03/30/15 – Rebecca Gordon – The Scott Horton Show

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That's the article.
Can you say blowback in Spanish?
It's by Rebecca Gordon from tomdispatch.com.
We also ran, of course, under Tom's name at antiwar.com.
She's the author of the book Mainstreaming Torture, Ethical Approaches in the Post-911 United States.
And she teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco.
The website is mainstreamingtorture.org.
Welcome back to the show, Rebecca.
How are you?
I'm doing just great.
It's wonderful to be back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here, and great to read you, as always.
What an incredible piece that you have here, and what a terrible story.
Oh, I know.
The parallels, that's kind of where you start the article, is kind of some of the parallels between America's drug war in Mexico and the terror war over in Mesopotamia.
And it's not entirely surprising, considering that the same people are organizing it, and they have basically the same strategy towards any problem, which is, let's shoot guns at it and drop bombs on it.
It's a little bit strange, not that we're dropping bombs in Mexico, but it really is a bit odd that over and over again, we conceive of every problem in this country as something on which we need to make a war.
And that has been what other countries consider to be a public health problem, the fact that people are addicted to drugs.
We have chosen to treat as a problem of crime, and not only a crime, but a war.
So we now, for many years, have had a war on drugs.
And in Mexico, it is a real war, in which real people die in the tens of thousands.
All right, now, so we've had a pretty good, I mean, bad, but pretty full-scale war on drugs since Nixon, and then especially since Reagan.
But then it is kind of a metaphor.
It's mostly a criminal problem, but that's really in the United States, for the most part.
It's also been at least an excuse for intervention throughout Latin America.
And of course, I guess it sort of goes without saying, doesn't it, that virtually all the drug laws of the Latin American states are with an American gun to their government's heads.
You may not decriminalize, you may not legalize, you may not try to find another way out of this.
You're going to do it our way.
So I guess that's the first part of the question.
And then the second part of the question is, when Mexico turned this into a real war, in terms of sending out the military to get involved, beginning in 2006, was that because of the Bush administration, or that was their own policy?
I would say it was a combination of the two, that it was the U.S. absolutely went along with it.
But they had as a partner, Felipe Calderon, who was the second president from the right-wing PAN, the National Action Party in Mexico.
And he was very happy to go along with the U.S.'s approach.
And there was about $2.4 billion to sweeten the deal.
Which came in something called the Merida Initiative.
Merida is a city in Mexico where the agreement was signed.
And the U.S. has provided $2.4 billion in military aid to Mexico, specifically to fight this war.
And what's very interesting about this, and my friend John Lindsay Poland has a wonderful story about this that happened to come out.
We didn't even know we were each writing a story.
This came out the same day at foreignpolicy.org.
And in it, he shows where that money went in terms of buying weapons from U.S. companies, including Blackhawk helicopters from Sikorsky.
So basically, what's happened is money has been funneled from U.S. taxpayers to the government of Mexico, where I'm sure a bunch was skimmed off, and then back to U.S. arms manufacturers in the United States to buy assault weapons.
Everything from assault weapons and grenade launchers all the way up to helicopters.
Right.
You know, it's interesting that I think probably most people, if they just, you know, walk out of a government school somewhere, they might think that it's mothers against cocaine abuse are up there lobbying for this stuff.
But I remember Ron Paul saying that whenever it came to Biden's plan Colombia and this kind of thing on Capitol Hill, you couldn't find a concerned group of pluralistic American Democrats or Republicans up there, concerned mothers or anything like that.
It was simply the helicopter manufacturers are up there saying, hey, listen, this is how we make our money, is spraying Agent Orange on the people of Colombia.
No, that's exactly right.
And now it's the people of Mexico and the government of Mexico, which is so completely interpenetrated with the drug cartels that really, in effect, the war is happening inside the Mexican government, as well as inside the country of Mexico.
And as I say in the article, well over 60,000 people through 2012 and probably another 30,000 after that have died in this war.
