rights Committee, told the daily La Jornada. “Now they do it directly with bullets, disappearances or jail.”

Occurring only months before what is expected to be a highly charged presidential contest, the killings allegedly committed by state or federal police agents splashed more cold water on a democratic transition many analysts consider is sinking into an abyss of political opportunism and corruption.

The Guerrero daily El Sur, whose Acapulco office was machine-gunned and nearly set ablaze late last year, compared the killings to the First Dirty War. In an editorial, El Sur pointed out that the state violence happened under the second of two “alternative” state governments led by the once-opposition Party of the Democratic of the
Revolution (PRD), which has governed Guerrero since 2005.

Although competitive elections displaced the long-dominant and authoritarian PRI party
from the governor’s office, the same policing structures set up by General Mario Arturo
Acosta Chaparro during the First Dirty War stayed intact, El Sur noted.

Prior to the Chilpancingo episode, other recent incidents also recalled repression that was supposed to be a relic of history. In October, police violently broke up a demonstration of teachers in Acapulco. On December 2, Joel Santana, a 26-year-old held on weapons and drugs charges in the Acapulco prison, was found dead. Santana belonged to a family that’s been embroiled in land conflicts and has suffered other murders.

To the disbelief of relatives, state legal authorities first said Santana’s death was from a sudden heart attack and then attributed it to pesticide poisoning. Only days after the mysterious death, two leaders of the Campesino Environmental Organization of Petatlan and Coyuca de Catatlan (OCESP) were snatched from a bus traveling along the Acapulco-Zihuatanejo highway and disappeared by a group of hooded, armed men.

According to a statement from the OCESP, the bus was stopped only minutes before at a military check point and boarded by soldiers who walked up to Marcial Bautista, the group’s president, and asked for him by name. Bautista did not give his real name, the OCESP said, and the bus proceeded only to be stopped a short distance down the road. Along with Bautista, Eva Alarcon, OCESP advisor and longtime PRD leader from Petatlan, was taken away to unknown whereabouts.

Quoted in El Sur, unnamed witnesses contended it would have been virtually impossible for soldiers not to notice the waiting men who later boarded the bus and kidnapped Bautista and Alarcon. General Benito Medina Herrera, commander of the 27th Military Zone in El Ticui, a military post near where Bautista and Alarcon disappeared, denied to an El Sur reporter that the army had anything to do with the disappearances.

The Dec. 7 abductions garnered widespread national and international attention, drawing condemnations and demands for the safe return of the activists from Mexican legislators, the Guerrero State Congress, the United Nations, Amnesty International and other human rights organizations.

Yet the disappearances of Bautista and Alarcon were announced well in advance. The OCESP leaders had been trading accusations with a family from another community, La Morena, over alleged responsibilities for murders and intimidation; both sides had demanded state intervention and protection. Earlier this year, hundreds of people were reported forcibly displaced from the region because of violence or threats.

The tensions flared in a region that has long been marked by vicious battles between competing drug cartels, guerrilla uprisings, anti-logging protests and military forays that have resulted in accusations of human rights violations.

The Mexican government is under an order from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to investigate and punish the 1999 torture of OCESP founder Rodolfo Montiel and his friend, Teodoro Cabrera.

Mexican soldiers who arrested the pair are clearly implicated in the tortures, but have not been punished. Whether the disappearances of Bautista and Alarcon have to do with historic antagonisms against the OCESP or are related to other reasons remains to be seen. In recent years, the OCESP has been prominent for promoting a protective corridor for the endangered jaguar in their troubled mountain homeland.

A Pattern of Attacks

A relative places a photo of missing activist Eva Alarcón in her nephew's hand

What stands out, however, is how the disappearances of Bautista and Alarcon conform to a pattern in which Mexican activists denounce threats, demand protection and then are openly attacked under the noses of police officers or soldiers.

Nepomuceno Moreno, the Sonora activist with the Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity (MPJD) who was brazenly murdered in broad daylight only blocks from police headquarters in Hermosillo last month, previously asked fellow MPJD activist Julian LeBaron for help in moving to another city because of threats, LeBaron said on Mexican television. After personally investigating the 2010 disappearance of his son, Moreno concluded that state policemen were involved.

In another case, Trinidad de la Cruz , a 73-year-old leader of the Nahua indigenous community in Michoacan and a MPJD activist, was murdered on December 6. De la Cruz was reportedly abducted in front of witnesses, tortured and then murdered immediately after a Federal Police patrol that had been providing protection to a MPJD caravan inexplicably vanished from sight.

Located in a violence-torn coastal region, Ostula’s land base was recovered by its inhabitants in 2009. Since then, 27 people have been reported murdered and 5 others disappeared from the community. Similar to neighboring Guerrero, the area around Ostula is coveted by organized criminal bands, land and tourism developers and miners.

Indigenous and rural communities have felt much of the brunt of the Second Dirty War.
Last October, Antonio Jacinto Lopez, leader of the Triqui indigenous community in
Oaxaca, was assassinated. According to the Apro news service, Lopez had earlier been granted a protective order from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, In 2006, he filed a human rights complaint with the Washington-based commission.

“In this context, the current offensive follows the neo-liberal manual on indigenous territories,” columnist and indigenous rights activist Gloria Munoz Ramirez recently wrote. “It is about sowing terror with a baseline of murders and disappearances until families abandon their lands…”

Yet another crime predicted by activists occurred on Dec. 2, against Norma Andrade. Andrade co-founded the anti-femicide non-governmental organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) in Ciudad Juarez after her daughter was abducted and murdered.

While Andrade had largely dropped from the public limelight in recent years, her daughter Malu Garcia remained active and publicly denounced threats and requested state protection only weeks before Andrade was shot and wounded.

Insulting, anonymous messages against Garcia appeared, on Ciudad Juarez’s Lapolaka news site. Earlier this year, Garcia’s home was the target of an arson attack.

Initially, authorities blamed the shooting on a bungled carjacking attempt. The attack on Norma Andrade happened just days from the one-year anniversary of the murder of another Ciudad Juarez mother, Marisela Escobedo, who was slain near the Chihuahua governor’s office while demanding justice for her own murdered daughter.

Other manifestations of the Dirty War are readily evident in today’s Mexico, with police brutality and torture at the top of the list. Police interventions in recent public demonstrations have been reminiscent of the deployments of the old, military-trained paramilitary squads known as Halcones.

On Nov. 2, Ciudad Juarez activists began plastering black crosses on buildings during a march sponsored by the Citizens Plural Front and other groups. The crosses were meant to commemorate the approximately 10,000 people murdered in the border city since the so-called war on drugs was launched in 2008.

A video of the event shows municipal police suddenly appearing and grabbing marchers without first attempting dialogue. An elderly man who suffers health problems was unceremoniously tossed into a police truck, according to Elizabeth Flores, director of the Roman Catholic Church’s Pastoral Obrera social action agency in Ciudad Juarez.

One protester among the 29 arrested that day later wrote: “…you can’t believe the treatment they accorded us in the police station and the torture that our companions were submitted to… They put all of us on our knees for approximately one hour, without being able to rest on our rear ends, with our hands against our backs and with our faces to the wall, treating us like we were criminals.”

Flores and others prepared a complaint against the Ciudad Juarez municipal police with the National Human Rights Commission for torture, excessive force and abuse of authority. The demonstrators face six months to 5 years in jail on charges of civil disobedience and damaging private property, even though property owners have declined to press charges, Flores said in an interview.

The attacks against activists are prompting a new round of protests in Mexico, the United States and Europe. In Guerrero, the killings triggered a major political crisis only eight months into Governor Angel Aguirre’s term. Under fire for the Chilpancingo killings, Aguirre quickly asked for the resignations of State Attorney General Alberto Lopez Rosas and three other top law enforcement officials. He also announced the detention of ten officers allegedly involved in the shootings.

