This is worth reading. Note the Plan Colombia $$ being used to train
Mexican and Central American police… Also, this quote from Noam Chomsky
at the end. I don’t always agree with Chomsky, but what he says here seems
to reflect clearly what we see in Mexico and Central America…I would only
add that the “war on drugs” is being used to carry out social cleansing in
Latin America also, not just domestically.
“The war on drugs,” Chomsky says, “is an attempt to control the
democratization of social forces,” because “it is a thin cover for
counterinsurgency abroad” and “at home it functions as … ‘social
cleansing’,” resulting in the mass imprisonment of black youth. Therefore,
he concludes, the “failure” of the war on drugs is “intentional,” since
what it seeks is the destruction of the social fabric by violence, and “to
destroy autonomous economic efforts of diverse communities in the region,
to the benefit of powerful interests.”
Tag Archives: Colombia
STRATFOR: Meth in Mexico: A Turning Point in the Drug War?
Mexican authorities announced Feb. 8 the largest seizure of methamphetamine in Mexican history — and possibly the largest ever anywhere — on a ranch outside of Guadalajara. The total haul was 15 tons of pure methamphetamine along with a laboratory capable of producing all the methamphetamine seized. While authorities are not linking the methamphetamine to any specific criminal group, Guadalajara is a known stronghold of the Sinaloa Federation, and previous seizures there have been connected to the group.
Methamphetamine, a synthetic drug manufactured in personal labs for decades, is nothing new in Mexico or the United States. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has led numerous crusades against the drug, increasing regulations on its ingredients to try to keep it from gaining a foothold in the United States. While the DEA’s efforts have succeeded in limiting production of the drug in the United States, consumption has risen steadily over the past two decades. The increasing DEA pressure on U.S. suppliers and the growing demand for methamphetamine have driven large-scale production of the drug outside the borders of the United States. Given Mexico’s proximity and the pervasiveness of organized criminal elements seeking new markets, it makes sense that methamphetamine would be produced on an industrial scale there. Indeed, Mexico has provided an environment for a scale of production far greater than anything ever seen in the United States.
Chihuahua murder rate higher than Colombia–CIDAC report
Here is a story from the weekend on a report from Centro para la
Investigación y el Desarrollo (CIDAC), entitled: Ocho delitos primero.
The report compares homicide rates and concludes that the rate of
homicide in the state of Chihuahua, approximately 130 per 100,000 far
surpasses the murder rate from Colombia during the worst years of the
violence in that country in the 1990s (about 80 per 100,000). Of
course, the rate in the city of Juarez is even higher than for the
state, currently about 160 per 100,000…down from a high of about 275
in 2010. The study also finds that Chihuahua is one of the Mexican
states which has also seen a huge increase in other high-impact crimes
such as extortion and kidnapping.
The full text of the CIDAC report is available here: Ocho delitos primero
