President Obama has promised Zapata’s family that the US government will spare no effort to bring the Mexican gunman responsible for the attack to justice, and Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, has express outrage, declaring “The full resources of our department are at the disposal of our Mexican partners in this investigation.”
Given the dearth of substantive press coverage on both side of the border, and the muted attitude of US officials toward Mexico’s efforts to curb drug trafficking and cartel violence over the past five years—during which roughly 38,000 people have been killed, including scores of US citizens—the vocalization of even these stylized objections is noteworthy.
The chaos in Egypt does indeed signal opportunity, but the big question is whether the Egyptian people (or their fellow protestors in neighboring countries) will end up with genuine reform or merely a different gang of corrupt officials willing to cut more (or different) people in on ‘the take.’
The fact that government outrage continues to provide the international media with grist for its insatiable mill is one of the great ironies in this scenario: perturbed at the site’s revelation of embarrassing diplomatic discussions and fumblings–tales only mildly interesting to the average reader–government officials are now in the process of creating a better, and far more spectacular story over First Amendment rights and the ‘treasonable’ activities of a Dutch citizen accused of committing “sex by surprise” (in Sweden?).
Even worse, the official call from some quarters for draconian regulation of the internet has given Russia (which suggests nominating Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize) and China, a human-rights violator of mammoth proportion, opportunities to ‘prove’ to an already hostile world that when Washington suddenly finds itself looking out through wall-to-wall glass, this nation of stone-throwers is no better than anyplace else.
It’s only the media–not a special, dedicated tunnel team–who might believe the identification of Guzman as the tunnel mastermind qualifies as breaking news.Any agent who’s worked the southwest border for a while already knows that if a tunnel or any other kind of operation is high-end, it’s almost certainly the work of “El Chapo”…
The discovery of a drug tunnel, no matter how long it may be or how lavishly outfitted–even the seizure of millions in coke or marijuana–means nothing, unless it leads authorities, in hot pursuit on both sides of the border, up the criminal hierarchies, to the drug lords, and their corrupt accomplices in the police, military, banks, business, and government. To everybody waiting, in Mexico and the US, for their ‘taste.’
Cartel-on-cartel violence may offer Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama the political solution they need in Mexico, and give international stakeholders in the Mexican drug industry the break they need to get back to ‘business as usual’–generating billions in drug dollars, cash that, as it ‘gets cleaner,’ is transformed into capital by ‘legitimate’ investors who create billions more.
Senator Lugar is right–as he said in his speech, the United States should undertake a broad review of further steps the U.S. military and the intelligence community could take to help combat the Mexican cartels in association with the Mexican government.
And one of the first steps should be to review the Brownsville Agreement, and the NAFTA-induced, “hands-off” treaty that currently prevents the US, not just from initiating investigations into the debacle inside Mexico, but from investigating the murders of our own citizens on US soil.
Bug Out Now, says Obama…
All of this follows on the heels of revelations–more ‘leaks’– from Woodward’s soon to be published best-seller, “Obama’s Wars,” especially a specific and ‘bizarre,’ as Woodward calls it, statement by the President about the nation’s ability to ‘absorb’ another 9/11 type attack, and by inference, the inability of the US government (or any government for that matter) to safequard its citizens from the bombs, bullets, and bacteria that are terrorism’s stock-in-trade.
This is the new face of global organized crime–a criminal smorgasbord in which players energized by shifting motives still cooperate at intersections in their operational journeys, ‘hooking up’ for a day or an extra dollar when there are benefits all around.
According to the Washington Times (March 2009), “Hezbollah is using the same southern narcotics routes that Mexican drug kingpins do to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, reaping money to finance its operations and threatening U.S. national security, current and former U.S. law enforcement, defense and counterterrorism officials say.” Now there are more recent […]
There is evidence that FARC has been trading cocaine for arms brokered by Venezuelan middlemen, entrepreneurs who are, at the same time, supplying weapons to Mexico.
What US policymakers also fear is that the steady sale of arms to Venezuela from Russia, Iran, China, and Cuba, and the willingness of both Venezuela (Russian and Chinese arms) and Nicaragua (US-manufactured weapons) to resell firepower to criminal or insurgent elements throughout South and Central America (Mexico being the prize) will someday allow Chavez and Ortega to realize a common dream — power over a Socialist Empire that encompasses most or all of Central and South America.
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