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(Disclosure: I am a Mexican citizen, writing from
Mexico City.) Suppose you could show that earlier US
presidents were, in their policies, every bit the anti-Mexican bully (or
worse) than Donald Trump. Wouldn’t that expose the contrast between Trump’s
in-your-face racist boor and Barack Obama’s urbane cosmopolitan charmer as
nothing more than a façade? Yes, it would. Or rather, it will, for I can and do show below
that, in the last century, US policy toward Mexico was never so violent as in
the Bush Jr.-Obama years. One might perceive in this, however, a
contradiction with the HIR model. Why? Because our model claims that, in the
US, both main parties belong to a covert ruling cartel that also owns Trump (Part 4). If cartel policy was already
anti-Mexican, and if it was expertly concealed, why pull back the curtains on
it now with a visibly anti-Mexican president? Because the cartel wishes to continue
with its—also expertly concealed—pro jihadi policies (Part 2, Part 5), which are meant to scare us into
exchanging our liberties—‘for our protection’—for greater State powers. And
it turns out that, if you kick Mexico where everyone can see you, you get to
keep your jihad. Wait. What? It sounds baroque, but that’s why it
works: because we can’t see the game. By harnessing ‘political
grammar’—cultural norms that determine the political consequences of doing
and saying certain things—you can crank emotional lever A here, move a series of grammatically
articulated gears (B, C, D…), and get the desired result there. It’s
psychological warfare. Let’s spell it out. First, the lever: A) Trump, adopting a racist style,
attacks Mexico in glee. This B)
causes the ‘left’ to hate Trump. Henceforth, C) ‘leftists’ wish to disagree with
anything he says—for example, that jihad must be confronted, that we must
support Israel. In consequence, D)
it becomes impossible for them to join the ‘right’ against jihad; in fact, E) they defend Islam as
another victim of Trump’s racism (and equate Zionism with racism). And thus, F) unwittingly, they’ll give the
cartel what breathing space it needs, allowing it to continue, under Trump, its pro-jihadi policies (Part 5, Part 6). This G) produces more violence, which H) makes the ‘right’ cry out for greater State powers, which in
turn I) eats away at Western
liberties. Voilŕ. Intrigued? Okay. First, we will show
that, policy-wise, Trump is Obama. Policy was already profoundly and
violently anti-Mexican; what’s new is just the media circus of Trump’s
anti-Mexican attacks. Done with that, we will say more about why the cartel
needs that circus to balance the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ in perfect equipoise. The
big picture: a quick snapshot of the Monroe Doctrine The Monroe
Doctrine
(from 1823) was the US power elite’s shot across the bow to European powers
that they should keep out of the American continent. This wasn’t opposition
to colonialism as such; just to the
European kind. For Uncle Sam viewed the Americas as his playground by right,
and developed his own, quite underhanded, form of colonialism. He blossomed,
in fact, into a top-grade bruiser, trailing a whole gang of sidekicks:
Latin-American thugs whose repressive coups he secretly organized and
protected. It is well-known, for example, that
the US government assisted the repressive coups in Guatemala and Chile, and armed and trained terrorists in El
Salvador and Nicaragua. Less well-known is the US role in Operation Condor, “a secret intelligence and operations
system created in the 1970s through which the South American military regimes
coordinated information and seized, tortured, and executed political
opponents in combined cross-border operations. …Condor was assisted and
encouraged by U.S. military and intelligence forces.”[1]
They’ll tell you this was all
‘well-intentioned’—support for right-wing strongmen in South and Central
America was ‘necessary’ to win the Cold War against communism. Two problems
with that. First, US policymakers branded any
Latin-American leftist as a ‘communist,’ and in fact destroyed democratic
regimes (e.g., Guatemala). Second, and more importantly, even if these
leftists had all been communists, you can fight communism by supporting democracy. So, we must put a hypothesis on the
table: perhaps democracy is what
the US cartel always meant to destroy. It is a natural hypothesis for the HIR
model, which claims that the US is run by an antidemocratic cartel. Whacking
Mexico before Trump Mexico also gets bullied. Here follows
a quick summary of the immediate historical context: the Bush Jr.-Obama
years. For 71 years, Mexico was run by a
party dictatorship. This never seemed to bother the US power elite—quite to
the contrary. Then, as Bush Jr. took office in the US, an opposition party
for the first time did the same in Mexico. The long-awaited democratic
transition had come. This was a ‘natural experiment,’ for
only one candidate hypothesis of US policy—‘fighting communists’ or
‘destroying democracy’—could now survive, as if God, playing in his World
Lab, had controlled the variables. Here’s why. The party that got
replaced in the democratic transition was the PRI, traditional custodian of
the Mexican Revolution, a ‘bolshevist’ movement according to many. The new
party in power was the PAN, the right-wing Christian-democratic party of the
middle classes, whose ideology is (guess what?) anticommunism. So, if the US power elite was opposed
to communism but not to democracy, they should have supported this change.
