The Mex Files

A e-mail sent to the Oaxaca Study Action Group about the U.S. funded expansion of the “War on Drugs” — the so-called “Plan Mexico” now being marketed under the more palatable name of “Plan Mérida” reads:

Plan Mexico has its roots in a pre-NAFTA concept born in rightwing think tanks. …
The concept dates back to Reagan’s time. Basically it was focused on economic concept coming out of Harvard. After years of conquest based on the theory of “Control the politics and you control the economy” of 18th and 19th century expansion the Harvardians turned the theory around: “Control the economy and you control the politics,”

The grand idea was to create a U.S. hemisphere with economic control from Alaska to Tierra de Fuego. NAFTA was advertised as a trade agreement but it was more than that: It was a measure to gain economic control over Latin America by indebting them to the U.S. through loans,extracting raw materials, creating a cheap labor pool and making the economies of the Latin American countries totally dependent. It worked with Mexico but along the way South America pulled out, Brazil and Argentina refusing to stay debt dependent and Venezuela developing a booming oil economy.

Plan Puebla-Panama fits into this plan of economic domination. So does the woeful condition of Pemex, which has to have outside investment just to maintain its equipment. (Thirty years of failing to put any money in infrastructure has totally depleted its capacity to continue to produce.) The U.S. already controls the banking system and through NAFTA both retail and commercial markets. (WalMart, McDonalds, etc.).

In 2006, shortly before the July presidential elections, I attended a forum in La Paz at which Davidow, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, was the featuredspeaker. I commented to the guy sitting next to me (suit and tie, shaved so closely his chin gleamed) that things might not work out the way Davidow was saying if López Obrador won the election.

He smiled and told me, very quietly, “The U.S. will never permit López Obrador to become president of Mexico.”

Plan Mexico gives Calderón a few millions bucks worth of equipment to repress leftists like APPO, of course. The U.S. government will pay U.S. manufacturers for all of the goodies they produce and send.

True or not, I’ve always felt that the very narrow (and statistically improbable) Calderón “victory” was a little too much like some of our “improbable” election results lately (Bush-Gore; Bush-Kerry) to be dismiss U.S. involvement entirely. And — given that I was loudly complaining about Republican Party operatives working for the Calderón campaign, it isn’t just a paranoid fantasy to suggest — as the PRD has maintained — that “they wuz robbed” .

I’ve also been suggesting (hell… I’ve been saying) that Calderón’s own “War on Drugs” was more a way of establishing his credibility than any real attempt to put down the narcotics trade. And, like the OSAG poster, I’ve wondered if the military actions weren’t ALSO designed to intimidate the opposition.

I happen to agree with the writers’ analysis of what has happened to the Mexican economy, though I’m less likely than he is to credit (or blame) some Harvard professors and right-wing think tank papers. Right and left, all country’s elites largely bought off on the globalization fad of the last few years.

While even some of the authors of globalization (like Joseph Steiglitz) have come to recognize ithe very real shortfalls of — oh — “neo-internationalism” or “neo-liberalism” (especially in middle-class countries like Mexico and Brazil), the Bush Administration seems to still be enamored of what’s more and more seen as a “retro” theory, and one that didn’t take into account OTHER factos like climate change, limits to growth and growing class disparaty in the wealthy nations (like the United States).

That’s what worries me most about “Plan Mérida”… not that a couple of billion U.S. dollars are going to the Mexican military to purchase U.S. made goods and equipment, but that it opens the door to some even more retro ideas. John Negroponte was in Mexico City the other day to talk to Felipe Calderón about “Plan Mérida”.

But what does anti-narcotics military/legal action have to do with “the economy and immigration”, which were the subject of these talks. Negroponte, speaking of fascists, scares the hell out of me. Besides the mess he made as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, his record in Latin America is fightening

As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez in Honduras. Between 1980 and 1994 U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army’s loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

…According to the New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for “carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua.”

…n early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two with a contact in the Honduran armed forces.

The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any US involvement, despite Negroponte’s participation in the scheme. Other documents uncovered a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government.

The son of a Greek-British shipping magnate, John Negroponte attended Philips Exeter Academy and Yale University, attaching himself to William H.T. Bush (Bush I’s brother, and Bush II’s uncle). I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but there is more than a whiff of cronyism about Negroponte and the Bush clan. Given his record in Honduras (he was later U.S. Ambassador to Mexico (Unsourced in Wikipedia’s biography is the statement “During Negroponte’s tour as US Ambassador to Mexico (1989-1993), he officiated at the block-long, fortified embassy and directed, among other things, U.S. intelligence services to assist the war against the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas.” — probably true, but unproven).

Carlos Salinas de Gortari (with a Harvard PhD in Economics) was President of Mexico during Negroponte’s tenure at the corner of Reforma and Danubo. This was precisely the time when NAFTA was developed — and when “neo-liberalism” became state policy in Mexico (and when the PEMEX collapse started… and when McDonalds and WalMart first made their appearance in the Republic)… and when the narcotics trade became economically and politically important.

I draw no conclusions at this point, but connecting the dots doesn’t paint a pretty picture.