The US secretary of state said Mexico's level of car bombings, kidnappings and mayhem resembled Colombia a generation ago. She floated the prospect of US military advisers being sent to Mexico and central America.
...
Clinton said the Obama administration was considering a type of "Plan Colombia" for Mexico and central America where Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are also plagued by drug-related violence.
The Colombia plan, introduced by Clinton's husband, Bill, bolstered Colombia's security forces with US military personnel, equipment and training. A decade and $7.3bn later Colombia's once-mighty guerrillas are reeling but drug trafficking continues almost unabated.
"There were problems and there were mistakes but it worked," said the secretary of state.
The Guardian. 9 September 2010
Colombia’s army has suspended seven officers and soldiers for failing to control their troops in connection with the brutal murders last month of three impoverished children near Colombia’s northeast border with Venezuela.
The killings have stirred outrage among human rights groups in Colombia. Medical examiners determined that one of the children, Yenni Torres, 14, was raped before she was killed. Her body and those of her brothers, Jimmy, 9, and Jefferson, 6, were found on Oct. 14 in a shallow grave near the town of Tame in rural Arauca, a war-torn border region.
New York Times. 3 November 2010
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Broken Eggs and Spilled Milk
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8 comments:
At least Columbia's military is doing something about it. (For the sake of argument) We would hold a show trial and exonerate the guilty parties (and certainly never charge any of the officers)...or we would be relying on privatized mercenaries who are conveninently free of any law or responsibility.
She floated the prospect of US military advisers being sent to Mexico and central America
Jesus.
You said it man.
I think some voices in Mexico - politicians or "prominent business people" or both - have already been calling for US military being sent in to help fight the drug cartels. I had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal until recently, and they seemed to be covering a lot of the violence in Mexico, and this was mentioned at some point.
The London Review of Books has an excellent article putting the drug wars down there in context of globalization and U.S. policy on drugs. Chris Floyd pointed it out to me
Yeah, the WSJ and similar publications often publish reports which are slanted to suggest that the US needs to "help" militarily with Mexico's problems. They always stop short of outright recommendations, but the intent is there.
They stop short because anyone who studies history knows that Mexico is a big pain in the @$$ to invade. A lot of its territory is as difficult as Afghanistan, only with less snow, and the locals know how to go to ground. That's why we Gringos took the arable parts away from them in the 19th Century but let the swarthy natives keep the rest. Otherwise, Durango would have been the 50th State instead of Hawaii, by now. Also, I've said before, Mexico is surprisingly diverse, which makes it difficult to govern, which is another reason why the Mexican government appears so ineffective.
So the WSJ and similar people, advocate taking "decisive action" in Mexico's affairs, but that's just to keep resources flowing out of the country. Mexico has a surprising wealth of natural resources -- starting with the fact that they're our 2nd biggest source of oil -- so the business press likes to write articles which make it appear that localized violence is a nationwide problem that threatens US borders. Articles which insinuate that the US needs to take military action with respect to Mexico (even in concert with the Mexican government) are invariably written by people who take the nationalization of Mexico's oil industry as a personal insult which must be "set right". And some of those voices include Mexicans who happen to make their fortunes off of exports. US intervention in Mexico is the sort of "stabilization" measure that stock markets and investors think would be wonderful, but the actual people involved on the ground would hate and sabotage. Ahh, the wisdom of markets.
I could expound quite a bit on the nationalization of Mexican oil. However, the fact that I lived in Mexico for 3 years recently, doesn't truly make me an expert. But believe me, 90% of Mexico's land area is pretty tranquil, by U.S. standards of crime. It's very rural, but the good kind of rural, where nobody can get away with much crime because everybody knows each other.
Which is not to say the violence doesn't exist. The situation in Ciudad Juarez is truly horrifying, and Tijuana is more dangerous than it was, say 5 years ago (but still less dangerous than it was 15 years ago. They really made a lot of progress towards cleaning up Tijuana.)
I'm just saying, don't believe any op-ed pieces which refer to Mexico as a "failed state" or imply that the government is going to topple. Ain't gonna happen anytime soon. The drug cartels are powerful and violent, but toppling any government is not on their list of priorities. In fact, if California had passed Prop 19, I think that would have been the best remedy for Mexican instability that I've seen proposed in a long time.
Oh, by the way, Hillary: Suuuuuuure, let's repeat the "successes" of Plan Columbia. Geez, I am glad this woman is not our President, but leaving her as Secretary of State is only slightly less dangerous.
Plan Columbia "worked" just fine, as Hillary puts it, to restore the exploitative flow of Columbian natural resources to America, and to keep natives from growing their own food instead of buying it from the US. Didn't do a lot to interdict drugs or attack the cartels. That's not me talking by the way, (check the Wiki link), that's eight consecutive Army-funded studies by think-tanks like RAND and the US Office of Technology Assessment. So you can see what I mean, when I say a certain type of person is in favor of US military intervention in Mexico.
Thomas,
Very interesting post. From what I understand, part of the problem in Mexico, as far as the voices in WSJ articles see it, is that the government is not concerned enough about the violence. The articles would quote people from Monterrey saying things about how they, too, were not as concerned about the violence until it started to occur in and around Monterrey, and they feel that the politicians in the D.F. feel the same way. Without being invested in either side of their debate, I can't help but notice similarities to the more breathless concerns about "Islamofascists" voiced by some on the Right in America. "9/11 changed everything" and so forth.
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