Poor United States, so far from God and so close to... the USA

The lesson of the past few years: Watch out for things that can go massively wrong. What could go massively wrong in 2011? Let's start next door, with Mexico.  Mexico drug war a nightmare scenario - CNN

David Seaton's News Links

I put the quote above, one that I have taken at random from CNN, to avoid being accused of setting up a straw man -- the idea that no one in the USA is worried about the Mexican drug war. Plenty of people are very worried, and for all the right reasons. All I want to do here is add some more reasons of my own to be worried. 

Many people fear, and they have good reason to do so, that Mexico may be in danger of becoming a "failed state", or may already be one to some extent. I am not that optimistic, I think that the real danger may be that the United States of America is in danger of becoming a "failed state" or may already be one to some extent and that Mexico's dilemma is in great part only a symptom of America's own dilemma.

This is really not all that complicated:

What is happening in Mexico is because of unsolved problems in the USA.

Americans consume 60 percent of the world's illegal drugs. Quaker.org

Ye Quakers really hath got this one all figured out:

Drugs are the ultimate consumer product for people who want to feel good now without benefit of hard work, social interaction, or making a productive contribution to society. Drug dealers are living out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs desperately trying to become upwardly mobile. That is why we could not win the war on drugs. We are the enemy, and we cannot face that fact. So we launched a half-hearted, half-baked war against a menace that only mirrors ourselves. Quaker.org

So it turns out that the Americans have an insatiable appetite for drugs -- unmatched in all the world -- seemingly bottomless pockets to pay for the stuff, after which, the American banks launder the drug money, and then to top it off, the US gun dealers take this laundered money and sell the Mexican drug lords the military grade weapons to fight off the Mexican army and police and to murder some 30,000 people in the last four years. Really you'd have to ask yourself which of the two states failed first, Mexico or the USA?

But all of this is the easy part... when states fail to deliver reasonable governance to this degree, when a state is what I call "bath tub ready", what follows is difficult to predict beyond its messiness.

Here is a possible scenario of political "science fiction":

Over the last few years, the drug gangs of Mexico have developed into very sophisticated paramilitary organizations with expertize in counter-surveillance, counter-intelligence, recruiting and corrupting public officials, confronting conventional military power, money laundering, clandestine transnational movement of men and materiel, financial engineering and communications of  all kinds, not just their primary skill set of torturing and killing people and blowing things up.

A large number of poor young Mexicans, both men and women, without a great deal to look forward to in life, are joining these organizations, where they are being exposed to and being trained in the above mentioned skills to a high degree. This might be the proper place to point out that these are the typical organizational and operating capabilities of a national liberation movement. It would appear that developed countries' addiction to illegal recreational drugs is the natural way to finance revolutionary activity in the underdeveloped countries that produce or transport those drugs... That is how the Taliban finance their long running war against the United States, by the way. Here might also be a good place to point out that traditional South American revolutionary movements such as Colombia's FARC and Peru's "Shining Path" already finance themselves by catering to American's love of cocaine and that neither Colombia nor Peru share Mexico's vibrant revolutionary traditions.

So it might be logical to postulate that if a contemporary Emiliano Zapata were to appear among the poor of  Mexico, he or she would almost certainly spring from the ranks of the young people who are being armed and trained by the Mexican drug lords. Many commentators accuse the FARC and the Shining Path guerrillas of being nothing more than drug gangs disguised as revolutionaries... perhaps to win the sympathy of Mexican poor, the Mexican drug lords might consider donning such a disguise themselves. Or perhaps one of their number might have a genuinely patriotic epiphany... Who knows? But the temptation would be great. As we know in the United States, wrapping oneself in the flag is... why continue?

But however such a development took place it would lead to outcomes much worse than anything that the Middle East or South West Asia could ever dish up. Nothing that Al Qaida or any Islamic organization could execute would ever destabilize life in the USA even a fraction of what a well funded, well armed and sophisticated revolutionary movement in Mexico could. 

Imagine what sort of nativist paranoia and racist hysteria would result if only one single Mexican woman ever blew herself up in a crowded shopping center in Los Angeles. Impossible you say, suicide bombers are always Muslim fanatics going for the 72 virgins in Islamic paradise... Sorry, but the exploding vest, the most effective terrorist weapon ever developed was the invention of Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, a secular, nationalist liberation movement. Globalization means the free movement of ideas, remember?

In the 1990s as the Russians lost control of their traditional spheres of influence; the world witnessed the seemingly magic disintegration of the czarist empire that Russia had maintained through world wars and revolution since the 17th century. The similarities to the deflation of US power in Latin America are striking. If anything defines the times we are living through it is that the unthinkable and the unbelievable not only can happen, they are almost sure to happen, just as sheep are cloned and the New York skyline is fractured.

