WHAT ARE THE U.S.'S REAL MOTIVES FOR LAUNCHING A DRUG WAR IN MEXICO?

The following is an excerpt from James Cockcroft's new book, Mexico's
Revolution: Then and Now (Monthly Review Press, 2010).

U.S. Intervention

For decades, Washington, D.C., has been pouring military aid into
Mexico. In 2008 there were 6,000 U.S. troops on the Mexican border,
and in 2010 President Barack Obama decided to send in more. The U.S.
side of the border is militarized, as it was before and during the
Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 and periodically since then. Drones
routinely fly over Mexican soil. In the United States, video games
show American troops invading Mexico.

Remember that the United States has often sent troops into Mexico.
There is a long history of U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of
the nation since the bloody seizure of one-half of Mexico's
territory--the outcome of the imperialist war of 1846-1848.

Today a militaristic weapon is the Alliance for the Prosperity and
Security of North America organized by the governments of the United
States, Canada, and Mexico in 2005. The Alliance is an expansion of
the Plan Puebla Panama of 2001 that aimed at the integration of
southern Mexico with Central America and Colombia. In 2008, the
Alliance was strengthened by the Merida Initiative/Plan Mexico, an
international security treaty established by the United States with
Mexico and Central America to fight narcotraffic and integrate Mexico
and Central America with the Northern Command of the United States.

These plans better U.S. chances of firming up energy security: Mexico,
Guatemala, Belize, and Colombia are oil countries.

The plans also make it easier for the United States, Canada, and
Mexico to use their arms against outside threats and, above all,
internal opposition. They represent a new phase of contemporary
imperialism.

What are the real targets of these plans for the international
coordination and militarization of the struggle against alleged
terrorists and narcos?

They are aimed at immigrants, original peoples, guerrilla resistance,
political dissidents, and social movements against transnational
corporations taking over natural resources, including water, and
causing mining pollution.

These plans, financed by billions of U.S. dollars, have made Mexico a
security priority for the U.S. ruling class.

They serve to "justify" the sending of U.S. personnel into Mexico to
take part in intelligence operations to tighten control over the
populations of both nations.

Mexico faces a dangerous and complex situation.

Obama's government has beefed up budgets for sending down agents of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), along with personnel to train Mexicans in the
so-called wars against narcotraffic and terrorism, wars against "the
Evil." Obama calls it that, and righteous citizens applaud him or
demand even stronger measures. Obama's government has created a new
"special force" made up of armed people from police and intelligence
agencies that operate in the border zones.

The FBI and the DEA have offices in several Mexican
cities.

In February 2010, spokespeople for de facto president Calderon
admitted that U.S. agents were active in Ciudad Juarez. The number of
U.S. military contractors sent to Mexico has increased during
Calderon's administration. There are videos of contractors who have
trained Mexican police taking part in the torture of prisoners.

In 2008, U.S. involvement in Mexico took the form of that business
enterprise called Blackwater. Exposed for its crimes against humanity
in Iraq, it has changed its name to Xe Services. It came to "help"
Calderon in his supposed war against the narcotraffic. He is fighting
"the Evil," and many churchgoing Mexicans thank him for saving their
children from that horrible "narcotic," cannabis.

They don't know that this war is an excuse for militarizing the
nation. Only 2 percent of Mexicans read a newspaper, and only 4
percent ever buy a book. Everyone has television, and the two TV
monopolies, Televisa and TV Azteca, known as the media "duopoly," are
under the iron control of two of the billionaires topping Mexico's
wealthy elite.

The TV duopoly, a powerful propaganda machine, is a key player on the
neoliberal stage saluting Calderon's war, spewing ultraconservative
pap, and warning about "the danger to Mexico" posed by such honest
political figures as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the real winner of
the stolen 2006 presidential elections.

In January 2010, 16 teenagers and students unrelated to the
narcotraffic were murdered in Ciudad Juarez. There, in the last two
years, some 4,700 people have died violently, and feminicide remains
rampant.

Most of the victims have been civilians executed by paramilitary
groups or military people dressed in black or wearing ski masks.

In March 2010, mysterious gunmen murdered U.S. citizens associated
with the U.S. consulate there.

Ciudad Juarez, the "perfect model" of industrialization by means of
foreign-owned maquiladoras (low-wage manufacturing assembly plants)
with the cooperation of charro (corrupt) trade union leaders and their
"protection contracts," is now known as "the most violent city on
earth." There, Calderon's government is working against the Juarez
drug cartel. But Calderon's forces are secretly allied to the Sinaloa
drug cartel, or at least are permitting its advance against the Juarez
cartel.

The boss of the Sinaloa cartel is "El Chapo" ("Shorty") Guzman, a
smooth-talking capo who walked out of a high-security prison in 2001
after bribing the guards.

It cost El Chapo a bundle of bills but he has them: Forbes magazine
ranks him as one of the richest and most influential men on the planet.