Now, when my article came out, I received a letter from somebody who lives in Mexico, a U.S. expatriate expat who said, you know, you should realize that these people who've died in this war, they're not just innocent people, right?
They're involved in the drug trade.
But as is the case in the United States, people who are involved, especially at the lower level, and that's who's getting killed, are people who are forced through economics into what becomes the only game in town, the only employment in town.
And this is one of the ways that the drug trade in Mexico is very similar to what happens in our poor cities and poor communities in this country.
It is the only game in town if you want employment and if you want, in fact, in Mexico, government services.
So just like ISIS in Iraq, the Sinaloa cartel and the other cartels in the places where they are strong actually provide services and employment for people.
Right.
Well, of course, the government is failing to do.
Yeah, that argument, of course, is it's that same old circular argument.
Drugs are wrong because they're illegal and they're illegal because they're wrong, because they're illegal.
And just taking for granted that somehow it's a sin to be a marijuana or cocaine businessman when, you know, that's just begging the question.
No one has ever proved that there's anything wrong with selling drugs to someone who's a willing buyer.
And you can complain about, you know, public health consequences and that kind of thing, like you said, but then all of a sudden you get right back to public health type solutions rather than military ones.
So, yeah, exactly.
And, you know, you and I may differ a little bit about the drug business, but here's where I think we agree, which is that decriminalization is absolutely essential, one essential piece to dealing with this problem.
I have friends who live up in rural Vermont where things are very poor and they've been watching over the last few years how the use of heroin has been expanding in their area.
And it's interesting in the ways that heroin seems to be replacing cocaine.
And, of course, it comes from two main places, Afghanistan and now Mexico.
So a lot of the new heroin that's coming into the U.S. is actually being grown and processed in Mexico.
This is relatively new.
And the thing about heroin is it is one of those drugs that people can use for many, many years and still carry on a life, but it's also a drug like other addictive drugs that in some people can be profoundly destructive.
Right.
No question about that.
But the answer to that is a medical answer.
It's not to throw people in jail.
And so the other piece of this, which you and I have talked about before, is that because of the Rockefeller drug laws which from New York, which then were copied in states all over the country and were federalized and under which judges are not permitted to decide how long a sentence should be, mandatory minimum sentences, all of those things have gone towards filling our prisons to the point where we have 2.3 million people in jail in this country, literally more prisoners than in any country in the world.
Yeah.
25% of all the prisoners on the planet when we have, I don't know, out of 7 billion people and we got 300 million.
So yeah, somebody else do the percentage.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Rebecca Gordon writing at tomdispatch.com and it's also at antiwar.com.
Can you say blowback in Spanish?
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton and it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Rebecca Gordon about her great piece for Tom Dispatch and also it's under Tom's name, Tom Englehart, that is, at antiwar.com.
Can you say blowback in Spanish?
And we're talking about America's mandated drug war down in Mexico and it's just tearing their society apart.
As she said, you know, somewhere on the order of maybe even 100,000 people have been killed in this thing.
And so now, okay, let me pretend for a minute that I'm a man with a hammer and the drug war, drug problem down in Mexico is a nail.
I actually saw, as an aside, Bill Clinton apologize to Mexico recently and he said, you know, we did such a good job of cracking down on drug shipments coming in overseas and through the air that we just made them all run over ground through your country, sorry.
Now he has no apology for any Americans who have suffered in the drug war this whole time.
We can all go screw ourselves, I guess, but at least he's sorry to the people of Mexico.
But so if I'm a general in the Mexican army and the president comes to me and says, hey, can you smash these cartels?
I'm going to say, hell yeah, I've got infantry.
We're going to go and we're going to find these guys and we're going to surround them and we're going to shoot them until they're all dead and that's going to solve our drug problem.
And so I know it sounds kind of silly, but in a way it kind of makes sense, right?
You shoot a bunch of Zetas till they're dead.
There ain't no Zetas no more.
So why has it been so ineffective that when they use the Mexican army to try to smash these cartels, Rebecca?