But remember, what happens in Mexico is financed by the American hunger for chemical release from their daily lives and armed by the greed of American arm dealers, who are unrestrained because the American political system is paralyzed by special interest lobbies. 

The United States is the world's richest, most powerful country, only the United States can defeat or destroy the United States... "Heck of  job Uncle Sam!" DS

Who really understands the USA?

"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States!"
Porfirio Díaz

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!
To a Louse - Robert Burns

Mexico's war on drugs costs more lives with every passing day. Drug-related killings this year exceed 4,300, according to media reports, almost double the rate of 2007. Swathes of Mexican territory are in the control of drug cartels, rather than the government. The heavy cost of fighting them is also paid in the corrosion of Mexican democracy and its institutions, as emphasised by recent arrests of high-profile police officers allegedly in the pay of the drug barons.(...) In his most dramatic decision, Mr Calderón also sent in Mexico's army to confront the traffickers. This move has had some success, though it could perhaps have been more precisely targeted, but it has stirred up a hornets' nest. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of this policy is likely to weaken over time as corruption takes its toll in the military.(...) the role that the US plays in this crisis is clear. As well as being the largest cocaine market, it supplies most of the traffickers' weaponry. Meanwhile, US aid for Mexico's drug efforts focuses excessively on hardware such as helicopters and is not sufficiently directed at supporting the police, the legal system and the judiciary. (...) (President Obama) should acknowledge that reopening negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement, as he pledged during his election campaign, would severely undermine legitimate business south of the border. That would bode ill for Mexico - and for the US. (emphasis mine) Financial Times

___________

Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said he and his countrymen “regret” and “resent” the construction of a security fence on the border between the United States and Mexico and called for more “intelligent” security between the two countries on Monday.

Zedillo also blamed drug violence largely on Americans’ use of illegal drugs(...) (Zedillo) appeared at the panel discussion with the co-chairman of the commission, former U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering.

Pickering noted that 90 percent of the guns seized in drug law enforcement operations in Mexico can be traced back to the United States, a statistic also cited by officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in testimony before the House Foreign Affair Committee’s subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere in February 2008. CNSNews

David Seaton's News Links
Every so often some irate reader who lives in the states asks me how I can know anything about the USA if I no longer live there.

To this I reply that the USA is everywhere, all the time, intruding into people's lives in endless ways all over the world: it is outside the United States where people really understand the USA. It is the Americans who have a totally fictionalized view of themselves.

Don't you think by now that any inhabitant of Baghdad is an expert on Americans, their foibles and their reality, the space between their words and their actions?

But of course this deep and intimate knowledge of the USA is new to Iraqis and most Middle Easterners. Where Americans are really known, where the USA has bent everything and everyone out of shape for nearly 200 years, is south of the border, in Latin America in general and in Mexico, most blatantly, in particular.

Americans are massively addicted to drugs and spend enormous amounts of cash on their habit. The Mexican drug cartels are formed to service that habit and they thus have the money to corrupt even key Mexican government officials (and key Mexican officials have never come cheaply) something which threatens the very existence of the Mexican state.

And the United States not only supplies the drug lords with cash. The United States is where they buy military grade weapons on the open market. This is made possible by a loose interpretation the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, which constitutional law professor, president-elect Barack Obama, has declared he has no intention of tightening up.

If, to top all this, the United States revised NAFTA, as the president-elect has promised during the campaign, Mexico might literally become a failed state.

It seems so long ago, that it is hard to recall that once upon a time, when he was running for president in the year 2000, Bush said a number of sensible things that he quickly forgot on being elected. One of the most sensible was defining America's relationship with Mexico as its the most important foreign policy relationship. It was true then and it is true today: what happens in and to Mexico affects Americans, their prosperity and even their physical safety, much more than what happens in and to, say, Israel... Much, much, more.

9-11 and the invasion of Iraq caused Mexico to disappear from America's agenda. However while we are following events far, far away, the rise in the price of corn, the staple food of Mexico's masses, due to ethanol production in the United States, which our president-elect also supports, combined with the corruption flowing from drug money derived from from the bottomless appetites of American addicts, has put the political stability of Mexico in grave danger.

If we add to that the effects of massive layoffs of Mexican workers in the USA due to the recession, with waves of unemployed immigrants returning home empty handed to find corn meal priced out of their reach... combined with stringent border controls and the mass expulsions that so many US politicians are clamoring for... Add to that many armed and horribly violent cartel gunmen with money and automatic weapons.... we are looking at a potential geopolitical disaster far worse than the war in Iraq...