But Guerrero students and their supporters demand that Aguirre turn in his resignation too.

The two students killed studied at the teacher’s college in Atoyzinapa, an institution specializing in training educators for assignment in low-income rural communities. Long known for its political activism, Atoyzinapa is the alma matter of two prominent guerrilla leaders from the 1960s and 1970s, Genaro Vazquez and Lucio Cabanas, both of whom led mass struggles but took up arms after the government answered their social petitions with bullets and beatings.

A former guerrilla and Lucio Cabanas’ widow, Isabel Ayala, was murdered last summer as talk mounted of forming a state truth commission to probe the First Dirty War. A government prisoner during that time, Ayala reportedly had potentially incriminating information.

“Regrettably, Isabel Ayala will not be able to render testimony on the flagrant violations of human rights that she was subjected to during that evil period,” Wilibaldo Rojas, former PRD leader in Guerrero, told the press.

Like the overwhelming majority of killings in the first and second dirty wars, Ayala’s murder remains unpunished.


Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who covers the southwestern United States, Mexico, and Latin America. He is a regular contributor to the CIP Americas Program at http://www.cipamericas.org
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Sounder » Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:13 pm

“In this context, the current offensive follows the neo-liberal manual on indigenous territories,” columnist and indigenous rights activist Gloria Munoz Ramirez recently wrote. “It is about sowing terror with a baseline of murders and disappearances until families abandon their lands…”


This sadly, rings quite true
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby justdrew » Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:30 pm

So, if the PRI regains power, I'm betting the rate of violence goes way down
By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jan 05, 2012 9:53 pm

justdrew wrote:So, if the PRI regains power, I'm betting the rate of violence goes way down


Are you 1) joking, 2) suggesting the PRI will be happy to provide the ordo ab chao, 3) supporting the PRI?

I'm guessing 2?

.

By the way, obviously related:

Plan Colombia
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Apr 10, 2012 10:59 am


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ap ... an-leaders

'War on drugs' has failed, say Latin American leaders

Watershed summit will admit that prohibition has failed, and call for more nuanced and liberalised tactics

Jamie Doward
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 7 April 2012 16.51 EDT


Image
Guatemala's president Otto Perez Molina believes a new approach to Latin America's war on drugs is urgently needed. Photograph: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images


A historic meeting of Latin America's leaders, to be attended by Barack Obama, will hear serving heads of state admit that the war on drugs has been a failure and that alternatives to prohibition must now be found.

The Summit of the Americas, to be held in Cartagena, Colombia is being seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favour of a more nuanced and liberalised approach.

Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country's military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: "The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated."

Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic. "To suggest liberalisation – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?"

He insists, however, that prohibition has failed and an alternative system must be found. "Our proposal as the Guatemalan government is to abandon any ideological consideration regarding drug policy (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach to drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that drug consumption and production should be legalised, but within certain limits and conditions."

The decision by Pérez Molina to speak out is seen as highly significant and not without political risk. Polls suggest the vast majority of Guatemalans oppose decriminalisation, but Pérez Molina's comments are seen by many as helping to usher in a new era of debate. They will be studied closely by foreign policy experts who detect that Latin American leaders are shifting their stance on prohibition following decades of drugs wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead.

Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, has called for a national debate on the issue. Last year Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's president, told the Observer that if legalising drugs curtailed the power of organised criminal gangs who had thrived during prohibition, "and the world thinks that's the solution, I will welcome it".

One diplomat closely involved with the summit described the event as historic, saying it would be the first time for 40 years that leaders had met to have an open discussion on drugs. "This is the chance to look at this matter with new eyes," he said.

Latin America's increasing hostility towards prohibition makes Obama's attendance at the summit potentially difficult. The Obama administration, keen not to hand ammunition to its opponents during an election year, will not want to be seen as softening its support for prohibition. However, it is seen as significant that the US vice-president, Joe Biden, has acknowledged that the debate about legalising drugs is now legitimate.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil and chairman of the global commission on drug policy, has said it is time for "an open debate on more humane and efficient drug policies", a view shared by George Shultz, the former US secretary of state, and former president Jimmy Carter.


© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Apr 16, 2012 12:24 pm

follow link for video


http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/16/l ... _us_policy

Latin America v. Obama: U.S. Policy on Cuba, Drug War, Economy Under Fire at Colombian Summit

AMY GOODMAN: The Americas Summit concluded Sunday without agreement on the key questions of whether Cuba should be allowed to attend the regional meetings and on the issue of legalization of drugs. Latin American leaders at the meeting in Cartagena, Colombia, said Cuba should be invited to the next summit in Panama in 2015, but the U.S. and Canada dissented. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa boycotted this year’s meeting because of Cuba’s exclusion. The Organization of American States, which runs the summits, excluded Cuba 50 years ago. President Obama said Cuba would be welcome to attend in the future if it becomes more democratic.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Cuba, unlike the other countries that are participating, has not yet moved to democracy, has not yet observed basic human rights. I am hopeful that a transition begins to take place inside of Cuba. And I assure you that I and the American people will welcome the time when the Cuban people have the freedom to live their lives, choose their leaders, and fully participate in this global economy and international institutions.

AMY GOODMAN: Several leaders also called on the U.S. to consider decriminalizing drugs as a way of combating the illegal trafficking that’s spawned violence across the region. President Obama ruled out legalization, instead announced more than $130 million in aid for increasing security and pursuing narco-traffickers and drug cartels in the region. He expressed willingness to hold a discussion on drug policy, but said legalization could lead to greater problems.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are ones that are doing more harm than good in certain places. I, personally, and my administration’s position is that legalization is not the answer, that, in fact, if you think about how it would end up operating, the capacity of a large-scale drug trade to dominate certain countries, if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint, could be just as corrupting, if not more corrupting, than the status quo.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the U.S. announced that a free trade agreement with host country Colombia will come into effect in May, far earlier than expected. The agreement had earlier been deferred because of Colombia’s weak record on workers’ rights, including murders and attacks on union activists. In announcing the deal, the Obama administration said Colombia had made, quote, "historic" progress on worker protections and human rights. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos hailed the agreement.

PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: [translated] It will generate employment. It will generate employment in Colombia, more than 500,000 jobs. It will lead to economic growth, about 0.5 to 1 percent, in a permanent form. This has many different benefits for the Colombian people and for the well-being of Colombia. And there are many sectors that have direct and immediate access to most important markets in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: The summit was marred by a prostitution scandal involving 16 U.S. security personnel. Eleven Secret Service and five military personnel were removed from their duty and sent back from Colombia to the United States. The U.S. Secret Service is investigating claims they brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms in Cartagena late Wednesday and had a dispute over payment with one of the women. President Obama said he expected a rigorous probe to be conducted.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If it turns out that some of the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry, because my attitude with respect to the Secret Service personnel is no different than what I expect out of my delegation that’s sitting here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, to talk more about the summit, we’re joined now by Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. His most recent book, Fordlandia, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Professor Grandin.

GREG GRANDIN: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance of this summit, though what most people in this country are hearing about is the prostitution scandal allegedly involving U.S. Secret Service that were supposed to be protecting the President.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, well, this scandal—I mean, this is just, I think, something that just came out into the open; I’m sure it’s nothing new for these kind of events. I mean, what’s interesting about it is Cartegena is a Caribbean city, so the Caribbean has a reputation as being a kind of playpen of the United States, a kind of place of sex tourism. So I’m sure that this is not going over well in Latin America itself. I mean, it kind of harkens back to the days of, you know, Fredo Corleone and Hyman Roth setting up, you know, meetings, setting up rendezvous with, you know, businessmen. So I’m sure it was—it’s something that kind of over—set a bad tone for the rest of the summit.

