War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby cptmarginal » Fri May 09, 2014 7:57 pm

JackRiddler » Mon Sep 09, 2013 11:23 pm wrote:Following posted first by conniption at viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37134


The Guardian

'Mexico's war on drugs is one big lie'

Anabel Hernández, journalist and author, accuses the Mexican state of complicity with the cartels, and says the 'war on drugs' is a sham. She's had headless animals left at her door and her family have been threatened by gunmen. Now her courageous bestseller, extracted below, is to be published in the UK

Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Saturday 31 August 2013

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Journalist and author Anabel Hernández, photographed for the Observer in Parque Mexico, Mexico City. Photograph: Adam Wiseman for the Observer

During January 2011, Anabel Hernández's extended family held a party at a favourite cafe in the north of Mexico City. The gathering was to celebrate the birthday of Anabel's niece. As one of the country's leading journalists who rarely allows herself time off, she was especially happy because "the entire family was there. There are so many of us that it's extremely difficult to get everybody together in one place. It hardly ever happens."

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Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers
by Anabel Hernandez, Roberto Saviano


Anabel Hernández had to leave early, as so often, "to finish an article", and it was after she left that gunmen burst in. "Pointing rifles at my family, walking round the room – and taking wallets from people. But this was no robbery; no one tried to use any of the credit cards – it was pure intimidation, aimed at my family, and at me." It was more than a year before the authorities began looking for the assailants. And during that time the threats had continued: one afternoon last June, Hernández opened her front door to find decapitated animals in a box on the doorstep.

Hernández's offence was to write a book about the drug cartels that have wrought carnage across Mexico, taking some 80,000 lives, leaving a further 20,000 unaccounted for – and forging a new form of 21st-century warfare. But there have been other books about this bloodletting; what made Los Señores del Narco different was its relentless narrative linking the syndicate that has driven much of the violence – the Sinaloa cartel, the biggest criminal organisation in the world – to the leadership of the Mexican state.

Her further sin against the establishment and cartels was that the book became, and remains, a bestseller: more than 100,000 copies sold in Mexico. The success is impossible to overstate, a staggering figure for a non-fiction book in a country with indices of income and literacy incomparable to the American-European book-buying market. The wildfire interest delivers a clear message, says Hernández: "So many Mexicans do not believe the official version of this war. They do not believe the government are good guys, fighting the cartels. They know the government is lying, they don't carry their heads in the clouds."


I just watched the Mexico City episode of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" show from last Sunday - it focused on the cartels and featured a remarkable interview with Anabel Hernández.

One thing that occurred to me, fresh from reading obsessively about the World Anti-Communist League and the Latin American death squads of the past several decades, was that the labels of "cartel violence" or "drug war" being applied to the current violence in Mexico could just as easily be described as death squad activity. In many respects it's the same phenomenon as what happened across Central & South America, at least in my opinion.

I'm wondering to what extent the "Santa Muerte" veneration accompanying some of the most horrific violence has some connection to the Tecos ("owls") fascist secret society in Mexico, described in the book Inside the League.

I was prompted to wonder this by noticing the owl symbolism often featured alongside Santa Muerte, such as on this tattoo seen in more than one place in that recent Anthony Bourdain episode:

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An off-shoot of Ordine Nuovo was the terrorist group, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (ARN), responsible for the 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station which killed 85 people. The notorious neo-fascist killer, Stefano delle Chiaie, the ARN architect of the Bologna massacre, attended the pivotal 1980 conference of the WACL-affiliated, Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL), held in Buenos Aires at the height of the "dirty war" against the Argentine left.

CAL was the organizational expression of a little-known group of Mexican neo-Nazis, the Tecos or "owls," centered at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. Founded by Third Reich collaborator Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the Tecos have created several anti-communist front groups which include the Mexican Anti-Communist Federation (FEMACO) and the Inter-American Confederation of Continental Defense (IACCD). These "men of action" were drawn from the ranks of the Mexican secret police, military officers, wealthy landowners and industrialists.

Tecos leader, Raimundo Guerrero, was recruited into the organization by Gallardo. According to Anderson and Anderson, the Tecos have close links with the remnants of the Romanian Iron Guard fascists of Horia Sima in Spain. The group publishes the anti-Semitic magazine, Replica. Serving as a liaison among right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, the Tecos joined WACL in 1972. But the Tecos are more than a collection of aging Nazis; investigative journalist Manuel Buendia, was assassinated in Mexico City after publishing a three-part series exposing "Los Tecos" in 1984. (ibid.)

