Small Wars Journal

Friction Rises as Mexico Curbs U.S Role in Drug Fight

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 2:16pm

An important article in yesterday's NY Times by Randal Archibold, Damien Cave, and Ginger Thompson. 

MEXICO CITY — In their joint fight against drug traffickers, the United States and Mexico have forged an unusually close relationship in recent years, with the Americans regularly conducting polygraph tests on elite Mexican security officials to root out anyone who had been corrupted.

Read the rest here.

Categories: Mexico - El Centro - corruption

Comments

Ned McDonnell III

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 11:01pm

From my limited perspective, in a city in the central highlands of México – and a great place which rivalling narcs may have designated as an informal D.M.Z. in which to enable their families to stay out of business, jail or the morgue – it is hard to tell exactly what is happening. My gut says that México has had enough bloodshed with various reports on the number killed reaching as high as 85,000 (perhaps even higher) in six and a halfyears. Additionally, I have never really been convinced that 'Plan Colombia' really solved anything in the long term in that country.

These drug production industries and their distribution channels are pretty low-tech and fluid. The escalating U.S. activity in her southern neighbor, increasingly kinetic and arguably more and more at the expense of mexican sovereignty, may have spooked mexican officials who see another Plan Colombia in the works. To me at least, I believe a ‘Plan México’ would be a disaster, both for the planners and the intended beneficiaries.

Perhaps I am out of step here, but before the U.S. starts leaning, or pounding, on nations who manufacture and distribute illegal drugs, perhaps we, as a society, ought to ask ourselves what is the spiritual gap in our culture that makes it necessary, or at least easy, for so many among us to turn to these substances. If we can better address the demand side of this challenge, then more effective policies can obviate the necessity for a ‘Plan Anything’.