The summit itself is a bit of a—it’s a bit of a show, a bit of a spectacle. It began under Bill Clinton in the 1990s and was very much tied to trying to move the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas along. And it started running into problems in Quebec during a rising anti-globalization movement, and then in 2005 in Argentina, which really did kind of derail the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. So, at this point, it’s unclear what the purpose of this summit is. Latin Americans themselves are creating these bodies that are excluding the United States, that are deepening integration, political and economic integration. This seems to be a venue in which they come together in order to criticize Washington, quite effectively.

AMY GOODMAN: And these bodies are threatening to the United States. Why have they excluded the United States? And why do they agree to come to this meeting, though some of the Latin American leaders did not attend, like Rafael Correa of Ecuador, protesting Cuba’s exclusion?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, and Hugo Chávez is ill, so he didn’t attend, and Cuba is excluded. So there are a number of people who didn’t attend. I think they attend because it does provide an effective high-profile venue in order to—in order to show their unity over a number of issues and voice their concerns to the United States, to Washington. What we saw in this episode, in this instance, was remarkable unity over three issues: one, humanizing policy towards the drug problem; two, including Cuba; and then, three, a kind of unexpected criticism that really did bring together, coelesce, a lot of Latin American leaders, which was Brazil’s criticism of U.S. monetary policy.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain that criticism.

GREG GRANDIN: Well, Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, was actually in Washington a few weeks ago, just last week, and she previewed this criticism. And the criticism is that the United States is basically depreciating its currency, and as—in order to solve its own financial problems. But that has the effect of valuing, raising the value of Latin American currency, and that creates a trade imbalance. That makes U.S. goods that much more cheaper for Brazilians and for Colombians and for Mexicans to buy, so it deepens the trade imbalance between Latin America and the United States. And it also has the effect of raising the value of debt that foreign bondholders owe or bankers owe, Latin American external debt. So it really puts pressure on Latin American economies. I mean, in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States largely, to a large degree, solved the economic crisis of that period, the crisis of Keynesianism, through a sharp austerity program that generated the debt crisis, that shifted from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. And I think Dilma is voicing concern that the United States is trying to do the same: get out of the mess it’s created by shifting the burden to Latin America. And there’s been—it was remarkable unity.

AMY GOODMAN: Dilma Rousseff is an interesting figure, the successor to Lula in Brazil, she, herself, a Brazilian guerrilla who was held in captivity for several years and tortured.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. I mean, and she came into office on the heels of Inácio Lula’s enormous popularity. He had two terms in office, and he left with over 80 percent pop—he was much more confrontational in—around a number of issues, around trade issues, around foreign policy. And the sense that Dilma Rousseff would be more of a technocrat, more willing to accommodate Washington’s interests, maybe on some issues she has. She has kind of gone along with some of the—some of U.S. foreign policy concerning Syria and maybe even Iran. She has distanced Brazil from Iran a bit, but not completely. Her foreign policy team is still very critical of Washington policy in the United Nations, in the Middle East around the Palestine-Israel conflict. And she’s been very critical around economic issues, including this. I mean, it was quite surprising how strident, how strong and sharp her criticism was. She talked about flooding Latin America with cheap money. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

GREG GRANDIN: Well, the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, you know, obviously, this is something that Barack Obama ran against as a candidate, ran against John McCain, said it would be bad for U.S. workers. And then, pretty much as soon as he got into office, he started to shift gears. He left pretty much the whole Bush team in the U.S. Trade Representative Office, and they continue to work towards passing and toward cobbling together a free trade agreement with Colombia.

Colombia—there’s a couple of things to know about Colombia. Colombia is the worst country in terms of labor organizing, hands down. Last year, 40 unionists were killed, and that was 60 percent of the global total. The human rights community, the labor community in the United States has been asking the Obama administration to basically build into any free trade agreement a number of guarantees. One, they wanted to see real change on the ground, before they went forward—say, a three-year period where there would be no murders, no executions of trade unionists. The White House refused that. They asked for a mechanism built into the trade agreement that would void the treaty if executions started to rise again. The White House refused to do that.

It’s largely symbolic, I think. I think the effect it’s going to have on the U.S. economy is minuscule. It really is kind of playing to domestic politics. Obama has an election coming up. He’s got to play to the Chamber of Commerce. He’s got to play to—you know, against Mitt Romney, who could position himself better on the economy. And I think what he’s doing is he’s betting his election on the backs of Colombian trade unionists.

AMY GOODMAN: Obama said that Colombia has actually made historic progress, and his administration said Colombia created a new labor ministry, prosecution of crimes against union workers, and steps to fight discrimination against Afro-Colombians and women, had assuaged their concerns and made it possible for the free trade deal.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, well, it’s kind of—I mean, all of these changes apparently went into effect two weeks ago, so there’s very little time to verify, very little—and who’s going to verify, who’s going to confirm? Again, the fact of the matter is Colombia is the worst country in the world to be a trade unionist. So if you’re willing—if you’re saying Colombia passes the threshold of what’s acceptable, then what country doesn’t pass the threshold of acceptable?

And a case in point is Guatemala. Guatemala brought its murder rate of unionists down to zero in order to get—in order to get the Central American Free Trade Agreement passed. As soon as that free trade agreement was passed, the murder rate of trade unionists shot up again. And so, there’s no guarantees that this won’t happen in Colombia. The mechanisms built into it is exactly what’s in NAFTA, and there has yet been a violation or a fine based on labor—violations of labor rights.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of President Obama spending three days in Cartagena, in Colombia, the longest any U.S. president has spent in Colombia?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, I think Colombia is a close U.S. ally, despite this very interesting dissent about drugs, that it’s being led actually not by the traditional critics of the United States, but by its two closest allies, Guatemala—very conservative presidents: Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, and in Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos. It’s fascinating. But aside from that, I think Colombia is the United States’s anchor in the region, in some ways, so it makes sense that he would spend a lot of time there.

AMY GOODMAN: Has President Obama changed policy towards Latin America from President Obama?

GREG GRANDIN: From—no, no. There’s—I mean—

AMY GOODMAN: From President Bush.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, there’s—I mean, the best way to think about it is a process of inertia. What started under Bush, or what actually even started under Clinton, just continues under Obama. The two main pillars of U.S. foreign policy—increasing neoliberalism and increasing militarism around drugs—continue. They feed off of each other and have created a crisis in that corridor, running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. That’s been a complete disaster, and there’s no change.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about the drug war after break. We’ll be bringing in Ethan Nadelmann. Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at New York University, author of Empire’s Workshop as well as Fordlandia. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in 30 seconds.

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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Apr 16, 2012 2:36 pm

Follow link for video.


http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/16/o ... owing_call

Monday, April 16, 2012 Whole Show

Obama Refuses to Back Growing Call for Drug Legalization to Stem Spreading Violence in Latin America

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. He is joining us from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he’s attending the World Economic Forum’s regional Latin American meeting, but here to talk about the significance of this meeting that has taken place, the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia. We’re also joined by Greg Grandin of New York University, Latin American history professor there.

Ethan Nadelmann, the significance of President Obama’s stance against decriminalization or any kind of legalization of drugs, the position he’s taken on drug policy, and the leaders in Latin America, what they have said in response?

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, I would not put that much significance into President Obama saying he’s opposed to legalization or decriminalization. That’s sort of the standard patter one expects from the politicians. They’ve been scared of their own shadows on this issue for a very long time.

But what’s much more important, Amy, is sort of looking at the tea leaves in all this stuff, because that’s why this summit is even—notwithstanding the nuance of the comments that were made—is really going to go down in a sort of historic way in terms of the transformation of the regional and global dialogue around drug policy. This is the first time ever that you’ve had a president, and for that matter, a vice president, saying this is a legitimate subject of discussion, the decriminalization, legalization. This is the first you’ve had a president saying that we’re willing to look at the possibility that U.S. drug policies are doing more harm than good in some parts of the world.