But if what they really meant to destroy was democracy, this was the moment to launch an attack. What happened? The new PAN authorities were just
getting the hang of it when they heard a knock. Opening the door, they were
instantly chilled inside Uncle Sam’s totemic shadow, and made to shiver. He
seemed… friendly? He came bearing ‘gifts’: secret agreements that would allow
his Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to operate in Mexico without any supervision from Mexican
authorities. You know, to ‘fight crime’ (sign here, beaner). His eye twinkled, but
was that a smile?
We’ve known since the 1920s that drug
prohibition and interdiction only make crime syndicates stronger. After
‘fighting drugs’ for a half century, getting illicit drugs in the US has
never been easier.[1a] There were grounds for suspicion,
therefore, in Uncle Sam’s new initiative. Why, for example, did he want that
no-supervision clause? Because these gringos, as it later
transpired, didn’t come to fight crime—just the opposite. They came to help their pet Mexican mafia, the
Sinaloa Cartel, outgun its rivals, and crown the DEA capo di tutti capi—the godfather—of
organized crime in Mexico.[2] It
was a con. Officially, the US claims the Sinaloa
Cartel got benefits in exchange for information about rival gangs. This, no
doubt, is meant to evoke a scene from US cop shows: a small-fry criminal,
already in custody, gets a break for rolling on someone higher in the food
chain. Two problems. Here, the guys getting breaks (and lots of help) were
Joaquin (“El Chapo”) Guzman Loaera and his associates, who were not in custody but operating freely.
And they were—by far—the biggest fish in the Mexican pond. At the time, Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa
Cartel was the biggest organization and had infiltrated the Mexican State
with tentacles of corruption more thoroughly, and higher, than anybody else.
And he was getting bigger. In 2001,
right after escaping with mysterious ease from the Puente Grande prison, he
organized a meeting with other big-time narcos and formed ‘the Federation,’
which fused the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels and made them ready to conquer
their rivals. “A new phase was about to begin in which shootings, blood,
torture, and beheadings would spill over and out without control.”[3] It was right before this, according to a year-long investigation by the
Mexican newspaper El Universal, that the DEA’s stealth
intervention—which involved meeting with, and assisting, the Sinaloa Cartel
out of sight of Mexican authorities—began.[4] Is this why Chapo Guzman felt so
confident that he could conquer the entire country? But Uncle Sam wasn’t in the mood to take chances. US authorities—including DEA, ICE, ATF, FBI, IRS, Homeland Security, and the US Attorney’s Office—deliberately allowed thousands of weapons into the hands of their preferred Mexican criminals: the Fast and Furious ‘gunwalking’ scandal. It was happenstance that this came to light, thanks to what emerged in a US homicide investigation.[5] Officially, US authorities claim they
were tracing the weapons to catch the criminals. “But relevant agencies of
the Mexican government were never informed about the operation, and it seems
that there was no actual effort to track the weapons once they crossed the
Mexican border.”[6] We have another ‘natural experiment.’ If
Democrats and Republicans were truly rivals, then Barack Obama had a golden
opportunity to expose Bush Jr.’s dirty tricks policy. Instead, he chose to continue and expand it, and fought
tooth and nail to avoid releasing the relevant documents. It all fits rather well with the
hypothesis that a cartel runs the US, and that Obama was just a new version
of Bush.