A La Jornada article of 16 May 1999 reports that an influential businessman who supports the future presidential candidacy of PRI figure Francisco Labastida was, in his youth, a militant of the University Anticommunist Front (Frente Universitario Anticomunista), reportedly a far-right group that operated in the state of Puebla in the 1960s and 1970s, and was linked to the Catholic Opus Dei, University Movement of Renewal Guidance (Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación, MURO) and the Tecos of the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (Autonomous University of Guadalajara, UAG) (La Jornada 16 May 1999).


(summary from here)

-

A less recently updated thread this could just as easily be posted in, started by 8bitagent:

The Devil Came Down To Mexico
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby cptmarginal » Fri May 09, 2014 8:03 pm

Just noticed that the first post of this thread has an equally serviceable summary of this topic; it didn't show up in a forum search because the term "Tecos" doesn't appear.

The DFS, the Federal Security Directorate, Mexico's CIA-trained combined CIA and FBI, was created as a subdivision of the Interior Ministry in the 1940's. In the mid-70's it organized Mexico's competing dealers and growers, centralizing all Mexican-based dope distribution. This operation was based in Guadalajara, home of the "Owl" death squads and the CIA's Autonomous University of Guadalajara, the Owl base, from which emanated the DFS's "White Brigade" death squads. The centralization enabled the DFS to rake off 25% of the cartel's gross - billions - and to protect its income more efficiently.

The Owls were founded by Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, a Mexican Nazi who spent World War II in Germany. Hitler's plan was to use Cuesta as his Mexican Quisling. The co-founder of the Owls was Father Julio Meinveille, an Argentine Jesuit. Meinveille is the author of The Jew, The Cabal of Progressivism, Among the Church and the Reich and Conspiracy Against the Church. These are the Owls' bibles.

High, very high up on the Owls' enemies list was Pope John XXIII, certainly the greatest Pope of the 20th century. He was a Jew, doncha know. Makes us Hebes proud. Pope Paul VI was not only a Jew, but a drug addict! Makes us dopers proud. Every time I take a poke, I get the heavenly feeling that I'm tokin with the Pope. Meinveille was the main speaker at the 1972 CAL conference in Mexico City. The Owls' front man at Vatican Council II was Jesuit Father Saenz y Arriaga, who was excommunicated for forging the signatures of Catholic leaders on hate literature.

Cuesta Gallardo founded the Autonomous University of Guadalajara in 1935. By 1960 Gallardo's University was just a few dilapidated buildings with an annual budget of $50,000. But CIA agent Oscar Wiegland, U.S. consul in Guadalajara, arranged AID funds for the struggling "university." By 1975 Cuesta's annual budget was $10 million. This is a CIA-financed hate-center, posing as a university, that runs classes in fascist "philosophy" and, literally, coordinates CAL death squad activities, and the dope-dealing that finances them, throughout Latin America.

When Manuel Buendia, a famous investigative journalist for Mexico City's daily Excelsior revealed these facts in 1984, he was shot dead. First on the murder scene was the Mexican DFS, whose agents immediately cleaned out Buendia's files, which were said to contain a videotape of high government officials meeting with Mexico's most powerful drug dealers. The engineer of the murder was the head of the DFS, Antonio Zorilla, whom Buendia had trusted as a source and confidant. Buendia was apparently unaware that the DFS shared operational control of the Owls.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby SonicG » Tue Oct 21, 2014 6:43 am

Ah sweeet irony..."El Buho" or "The Owl" was the nickname of an excellent Mexican reporter who investigated the Colosio assassination:
In the aftermath of the Colosio assassination, former drug-enforcement czar Eduardo Valle fled to the United States and elaborated on this PRI-Cartel conspiracy theory: Per Valle, the Colosio assassination was engineered by high-ranking members of Salinas's cabinet and their mob associates. (Valle specifically fingers Transportation Minister Emilio Gamboa, and others have accused Carlos Hank Gonzalez of involvement.) Valle, known as "El Buho" (The Owl), claims that the Colosio hit was carried out by members of the Grupo del Gulfo cocaine cartel, with the complicty of the slain candidate's PRI security team. Valle has documented a number of insidious links between Transportation Minister Gamboa and the Grupo del Gulfo and Baja drug cartels. Valle estimates that more than half of Mexico's police chiefs and attorney generals receive illegal payoffs from the drug cartels. If this alliance isn't broken up, Valle warns, the assassinations will continue.

For more background on the crazy times of early 90's Mexico, see here:
http://www.customscorruption.com/60conspiracies.htm

If you can speak Spanish, start at his Wiki page:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Va ... C3%BAho%22

But I came to post this sadness:

http://www.economist.com/news/americas/ ... -unchecked

Mexico has been convulsed by the abduction of 43 teacher-trainees on September 26th in the city of Iguala 80 miles (125km) south-west of the capital, allegedly by local police. They are feared dead, though the government says 28 semi-charred corpses found two weeks later near Iguala do not belong to them. The area is a killing ground littered with mass graves and tensions are running high.