So, then you have the other leaders in the region. President Santos is, you know, as was just said before, an important ally of the United States, the former defense minister under President Uribe, somebody with a lot of credibility in waging a drug war. And he’s very focused on opening this up. And he’s not—you know, Time magazine has him on the cover this week as the emerging Latin American leader of significance. Otto Pérez Molina is very focused. Laura Chinchilla, the president of Costa Rica, came away saying she was very pleased that the Central American nations were benefiting because of the opening of this discussions. You have the funny situation of Evo Morales, the leftist leader of Bolivia, former head of the coca growers’ union, lecturing the United States about—essentially, sounding like Milton Friedman, that "How can you expect us to reduce the supply when there is a demand?" So there’s the beginning of a change here. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to put this genie back in the bottle.

AMY GOODMAN: Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón renewed calls on the United States, the world’s largest market for illegal drugs, to do more to curb consumption, as well.

PRESIDENT FELIPE CALDERÓN: [translated] Consumer countries—generally, the United States—should make a bigger effort to reduce consumption, and consequently, the extraordinary flow of economic resources that goes into the hands of the criminals.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the Colombian president himself, as you mentioned, Santos, I mean, who’s been the recipient of millions in drug war money, still coming out for decriminalization. Ethan Nadelmann?

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, you know, it’s an interesting time for President Calderón. I mean, his term ends later this year. He has waged the war on drugs for a long time. He’s pointing his finger at the United States and saying, "Why don’t you reduce your demand and stop sending so many guns down our way?" You know, at the summit, he expressed his appreciation for new organized crime agreements. But at the same time, he’s also floating and supporting this new discussion. When he was in the United States last year traveling around, he started saying, if the U.S. cannot reduce its demand for illegal drugs, it’s time for it to investigate, quote-unquote, "market alternatives," which was seen correctly as codeword for legal alternatives. His foreign minister, Patricia Espinosa, in February said that now Mexico does in fact support a debate about the legalization issue. So, the real question, I think, with Calderón is, in the extended period in which he’s a lame duck, after the election in July but before he leaves office in December, will he speak out? Will he make an effort to speak more boldly, in the way that Santos and Otto Pérez Molina are right now?

And the other question is his likely successor, Peña Nieto, coming from the old PRI party, the one that dominated Mexican politics for something like seven decades. The general thought has been that he just wants to sort of put all this—go back to the old understanding between government and gangsters, that PRI model for so many years. But as one former president, César Gaviria, said to me recently, when somebody becomes president, they’re faced with a new situation. So the new president of Mexico, come next year, is going to have to decide, does he want to let this whole debate dwindle? Does he want to just keep suffering the consequences of a failed U.S. policy? Or does he want to actively participate in the initiatives of Santos, Otto Pérez Molina, Chinchilla and others?

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the fact that this is an election year, Ethan Nadelmann?

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, it simply means that you’re not going to hear much of this in U.S. politics. I’ll be curious to see whether Fox News or Romney’s campaign try to pick on Obama even for the modest acknowledgments he made. But the interesting thing, of course, Amy, on this issue is that this is very much an issue that’s of the left and the right. As was said before, some of the leading proponents of drug policy reform in the region are coming from the right and the center-right, both the current presidents, Santos and Otto Pérez Molina, but also former presidents, like Cardoso, Gaviria and Zedillo from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, who are the ones who spearheaded these important global commissions that helped open up the issue. In the United States, you know, the two lions of the conservative movement in the late 20th century, William Buckley and Milton Friedman, it’s in the Republican Party primaries that you hear libertarians like Ron Paul and Gary Johnson talking to this issue. You know, it’s people like former Secretary of State George Shultz or Frank Carlucci who are clearly opposed to the drug war. It’s Grove Norquist, the anti-talks partisan, who’s very much a committed opponent of the drug war. So this is very much a bipartisan issue. We’re not going to see the same sorts of sniping from left and right on this issue as on others. And I think that means that this debate is going to grow stronger and more bolder as a result.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Greg Grandin, the alarming rate of drug-related violence in Central America that all are trying to deal with?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, I mean, it’s a direct consequence of Clinton’s Plan Colombia, which has telegraphed the violence up through—up from Colombia through Central America. It had the effect of breaking up the transportation cartels, but did little about production or consumption, so therefore just increased the incentive for cartels and gangs in Central America. This was a moment when these countries were coming out of these devastating civil wars, just trying to put their institutions, civil institutions, back together again. It was like a tsunami. And added to that was the disruptions, the dislocations of neoliberalism, first NAFTA and then the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which just created massive dislocation in the countryside and destroyed agrarian markets, and just, you know, both created this void and vacuum that the drug violence filled. I mean, these are really the two legacies of the Clinton administration.

I’m a little bit—little bit more pessimistic about the United States’s ability to respond to this. I mean, you know, the United States, what we’re seeing, what’s at play—what you see at the Summit of the America is really an international forum, foreign policy forum, that what’s on view is domestic political sclerosis. The three things the U.S. could do to improve its situation and its relation with Latin America—Cuba, normalize relation with Cuba; humanize its drug policy; and three, and then have a more kind of humane trade policy—what stops that is—and then also immigration, so four things—is domestic politics. I mean, we always have an election in the United States. There’s always short-term interests that mitigate any—against a rational long-term response. But then there’s also deep interests within the United States. There’s the military-industrial complex, which makes a lot of money on the drug war. There’s SOUTHCOM, whose whole reason for existence is the drug war in Latin America. I mean, it’s going to be a lot—it’s going to take a lot to kind of pry those interests off of this policy and lead to a more rational response, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: Ethan Nadelmann, you’re speaking to us now, not from Cartagena, but from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where you’re there for the World Economic Forum regional meeting. The significance of this, following Cartagena right now?

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, it was planned before people knew that this was going to be on the issue of the Summit of the Americas, but I’ll be on a panel in a few days with the president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, with the assistant secretary of state in the U.S. for law enforcement matters in narcotics, William Brownfield, and with the Mexican interior minister, whose job it is to wage the drug war. So it’s notable that, in a forum like this, which mostly focuses on business issues, that this issue is on the agenda. It’s consistent, however, with the fact that you now see the legal business communities in places like Mexico City, Monterrey, Guatemala City, beginning to step up and say this isn’t working.

And I should also just say, Amy, I agree with the previous speaker: this is going to be very difficult to sort of bring this—keep this discussion going in an above-ground way. You know, there is a prison-industrial complex. There are vested interests and powerful bureaucracies that have spent decades trying to suppress and ignore this discussion. Already, the U.S. is trying to find ways to maneuver this discussion into places where it will get stuck in sorts of intellectual quagmires and go nowhere.

But I think that, on the other hand, people like Santos, Otto Pérez Molina and others are savvy enough and are investing enough of time, of their own energy, to keep this thing moving, to understand that civil society, the intellectuals, the drug policy experts need to be engaged, and that if we just turn this over to the governments’ drug czars or their foreign ministries, this thing will die. That’s where the U.S. wants it. The others know it has to expand out for it to be effective.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both very much for being with us, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, speaking to us from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and Greg Grandin, teaches Latin American history at New York University, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and Fordlandia, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, the debate raging in election politics now about women’s work in the workplace both outside and inside the home. Stay with us.

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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby elfismiles » Fri May 04, 2012 5:24 pm

"Tortured Bodies Found Just Across Border"



More victims in Mexican massacre just across U.S. border
Friday - 5/4/2012, 4:32pm ET
J.J. Green, wtop.com

WASHINGTON - The bodies of at least nine people were found dead in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico on Friday morning, intelligence sources tell WTOP. Some were hanged from a bridge, others were found in a truck and still others were dumped in front of city hall.