El Chapo did the old Houdini act and disappeared during year one of
governance by the first political party to break the seventy-one-year-
long monopoly of political power held and enforced by the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Since 2000, the new occupants of
the Mexican presidency have come from the populist Church-backed
Partido Accion Nacional (PAN). Its first new president was Coca-Cola
millionaire Vicente Fox. Tall, hand-some, mustachioed Fox wore boots
and lied frequently, but always with a showman's good-natured smile.
He invited Israel's deadly Mossad to train his secret police, the
Center for Investigation and National Security that works under the
Presidential Coordination Office. This was done behind the backs of
the Mexican people.

As Machiavelli said in the 16th century: "Everyone sees what you seem
[to be] but few know what you are." And now, of course, the duopoly's
television really does reach everyone.

El Chapo continues to play the "invisible man" to police dragnets in
Mexico. When his kind of money is flowing, nobody can see a thing.

The Calderon government wants to finish off the Juarez drug cartel in
favor of the Sinaloa cartel.

The FBI says its "confidential informants linked directly to the narco
gangs" believe that El Chapo is winning.

The murders or captures of powerful capos carried out by the army--and
the navy in cases like the Beltran brothers--strengthens the power of
El Chapo nationally and internationally.

Businessman Calderon's popularity is sputtering like a bonfire in a
hailstorm. Under the hail of bullets from shootouts, public opinion is
beginning to snarl on all sides.

When el Presidente walked into an auditorium in Torreon in early 2010
he was deafened by a crowd of booing citizens. The TV duopoly
coveringhis appearance barely snuffed the sound in time.

Five transnational corporations control the U.S. mass media for
imperialist interests and say nothing or spread lies about the
people's uprisings in Mexico and the Mexican immigrants in the United
States. This is because the U.S. government is focusing its sights on
the rising Mexican opposition in order to gain greater control over
Mexican oil, minerals, uranium, water, biodiversity, and immigrant
labor.

And it wants to keep immigrant labor cheap, and so aligns with the
Mexican business elite and its government. The elite loves Uncle Sam
like kids love Santa Claus. The elite's Business Coordinating Council
of big capitalists is crying for more aid in fighting the cartels, and
the aid is pouring in. It does not come in a reindeer sleigh, mind
you, but as Blackhawk helicopter gunships that spit fire and death.

In February 2010,National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair condemned
the cartels and the violence in Mexico and Central America as the
result of "failed states." Basic security has been undermined, and
instability marked by crime, corruption, and "ungovernability" is
growing, he asserted. In the same fashionable language, President
Obama has warned that the struggle against violent extremism involves
diffuse enemies, unstable regions, and "failed states." High officials
of the U.S. government and its armed forces blather a lot about
"failed states." We are told that these states are bleeding to death
and only a transfusion of military intervention can save the patients.

Good old Uncle Sam then appears as a humanitarian white-coated doctor
leading a caravan of arms donors, contractors with torture needles,
and flying gunships painted with a red cross.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has named Mexico and Pakistan
the two most unstable nations in the world--they can melt down any
minute. They are "failed states." So in 2009 Obama appointed his new
ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, an expert in "nationbuilding"
and in "failed states." Carlos is a Cuban American. He has 27 years of
experience in Africa, Eastern Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, and
conflict situations in Latin American and Caribbean nations such as
Haiti. In the State Department, Carlos Pascual was head of the Office
of Reconstruction and Stabilization. Its critics--among them Naomi
Klein--call it the "U.S. Colonial Office." Klein describes Pascual as
an expert in shock therapy for "failed states." Pascual arrived in
Mexico City to begin coordination of the Binational Office of
Intelligence. Crawling around in this pit are officers of the
Pentagon, the DEA, the FBI, the CIA, and other critters of the U.S.
intelligence community.

The Mexican government is not a "failed" state, because it carries out
the tasks assigned to it by the empire's design.

All of Washington's propaganda backs up the militarization of Mexico
in order to protect the interests of transnational corporations and
foreign bank.

The militarization is a revival of the "dirty war" of the 1970s,
especially in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacan.
Now the dirty war is furthered by the presence of narco thugs and
unemployed youth who, in some parts of the nation, work with top
police and military officers.

But there is another difference between now and the 1970s.
Internationally renowned Mexican Senator Rosario Ibarra, famed for her
outspoken defense of human rights, has pointed out that the murdered
and disappeared are not only opposition figures and social movement
activists but also "the civilian population unrelated to any political
or social conflict or the narcotraffic. . . . [The majority] are
executions of the civilian population, of youth, both men and women,
and of the poor."

Every rise in the number of deaths permits the military and Calderon
to exclaim that they are "winning the war." Meanwhile, the number of
assassinations and disappearances of human rights activists,
left-leaning political figures, journalists, and social movement and
labor activists has escalated in recent months and hardly ever is an
assassin or kidnapper "found," much less charged.

Amnesty International and academic experts on Mexico observe that the
military often does as it pleases, and in fact it runs whole regions
of the country.

Or tries to do that: it has competition from some of the narco
groups.

In February 2010, General Guillermo Galvan, Secretary of Defense,
called for the armed forces to support a political reform proposal
sent to Congress by Calderon. The reform gives the army the right to
enter homes without warrants and arrest anyone on suspicion.

Soldiers who shoot civilians "by mistake" cannot be tried in civilian
courts.

