All right, y'all welcome to the show, back to it.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest today is John Glazer.
He's an assistant editor at Antiwar.com and he's been writing a lot over the past couple of months and including very recently about the drug war in Mexico, which is of course, I think, I don't know, maybe you can explain this part of it, John.
Made in Washington D.C.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Is that right, that it's Washington D.C. that's dictated Mexico City's war on drugs?
That is correct.
What they've done, essentially, is push it in a certain direction.
That might be more accurate to say.
Because of Washington influence and because of aid and because of the pressure that our country has been putting on many, many Latin American countries, not just Mexico, to deal with the drug violence is to basically militarize the approach.
And this was evident in President Calderon of Mexico, his decision soon after he was inaugurated in 2006 to deploy 50,000 Mexican troops and thousands of more federal police officers, by the way, all of whom were trained by the United States, to hit the streets.
They're on the streets sort of doing, catching criminals, but they accept they don't have a baton.
They've got an AK-47.
And it leads to the digging into the heels of the cartels, and it leads to increased violence on both sides.
Almost 50,000 people have died in Mexico since Calderon's inauguration in 2006.
So it's a pretty violent situation.
No one in Washington will even, for a second, look at the facts, which are that the way we've been doing it is counterproductive and has no effect that, at least the effects that they wish they saw and say they want to see are not coming about by just militarizing the entire region.
Yeah.
Well, you know, never mind the American voters' ignorance.
They always, in the polls, you know, are very afraid of supporting any candidate who even talks about considering legalizing drugs, anything like that.
As far as I know, anyway, maybe there are some exceptions to that.
I guess there was a poll recently that said people would consider legalizing weed only, something like that.
But the real problem it seems like we're up against here, John, is the understanding of the world and how it works by the people actually in charge, in the Congress, in the executive branch.
And the reason I say that is because I'm thinking of two specific New York Times articles that are written very much from the DEA's point of view.
And one of them is about how the cocaine trade used to be run by these Jimmy Buffett types in open shirts and private planes.
Good time drinking, fun having guys were bringing the cocaine from the South up into the United States.
But then the DEA started cracking down and over 40 years for some reason, according to the New York Times, which nobody can figure out, the more they crack down, the worse the criminals running the trade are, of course, because they just don't understand what a time preference is and that the worst criminals got the shortest time preference and these kinds of things that they drive up the price and increase that worst criminals incentive for getting involved in the market, whatever they just cannot get their head around it.
And the one more was Juarez, where there was some Tony Soprano ran all the drugs in Juarez.
Well, then the DEA, working with the Mexicans, went in there, cracked down and killed the guy.
And then what happened?
All of his lieutenants went to war over who was going to replace him.
Thousands of people killed.
Drugs, of course, still everywhere.
And the DEA agents are in the New York Times scratching their head going, well, huh, or something.
But they just they cannot learn the lesson that you're doing it wrong, man.
You're the one who's causing this.
They just can't understand it.
They can't.
That's right.
I think there's two in my estimation, there's there's two aspects of this.
On the one hand, like you mentioned, when you push something into the black market, when you when you make something, you know, when you blanket a prohibition on an entire class of substances, what you do is you raise that price.
It's basic economics.
And it's clear to anyone who just looks at the facts, you raise that price and that incentive causes, you know, the cartels to rise up.
But the fact that they can't sell their shit in CVS means that they have to arm themselves and protect their own and sort of police themselves.
Yes, that causes violence.
The other part of this is that, like I said, the the U.S. has been pushing the military in Latin America recently.
So there's this there's this long standing aspect of American law, which is called the Posse Comitatus Act, which basically means that the that the domestic issues in the United States are not to be dealt with with the military.
That's a police thing, militaries for actions that are abroad and so on and so forth.
And it actually allows it's a safeguard against dictatorship, which is that's essentially what it is.
But the United States does a very different thing when it encourages policy in these other countries.
As I said, you know, they they pushed it in in in Mexico when Calderon unleashed 50,000 military troops to the streets.
But they also do it in other parts of of of Latin America, too.
I mean, Honduras, for example, the Obama administration supported the illegal military coup in 2009.
They admitted it was illegal and they still decided to support it.
But now the Obama administration has been meeting with with the de facto president there.
It's basically a military regime.
We've set up three new military bases there.
Aid is increasing the drone.
We have a drone base there that's set up at an Air Force base that we've constructed.
And this is the sort of policies that we get.
We think, OK, we want to end the rampant drugs and then we militarize and it just progresses the problem on and on and on.