There are conflicting reports as to how many bodies were found.

Nuevo Laredo is just across the border from Laredo, Texas. All of the victims showed signs of torture, their hands were bound and their eyes covered, the sources say.

The incident appears to be retaliation by Los Zetas drug cartel. The victims were allegedly identified by their killers as members of the Gulf cartel.

Mexican military and police authorities are investigating. U.S. Homeland Security officials are watching the situation carefully because of its proximity to the U.S. and the encroaching violence growing out of the cartel drug wars.


http://www.wtop.com/215/2852855/Torture ... oss-border

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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby 8bitagent » Fri May 04, 2012 7:12 pm

Zetas(who make al Qaeda and Taliban look like choir boys) could come into America guns ablazing, with car bombs and take over whole towns and the media and US government would try it's best to cover it all up and keep it quiet.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby JackRiddler » Fri May 04, 2012 8:05 pm

8bitagent wrote:Zetas(who make al Qaeda and Taliban look like choir boys) could come into America guns ablazing, with car bombs and take over whole towns and the media and US government would try it's best to cover it all up and keep it quiet.


Didn't get a chance to tell you when we met how I very much liked you in person, as I expected, and how incredibly annoying you are online because of statements like these. Really?!
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby elfismiles » Wed May 16, 2012 9:20 am

via stratfor ... nice map.


Shifts in cartel areas of influence in Mexico's Drug War

Image

http://app.en25.com/e/es.aspx?s=1483&e= ... a3cc700801
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby StarmanSkye » Wed May 30, 2012 4:31 pm

Another mind-blowing collection of information detailing the intricate deep-cover psyop/blackop management fraud which is the US Deep State's malicious, duplicious Drug War espionage scam to exploit all sides of criminal-brokered narcotics trafficing to assist the multinational ruling elite's imperialist & globalist agenda.

It is DAMN hard keeping tabs on the many details of this ongoing debacle, other than the general scheme of insidious conspiracy where various sides are played against each other in a longrange gameplan masterminded by the most noxious crime bosses deeply embedded in the kleptocratic fabric of government, business, finance, MIC/Pentagon, Justice Dept, Law Enforcement. As utterly criminal & corrupt the ruling class culture in Mexico is, they're like juvenile Boy Scouts next to the ruthless born-again true-believer thugs & fanatical killers in good 'ol USA who provide their cover, call the shots, make it all lucratively possible & agenda-satisfyingly necessary.

How totally fucked. This article, to me, reflects the decietful essence of evil and rottoness in the US that hides behind an artfully PR-crafted facade of democracy and 'American values'.

I know its longish and difficult to grasp the entirety of what it means, but its timely and SO deserves to be part of this topical archive tracing the episode of Mexico's civil sabotage & betrayal via the elite's Drug War.

If ONLY middle-class America would get-around to digesting the significance of what this means in the context of how unaccountably rotton and self-serving America's political culture is, & the practices that make our Police State tyranny inevitable. The sheer gap between the pathetic illusion of freedom and noble American idealism held by mainstream public and the reality of the way things really are is just too big for me to wrap my head around.

&&&&&&&&&

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=31100

NARCOTICS: CIA-Pentagon Death Squads and Mexico's 'War on Drugs"
Mexico Arrests Three Army Generals


by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, May 28, 2012
Antifascist Calling...

Earlier this month, the Mexican government arrested three high-ranking Army generals "including a former second in command at the Defense Ministry," The New York Times reported.

According to multiple press reports, Tomás Ángeles Dauahare, who retired in 2008, was an under secretary at the Defense Ministry during the first two years of President Felipe Calderón's "war" against some narcotrafficking cartels and had even been mentioned as a "possible choice for the top job."

The Times disclosed that in the early 1990s Ángeles "served as the defense attaché at the Mexican Embassy in Washington," a plum position with plenty of perks awarded to someone thought by his Pentagon brethren to have impeccable credentials; that is, if smoothing the way the for drugs to flow can be viewed as a bright spot on one's résumé.

The other top military men detained in Mexico City were "Brig. Gen. Roberto Dawe González, assigned to a base in Colima State, and Gen. Ricardo Escorcia Vargas, who is retired."

Reuters reported that "Dawe headed an army division in the Pacific state of Colima, which lies on a key smuggling route for drugs heading to the United States, and had also served in the violent border state of Chihuahua."

When queried at a May 18 press conference in Washington, "whether and to what extent" these officers participated in the $1.6 billion taxpayer-financed boondoggle known as the Mérida Initiative or had received American training, Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Robert L. Ditchey II tersely told reporters, "We are not going to get into those specifics."

Inquiring minds can't help but wonder what does the Pentagon, or certain three-lettered secret state agencies, have to hide?

CIA-Pentagon Death Squads

Although little explored by corporate media, the CIA and Defense Department's role in escalating violence across Mexico is part of a long-standing strategy by American policy planners to deploy what the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty called The Secret Team, "skilled professionals under the direct control of someone higher up." According to Prouty, "Team members are like lawyers and agents, they work for someone. They generally do not plan their work. They do what their client tells them to do."

In the context of the misbegotten "War on Drugs," that "client" is the U.S. government and the nexus of bent banks, crooked cops, shady airplane brokers, chemical manufacturers, and spooky defense and surveillance firms who all profit from the chaos they help sustain.

As Narco News disclosed last summer, "A small but growing proxy war is underway in Mexico pitting US-assisted assassin teams composed of elite Mexican special operations soldiers against the leadership of an emerging cadre of independent drug organizations that are far more ruthless than the old-guard Mexican 'cartels' that gave birth to them."

"These Mexican assassin teams now in the field for at least half a year, sources tell Narco News, are supported by a sophisticated US intelligence network composed of CIA and civilian US military operatives as well as covert special-forces soldiers under Pentagon command--which are helping to identify targets for the Mexican hit teams."

"So it should be no surprise," Bill Conroy wrote, "that information is now surfacing from reliable sources indicating that the US government is once again employing a long-running counter-insurgency strategy that has been pulled off the shelf and deployed in conflicts dating back to Vietnam in the 1960s, in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, and beyond, and in more recent conflicts, such as in Iraq."

That strategy, as numerous journalists and researchers have reported, provides specialized training and heavy-weapons to neocolonial clients that the imperial Godfather believes will do their bidding. More often than not however, there are serious consequences for doing so.

As The Brownsville Herald revealed nearly a decade ago, the Zetas were the former enforcement arm of Juan García Ábrego's Gulf Cartel; then Mexico's richest and most powerful drug trafficking organization.

During the 1980s, the Gulf group negotiated an alliance with Colombia's Cali Cartel, amongst the CIA's staunchest drug-trafficking allies during the Iran-Contra period. By the 1990s, the Mexican Attorney General's Office estimated that the organization handled as much as "one-third of all cocaine shipments" into the United States from their suppliers and were worth an estimated $10 billion.

But as the Herald disclosed, the Zetas, now considered by the U.S. government to be the "most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico" were "once part of an elite division of the Mexican Army, the Special Air Mobile Force Group. At least one-third of this battalion's deserters was trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., according to documents from the Mexican secretary of defense."

By 2010, the Zetas had broken with their former Gulf partners to become one of the most formidable, and brutal, DTOs in the area. According to published reports, the organization's core operatives include corrupt former federal, state and local police officers, renegade soldiers and ex-Kabiles, the CIA and Pentagon-trained Special Forces of the Guatemalan military, responsible for horrendous atrocities during that country's U.S.-sponsored "scorched earth" campaign against leftist guerrillas; a war which killed an estimated 250,000 people, largely at the hands of the military and right-wing death squads.

Perhaps this is one reason why the Pentagon "won't get into" the "specifics" behind the generals' recent arrests, nor will the Justice Department come clean about the "quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they [the Sinaloa Cartel] were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations," as Narco News reported.

