by FRED ROSEN
More and more, in talking about Mexico’s out-of-control violence, many Mexicans, in public and in private, complain that the country has been fighting Washington’s drug war and taking all the casualties. They have recruited us, the argument goes, and we have suffered nearly all the casualties. They have sold us a model for combating the drug trade and we have ended up killing each other and putting our small-time traffickers in jail. They—the gringos— sell guns to the traffickers and none of them goes to jail. They launder money for the traffickers and not one of them has gone to jail. They train death squads in Guatemala who sell their services to all sides in Mexico, and no one has gone to jail. (See, for example, historian Lorenzo Meyer on the televised opinion program Primer Plano, 4/11/2011).
Writing in the daily paper La Jornada this past January 15, novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo echoed the theme: “The war against drugs was not, and should not have been, a Mexican War. It was, and continues to be essentially a U.S. war generated by the greatest level of drug consumption on the planet—that which takes place in U.S. territory. Thus, the Mexican proposal should have gone no further than to offer to support a war that should have taken place in gringo territory, combating the distribution networks and the financial structures, and controlling the border. In their territory, not ours.”
Now, three simmering scandals, involving U.S. arms shipments to drug cartels, the presence of Guatemalan paramilitaries who had been trained under U.S. auspices, and money laundering by a prominent U.S. bank, have led many Mexicans to believe, along with critical commentators like Meyer and Taibo, that the guns, the assassins, and the laundered money that are at the heart of the violence all carry a few U.S. fingerprints.
The first set of fingerprints is not, strictly speaking, scandalous. It is simply the market—the sovereign consumer demand for illicit drugs. According to the CIA Factbook, the United States is the “world’s largest consumer of cocaine (shipped from Colombia through Mexico and the Caribbean), Colombian heroin, and Mexican heroin and marijuana…[and a] major consumer of ecstasy and Mexican methamphetamine.” Drug researcher Paul Gootenberg estimates that U.S. consumers spend about $80 billion a year on illegal drugs, about half of that on cocaine, one of Mexico’s major transshipments. About half of world usage of recreational cocaine, he estimates, is in the United States. (Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
NACLA for more https://nacla.org/news/consumers-and-guns-assassins-and-money-mexico%E2%80%99s-transnational-violence