YOUR DRUG CONNECTION

An Online Guide To The Alien, If Not Totally Foreign, World Of Narco-Politics

A few years back, former Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano walked away
from the world of the media disillusioned with the Disney-fied,
corporate-mergered, bottom-line-driven, commercial monolith of phony
consensus that he saw the free press becoming. After serving some serious
incommunicado time in Latin America -- with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas
and elsewhere -- he'd pop out of the woods, as it were, and offer the
Phoenix an occasional report on Latin-American politics. (See "Clinton's
Narco Pals" and "Borderline Behavior.")

Now Al's back in force as publisher of The Narco News Bulletin, a Web site
that promises to digest, interpret, and critique published information from
both sides of the Border on the failure of US drug policy, internal Latin
American narco-politics, and, perhaps most important, the growing but
under-reported drug-legalization movements in Mexico and other Latin
countries.

The kick-off edition of narconews.com includes excerpts from a piece in the
Mexican magazine Milenio and other commentary on US Ambassador to Mexico
Jeffrey Davidow's inflamatory remarks about Mexican drug crime made during
a speech at the University of Southern California; speculation on the CIA's
involvement with the assassination of the police chief in Tijuana from the
Mexican newsweekly La Crisis; and snippets from the Mexican press and the
national Mexican daily El Universal covering the alleged narco connections
of PRI presidential candidate Francisco Labastida Ochoa. (And this is all
presented in English, by the way; the theory being that Spanish-speaking
Americans have already read it.)

The Narco News Bulletin also offers a "Narco of the Month" (for April, a
high-ranking US anti-drug officer whose wife turned out to be a drug
smuggler) and a "Hero of the Month" (a pair of environmental activists
victimized by Mexican drug-enforcement efforts).

Gringo Web surfers may find narconews.com unfamiliar and disorienting. It's
short on cyber-gimmicks, long on the strident rhetoric of crusaders, and
full of things you probably didn't read about anywhere else. Just the sort
of thing the Web promised to deliver.