The important thing that the news recently was that it was in the New York Times.
I don't know if this is what you were referring to earlier, but the DEA, the New York Times reported now has five commando style squads that it has been quietly deploying for the past several years.
Oh, yeah.
That's the brand new Charlie Savage piece from, I think, Monday or some I'm talking about a couple that are a couple of years old.
But yeah, this is a major development here.
So it included Haiti, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, so on and so forth to basically that's a secret war that Americans don't know about.
Congress wasn't asked to support so on and so forth.
And it's making the region a war zone.
In fact, one of the DEA agents that was involved in the 20 hour or 20 minute gunfight with with with the cartel troops said it reminded him of Vietnam.
So this is what we're dealing with.
This is how the Obama administration, the hope and change candidate has chosen to deal with the drug war in Latin America.
Well, and you can see the hypocrisy behind this, too.
They're turning the DEA guys into these warriors to wage this war.
But you just look at Fast and Furious and all the scandals surrounding that they were deliberately arming up the Sinaloa cartel against the Zetas.
And they had all their informants and all their, you know, cooperating drug smugglers inside the Sinaloa cartel.
And there was just a story, I don't know, three, four weeks ago or something about how they were absolutely had given them carte blanche to smuggle cocaine in the United States.
As long as you're working with us against the guys that we decided we're picking on now, the guys who aren't cutting in on the action, I guess.
It gets even uglier than that, because when you look into, for example, as I mentioned in Honduras, one of the people who supported the coup in 2009 against the against the democratically elected government was this guy, Miguel Fakuse.
He I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
I don't speak Spanish.
But he's a wealthy landowner and a corporatist.
And he, you know, hires his own paramilitaries to police his area and harass poor peasants.
The US has been meeting with him.
And he's a part of the drug trade in Honduras.
All right, well, we'll have to hold it there for this break and pick it up with Honduras and American drug dealing when we get back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the phone with John Glazer, assistant editor at antiwar.com.
You can most often find him on the blog there, antiwar.com/blog.
He also writes at news.antiwar.com.
And we're talking about Barack Obama's drug war in Mexico and in the rest of Latin America.
But I want to make sure that I heard you right before we get back to Honduras, John, did you really just tell me you must be wrong?
Did you say that 50,000 Mexicans have been killed in the drug war in just the last five years?
Yeah, the number that the Human Rights Watch report from the other day puts it at was 46,000.
So that's quite a bit.
And now it's gotten so violent that it's gotten so violent that's quite a bit.
And now it's gotten so violent to the point where the other day, two bodies were hung from their limbs above an overpass above, you know, a driving way, a highway.
One of them was disemboweled.
The other one showed intense signs of torture.
And another case where the guy was beheaded.
And both of these cases, the cartels left a sign that said, you know, stop cooperating with the government and stop ratting us out in the media, and so on and so forth.
But this is the kind of thing, this is the kind of reaction that we see utter savagery and violence from a group that is in a business, but that business is being crushed by military militarism from the United States and Mexico.
And it's just it's gotten us nowhere.
Yep.
Well, at least they've eliminated the ability of Americans to buy Mexican pot, right?
That's precisely right.
There has been absolutely zero effect on drug consumption in the United States.
And, you know, Obama was actually elected in part, I believe, there's actually a rather strong, it's a bunch of youths, basically, but there's a strong voting bloc in the United States that says, I vote on how sort of decriminalizing marijuana friendly the candidate is.
And a lot of the people that pay attention to that kind of thing, noted that Obama said during this campaign that he would think about decriminalizing it.
And then once he got in office, he just, just like the rest of what he promised, he backtracked completely and ended up totally lying.
But what's interesting is that even Latin American leaders like Calderon and like the president of Colombia, for example, have uttered in public or in in print media that they, we need to start looking at market alternatives to the drug war.
We need to look at decreasing the price of drugs, which the only way to do that is to introduce competition.
And the only way to do that is to decriminalize it or legalize it in some areas.
But these are sensible policies.
So they're obviously not going to be paid much attention to in Washington.
Right?
Yeah, I mean, and that's really the thing.
It's not just decriminalizing the possession of small amounts or something like that.
They've got to legalize the drug business, the trade in these drugs, because that's where all the violence comes from is people, you know, the guys that run the Zetas cartel probably don't use that much coke.
They just make money distributing it.
And that's why they're willing to kill it's dollar amounts.
That's right.
It should be a business.
