THE WAR IN OUR BACKYARD

Since December 2006, Mexican drug gangs have killed twice the number of people who perished on 9/11. In fact, the Mexican death toll, mostly of civilians not connected with the drugs trade, far exceeds the total of U.S. fatalities in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to Mexican Attorney General, Eduardo Medina Mora, 8,150 people have been murdered since Felipe Calderon became the country’s president in December 2006. Calderon is on record saying his country is fighting a war that must be won. Former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, says the lack of coverage of the drug war and its impact on the U.S. is due to the failure of the U.S. mainstream media to focus on it. In his view, we now have a war on our doorstep that may turn out to be one of the major priorities for the incoming Obama presidency. The Justice Department is also beginning to accept that the greatest threat to the U.S. from organized crime syndicates comes not from within, or from trans-national syndicates operating out of Eastern Europe, but from across our border in Mexico. In Acapulco, once the playground of the rich, hundreds have died.
The sheer scale of the violence has echoes of brutal conflicts in other parts of the world. Three days before Christmas, twelve men were decapitated and their heads and bodies dumped at different sites. The bodies were found at two locations while the heads, all in a plastic bag, were left in a village on the outskirts of Chilpancingo, a city in Guerrero state. The victims were believed to be soldiers and a police commander involved in the war against the cartels. The horror of the crime hardly shocked Mexicans who had become only too familiar with grisly murders. In some instances, drug gangs have tossed decapitated heads into dance halls and cafes to warn people not to inform on them to the police or military.
President Calderon has committed 45,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal officers to the battle because the cartels are heavily armed with weapons smuggled across the border from the U.S. The Mexican governments says thousands of high powered weapons are being smuggled each year into Mexico, a claim confirmed by ATF statistics, which show that since 1966 the Bureau has examined 62,000 guns seized in Mexico and has traced them all of them to the U.S. Some weapons such as .50 caliber Browning sniper rifles and grenade launchers were stolen from U.S. military facilities. In recent years, the rise in weapons smuggling has meant drug gangs have had the upper hand in shootouts with not only the local and federal police but also troops sent to confront them.
Mexico has steadily become the major trafficking route into the U.S. for Colombian cocaine growers. More worrisome for U.S. drug enforcement agencies is that Mexican cartels are now heavily involved in the processing of cocaine in parts of Colombia. For years, the Bush administration ignored the growing threat from Mexico’s cartels and instead provided hundreds of millions of dollars to the Colombia to fight FARC guerillas and narco-trafficking. In October 2007, President Bush decided it was time to address the problem in Mexico, using tactics that have not worked well in Colombia, namely throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the issue. In what became known as the Merida Initiative, because it was launched in the Mexican town of Merida, President Bush allocated $1.6 billion to be spent over four years targeting narco-traffickers across Central America. Of that sum, $400 million was promised to Mexico, and as much again to Colombia, which receives generous military aid annually from Congress. The Merida plan stipulated that the money should not be given in cash but spent on devising law enforcement and military training programs, as well as strategies to eradicate corruption. Some observers argued it was too little too late to stem the growth of the Mexican cartels. There was also much criticism of the fact that “Merida” was loaded with too many conflicting drug detection programs. Congress added to the complexity by introducing other ways to spend the $1.5bn allotment by encouraging a variety of federal and private agencies to apply for money for their pet anti-drug projects. For some critics, the scheme was simply a confusing, unregulated exercise in spending massive amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars.
One of the difficulties for the U.S. in working with the Mexican authorities is that Mexico has traditionally been a nation riddled with corruption from top to bottom, much like Colombia. In November 2008, that was brought home to U.S. and Mexican authorities with a frightening reality. Mexico’s former drug czar, Noe Ramirez, was arrested for accepting a bribe of $450,000 from the Pacific cartel. According to the country’s attorney general, the cartel had promised Ramirez a similar sum each month for alerting it to police operations. Ramirez had been at the center of President Calderon’s war against d rugs from the day he took office in December 2006. Immediately following the Ramirez scandal, Mexico’s head of Interpol, Ricardo Gutierrez, was also arrested for working for a different cartel. It was believed he had done incalculable damage to the war on drugs. His arrest happened a short time after authorities seized two other senior anti-drug agents for receiving bribes totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the wake of the arrests, the country’s military entered Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, and removed 500 policemen from their duties. It is thought the numbers of policemen and local officials in Tijuana compromised by the cartels may be in excess of 2,000. In this kind of environment, U.S. drug enforcement and intelligence agencies are reluctant to trust their Mexican counterparts yet corruption in public life should come as any surprise to those who have watched the rise of Mexican drug lords. As far back as February 1997, the country’s then drug czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was jailed for taking bribes directly from the a drug baron, who lived next door to him.
Some veteran law enforcement analysts believe this is a war that may take decades to win and could cost tens of billions of U.S. funded dollars. They argue that a complete overhaul of the Mexican political and judicial systems is the only way to curb the power of the cartels and that will require major U.S. involvement, including joint military and law enforcement operations
While the Bush administration is certainly guilty of ignoring the steady rise of the cartels, Mexico must share the majority of the blame for failing to end corruption at all levels of life, especially within the police, military and judiciary. Too little was done before 9/11 and it was only with the arrival of Felipe Calderon as president in December 2006 that a serious effort was made by the Mexican government to tackle the problem head on. In contrast, Washington’s focus post 9/11 was on Iraq and Afghanistan with occasional talk about the need for a border fence and the danger of Islamic terrorists entering the U.S. from Mexico. The truth is that with Mexico in the grip of a drugs war being won by the most unscrupulous people imaginable, terrorists might now find it easier to enter the U.S. by linking up with Mexican cartels that are expanding their operations to Europe and Africa.