Well, the problem is that the cartels are sort of like an amoeba and you can smash one piece of it, but they just split off and recreate others.
So that, for example, and you mentioned the Zetas and the Zetas are actually a little bit on the decline now.
I am not an expert, by the way, on the drug wars in Mexico.
I'm not the person, if you want, all of the in and out chronology of which group came to the top at which time.
But what I can tell you is that the United States and the Mexican government have used a method they call divide and conquer.
And so what they've done is basically taken sides in the drug wars.
So the United States, the DEA and the ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, have actually been working with fairly high placed confidential informers in the Sinaloa cartel in order to get information about the other cartels.
And they probably took part, it looks like, took real sides in the war between Sinaloa and the Juarez cartel in Ciudad Juarez a few years ago in which the Sinaloa cartel actually destroyed or beat back the Juarez cartel, leaving about 10,000 people dead in the streets of Juarez.
So one of the things that's really clear is that there's this deep interpenetration between our agencies, the Mexican government, and the cartels themselves.
You know, I read a New York Times story about Juarez one time where, it's funny, it's almost kind of out of the mouths of babes kind of thing, where these idiot DEA guys are saying, you know, it's funny.
Back in the 70s, all the cocaine was being run by these kind of open shirt, sort of Margaritaville, good time having guys.
And we clamped down on them.
And the more we clamped down, and the more we clamped down over the decades, the meaner and meaner and meaner the drug lords got.
And then we killed, or arrested, I think, killed the top drug boss in Juarez who ruled all of Juarez.
And as soon as we did, his 50 lieutenants all went to war with each other.
And all these people all got killed.
And then of course, as you're saying, they're picking sides in that to some degree or another.
But of course, their only answer is, well, I guess we better just work harder and do the same thing.
And, you know, the US is also providing, it's not just the DEA and the ICE, but actually the US military and the CIA are also working inside Mexico providing training and also running a couple of these really ridiculous failed operations, the most famous of which is Fast and Furious.
So do you know about Fast and Furious?
Just a little bit, but go ahead and tell them.
All right.
So Fast and Furious was this brilliant idea that the United States, instead of stopping assault weapons and grenade launchers from going into Mexico, should actually allow those weapons to go into Mexico.
The theory was that we would be able to trace them and that those guns would lead us to the leaders of the big cartels and we could then arrest.
So this was back in 2010 and 2011.
And so you may not know, but there's actually only one legal gun shop in all of Mexico.
It's in Mexico City.
But along the border of the 2000 mile border between the US and Mexico, there are 6,700 gun shops.
And that's where 70% of the guns that go into Mexico are coming from.
And so the US said, okay, well, instead of stopping guns from going into Mexico, let's follow them.
Only what happened was they never followed them.
They just let the guns go across the border.
They kept track of the serial numbers.
And then surprise, surprise, those very weapons turned up in murders over and over again, not only in Mexico, but also back here in the United States.
And a US border patrol agent was actually killed in 2010 by one of those weapons.
So what's interesting about this is that inside Mexico, this Fast and Furious was not approved by the Mexican Congress.
It was a secret deal with parts of the Mexican government, but not the whole Mexican government.
So in a way it was subverting the legitimate government of Mexico and the guy who was the attorney general at the time who knew that it was happening was this guy named Eduardo Medina.
Eduardo Medina later became the Mexico ambassador to the US.
And then just this past year, in fact, just this past month, he was appointed to be the head of the Supreme Court in Mexico.
And people in Mexico are furious about this because they know that he secretly colluded with the US government to allow weapons to come into Mexico that ended up murdering Mexican civilians.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny too, when you talk about all the cooperation, and not just ATF, oh, a couple of rogue ATF officers went off the reservation or something, but here we have this huge operation.
You have them working, as you said, outright aligned with Sinaloa, against the Zetas.
It's the kind of thing where, in my imagination, if we lived in a normal country in a normal time and we weren't a world empire at war across the Middle East and this kind of thing, this is the kind of scandal that could bring down the government of the United States of America.