But even me, who is someone who believes in the decriminalization of drugs, recognizes full well that, you know, lots of them are very, very dangerous.
I've seen personally how, how ugly addiction to serious drugs can get.
But what we need to do is treat the selling and buying part of it as a business and treat the consumption bit as a health issue, which is what it is.
You need to help these people, you need to put them in hospitals, you need to get them into rehab, as opposed to lock them up for having small amounts of this or that, and then have them get out again and, you know, ruin their lives some more.
People don't do drugs.
Nobody is, you know, disincentivized from doing drugs because they're illegal.
If you want to do drugs, you basically can do drugs, they're available, you can get them.
And making them illegal is only causing more deaths abroad and more hurt here at home.
Well, I wonder how long this can continue in Mexico.
I mean, there were huge protests, maybe there still are thousands, tens of thousands of people marching against the militarization of the war on drugs there.
And it seems like they keep going like this.
They've got to see they're tearing their country apart.
There's got to be an end before they really cede authority over the land.
There would be a lot less longevity to these types of policies if the United States was not playing both sides of this game.
Yes, we're encouraging the militarization of the government response in Latin America, but we're also training and contributing to the training and bolstering the side of the cartels.
I mean, in Guatemala, the Cabiles, who are U.S.
-trained Guatemalan state militias, infamous for their role back in the day of killing civilians during the Guatemala Civil War, but now Mexican drug gangs like the Vetas are recruiting them in large numbers to fight for them and be their security forces.
So now we have U.S.
-trained soldiers and security forces fighting on behalf of the cartels who are fighting U.S.
-trained soldiers on behalf of the Mexican state.
And this is just getting sort of too ridiculous to even explain, because it would have a lot less longevity, as you questioned about, if we weren't playing both sides of this game.
It should have ended years ago, but it's still going on.
Yeah.
All right.
Now let's get back to Honduras here, because you wrote quite a bit about this.
In fact, let me read a couple of headlines here.
HRW on Mexico's war on drugs.
U.S.
-supported Mexican security forces commit widespread abuse.
Obama's Reagan-like drug war in Latin America.
Mexican cartels escalate violence as U.S. insists on more of the same.
And drug-related Mexican violence soars as U.S. policy bolsters cartels.
All of these can be found at either antiwar.com/blog or news.antiwar.com, all of them by John Glaser.
And now you were talking about, and it's in one of these articles here, is Obama meeting with this landowning, drug-slinging supporter of the military coup down in Honduras?
That's right.
He is a wealthy landowner.
He supported the coup in 2009, and his name is Miguel Facuse.
He's one of the key supporters of the coup, and he's basically very much involved in the drug trade.
And he's also been, you know, basically harassing and killing poor campesinos, poor basically peasants in Honduras.
And he has ties to the U.S. and he has ties to the drug trade.
Honduras in general in the past few years has soared to be the main cocaine transit hub.
I mean, a total of 20 to 25 tons each month, according to U.S. and Honduran estimates, come through that country.
Well, and this is new, right?
I mean, cocaine isn't produced in Honduras, and Honduras has not traditionally been a distribution hub.
This is only because there are connected people there, connected to the United States, who have carte blanche to deal cocaine.
That's correct.
And it's contributed to Honduras' extreme rise in their homicide rate, which, according to a recent AP article, rivals that of Kabul, Afghanistan.
So anyone that doesn't think that this is a war on drugs, or whatever you want to call it, needs to look at the facts here, because it's one of the most violent rages in the world right now, and it's because, basically, of U.S. policy.
Yeah, well, it's just amazing that this continues.
I mean, after the end of the Cold War, they kind of went with the drug war, sort of by default, until they could piss off some Muslims enough to attack us and get us into war over there.
So they kind of had this, well, let's pretend that we need the Pentagon to fight drug dealers in Latin America, and that became the basis for our entire foreign policy down there.
Instead of keeping the Soviets out, it was keeping people from selling drugs.
And yet we see, even still this day, whether you want to talk about Gary Webb's work on the Dark Alliance, or yours, right here at Antiwar.com, from 2011, the government of the United States is in on it, with some of the bad guys, and that's why they fight the other bad guys, is for the bad guys they're fighting for, basically, here.
Same old story.
Well, I really appreciate you writing about this stuff, because it's really the only time I pay attention to it.
Most of my eyes, most of the time my eyes are focused overseas.
So, good work, John, as always.
Thanks very much.
John Glazer, everybody.
Antiwar.com/blognews.antiwar.com.