While the implications of these policies may be scandalous to the average citizen, they're part of a recurring pattern, one might even say a modus operandi reproduced ad nauseam.

More than three decades ago we learned from Danish journalist Henrik Krüger in The Great Heroin Coup, that the CIA was at the center of the "remarkable shift from Marseilles (Corsican) to Southeast Asian and Mexican (Mafia) heroin in the United States," and that the legendary take-down of the "French Connection" actually represented "a deliberate move to reconstruct and redirect the heroin trade... not to eliminate it." (emphasis added)

A similar process is underway in Mexico today as drug distribution networks battle it out for control over the multibillion dollar market flooding Europe and North America with processed cocaine from South America's fabled Crystal Triangle. In fact, the illicit trade would be nigh impossible without official complicity and corruption, on both sides of the border, and at the highest levels of what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the Power Elite.

Without batting an eye however, the Times told us that the arrest of Mexico's top "drug fighting" generals "is sure to rattle American law enforcement and military officers, who in the best of times often work warily with their Mexican counterparts, typically subjecting them to screening for any criminal ties."

Really?

Not if a U.S. Army Special Operations Forces Field Manual (FM 3-05.130), titled Unconventional Warfare, serves as a guide for the Pentagon's current strategic thinking on the conflict in Mexico. Published in 2008 by WikiLeaks, the anonymous authors informed us that:

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political "undesirables." (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-3)

From this perspective such "irregular forces" sound suspiciously like today's army of professional contract killers or sicarios, who act as mercenaries for the cartels and as political enforcers for local elites.

According to carefully-crafted media fairy tales, we're to believe that unlike corrupt Federal and local police, the Army, which has deployed nearly 50,000 troops across Mexico are somehow magically immune to the global tide of corruption associated with an illicit trade worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

However, ubiquitous facts on the ground tell a different tale. Like their U.S. counterparts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Mexican Army stands accused of serious human rights violations. And, like marauding U.S. imperial invaders, Mexico's Army regularly carry out illegal detentions, extortion, extrajudicial killings, torture along with the "disappearance" of indigenous and left-wing activists.

Indeed, like their American and NATO counterparts in Afghanistan today, some elements within the Mexican Army have forged highly-profitable alliances with drug traffickers, especially among organized crime groups afforded "cover" by the CIA. But unlike the global godfathers in Washington however, Mexican authorities have brought criminal charges against corrupt officials.

In the Times' report we're informed that "a retired general, Juan Manuel Barragán Espinosa, was detained in February, accused of having leaked information to a drug gang. Another general, Manuel Moreno Avina, and several soldiers he commanded are on charges of murder, torture and drug trafficking in a border town in northern Mexico."

The Houston Chronicle disclosed that the "investigation of the generals reportedly was spurred by informants' testimony linked to the August 2010 arrest of Edgar Valdez Villarreal, the Laredo native known as La Barbie who served as the Beltran Leyva's top enforcer."

According to the Chronicle, "accusations of political motivation--by the generals' wives, lawyers and others--have been raised because of prosecutors' nearly two-year delay in acting on the informant's testimony and because the arrests come less than six weeks ahead of Mexico's presidential elections."

In fact, just days before being taken into custody, Ángeles "participated in a national security conference organized by supporters of presidential front-runner Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI."

But Ángeles' inconvenient arrest just weeks before contentious national elections isn't the only problem that PRI front-runner Peña Nieto has to worry about.

The Associated Press reported that Peña Nieto's one-time ally, the former governor of the violence-plagued state of Tamaulipas, Tomás Yarrington Ruvalcaba, has been accused in a civil action filed by federal prosecutors in Texas that he "'acquired millions of dollars in payments' while in public office from drug cartels 'and from various extortion or bribery schemes'."

"Yarrington," AP disclosed, "then used various front men and businesses 'to become a major real estate investor through various money laundering mechanisms,' according to documents filed in Corpus Christi."

The former governor "was also named earlier this year in the federal indictment of Antonio Peña Arguelles, who was also charged with money laundering in San Antonio. That indictment alleged that leaders of the Gulf and Zetas cartels paid millions to Institutional Revolutionary Party members, including Yarrington," AP reported.

Curiously enough however, that AP report failed to mention Yarrington's close political ties to politicians on this side of the border. Indeed, according to Digital Journal writer Lynn Herrmann, "Yarrington was at Texas Governor Rick Perry's swearing into office for his first full term in 2003. Prior to that, the Tamaulipas governor was a recipient of a Texas Senate resolution honoring him."

"Even closer was the relationship between Yarrington and President George W. Bush," Herrmann wrote, "a relationship apparently developed when junior was governor of Texas. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times quoted Bush as saying, 'Tomás is terrific, worked with him a lot'."

Now why wouldn't the AP report that?!

While one cannot dismiss that political motivations may lie behind the arrests, salient facts coloring these latest examples of drug war shenanigans again betray that this phony war is being waged not to stamp-out the grim trade but over who controls it.

Another Day, Another Bent General

The arrests were hardly precedent setting if truth be told. Indeed, the best known case of collaboration between the Army and the Cartels was that of Gen. José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo.

After having risen in the ranks to become a Three-Star Divisional Commander in the 1990s, Gutiérrez was appointed by the Attorney General of Mexico during the reign of President Ernesto Zedillo, currently a director of the drug-tainted financial black hole Citigroup, accused of laundering tens of millions of dollars in drug money for Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of Carlos Salinas, the former president of Mexico. With powerful connections, the general became that country's top-ranking drug interdiction officer as head of the Instituto Nacional para el Combate a las Drogas (INCD).

From his perch, Gutiérrez had access to intelligence provided to the government by Mexican and U.S. secret state agencies. The treasure trove of data available to the general and his patrons included files on antidrug investigations, wiretaps on cartel leaders and informant identities.

There was just one small problem.

After receiving a tip that Gutiérrez had moved into an upscale Mexico City neighborhood in an apartment "whose rent could not be paid for with the wage received by a public servant," the Attorney General's Office opened an investigation.

It turned out that Gutiérrez had moved into palatial digs owned by a confederate of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the legendary head of the Juárez Cartel and "Lord of the Heavens." The drug lord earned that moniker because he moved vast quantities of cocaine into the U.S. aboard a fleet of airplanes purchased from bent brokers on the American side of the border. This too is a recurring pattern, as Daniel Hopsicker revealed during his investigation into the secret history of a fleet of fifty drug planes bought with hot money laundered through U.S. banks.

During the course of their investigation, Mexican authorities obtained a recording of Gutiérrez and Carrillo Fuentes which discussed payments to the General; remuneration for his role in leaving the Juárez Cartel alone, then Mexico's largest drug corporation.

In a 1997 interview with The Boston Globe, Francisco Molina, the former head of the anti-narcotics unit, said that during the change of command, "he personally handed over to Gutiérrez all of Mexico's 'most delicate' drug-fighting information."

"The files included thousands of documents on open investigations," the Globe reported, "pending operations, wire taps and voluminous material on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the trafficker to whom Gutiérrez was linked."

That information, Molina said, "places many people at risk, and it throws into the garbage the huge amount of resources, money, and time that were spent" on operations. "It's like letting the enemy in to dig around in the files."

And with the U.S. State Department poised to expand the Mexican secret state's access to the latest in communications' intercept technologies as Antifascist Calling recently reported, the Cartels may soon have even more information at their disposal and the wherewithal to strike their adversaries with ruthless efficiency.

'Dirty Warrior' and 'Lord of the Heavens' United in the Great Beyond

It remains to be seen whether the accused military men will suffer the fate of another narco-linked Army commander, retired Gen. Mario Acosta Chaparro.