We didn’t have a perfect country, and
had already suffered some worrisome drug violence, but US-instigated gang
warfare destroyed any semblance of equilibrium and became the public argument
for a Mexican ‘war on drugs.’ It’s not really against drugs, but it is a real war. CNN writes that
“Mexico’s drug wars claimed 23,000 lives during 2016—second only to Syria,
where 50,000 people died.”[7] We are also like Syria in style: lots of beheadings, corpses
displayed in public venues to make a point, and other ISIS-type gore.[8] A quarter million Mexicans, according
to the Guardian, have been killed or made to vanish since our decade-long ‘war on drugs’
began.[9] A
quarter million Mexicans… (That’s an estimate; it may be worse.[10]) What’s this about? Our hypothesis: those who call the shots in the US are enemies of democracy and mean to destroy it everywhere (see ‘Operation
Condor’ above). Thus, when Mexico took its first democratic steps in 2000,
they went to work and found a fix: provoke and manage a war between the
Mexican government and the drug gangs, giving the gangs an incentive to
thoroughly conquer the State. They succeeded: the drug lords “have penetrated
the local, state, and national governments and control entire sections of the
country.”[11]
This is killing Mexican democracy in
the cradle. In 2012, ordinary Mexicans, disgusted
with the violent transformation of their country, returned to power the old
PRI, the party that had ruled Mexico for 71 years. The PRI immediately got to
work with reforms that undermined the effectiveness of Mexico’s electoral
institute.[12] Meanwhile, the ‘war on drugs’ violence—and
all sorts of other violence, for the crime syndicates have branched out and
diversified—continued and worsened. Does
it still matter which candidate Mexicans choose in 2018?| Of course, there are side benefits (no
reason not to make a buck while you destroy Mexican democracy). Seventy
percent of guns used by our drug gangs, per a US
congressional report,
are ‘Made in the USA.’[13] And the Mexican government buys tons
of US weaponry to (guess what?) ‘fight the drug cartels’! We die by the hundreds of thousands;
US weapons manufacturers get fat. Perhaps you can forgive us for feeling
bullied. In sum, the above establishes what we
announced: the pattern was already firmly in place. The US bullies Mexico;
Trump didn’t start it. What changes with Trump is just the style. Donald
Trump But, boy… did the style ever change!
When Donald Trump arrived, the bullying became a truly grand media spectacle. Trump accuses that Mexico is the
second-most violent country in the world, after Syria. Our Mexican
authorities, like characters out of a Ionescu play, reply with dignity: we’re
not the second; maybe the fifth…[14] Good grief. What they should say is: Yes, we are a violent
country but who’s to blame? US
policy is responsible for the orgy of violence in Mexico—and, by the way, also in Syria.[15]
But Trump goes beyond rebuking Mexico
for its internal violence. As “Build That Wall” became a hypnotic mantra for his
starry-eyed followers to chant during the campaign, Trump blamed us Mexicans for violence in the United States. Did I mention a
quarter million dead Mexicans? This is like regaining consciousness on the
prison floor, in a pool of your own blood, to hear the guards, your
attackers, blame you (because,
look, one of them has a scratch). And this is where the style takes on a
rather unmistakable tone. Because it makes sense, I shan’t deny it, to worry
about illegal entry through the southern US border—it’s legitimate—. Build
that wall. But to yell with glee that you’ll force Mexico, the struggling country you bullied and destroyed, to pay
for it—that’s just mean. And to
slander, by way of ‘supporting’ this policy, most illegal immigrants as
rapists and murderers—that’s racism. And the symbolic and media investment
here is so huge that we are forced
to ask: Is
that racism impulsive and frank? Or is this another con? Perhaps Trump really is an impulsive racist. He seems unmanaged—wild,
even. Perhaps he can’t help himself. Or perhaps Trump is an actor, as our
‘cartel’ model suggests. In the US, says the model, a cartel
owns both main parties (Part 4) and also Donald Trump, who isn’t
anti-Establishment (Part 5), or pro-Israel (Part 3), or a counter-jihadist (Part 5, Part 6). Despite the telegenic appearances,
the traditional pro-jihadi and anti-Israeli cartel policies (Part 2) are ones that Trump faithfully
carries forward. The point of these policies is to
destroy democracy. The principle is simple: as jihadi violence is made to
rise, so too does anti-jihadi sentiment rise, and with it a demand to trade
individual liberties for a stronger State (‘to protect us’). This is an old game—but delicate, and
fraught with danger for its managers. For suppose the anti-jihadi sentiment
were to become unanimous. What then? The system would tip the other way and
tie the ruling cartel’s hands! Why? Because a united citizenry would render
impossible many important overt and semi-covert pro-jihadi policies (for
example, Trump’s $100 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia). And this would
severely weaken jihadism because, let’s face it, without the Western cartel,
jihadis ain’t much (they can’t beat the Kurds in Syria, whom nobody helps). If the jihadi threat
subsided, Western citizens would again demand their rights and liberties, and
take back the system. To succeed, therefore, the cartel must
contain and control the counter-jihad movement, and limit it to no more than
half the citizenry. How? By conning the ‘left’ and the ‘right.’ To
shepherd to your liking the counter-jihad movement on the ‘right,’ give them
an ‘anti-Establishment’ leader who, in fact, is wholly owned by the cartel.