If Mexico collapsed into anarchy, besides having to find space for the entire Mexican middle class, the United States could find itself fighting a real counter-insurgency; a conflict where the southern US border would be little more than a line drawn on a map and with the whole South West under virtual martial law.

Anything even remotely like this scenario would multiply the effects of the deep recession/depression we are entering beyond imagining. All the elements are in place for a disaster and nobody seems to care very much.

Who knows who?

Who could know America and the Americans, who they are, what really motivates them and why they do the things they do more truly than Mexico and the Mexicans? It is the Americans themselves that don't know America and what it is. DS

The Corn Bomb

The US is starting to break its “addiction” to foreign oil as high prices, more efficient cars, and the use of ethanol significantly cut the share of its oil imports for the first time since 1977.(...) This new trend is likely to have domestic and international policy implications, making it harder to prove the case for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to reverse the ambitious biofuels production targets regardless of their impact on global food prices. Financial Times

Frustrations over rising prices and poor living conditions and resentment at a flood of immigrants from other parts of Africa have sparked some of the most chilling scenes in South Africa since the end of apartheid(...) "the problem will become worse because many people are without jobs and houses and food prices are rising. I can only predict worse." Financial Times

David Seaton's News Links
Above these lines are excerpts from the Financial Times. The first gives the "good news" that America is less dependent on Foreign oil, in great part thanks to Ethanol made from corn.... "regardless" of its impact on world food prices.

The second excerpt from the FT explains how the rising cost of food affects the poor of the third world and explains the horrific violence we are witnessing in South Africa.

And below these lines I have an extensive quote from an article by George Friedman of Stratfor warning of the dangers of Mexico collapsing into narco-anarchy as the drug cartels bribe and intimidate civil servants at the highest level, fueled by the high prices their wares bring in the USA, prices pushed up by America's "war on drugs".

As Mexican President Porfirio Díaz once said, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States". How near and how far can be illustrated by the following excerpt from Business Week,

The U.S. slowdown is compounding poverty in rural Mexico as jobless migrants struggle to pay for rent and groceries, let alone send money home.(...) Mexico accounts for more than half of all remittances from the U.S., and they represent Mexico's biggest source of foreign earnings after oil. The country's rural poor, who rely on the wire transfers for basic consumption, are reeling from the drop. "For the families who are receiving this money, it can [be] around a third of household income," says Robert Meins, an IADB remittance expert. "It's that third that helps many…stay above the poverty line."(...) In the unpaved hamlet of Los Cuachalates, subsistence corn farmer Julián Calvillo, 65, sadly surveys a roofless bare brick construction site. His son, who worked in restaurants in Kansas City, Mo., had been wiring money to build a house. But he was fired because of the slowdown, has not been rehired, and has sent nothing for months. "We're all very sad," says Calvillo. "I'm borrowing from friends so that we can eat."(...) Even a crackdown on drug trafficking has been a mixed blessing. Michoacán is a major center for methamphetamine production and traffickers used to buoy the economy by splashing out on luxury goods. But an army crackdown by President Felipe Calderón has driven them underground and curbed their spending.

It seems so long ago, that it is hard to recall that once upon a time, when he was running for president in the year 2000, Bush said a number of sensible things that he quickly forgot on being elected. One of the most sensible was defining America's relationship with Mexico as its the most important foreign policy relationship. It was true then and it is true today: what happens in and to Mexico affects Americans, their prosperity and even their physical safety, much more than what happens in and to, say, Israel... Much, much more.

9-11 and the invasion of Iraq caused Mexico to disappear from America's agenda. However while we are following events far, far away, the rise in the price of corn, the staple food of Mexico's masses, due to ethanol production in the United States combined with the corruption flowing from drug money derived from from the bottomless appetites of American addicts, has put the political stability of Mexico is in grave danger.

If we add to that the effects of massive layoffs of Mexican workers in the USA due to the recession, with waves of unemployed immigrants returning home empty handed to find corn meal priced out of their reach... combined with stringent border controls and the mass expulsions that so many US politicians are clamoring for... Add to that many armed and horribly violent cartel gunmen with money and automatic weapons.... we are looking at a potential geopolitical disaster far worse than the war in Iraq...

Mexico is not to be trifled with.

Mexico is a country of 100,000,000 people with one of the world's greatest revolutionary traditions. The legitimacy of the present government is not very great. As Professor Immanuel Walerstein observes, "the conservative government (of Felipe Calderón) won the last elections with about the same degree of legitimacy as Bush won the 2000 elections in the United States". If the drug cartels assassinated Calderón, who knows how quickly things might unravel?