The Latin American Herald Tribune reported last month that Acosta, "who was convicted of drug-gang ties a decade ago but subsequently exonerated, has died of wounds suffered in a gunshot attack, sources with the capital's district attorney's office said."

According to McClatchy's "Mexico Unmasked" blog, the general was killed "as he descended from his chauffeured vehicle to pick up his Mercedes Benz (how many generals can afford to buy MBs?) in a suburban area of Mexico City. A guy in a motorcycle fired 3 rounds from a 9mm handgun into Acosta's head."

As Antifascist Calling reported in 2010, this was the same general who was shot and wounded in Mexico City during an alleged "robbery attempt." At the time, El Universal reported that police claimed a thief wanted to "steal the general's watch" and shot him several times in the abdomen when he resisted.

It must have been a nice watch.

But with last month's murder it appears that Acosta's past caught up with him. "In 2007," Antifascist Calling reported, "after a six-year imprisonment on charges of providing protection to late drug trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes ... Acosta Chaparro was released from custody after his conviction was overturned on appeal."

Freed on technicalities despite testimony by witnesses under the protection of the Mexican government, documents published by WikiLeaks revealed that the Swiss Bank Julius Baer's Cayman Islands unit hid "several million dollars" of funds controlled by Acosta and his wife, Silvia, through a firm known as Symac Investments.

WikiLeaks wondered whether Mexican authorities would "want to know whether the several millions of USD had anything to do with the allegations that Mr Chaparro, a former police chief from the Mexican state of Guerrero, stopped chasing his local drug dealers and joined them in business."

The secret-spilling web site averred: "With the assistance of Julius Baer, Mr Chaparro was able to invest several millions of USD in Symac with all the secrecy which the Caymans allowed and to draw out some $12,000 a month until he suddenly stopped it in July 1998. The following year, a particularly notorious colleague from the Mexican police became an FBI informer and offered new evidence against him."

During his 2002 trial on drug trafficking and corruption charges one of the witnesses, Gustavo Tarín Chávez testified that Acosta answered a phone call and a voice on the other end of the line said: "Son! How are you? Son!" Tarín Chávez told the court that the only person who called the general "son" was none other then Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

During that call, the late drug lord told Acosta that he had spoken with Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, the former governor of Guerrero, and that "everything was settled."

Multiple reports in the Mexican press subsequently revealed that the general had been given orders to pick up fifty AK-47 assault rifles, thirty semiautomatic pistols, twenty two-way radios and a SUV from Carrillo Fuentes and deliver them to the governor.

Talk about a high-priced errand boy!

Tarín Chávez also testified that Acosta did all the technical planning for the Juárez group and made arrangements for the arrival of Colombian aircraft loaded with cocaine and that this logistics work involved the delivery of vehicles, cash and communications' equipment to other military officers who worked for the drug lord.

Though his case was tossed out by the Mexican Supreme Court due to a "lack of evidence" (perhaps one or all of those witnesses lost their "protection" and "vanished," into an unmarked grave perhaps?), like other close U.S. allies in the "War on Drugs," Acosta had been linked to Mexico's "dirty war" against the left during the 1970s under the administration of President Luis Echeverría.

Echeverría was Interior Minister during President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's corrupt, repressive regime. Díaz, with much encouragement from the Pentagon, State Department and the CIA, ordered the murders of hundreds of student protesters in the now-infamous Tlatelolco Plaza massacre a few days before the start of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

In 2006, investigative journalist Jefferson Morley and The National Security Archive obtained previously classified documents which revealed "CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría."

Those documents detailed "the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named 'LITEMPO.' Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide 'an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges'."

Scott, a strident anticommunist who saw Moscow's "hidden hand" everywhere, suspected that student protests were "a communist controlled rebellion," and argued that the movement represented "a classic example of the Communists' ability to divert a peaceful demonstration into a major riot." Never mind that radical students despised the Stalinist Communist Party of Mexico and viewed them as conservative sell-outs; for Scott and his CIA masters, the fable of an International Communist Conspiracy directed by the Kremlin had to be maintained at all costs.

"As the student protests grew larger," Morley wrote, "Scott's information from the LITEMPO agents informed Ambassador Freeman's increasingly dire cables to Washington, which noted that Díaz Ordaz and the people around him were talking tougher. The government 'implicitly accepts consequence that this will produce casualties,' the ambassador wrote. 'Leaders of student agitation have been and are being taken into custody....In other words, the [government] offensive against student disorder has opened on physical and psychological fronts'."

The rest, as they say, is history. Army units stationed around the perimeter of Tlatelolco Plaza and in the windows of adjoining buildings began to open fire on the protesters; hundreds were killed and more than fifteen hundred people were arrested, many of whom were subsequently tortured and then "disappeared."

Heroin Coups and Iran-Contra Connections

Díaz and Echeverría did more than just ignore crimes perpetrated by the drug and CIA-linked intelligence agency, the Direcciòn Federal de Seguridad, or DFS; in the wake of the massacre, they handed DFS and the Army a blank check to carry out an anti-leftist purge which claimed thousands of lives.

Analyzing the CIA's role in global drug trafficking networks, researcher Peter Dale Scott wrote: "One of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create. From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a 'license to traffic'."

According to Scott, "DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance. Eventually the DFS became so identified with the criminal drug-trafficking organizations it managed and protected, that in the 1980s the DFS was (at least officially) closed down."

Though 90 at the time of this writing, Echeverría, until recently, was considered the éminence grise of Mexican politics. He continued to wield considerable power long after his presidential term ended, mostly through his influence over the "old guard" of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, the special police and army forces stood up under his watch, along with his alleged ties to the drug cartels.

As Scott and Jonathan Marshall disclosed in Cocaine Politics, the "failure" of various anti-trafficking programs such as Operation Condor "were inevitable given the records of the two Mexican presidents" who oversaw the operation.

"Luis Echeverría, under whom the program began," Scott and Marshall wrote, "appears to have been linked to [drug trafficker and CIA asset Alberto] Sicilia Falcón through his wife, whose family members had suspected ties to the European heroin trade." And when José López Portillo "took charge in 1976," Scott and Marshall averred, he "reportedly amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal profits and bought large estates in Spain with the proceeds."

As Henrik Krüger related in The Great Heroin Coup, when he was arrested in 1975, Sicilia Falcón "claimed to be an agent of the CIA, and that his drug ring had been set up on orders and with the support of the agency."

"Part of his profits," Krüger wrote, "were to go towards the purchase of weapons and ammunition for distribution throughout Central America for the destabilization of 'undesirable' governments. If true, U.S. heroin addicts were again footing the bill for clandestine paramilitary operations and anti-Communist terror campaigns."

But the former president's shady connections didn't stop there. Indeed, Echeverría's brother-in-law, Rubén Zuno Arce, was convicted in U.S. Federal District Court in California in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison for his role as a top-tier leader of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo's Guadalajara drug cartel and for the torture-murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena in 1985.

Camarena had amassed evidence that the CIA and U.S. State Department considered Gallardo "untouchable" because of the "special relationship" forged by the Agency amongst drug traffickers and the Nicaraguan Contras. Scott and Marshall disclosed that "Mexico's biggest smuggler, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, responsible for moving four tons of cocaine a month into the United States, was also 'a big supporter' of the Contras, according to his pilot Werner Lotz. Lotz told the DEA that his boss advanced him more than $150,000 to pass on to the Contras."

In an 1996 PBS interview with former DEA deep-cover specialist turned whistleblower, Michael Levine, the co-host of The Expert Witness Radio Show, Levine related that "Camarena was a DEA agent working on high level drug investigations. He was stationed in Guadalajara, Mexico and his investigations were taking him right into the Contra resupply lines, that is, the Contras trafficking in drugs with the support of the Hondurans, the Mexicans, and everybody else and Enrique was down there working this case with an informer and suddenly he's arrested in broad daylight by Mexican police. He's taken to a ranch of a top Mexican criminal and slowly tortured to death over a 24 hour period."

