Nothing to see here?
Nothing particularly new here (and MexFiles doesn’t take sides in U.S. elections… though the writer does), but there is a reason the U.S. presidential candidates worry us, one in particular.
Jesse Franzblau, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, recapitulates the sorry story of “Hillary Clinto’s Dark Drug War Legacy in Mexico“.
Since 2008 […] over $2.5 billion [has been] appropriated in security aid through the Mérida Initiative, a drug war security assistance program funded by Washington…. [T]he plan was originally proposed as a three-year program. Yet Hillary Clinton’s State Department pushed aggressively to extend it, overseeing a drastic increase of the initiative that continues today.
Much of this aid goes to U.S.-based security, information, and technology contracting firms, who make millions peddling everything from helicopter training to communications equipment to night-vision goggles, surveillance aircrafts, and satellites.
This aid comes in addition to the direct sales of arms and other equipment to Mexico authorized by the State Department, as Christy Thorton pointed out in a 2014 New York Times op-ed. Those sales reached $1.2 billion in 2012 alone, the last full year of Clinton’s tenure. Indeed, as the Mérida Initiative has grown, Mexico has become one of the world’s biggest purchasers of U.S. military arms and equipment.
But while sales have boomed for U.S.-based contractors, the situation in Mexico has badly deteriorated. The escalation of U.S. counter-drug assistance in the country has paralleled a drastic increase in violence, fueling a drug war that’s killed more than 100,000 people since 2006.
[…]
Naturally, Clinton herself was aware of how her department’s support for the Mexican drug war would look in light of the revelations about corruption and human rights abuses.
In January 2011, shortly after the release of a huge tranche of leaked diplomatic cables, Secretary Clinton apologized to her Mexican counterpart Patricia Espinosa for any “embarrassment” caused by the WikiLeaks documents, announcing her intention to get “beyond WikiLeaks” and reaffirm the U.S.-Mexico relationship. Clinton expressed optimism that they could create a better “narrative” than the waste, fraud, and abuse revealed in the cables and regular media accounts and “explain to Congress why foreign assistance money under ‘Beyond Merida’ should continue.”
[…]
Clinton’s defense of the status quo in Mexico is “grounded in a vicious cycle of complicities between economic and political elites on both sides of the border.” Indeed, the record available for public scrutiny shows that Clinton’s State Department — rather than addressing human rights concerns over the Mérida funding — focused on ensuring that security assistance continued in the face of abuse, cover-ups, and ongoing impunity.
The Mex Files 
“:….. has fueled a drug war that has killed 100,000 people since 2006.”
To begin the “Frumpy”, the murderous, mendacious, marxist hag known as (Sir Edmund) Hillary could not find Mexico on a 1″ = 1″ scale map. The idea that she would have any idea about anything concerning Mexico, or how many left-handed bats are required to play Canadian baseball is ludicrous.
Her task and job is to be a shake-down artist. She operates a kind of a pre-ransom, pre-blackmail service whereby sheiks, kings, presidents, perverts, “socialist democrat heads of state”, and people who care about the autistic children of left-handed, lesbian. Eskimo, transgendered submarine captains can pay-it-forward for favours that might be required during the coming time of the Reinatus Hildebeastus.
The notion of the writers that the “situation” in Mexico has “exploded” since 2006….is a dream notion promulgated by your publication and other leftist / marxist who desire to hang Calderon Hinojosa with some kind of guilt for having tried to save Mexico from flushing itself into some kind of a telenovela septic tank of degeneracy, depravity, and anarchy.
His efforts, including the militarisation of the overall “defense programme” were overwhelmingly successful in strategic terms. Tactically, the Mexican Army and the Naval Infantry have acquitted themselves honourably and effectively. The cartels and associated pandillas have been degraded into an ever-more disorganised assembly of cannibals who contest continuously over “plazas de dominio”.
From your vantage in fancy saloons in Mexico City and in private penthouses arrangements in Lomas de Chapultepec and other private nooks of the Diego and Frida frauds, socialist millionaires who live protected from the hoit poloi while advocating oh! so sincerely for them….it is easy to ridicule a common man who did a creditable job running the Earth’s most complicated country to the best of his ability. Would that he had been Lazaro Cardenas? He solved all the problems. Right?
Your writings, observations, and self-contentment do entertain a bit. However, you will learn as do all leftists, that the efforts of socialists and marxists to perfect society, while exempting themselves from the rules they wish to impose upon the slobs who constitute the masses who must be protected from themselves, never function. Sub-Commandants Marcos, Fidel and Raul, the Ortegas, Hugo, Salvador Allende, even Frida and Evita, cannot perfect the human condition.
Your humble servant, whose family has since the 1880s in Mexico, involved in legally and morally correct business pursuits, has his little adobe bed and brunch place in a rural area in Nowhere, Mexico….up against the Sierra Madre Oriental, not too far from Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas. It is called the “Quinta Tesoro de la Sierra Madre”. I have 40 years of working and living in Mexico. You have only the experience of socialist professors who taught you that it is not “fair” that some have and others do not, and it is mainly the fault of the rich and the Americans and America that poverty exists. It is only by causing poverty, you think, that the rich remain rich…which, of course, is the logic of the deranged.
The “cartels” ruled there for an episode….2010 – 2014….and they still lurk about, here and there….but only as a shadow of their previous, hideous, inhuman selves. The Mexican military has degraded them to the point that now business and even touristic activity has returned to nearly previous levels, and such activity continues to increase. So, you can snicker about Calderon Hinojosa….but many do not.
Your dream of a pure, socialist, and purely democratic honeycomb and/or anthill where the rich are required to pay their “fair share” that is determined by arrogant, ignorant social engineers so that the “poor” can be allowed to live in the dignity that your ignorant social engineers determine to be sufficiently “just and democratic” is a conceit and delusion that can never be realised.
Thank you for your time and interest.
Oy… a lot to go through here. As our mutual acquaintance and my partner in capitalism, Mexico Mike, can no doubt tell you, it might be a stretch to call my azotea room a “penthouse”… and while it is Roma Sur (quite a step up from former digs in Gertrudas Sanchez), nowhere near as elegant as a guesthouse-BnB within an easy drive of McAllen. I very much regret that I know no one in Lomas de Chapultepec, nor am I much of an admirer of Frida Kahlo (as I have stated on this site innumerable times).
I’m not aware that the New York State College of Forestry being a hotbed of Marxist professors, though perhaps things have changed since the 70s.
Noting your post on your resort website regarding the matter under discusssion (http://privatouring.blogspot.mx/2016/03/many-ask-i-tire-of-responding-but-one.html), other than the efficacy of the Calderón Administration’s willingness to take money from the Bush and Obama administrations (which, as you are aware, was less in the way of direct assistance, and more in the way of credits, for the benefit of U.S. businesses), what your issue is. By any measurement violence did increase (for people like you and I?… No, but that’s not what the author of the article quoted said, nor have I in my posts about this issue over the last several years). Did the “strategy” work? Whether U.S. involvement was beneficial is something most would question (as I do). Whether it has helped or hindered the tourist industry is rather beside the point to this website, since I’m only peripherally involved in tourism, being a permanent resident of Mexico, not a drop-in for a few days or weeks at a time.
That “socialism” has been historically important in this country (as has been “communalism”… though in the mid-20th century interpreted as “socialism” for the benefit of European-theory based scholars and “pundits”) is simply a fact anyone looking at the history of Mexico (and Latin America in general) has to consider. While I tend to think any theoretical system (whether Socialism, or Liberalism) doesn’t always work in practice, I also know that the quality of life improved here under the more left-leaning administrations.
Cheers.