Bloodied civilian corpses are stacked high: they are "collateral
damage" in the so-called "war against drugs." General Galvan's
publicly backing the political reform was an indication that the
formation of a civilian-military dictator-ship might be in process.

There is always the chance of a military coup in Mexico, and judging
from the reception of the coup in Honduras the empire might welcome
it. But there is another opinion: some retired military men in Mexico
think that a few generals and admirals and an unknown number of
soldiers are still uncorrupted and patriotic enough to believe in a
more democratic system. This has happened several times in the history
of Latin America.

The problem of the narcotraffic has to do not only with
militarization, bad government, or "failed states." For decades,
Washington's all-out campaigns against the narcotraffic in Colombia
and Mexico, in Bolivia and Afghanistan, and in the United States
itself, have repeatedly ended in failure.

All the experts say so. You catch a capo and another takes his place;
you knock out a drug route to the United States and other routes open
up; the forbidden but highly profitable stuff is in the merchandise
flowing to the North under free trade.

There are "mules" willing to hide drugs on their persons.

A family passed from Mexico into Laredo with a white plastic Christ in
the back seat and sniffing dogs barked. It turned out to be a coke
Jesus.

Yes, the situation has brought endless failure.

But haven't the repressive campaigns really succeeded?

They enrich (mainly U.S.) bankers through secret arrangements to
launder drug money, while recycling phenomenal amounts of dirty money
into many sectors of the legitimate economy. They also keep up huge
profits in the international drug market for the exporting countries
and their governments, a large part of which is recycled into the
international arms market for the benefit of arms manufacturers. The
United States sells more weapons than all the other arms-producing
countries put together.

It is the world's arsenal of death.

The "failures" of the campaigns against the narcotraffic help to justify
war, state violence, and massive repression. The "war against drugs"
sponsored by Washington and its allies has nothing to do with national
security or ending the drug traffic and everything to do with profits.
It involves the forging of strategic alliances against democratic
anti-imperialist governments like those in Venezuela, Ecuador, and
Bolivia. The key alliance for the United States in Latin America is the
chain of neoliberal governments on the Pacific Coast: Chile, Peru,
Colombia, all of Central America except Nicaragua (where Washington is
fomenting a "failed state")--and, of course, Mexico. The chain is made of
iron: each government is an enemy of its people.

There are legal proposals cooking in the Mexican Congress that permit
foreign troops to enter national territory.

The United States has already set up seven new military bases in
Colombia, and there is a bilateral agreement to build five more in
Panama. There are U.S. bases in almost all of Latin America and the
Caribbean. There are bases on Aruba and Curacao, island nations once
colonized by the Dutch, near Venezuela's oil fields.

There are plans for creating a "multinational, multifunctional
military base" with Brazil in Rio de Janeiro "in order to patrol the
drug traffic of the region." Official documents of the U.S. Air Force
have proclaimed that the new military bases "expand the capacity for
expeditionary war . . . [guarantee] the opportunity for conducting
complete spectrum operations in all South America . . . [to combat]
the anti-American governments in the region."

In the last week of March 2010, top government officials from Mexico
and Washington met in Mexico City to discuss the terrifying violence
in Ciudad Juarez and to work out a strategy.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that the U.S. demand for
drugs and the arms smuggled into Mexico from the United States were
feeding the violence of the cartels, so both governments proclaimed a
"new stage" in the war on drugs: "Plan Juarez." Supposed social
programs and more military aid make up the public part of this glitzy
new plan, which will stuff the pockets of the Mexican government with
$300 million.

It aims to strengthen the Merida Initiative/Plan Mexico and the
Northern Command's control over Mexico. The new U.S. ambassador to
Brazil has called this military integration "armoring NAFTA" and so,
in effect, acknowledges that behind the "war on drugs" is the aim of
protecting the economic interests of big capital in the era of
neoliberalism.

After this meeting, during a TV interview for Televisa, U.S.
ambassador Pascual boasted about Calderon's military strategy, saying
"we designed it together." The secretary of Homeland Security, Janet
Napolitano, admitted that at Calderon's "request" members of the U.S.
Army work in Mexico in a "limited" way as military intelligence personnel.

Calderon is throwing away national sovereignty by integrating Mexico
with the United States.

In 14 documents recently declassified by the Presidency of the
Republic about "Plan Mexico 2030, Project of Great Vision" are the
details of thematic workshops convoked by Calderon in October
2006.Plan Mexico 2030, says political scientist Gilberto Lopez y
Rivas, violates the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and guarantees the
future "integral occupation of the country" by the United States. The
plan programs the privatization of the energy sector, biosphere
reserves, education, social security for state employees, and other
public services.

It calls for the repression and co-optation of social
movements.

Lopez y Rivas maintains that the plan is inspired by imperialism and
that Mexicans confront a "social war" disguised as a fight against
narcotraffic. According to him, the aim of the plan "is to finish off
the Mexican state." Journalist Carlos Fazio adds that what is
happening in Mexico is a "low intensity war that combines intelligence
work, civic action, psychological war and control of the population. .
. . The center of gravity is no longer the battlefield as such, but
rather the social-political arena."