What do you mean you guys are the ones arming and aligning with the cocaine dealers of Mexico like this?
And when you talk about the guns, we're talking about full autos and 50 calibers and the kinds of guns that the local capitalist gun shops would not be selling these men unless they had the US government telling them to do it.
Absolutely.
No, I think that's right.
And what's interesting is sometimes they actually do because they worry about their licenses and that's what happened in the case of Fast and Furious.
They actually informed the ATF that look, there are these purchases that really don't look like they're hunters going out for gazelles.
And the ATF said, great, let them go.
It's called gun walking.
So the University of San Diego has a trans-border institute and one of the things they look at is interdiction.
They look at the guns that are seized that are going between the US and Mexico.
So between 2010 and 2012, about 253,000 guns each year.
And you're right, we're talking full-on assault weapons made it across the border.
The Mexican authorities actually stopped almost 13% of those guns.
Do you know what percentage the US efforts to stop guns going across the border caught?
2%.
In other words, the Mexican government is doing a better job of stopping those guns going across the border than we are.
And you have to ask yourself, how hard could it be to stop 253,000 rifles a year crossing the border if you wanted to?
Right.
Yeah, it's the same.
Then they turn around and complain that the Turks won't stop letting all the guns and Mujahideen across into Syria.
You know, they got the exact same thing going on.
The parallels are really sad.
Oh, man.
Well, and so I guess, have things changed in the politics?
It's such a horrible failure here.
I mean, I could see Americans not getting it, but in Mexico, they understand now.
The entire population understands that militarizing the situation has made it that much worse.
Are they trying to cool it off now?
Well, not the government.
No, the Mexican government is the three.
The traditional ruling party of Mexico is now back in power, but that hasn't made any difference in terms of how the Mexican government is approaching this problem.
But for the first time, the news kind of from Mexico kind of made it into the United States when the 43 teachers in training from Ayotzinapa were kidnapped back last year and turned over when the mayor of their town, Iguala, turned them over to the police who turned them over to the drug gangs.
We still don't know what happened to them, but it seems very likely that they were murdered.
That finally touched off huge demonstrations around the country.
And in fact, on November 20th of last year, there was a national strike.
And the reason I know this is that was the day I was expected to speak at the Autonomous University of Mexico in the capital city, which is the largest university in Mexico.
But I couldn't go because the whole country was on national strike to do something about this violence.
People are sick and tired of it.
Yeah, the ones who are still alive.
The problem is impunity.
Right.
My Mexican friends say the problem is that there is no way to bring these government officials to any kind of account.
There is no way to make them pay for their crimes.
In fact, they continue running the country.
And, you know, if you want to talk about impunity, we have the same problem here where we have war criminals wandering around Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, who also have gotten away with their murders and tortures with impunity.
Right.
Just to bring in my favorite subject.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm glad you I'm glad you did, too.
And it's also kind of an ironic note.
I don't have a problem with all the immigration in the world.
Come on over is my attitude.
But, you know, the conservatives in America who are the most concerned about all of the immigration, not just from Mexico, but from all of Latin America, I guess they're all Mexicans to an American conservative.
They never ask themselves, what am I doing to help destroy their civilization so they have no hope for a decent life whatsoever, except to come here?
And why would anybody leave their home to come to move far away to another country, except because they're desperate?
That's exactly right.
I mean, you know, people who study immigration talk about two kinds of factors, push factors and pull factors.
So you can figure what the push factors are.
War, famine, economic disaster.
And you're exactly right.
Who would want to leave their home unless there was no better option?
And that's the reality.
I think, you know, we also have to look at how this drug war is increasing the amount of surveillance and the militarization of our own police back here in the United States.
And this is something you and I have talked about before.
But the drug war in the United States is the pretext for giving, well, my local police force in Oakland, armored personnel carriers to patrol the streets of East Oakland.
If I go a block and a half to 24th Street and Mission, there are the surveillance cameras.
Supposedly, they're primarily to protect me from drug gangs.
And by the way, in the chat room, they're asking all this cooperation with the Sinaloa cartel.
