Plan Merida: Does the US economy need the War on Drugs?

Groan.  Richard Grabman over at Mex Files is the real blogger in English on Mexican topics. Once again, he has posted on the topic du jour with more information and ahead of me. This time, he captured the news from Reuters on the bidding for the contracts to provide the hardware for Plan Mérida, the joint program for the US to supply technical and arms equipment to Mexico in the struggle with narcos and organized crime.  You knew of course that Plan Mérida was in reality just another means of providing income to US arms producers.  To sum up a few points in case you're not up to following the links:

• Private US security firms will get most of the $1.4 billion dollars pledged.
• Some of the equipment thus far provided is pretty useful, including armoring police cars.  (Those of you who live here are accustomed to seeing police riding in the back of open pick-up trucks).
• The militarization of the drug conflict has led to increased violence. 
• Very little of the stuff has reached Mexico (not that it necesarily should) 
• There are concerns in the US (at least on the part of one US congresswoman) about the involvement of US contractors rather than US government people: contractors are harder to monitor (see Iraq, Colombia, Afghanistan). 
• In Mexico, there is fear of becoming like Colombia and Iraq.   

(Here is a link to the Primer on Merida at CIP Americas Program for more information on the particulars.  The posting is a year old, and there have been some changes, implementations, and lack thereof, but the Primer still provides a huge amount of information.) Anyway, with the PRI victory in the recent elections for the House of Deputies which brings the PRI to dominate the legislature, there is likely to be some shift in the execution of the narco wars.

  

Today in La Jornada, there is a sharply critical editorial on Plan Merida, and so you can get a feel for how at least the leftish press feels about it, I translate it below.

Plan Mérida represents, it seems, much more than a simple security and cooperation agreement  between the Mexican and US governments which addresses the fight against narcotráfico and the fight against terrorism. It also constitutes, as today's edition of the paper informs us, a splendid opportunity for dozens of our neighboring country's businesses: some 40 US military-industrial corporations are hoping to receive a substantial share of the hundreds of millions of dollars remaining (after a substantial reduction) in the mountain of aid that Washington is giving the Mexican authorities.  Among the companies can be found Dyncorp, Northrop Grumman, NOC and Blackwater [now Xe], firms which in the various military conflicts undertaken by the US throughout the world have turned war, destruction and human suffering into bulging profits for their stockholders.

This initiative was criticised before it was signed because of, among other things, its unilateral, militaristic and simplistic focus on the problems of criminality and security, because of its similarities to Plan Colombia --which injected that South American country into the existing counterinsurgency activity--, because of the sacrifice in matters of sovereignty which it entails, and because it plunges Mexico to causes which, besides being outdated, are not its problems, like the war against terrorism undertaken by the last US administration.

Newly available information adds a new negative aspect, and one that is particularly alarming, to the agreement signed by President Felipe Calderón and then-U.S. President George W. Bush: The contracts dedicated by the US Congress to help Mexico are actually a subsidy for the voracious military industry of the US which is desperate for new war scenarios -- that is to say new markets -- following the announcement of the exit of the US troops occupying Iraq.

There is a perverse cycle which links the military-industrial complex of the superpower to geo-strategic decisions of the US government: on numerous occasions, the decision to involve itself in armed conflicts or to generate them has been economically motivated precisely to create business opportunities for the war industry.  The concerns expressed about democracy, liberty, seucrity and peace were generally just rhetoric added to justify the action, which includes subordinating geopolitical calculations to the goal of business's selling arms and military technology.

With these facts in mind, one can't ignore the risk that the military-industrial interests of our neighboring country pressure it to exaggerate, prolong or extend threats real or imagined in Mexican territories for the purpose of perpetuating themselves.  What started as a police problem of public security can be escalated, in this perverse logic, with unpredictable consequences, certainly undesirable ones for Mexico.  For now, it is logical to suppose that the arms and defense equipment factories have undertaken  to present the worst possible scenarios of Mexico's current situation to the government in Washington.

Everything mentioned above confirms, one more time, the central mistake of the anti-crime strategy formulated and put into place by the current Mexican government.  The battle agaisnt drug traffic and organized crime in general ought to be re-planted, in a radical fashion, on a different foundation.

As Richard notes in his post, Read Me! (where you should also follow his link to the Nation article, also given in my previous post) the drug thuggery is really woven into a much more extensive and grave set of problems which exist between the US and Mexico and which in fact are the results of the ruthlessness of neoliberal economics. Of course, the military-industrial corporate complex in the US has no interest in dealing with these bigger problems.