American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [76]
Not surprisingly, narco-corruption in Mexico quickly spread to other agencies of law enforcement. By the time Carlos Salinas became president in the nineties, his attorney general’s office was “as much as 95 percent ... under narco-control.” DFS agents were regularly escorting narcotics shipments through Mexico, and selling drugs they seized to organizations they favored. The DFS was carrying out high-level busts with the assistance of even higher-level traffickers. Operation Condor, carried out with the CIA’s help, did the Guadalajara cartel “a great service by winnowing out the competition.”40
A new class of oligarchs—known as the “twelve billionaires”—sprang up under Salinas’s policy of “directed” deregulation. Some of the privatized businesses got “snapped up by traffickers in order to launder and invest the profits from their drug operations.” Citibank helped the president’s brother, Raul Salinas, hide his fortune in safe places, and Citibank’s role would later be described as “willfully blind” drug money laundering. Now-defunct Lehman Brothers was right in there too, helping Mexico’s regional governor Mario Villanueva Madrid go into hiding after he got targeted in a drug-and-racketeering investigation. 41
Beginning in the nineties, drug dealers in Mexico were taking charge of half of Colombia’s drug trade into the U.S. While Mexico used to be just the trans shipping point from South America, now it was a major producer and distributor. Numerous new cartels came into existence—Sinaloa, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana, and more—with its gangs even taking control of cocaine networks in many American cities and clandestinely growing marijuana on our public lands. Today, authorities figure that between $19 billion and $39 billion in proceeds from drugs heads back south every year from the U.S.42
Of course, the death toll figures on what’s happening in Mexico’s drug war are astounding. Between December 2006 and the spring of 2009, more than 10,780 people were killed.43 And most of the guns fueling the violence are coming from the U.S. About 87 percent of the firearms that Mexican authorities have seized over the last five years can be traced to here, many of them from gun shops and gun shows in the Southwestern border states.44 And these are no longer simply handguns, but now military-grade weaponry and very serious ordnance. How come the manufacturers are not being held accountable for selling these weapons over the border? My wife and I have driven across the border three times and nobody’s even stopped us—I could have had a Hummer-full of automatic weapons.
Since Bush-II and Mexican president Felipe Calderon announced their $6 billion Plan Mexico in 2007—with the bulk of the money going to military training and hardware—the production of Colombian cocaine seems to have actually increased.45 To his credit, Obama stepped things up on the drugs-and-guns front, threatening to prosecute any Americans doing business with three of the most violent cartels and looking to seize billions of dollars in the cartels’ assets.46
I give Obama praise for renouncing the “war on drugs” phrase, on grounds that it promotes incarceration and not treatment. Before the election, Obama said: “I think it’s time we take a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first time nonviolent drug users for decades.... Let’s reform this system.”47 I’m waiting for him to follow through on that promise. To his credit, the Justice Department has released new guidelines that reverse a Bush Administration policy. Now federal officers are instructed not to go after marijuana users or suppliers who are in compliance with states’ laws on medical usage.
But isn’t it high time for complete reform of our drug policy? We’ve got a shadow economy happening, friends. One hundred million Americans have sampled