The DEA and the Sinaloa Cartel

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WEEKEND EDITION JANUARY 17-19, 2014

Organized Crime: An American Tradition

The DEA and the Sinaloa Cartelby NICK ALEXANDROV

El Universal, the Mexican newspaper, reported on January 6 that Washington and the

Sinaloa Cartel have cooperated for years. Sinaloa lawyer Humberto Loya-Castro stated

that [DEA] agents told him that, in exchange for information about rival drug trafficking

organizations, the United States government agreednot to interfere with his drug

trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel, published court documents reveal.

These disclosures should be considered together with those the intrepid journalist Anabel

Hernndez published in Los Seores del Narco, translated as Narcoland for last falls

English-language release. Her main argument, as she explained on Democracy Now! last

September, is that in Mexico there isnt really a war against the drug cartels. What exists

in the government of Felipe Caldern was a war between the cartels, and the government

took a side of that war, protecting the Sinaloa Cartel.

President Caldern, during his six-year term ending in 2012, presided over an

unprecedented slaughterperhaps 120,000 Mexicans were murdered while he held

office, Le Monde estimatedand the distribution of unprecedented U.S. fundingwell

over $1 billion by April 2013to the Mexican military, police, and judicial systems for

training and equipment, the Center for International Policys Laura Carlsen

summarized. When his term ended, he fled to an institution certain to ignore the blood on

his handsnamely Harvard, where he was a Mason Fellow at the Kennedy School of

Government.

Past recipients of this honor include Hctor Gramajo Morales, an architect of the

genocidal rampage that ripped through Guatemalas countryside in the 1980s, and a guest

speaker at the School of the Americas in December 1991, during its commencement

exercises. One wonders whether, to mark the occasion, he imparted his political

philosophy: You neednt kill everyone to complete the job. Massacring 30% of the

public was more reasonable, he stressed.

In her review of Washingtons Mexican policy, Carlsen noted that Thomas Shannon, U.S.

Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, remarked in April 2007 that

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U.S. assistance for Mexican security forces was a means of armoring NAFTA, the

so-called free trade agreement that turned 20 years old as this month began. The

arrangement, DEA official Phil Jordan explained, was a deal made in narco heaven.

For Mexican drug cartels, U.S. Army War College professor Paul Rexton Kan writes,

the provisions of NAFTA came at an opportune time, when U.S. interdiction of

Colombian cocaine in the Caribbean was increasingly taxing Colombian groups while the

demand for methamphetamines in the United States skyrocketed, indicated in the

number of meth-related emergency room visits in the United States, which doubled

between 1991 and 1994. The result was that Mexican cartels were able to capitalize on

newly available overland routes to bring cocaine and meth to the U.S. market, and

commercial-vehicle smuggling shot up 25% in NAFTAs first yearthe biggest jump on

record, Kan concludes.

The connections between NAFTA, drug smuggling, and the ruin free tradeslang for

the U.S. dumping of government-subsidized corn into Mexicobrought to the Mexican

countryside are rarely examined. Dale Wiehoff, of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade

Policy, is one of the few writers reflecting upon these interwoven developments, and

argued last summer that the exploding numbers of unemployed and displaced young

Mexicans were vulnerable to the drug cartels[.] Displacement is fueled by the conversion

of subsistence lands to potential profit sources, with poor farming communities shattered

in the process. In the state of Sinaloa, where the cartel originated, NAFTA spurred these

processes of territorial transfer, as agribusinesses amassed plots that had once been

worked collectively.

Tracy Wilkinson reviewed current conditions there in the Los Angeles Times last autumn.

On the enormous farms, the planting, weeding, pruning, and picking of the vegetables

fall to armies of workers from Mexicos poorest states, like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and others

NAFTA devastated. Carmen Hernandez Ramos is 52 and looks 80, and is just one of the

many laborers there who feel trapped, Wilkinson explained, and are housed in fenced

compounds in desolate regions.

But not everyone suffers. The Guardian reported in July 2012 that HSBC, Europes largest

bank, had laundered billions of dollars for drug cartels, its subsidiaries permitting

Mexican drug lords to buy planes with money laundered through Cayman Islands

accounts. Leopoldo Barroso, a former bank official, voiced worries regarding allegations

of 60% to 70% of laundered proceeds in Mexico moving through HSBC, supposedly

tainted by these revelations, as if its money would have been clean otherwise. But the

differences between legitimate and illegitimate business activity are vague, if even

meaningful, as Roberto Saviano observes in his foreword to Hernndezs Narcoland: the

book demonstrates that it is not the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern


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capitalist enterprise, but instead capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia.

Others would say this assessment doesnt go far enoughthat organized crime is intrinsic

to capitalism, a phenomenon that complemented rather than conflicted with the

maturation of U.S. economic and political power structures, British historian Michael

Woodiwiss argues, pointing out that the United States can claim no legitimacy in its

alleged anti-crime initiatives. Pick any episode in the countrys history, whether the

frequently criminal exploitation of African American and other working peoples, the

enactment of prohibition laws that fostered corruption and criminal enterprise, or the

involvement of intelligence agencies in drug trafficking operations, and this fundamental

point is made. The recent DEA-Sinaloa revelations only drive it home.

Nick Alexandrov reports on the deteriorating political climate in Honduras in

the December issue of CounterPunch magazine. He lives in Washington, DC.


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Documents

The DEA and the Sinaloa Cartel