"And later what is... what's found is Enrique was investigating [Honduran drug lord Juan Ramón] Matta-Ballesteros and Matta-Ballesteros' partner Gallardo and Matta-Ballesteros, by the way, was on the State Department payroll... in spite of being a documented heavy drug trafficker. His airline that we knew was used to traffic drugs, was used on the US government payroll to fly these Contra resupply mission. So here's this murderer who was later convicted of murdering... or conspiring to murder Kiki Camarena and he was on the US government payroll in spite of the fact that the DEA called him a drug trafficker, in spite of the fact that Kiki Camarena was investigating him. Now here's Kiki Camarena investigating the Oliver North supply line and he's tortured to death."

As investigative journalist Robert Parry revealed two years later on the Consortium News web site, Matta-Ballesteros' airline, SETCO, "emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras."

"During congressional Iran-contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986."

Let's get this straight: Ollie North, a convicted felon who turned a blind eye to drug trafficking Contra networks he helped stand up runs for the U.S. Senate, hosts a "national defense" program on Fox News and earns millions of dollars. "Kiki" Camarena, who's investigating North's criminal assets is brutally murdered by those same "resistance" fighters.

Curiously enough, when Sinaloa Cartel head Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán escaped in 2001 from a maximum-security prison during the "reform" administration of Vicente Fox, then the leader of the neoliberal Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN, and whose Federal Police chief was recommended by Luis Echeverría, it emerged that Guzmán once worked for Matta-Ballesteros, Gallardo and Zuno Acre's Guadalajara Cartel.

Small world.

But then again, with the CIA suppressing evidence that they negotiated a quid-pro-quo with the Sinaloa Cartel and can't talk about it because of "national security," or that an FBI drug-trafficking informant was at the center of the Justice Department's gun-walking "Fast and Furious" fiasco and can't be prosecuted, perhaps controlled chaos is just what the Global Godfather wants.

A bent general or two is the least of our problems.


Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby dqueue » Wed May 30, 2012 4:36 pm

While on this side of the US/Mexico border, it's worth reading Hopsicker lately. He follows the story of the decapitated head found near the Hollywood sign in California...
The decapitated head found in a plastic bag on a hiking trail in the shadow of the Hollywood Sign four months ago belonged to a man known to local authorities as the former “concierge” in Los Angeles for the now-defunct Cali drug cartel, the Mad Cow MorningNews has learned exclusively.
...
When the head of Harvey Medellin, a 66-year old Mexican national, was discovered alongside a hiking trail in Los Angeles, the moment many have dreaded— when the Drug War raging in Mexico would spill over onto the streets of a major American city, arrived, and passed without recognition.
...

http://www.madcowprod.com/tag/hollywood-head/
We discover ourselves to be characters in a novel, being both propelled by and victimized by various kinds of coincidental forces that shape our lives. ... It is as though you trapped the mind in the act of making reality. - Terence McKenna
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Saurian Tail » Tue Jun 05, 2012 2:43 pm

Western banks 'reaping billions from Colombian cocaine trade'

While cocaine production ravages countries in Central America, consumers in the US and Europe are helping developed economies grow rich from the profits, a study claims


Ed Vulliamy
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 2 June 2012 14.34 EDT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ju ... aine-trade

The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich "consuming" countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn "producing" nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.

The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

"The story of who makes the money from Colombian cocaine is a metaphor for the disproportionate burden placed in every way on 'producing' nations like Colombia as a result of the prohibition of drugs," said one of the authors of the study, Alejandro Gaviria, launching its English edition last week.

"Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia's own banking system is subject to."

His co-author, Daniel Mejía, added: "The whole system operated by authorities in the consuming nations is based around going after the small guy, the weakest link in the chain, and never the big business or financial systems where the big money is."

The work, by the two economists at University of the Andes in Bogotá, is part of an initiative by the Colombian government to overhaul global drugs policy and focus on money laundering by the big banks in America and Europe, as well as social prevention of drug taking and consideration of options for de-criminalising some or all drugs.

The economists surveyed an entire range of economic, social and political facets of the drug wars that have ravaged Colombia. The conflict has now shifted, with deadly consequences, to Mexico and it is feared will spread imminently to central America. But the most shocking conclusion relates to what the authors call "the microeconomics of cocaine production" in their country.

Gaviria and Mejía estimate that the lowest possible street value (at $100 per gram, about £65) of "net cocaine, after interdiction" produced in Colombia during the year studied (2008) amounts to $300bn. But of that only $7.8bn remained in the country.

"It is a minuscule proportion of GDP," said Mejía, "which can impact disastrously on society and political life, but not on the Colombian economy. The economy for Colombian cocaine is outside Colombia."

Mejía told the Observer: "The way I try to put it is this: prohibition is a transfer of the cost of the drug problem from the consuming to the producing countries."

"If countries like Colombia benefitted economically from the drug trade, there would be a certain sense in it all," said Gaviria. "Instead, we have paid the highest price for someone else's profits – Colombia until recently, and now Mexico.

"I put it to Americans like this – suppose all cocaine consumption in the US disappeared and went to Canada. Would Americans be happy to see the homicide rates in Seattle skyrocket in order to prevent the cocaine and the money going to Canada? That way they start to understand for a moment the cost to Colombia and Mexico."

The mechanisms of laundering drug money were highlighted in the Observer last year after a rare settlement in Miami between US federal authorities and the Wachovia bank, which admitted to transferring $110m of drug money into the US, but failing to properly monitor a staggering $376bn brought into the bank through small exchange houses in Mexico over four years. (Wachovia has since been taken over by Wells Fargo, which has co-operated with the investigation.)

But no one went to jail, and the bank is now in the clear. "Overall, there's great reluctance to go after the big money," said Mejía. "They don't target those parts of the chain where there's a large value added. In Europe and America the money is dispersed – once it reaches the consuming country it goes into the system, in every city and state. They'd rather go after the petty economy, the small people and coca crops in Colombia, even though the economy is tiny."

Colombia's banks, meanwhile, said Mejía, "are subject to rigorous control, to stop laundering of profits that may return to our country. Just to bank $2,000 involves a huge amount of paperwork – and much of this is overseen by Americans."

"In Colombia," said Gaviria, "they ask questions of banks they'd never ask in the US. If they did, it would be against the laws of banking privacy. In the US you have very strong laws on bank secrecy, in Colombia not – though the proportion of laundered money is the other way round. It's kind of hypocrisy, right?"

Dr Mejia said: "It's an extension of the way they operate at home. Go after the lower classes, the weak link in the chain – the little guy, to show results. Again, transferring the cost of the drug war on to the poorest, but not the financial system and the big business that moves all this along."


With Britain having overtaken the US and Spain as the world's biggest consumer of cocaine per capita, the Wachovia investigation showed much of the drug money is also laundered through the City of London, where the principal Wachovia whistleblower, Martin Woods, was based in the bank's anti-laundering office. He was wrongfully dismissed after sounding the alarm.

Gaviria said: "We know that authorities in the US and UK know far more than they act upon. The authorities realise things about certain people they think are moving money for the drug trade – but the DEA [US Drugs Enforcement Administration] only acts on a fraction of what it knows."

"It's taboo to go after the big banks," added Mejía. "It's political suicide in this economic climate, because the amounts of money recycled are so high."

Anti-Drugs Policies In Colombia: Successes, Failures And Wrong Turns, edited by Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía, Ediciones Uniandes, 2011
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jun 05, 2012 3:35 pm

Having seen how the Stratfor sausage gets made, I would consider processing their output to be a net loss of knowledge.

That is an undeniably awesome graphic, though.
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