And to limit the appeal of the counter-jihad position, make this leader viscerally offensive to the entire
‘left.’ This latter move is sheer genius. Picture it. If you are on the ‘left’
you can’t help yourself: you hate
Donald Trump as a racist. Why? Because he bullies Mexicans—it’s his
signature move. And since you do hate him, your gut pulls you to reject
anything he says. You’ve been ‘immunized.’ When Trump warns that Islam is a great danger, you see that as
more racism and reject it. In fact, you wish for nothing better than to spite
that odious racist by defending Islam. There you have it: the ‘anti-Mexico’
con. The cartel gets the best of both
worlds. Half the citizenry demands greater State powers ‘to fight jihadism,’
helping morph the system by degrees into a Police State; the other half defends
Islam as a ‘human rights battle,’ giving cartel owners breathing room to
continue supporting the growth of Islam in the West, which undermines Western
freedoms by being Islam. Political management via psychological warfare, and a neat
balancing act to boot. That’s our hypothesis. Now, it would certainly help our case
if we could show that Trump has an accomplished record as a career con
artist. Even better if it turned out that he’s conned us once before by talking about Mexicans. I turn to this next.
[0]
To get a sense for the effect of
Saudi Arabia’s dollars, consider Sweden. As Wikipedia
explains, “The governments of Saudi Arabia and Libya have financially
supported the constructions of some of the largest Mosques in Sweden.” What
Swedish Muslims hear in those mosques is consistent with the reigning
ideology in Saudi Arabia: Salafism or Wahhabism, which preaches the
application of totalitarian Muslim Sharia law and the murder of ‘infidels.’ According
to an article in the Swedish media (Dagens Nyheter), the number of ‘no go’
zones in that country, where even the Swedish police dare not tread (given
the levels of religious extremism and criminality), has been rising steeply.
In fact, there has been a 50% increase in such areas in just the last two
years. And they are getting larger. In some of these places, even the Post
Office no longer delivers, judging them too dangerous (read about this in
English here). More
widely, Saudi dollars cause plenty of other trouble, for “Saudi
Arabia plays the lead role in financing contemporary Islamist movements,
within the Arab-Muslim world but also in Africa, Asia, and Europe.” —Labevičre,
Richard. 2000. Dollars for Terror: The
United States and Islam. New York: Algora Publishing. (p.231) In
June 2012, it became public that Obama’s CIA—Trump’s alleged nemesis—was
running a program to arm the—allegedly democratic—‘Syrian opposition’ to
Assad. “The arms themselves,” the report stated, “are coming from
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.” As a Pentagon secret report confirmed two months later, the
‘Syrian opposition’ (except for the Rojavans) was entirely jihadi,
including the recipients of CIA-sponsored weapons. And yet, immediately after that report, Obama
gave his favorite ‘Syrian rebels’ more weapons and military training, after
which they joined ISIS—Trump’s other alleged nemesis—en masse. So,
Trump is making massive transfers of weapons to Saudi Arabia because he is
different from Obama? Because he is sincere about fighting jihadi terror? I
hope the sarcastic tone is coming through. Obviously, the ‘free market’ model
of US politics cannot account for this evidence. [1] McSherry, J. Patrice. 2002. “Tracking
the Origins of a State Terror Network: Operation Condor.” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29,
No. 1, Brazil: The Hegemonic Process in Political and Cultural Formation. pp.