In the same way that so many of the concerns we had in the golden summer of 2001 seem so frivolous and far off after 9-11, so today's disputes between Obama, Hillary and McCain may appear if Mexico explodes. All the elements are in place for disaster. And nobody seems to care very much. DS

Friedman: Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State? - Stratfor
Abstract: Violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has been intensifying for several years, and there have been attacks in Mexico City. But last week was noteworthy not so much for the body count, but for the type of people being killed. Very senior government police officials in Mexico City were killed along with senior Sinaloa cartel operatives in Sinaloa state.(...) Mexico now faces a classic problem. Multiple, well-armed organized groups have emerged. They are fighting among themselves while simultaneously fighting the government. The groups are fueled by vast amounts of money earned via drug smuggling to the United States. The amount of money involved — estimated at some $40 billion a year — is sufficient to increase tension between these criminal groups and give them the resources to conduct wars against each other. It also provides them with resources to bribe and intimidate government officials. The resources they deploy in some ways are superior to the resources the government employs. Given the amount of money they have, the organized criminal groups can be very effective in bribing government officials at all levels, from squad leaders patrolling the border to high-ranking state and federal officials. Given the resources they have, they can reach out and kill government officials at all levels as well. Government officials are human; and faced with the carrot of bribes and the stick of death, even the most incorruptible is going to be cautious in executing operations against the cartels.(...) There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels. Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels. Since there are multiple cartels, the area of competition ceases to be solely the border towns, shifting to the corridors of power in Mexico City. Government officials begin giving their primary loyalty not to the government but to one of the cartels. The government thus becomes both an arena for competition among the cartels and an instrument used by one cartel against another.(...) It is important to point out that we are not speaking here of corruption, which exists in all governments everywhere. Instead, we are talking about a systematic breakdown of the state, in which government is not simply influenced by criminals, but becomes an instrument of criminals — either simply an arena for battling among groups or under the control of a particular group. The state no longer can carry out its primary function of imposing peace, and it becomes helpless, or itself a direct perpetrator of crime.(...) The killing of senior state police officials causes other officials to recalculate their attitudes. The state is no longer seen as a competent protector, and being a state official is seen as a liability — potentially a fatal liability — unless protection is sought from a cartel, a protection that can be very lucrative indeed for the protector. The killing of senior cartel members intensifies conflict among cartels, making it even more difficult for the government to control the situation and intensifying the movement toward failure. It is important to remember that Mexico has a tradition of failed governments, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century. In those periods, Mexico City became an arena for struggle among army officers and regional groups straddling the line between criminal and political. The Mexican army became an instrument in this struggle and its control a prize. The one thing missing was the vast amounts of money at stake. So there is a tradition of state failure in Mexico, and there are higher stakes today than before.(...) Mexico’s potential failure is important for three reasons. First, Mexico is a huge country, with a population of more than 100 million. Second, it has a large economy — the 14th-largest in the world. And third, it shares an extended border with the world’s only global power, one that has assumed for most of the 20th century that its domination of North America and control of its borders is a foregone conclusion. If Mexico fails, there are serious geopolitical repercussions. This is not simply a criminal matter. The amount of money accumulated in Mexico derives from smuggling operations in the United States. Drugs go one way, money another. But all the money doesn’t have to return to Mexico or to third-party countries. If Mexico fails, the leading cartels will compete in the United States, and that competition will extend to the source of the money as well. We have already seen cartel violence in the border areas of the United States, but this risk is not limited to that. The same process that we see under way in Mexico could extend to the United States; logic dictates that it would.(...) So long as vast quantities of goods flow across the border, the border cannot be sealed. Immigration might be limited by a wall, but the goods that cross the border do so at roads and bridges, and the sheer amount of goods crossing the border makes careful inspection impossible. The drugs will come across the border embedded in this trade as well as by other routes. So will gunmen from the cartel and anything else needed to take control of Los Angeles’ drug market.(...) One way to deal with the problem would be ending the artificial price of drugs by legalizing them. This would rapidly lower the price of drugs and vastly reduce the money to be made in smuggling them. Nothing hurt the American cartels more than the repeal of Prohibition, and nothing helped them more than Prohibition itself. Nevertheless, from an objective point of view, drug legalization isn’t going to happen. There is no visible political coalition of substantial size advocating this solution. Therefore, U.S. drug policy will continue to raise the price of drugs artificially, effective interdiction will be impossible, and the Mexican cartels will prosper and make war on each other and on the Mexican state.