Does that extend to allowing them to operate inside the United States of America as well?
I don't know the answer to that.
I really I do not have any facts to speak to that.
What I do know is that there was at least one case in which the ICE was working with a couple of confidential informants, gave them multi entry, reentry visas down in Texas so that they could come back and forth the border easily in order to meet with their contacts in the ICE in Texas.
And they use that multi, those visas to move lots of products across the border.
But that's a single example.
It doesn't mean that there's an organized support there.
I can't speak to that.
But what I will say is that, you know, those of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s, and I'm an old lady, so I'm one of them.
You know, when we think about urban gangs, maybe we think about the about West Side Story and the Sharks and the Jets.
This is not the Sharks and the Jets.
This is not teenagers who are bonding together because they have nowhere else to turn.
The gangs in my city, in most cities around the country that are big cities, these are part of an international business that is run with guns.
And which is so that once the kids get caught up in it, they have no out.
And I've been watching this happen actually to a young man who is somebody that my church works with.
And he tried to get out of the gun life and the drug life and they murdered his fiance.
It's not, you know, these are not just groups of young people getting together anymore.
And well over half the people in gangs nowadays are not teenagers.
They're adults.
It's a big business.
And, you know, one thing I didn't talk about in this story, because again, this is not my area of expertise, is what are the solutions?
But there are some pretty obvious ones.
Decriminalization, ending the mandatory minimum, doing something to open up our prisons.
Also the ban the box campaign, which you may have heard of, which is the idea that when companies are hiring people, they should not have that box you have to check that says, have you ever been convicted of a crime?
That that should not be a NC level question to getting a job and that it should only be a question for jobs where it's actually relevant to the job the person is going to do so that people can actually, once they get out of prison, have a chance of reestablishing a life.
You know, Portugal has a 12 year experiment going in which they decriminalized drugs in their country and they began treating drug problems as a drug addiction as a public health issue.
And a lot of people said, well, if you do that, first of all, Portugal is going to fill up with every drug addict in Europe.
And secondly, you're going to have hugely increased amounts of drug addiction.
What they found was the exact opposite, that they have lower prison populations and they have many fewer people with addiction problems than they did before they decriminalized.
Uruguay is a country that has actually resisted U.S. pressure, at least as far as marijuana goes.
And they legalized marijuana last year.
And as far as I know, the country has not yet exploded.
Right.
So.
Well, we've seen, too, that ever since they've legalized just in a few states here in America, the growing and cultivation of pot, that that's put all the pot businessmen in Mexico out of business.
They're now importing American weed because it's better.
Really?
I had not heard that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, they were like complaining, oh, man, legalization is really hurting us.
It's just like the old thing about bootleggers and Baptists, right?
For prohibition back then.
Pretty obvious why the cartels wanted to stay illegal.
That's where they get their artificially high profit margins.
On the other hand, when it comes to meth, it's the Mexican cartels that are putting the local homebrew people out of business, which is probably not a bad thing, frankly.
But what the only reason anybody's addicted to meth is because cocaine is so artificially expensive.
Otherwise, we wouldn't even have a meth epidemic in the first place.
Well, it's interesting because cocaine importation has also decreased tremendously in the US.
And some people think that it's being replaced with heroin.
I think you may be right that it's more likely it's being replaced with meth.
And the deal is that apparently in Mexico, they can get the precursor chemicals from China and they are purer and makes it easier to make meth in Mexico than in the United States.
Right.
I'm sorry.
We got to go, Rebecca.
We're all out of time.
I've kept you way over time through the top of the hour here, but I really got to go.
But thank you so much for your time.
It's just been great as always.
All right.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That's Rebecca Gordon from TomDispatch.com.
It's also running at Antiwar.com.
This one is called Can You Say Blowback in Spanish?
Her website is MainstreamingTorture.org and that's also the name of her book, Mainstreaming Torture, Ethical Approaches in the Post 9-11 United States.
We'll be right back with Danny Sanchez in just a sec.
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