38-60. (pp.38-40) [1a] “Despite growing resources directed
at supply-side enforcement, the illicit drug market has continually expanded,
and is now estimated by the UN to turn over more than $330 billion a year, a
figure that dwarfs the GDP of many countries.” SOURCE:
“The War on Drugs: Wasting billions and undermining economies”; Count the Costs: 50 Years of the War on Drugs;
by Transform Drug Policy Foundation [2]
“Under these secret agreements,
US DEA agents met repeatedly with high-level members of particular drug
cartels, especially the Sinaloa group, to obtain information about rival
organizations. Informants served as go-betweens in contacts between the DEA
and “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of that cartel. …The DEA arranged to dismiss
drug trafficking charges that were pending in the United States against some
of their Sinaloa Cartel informants. In other words, it allowed the cartels
with which it worked to continue business—and murder—as usual.” SOURCE:
“The US’s ‘War on Drugs’ Has Spiraled Dangerously Out of
Control: It didn’t work in Afghanistan, so let’s do it in
Mexico”; The Nation; 23 March 2015;
By Rebecca Gordon [3] “Atentamente, El Chapo”; Nexos; 1 agosto 2010; por Héctor de Mauleón [4] “La Guerra Secreta de la DEA en México”; El Universal; 6 enero 2014; por Doris
Gómora [5] ‘Fast and Furious’ became a scandal
because US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in Arizona with one of
the guns that US authorities had supplied to Mexican drug cartels, and the
investigators in charge of that murder doggedly followed their leads. This is
chance. Happenstance. Other such operations to undermine Mexican democracy
may exist, but without the same stroke of ‘luck’ (apologies to Terry’s
family), we may never find out about them. SOURCES:
“Federal judge reopens ‘Fast and Furious’ controversy”;
CBS News; 21 August 2014; By Jake
Miller. “Brian Terry family sues ATF officials in Fast and Furious”;
CBS News; 17 December 2012; By
Sharyl Attkisson. [6] “In the debacle known as ‘Fast and
Furious,’ the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF)
allowed ‘more than 2,000 weapons, including hundreds of AK-47-type
semi-automatic rifles and .50 caliber rifles,’ to ‘walk’ across the border
and into the hands of the Mexican cartels. Its ostensible purpose was to
follow the guns in hopes that they would lead to the arrest of high-level
cartel leaders. But relevant agencies of the Mexican government were never
informed about the operation, and it seems that there was no actual effort to
track the weapons once they crossed the Mexican border. The weapons turned up
at crime scenes in both Mexico and the United States. On December 14, 2010,
near the Mexican border in Arizona, one of them killed Brian Terry, a US
Border Patrol agent. ATF
wasn’t the only agency involved in ‘Fast and Furious.’ Personnel from ICE,
the Department of Homeland Security, the DEA, and the US Attorney’s Office in
Arizona also participated, along with the FBI and the IRS.” SOURCE:
“The US’s ‘War on Drugs’ Has Spiraled Dangerously Out of
Control: It didn’t work in Afghanistan, so let’s do it in
Mexico”; The Nation; 23 March 2015;
By Rebecca Gordon [7] “Report: Mexico was second deadliest country in 2016”; CNN; 11 May 2017; By Elizabeth Roberts [8]
Mexico’s drug cartels “behead
people by the hundreds… heap headless, handless bodies along roadsides as
warnings to those who would resist their power.” I
remember a different Mexico. As a kid, at the barber shop, I would ogle clandestinely
this horrific tabloid, ˇAlarma!,
which collated, as a kind of pornography, gruesome photos of mutilated and
burnt bodies and stories of back-alley tortures. Those were the good old
days! For only the innocent can be thus titillated. There is no market for
that today, when every newspaper has become ˇAlarma! SOURCE:
“The US’s ‘War on Drugs’ Has Spiraled Dangerously Out of
Control: It didn’t work in Afghanistan, so let’s do it in
Mexico”; The Nation; 23 March 2015;
By Rebecca Gordon [9]
“Mexico's war on drugs: what has it achieved and how is the
US involved?”; The Guardian;
8 December 2016; by Nina Lakhani and
Erubiel Tirado in Mexico City. [10] Alejandro Madrazo, a respected analyst
of the Mexican ‘war on drugs’ working out of CIDE, in Mexico City, explained
to me that these are (reasonable) estimates. But nobody really knows, and the
numbers could be higher. (personal communication) [11]
“The US’s ‘War on Drugs’ Has Spiraled Dangerously Out of Control: It didn’t work in Afghanistan, so
let’s do it in Mexico”; The Nation;
23 March 2015; By Rebecca Gordon [12] “Frustración y esperanza”; El
Diario (Coahuila); 27 de Junio 2017; por Onésimo Flores Rodríguez [13]
“Halting
U.S. firearms trafficking to Mexico: A report by senators Dianne
Feinstein, Charles Schumer, and Sheldon Whitehouse to the United States
Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control; One Hundred Twelfth
Congress, FIRST SESSION; June 2011. [14] “México no es el segundo país más violento: SRE a Trump”;
Milenio; 22 de Junio 2017. [15]
“NOW YOU
SEE IT...: Just where did ISIS come from?”; Historical and Investigative Research; 23 Nov 2015; by Francisco
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