“Plan Mexico” … and “Plan Mex Files”
The Foreign Affairs Secretariat is keeping quiet about it, but it looks as if Bush is going to promise Mexico “several hundreds of millions of dollars” to “fight narcotics traffickers.”
Bush is known to promise things he never delivers, and you have to wonder about the “emergency.” The Washington Post reports that
The plans are being discussed at a time when Mexico is struggling to contain a war among major drug cartels that has cost more than 3,000 lives in the past year and has horrified Mexicans with images of beheadings and videotaped assassinations.
Well, yeah… beheadings tend to be newsworthy events, but 3000 deaths in a country of 120,000,000 works out to 0.25 per 100,000 which doesn’t exactly translate into an overwhelming security or health problem. Narcotics smuggling is a dangerous occupation, so maybe the money would be better spent on health and safety (like reducing the number of firearms smuggled in from the United States).
But, then, I don’t think this has much to do with narcotics really.
[The] aid plan … would include telephone tapping equipment, radar to track traffickers’ shipments by air, aircraft to transport Mexican anti-drug teams and assorted training, sources said.
Calderón
has impressed U.S. officials by extraditing a record number of drug suspects to the United States and by dispatching more than 20,000 federal police officers and soldiers to fight the trafficking organizations, but that effort has failed to stop the violence.
Does anyone really believe more money for the military is going to do anything? And that it has anything to do with controlling the U.S. drug habit?
Somebody once said that invading Iraq after 9-11 was like invading Bolivia after Pearl Harbor. I don’t know what the metaphor is here — maybe not teaching evolution in Kansas to bring down the AIDS rate in Texas or some such… in other words, government contracts to finance solutions in search of a problem.
I’d be curious to know who is getting the contracts to provide phone intercepts (and why the dubiously elected governments of the United States and Mexico both think they’re necessary) and what that “other training” will be. Will Alberto Gonzales be giving Mexicans lessons in “enhanced interrogation techniques” or vice-versa?
Not that Mexico can’t use a few hundred million bucks. The Mex Files could use a few hundred to catch up the phone bill (I still have internet service, but no long distance today… slowly, slowly):
If you prefer to send a check, money order or make other arrangements, please write me at “richmx2 -AT- excite -DOT- com” and include “Mex Files” in the subject line.
The Mex Files 
I’ve always thought that money is better spent on education and health than “the war on drugs.” I don’t know when the U.S. federal government is going to realize that most of their own people aren’t for it and it actually hurts society more than it helps. Just remember prohibition, the reason Al Capone and other mafia bosses fell is because alcohol became legalized. Before the legalization of alcohol the Italian mafia killed people and caused basically the same problems that are seen with modern-day drug traffikers. Afterwards, all of these problems ceased. And currently there aren’t people killing each other to control territories for alcohol sales. When is the U.S. government going to understand that keeping drugs illegal makes more problems than it solves? This is not the only issue here. There is an issue of free-choice in one’s life. The government has no right to tell someone what they do with their own body as long as that person is not directly hurting someone else. What’s next? Is the government going to ban high cholesterol foods or ban going out in the sun because it causes cancer? Will people go to jail for selling eggs which are bad for health? This is just as rediculous as the governments anti-drug laws. People have a basic human right to decide what they eat, the drugs they use, etc.–as long as they don’t infringe on other peoples rights. And as far as president calderon goes, I think he is just kissing the U.S. goverment’s butt because he was scared that his opposition in the last presidential race was going to force him out of his job and he looked to the U.S. goverment for backup. I think Calderon sucks as a president because of this. There are much more important problems to be addressed in Mexico than drug traffikers. There is poverty and lack of education, there are gang problems which are prevalent in every part of Mexico. These are real problems and Calderon just wants to make people not see the real problems by hiding them behind the drug traffiking problem.
As far as Bush goes, thank god he can’t be re-elected next time. I hope the next president legalizes marijuana and takes our troops out of Iraq and begins to make friends with other nations instead of making enemies.