Two of the Bush Administration's high-priority policy initiatives last fall, Plan Mexico and the Peru NAFTA Expansion, illustrate the continued focus on leveraging guns and money to exert U.S. influence in the region, ignoring the fallout from decades of similar failed policies.
Last October, the Bush Administration officially announced the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion aid package to Mexico to be distributed over the next three years purportedly to fight drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico. The aid package, called Plan Mexico for its resemblance to the $5 billion Plan Colombia, would consist largely in advanced military equipment such as helicopters and surveillance aircraft, according to the Mexican foreign minister.
The plan came under immediate attack on both sides of the border.
According to the Associated Press, Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Western Hemisphere subcommittee, said Congress was "in no way consulted" as the aid plan was developed. "This is not a good way to kick off such an important bilateral effort to combat drug trafficking and drug-related violence in Mexico," Engel told the AP.
Carlos Fazio, an expert on Mexican social movements and militarization, writes that Plan Mexico would amount to "ceding national sovereignty and the de facto subordination of the national armed forces," to U.S. will.
While drug trafficking is major problem in both Mexico and the U.S., Plan Mexico fails to address the roots of the problem: U.S. consumption and Mexican corruption.
Drug violence in Mexico has reached truly harrowing levels over the past two years, with over 2,000 people slain in the streets so far in 2007, most of them public officials, police, reporters, and rival drug-traffickers. Drug killings have made Mexico the second most dangerous country in the world (after Iraq) for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders. Still, the most terrifying fact of Mexico's drug violence has always been the depth of the drug cartel's penetration into seemingly every facet of the Mexican police, military, and judicial system.
Mexico's first anti-drug Czar, General Rebollo, was on the payroll of one of Mexico's bloodiest cartels; he is now in a maximum-security prison. In Tabasco state, drug gangs beheaded a local official who had made a supposedly anonymous call to the authorities to denounce drug trafficking through his region. The note written on poster board in his own blood and left over his headless shoulders read: "This happened to me for making an anonymous call to the authorities, and they were the very ones who did this to me."
This past June, nearly 20 soldiers shot and killed three children and their mother at a road block meant to detect drug traffickers in the state of Sinaloa; seven of those soldiers tested positive for marijuana use and one of the seven also tested positive for cocaine.
As has been the case with Plan Colombia, there is great concern that Mexico could use their new equipment not for preventing drug-related crimes but for counter-insurgency raids against both social movements and suspected guerrilla forces, mainly in Mexico's indigenous and highly marginalized south where paramilitary and para-police attacks continue.
Mexican officials and analysts have long said that the U.S. should curb the consumption of drugs within its own borders, and the flow of high caliber guns from the U.S. to the traffickers in Mexico. Plan Mexico would do neither of these things. Instead, it would simply give military equipment to the very Mexican forces that have so long been implicated in drug trafficking and human rights violations without first addressing the U.S.'s active role in drug violence by providing the market place for the drugs and the guns.
But the U.S.'s continued support for the disastrous War on Drugs is not isolated; it is closely related to the Administration's pursuit of trade policies that uproot rural subsistence farmers and small businesses.
Just two weeks after the announcement of Plan Mexico, the House of Representatives passed the so-called Peru Free Trade Agreement, which opens the way for an immediate raid on the Peruvian market (by eliminating duties on some 80 percent of U.S. industrial exports and two-thirds of U.S. agricultural exports), and for further passage of trade deals for Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.
The Democrats may have taken over the House, but they appear to be doing little to clean it up. Only a slight majority of Democrats voted against the Peru deal: 116 voted no and 109 voted yes, including Speaker Pelosi.
With over 10 years of fallout from NAFTA, the shallow talk amongst Democrats of including labor and environmental protections in current trade talks—mostly unenforceable guidelines meant only to sound pretty when read aloud—cannot account for their selling out.
With the Peru deal and future deals planned for Colombia and Panama, the U.S. seeks not only to gain more duty-free market access for its exports, but also to diversify its migrant labor force by rattling the rural economies across Latin America and displacing millions more workers.
In the years leading up to NAFTA—when the Mexican government retooled its Constitution in order to allow for NAFTA's passage—migration jumped up by 95 percent; by 2002 migration to the U.S. was up over 450 percent. Since the passage of NAFTA, Mexico sends more migrants across its northern border than any other country in the world.
While Mexican migration to the U.S. gives an amazing boost to the U.S. economy (in 2003, Mexican consumers living in the U.S. contributed $395 billion to the economy) it displaces workers across the border and leaves devastation and abandon behind in the migrants' home villages.
Mexican migration expert, Raul Delgado Wise thinks that such huge numbers of disenfranchised workers walking through the desert to find low-paying jobs in the U.S. is no accident of history. "The intensification of commercial ties," writes Delgado Wise, "between the two countries [is] part of a new strategy of imperialist domination controlled by financial capital and the large U.S. multinational corporations...sustained by the role that the Mexican workforce—both in Mexico and outside its borders—has played in the industrial restructuring of the United States."
Even though Latin Americans have replaced the brutal military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s with electoral regimes—with varying grades of legitimacy—the U.S. continues to mold its relationship to the region with an exhausted and failed quasi-Cold War logic: using guns to address social problems and economic bullying to address rooted inequalities. Plan Mexico and the Peru NAFTA Expansion testify to the U.S.'s continued focus on regional dominance and continued neglect of its own role in the political and social violence that plagues the lives of millions of Latin Americans.