If you speak Spanish:
http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=385273
http://internacional.elpais.com/interna ... 12341.html
(By an old friend...)
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby elfismiles » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:43 am

Mexican Prosecutor Says Mayor, Wife Ordered Attack On Students
by Carrie Kahn
October 23, 2014 4:29 AM ET
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014 ... n-students

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Listen to the Story
http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2 ... s.mp3?dl=1
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlaye ... =358238942

Morning Edition
4 min 25 sec
Playlist
Download / Transcript
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby SonicG » Tue Nov 04, 2014 9:39 am

The war churns on...
http://news.yahoo.com/mexico-general-fi ... 57601.html

I'll reserve comment but here is the real sadness...

More than 80,000 people have been killed and 22,000 have gone missing since Mexico's government deployed troops to crack down on drug cartels in 2006.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby elfismiles » Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:31 am

Suspects admit to massacring missing Mexico students
AFP | Nov 8, 2014, 10.31 AM IST
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Worl ... 077865.cms

elfismiles » 23 Oct 2014 13:43 wrote:Mexican Prosecutor Says Mayor, Wife Ordered Attack On Students
by Carrie Kahn
October 23, 2014 4:29 AM ET
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014 ... n-students
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Hunter » Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:32 pm

Anyone see THIS, I dont know about the source so draw your own conclusions. A cargo ship owned by the family of Mitch Mconnell who is one of the most hard core anti drug Senators in office, found to be smuggling coke:


http://thefreethoughtproject.com/90-pou ... rs-family/

A cargo ship connected to Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell was recently stopped and searched before departing from Colombia. During the search, Colombian Coast Guard agents seized roughly 90 pounds of cocaine.

The drugs were found on the Ping May, which is a vessel operated by the Foremost Maritime Corporation, a company owned by Mitch McConnell’s in-laws, the Chao family. This connection is not only relevant because of the family connection, but also because the Chao family has often made large donations to McConnell’s campaigns.

In fact, the Chao family has been funding McConnell since the late 1980s. Years later, in 1993, McConnell married Elaine Chao and secured the Chao family as one of his primary sources for investments.

A gift worth somewhere between 5 and 25 million dollars from the Chao Family made McConnel one of the richest senators in the country in 2008.

The Foremost Maritime Corporation is currently operating 16 dry bulk cargo ships, most of which are currently still in service.

What makes this case even more interesting is that McConnell is well known as a staunch prohibitionist. In 1996, McConnell sponsored “The Enhanced Marijuana Penalties Act”, a bill designed to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for people caught with marijuana.

Luis Gonzales, an official with the Colombian Coast Guard in Santa Marta told The Nation that the Ping May’s crew were questioned as part of the investigation, but that they have yet to file any charges in the case.

The war on drugs is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. There are mountains of evidence proving that the biggest importers of harmful, addictive, mind diminishing street drugs is the government. The drug laws that exist do not apply to the government agencies that bring these substances to our country. They are only designed to keep everyone else from this extremely lucrative business and give the establishment another reason to oppress people.

We have seen this all before during alcohol prohibition, where the government, law enforcement and organized crime were all working together and making an unbelievable amount of money in the black market. When black markets are created the crime rate goes up, taxes go up, prices go up and the police become more corrupt, all of this is inevitable. These are in fact the very consequences that any type of prohibition intends to create.

To solve these problems all that we have to do is end all prohibitions, this would cripple the black market and drastically reduce violence. This would also drastically reduce the reach of police and the state in general, which is why it is looked at as such an impossibility. Drug laws don’t do anything to prevent drug problems in our society, they only encourage violence, raise prices and criminalize half of the population.

John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work he is also the owner of a successful music promotion company. In 2013, he became one of the organizers of the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com.

Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/90-pou ... h5yrVE2.99
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby semper occultus » Tue Nov 11, 2014 9:08 am

http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/20/shaul-schwarz-music-guns-and-drugs-in-the-film-narco-cultura/

Shaul Schwarz: Music, Guns and Drugs in the film ‘Narco Cultura’

How do you make a documentary about violent drug culture without getting yourself killed? The answer is: with a lot of patience, intimacy, and trust.

Last week week I spoke with photographer and filmmaker Shaul Schwarz about his new documentary Narco Cultura. The film examines the grim reality of the violent drug war in Mexico, as well as the glorification of that lifestyle in a popular form of music called “narcocorridos.”

The film follows two main characters: Edgar Quintero, the singer of the narcocorrido band “BuKnas” from Los Angeles, and Richie Soto, a crime scene investigator in Juarez, Mexico. It cuts back and forth between the two, allowing viewers to experience the surreal dichotomy between the shell-shocked residents of Mexico, and the club-goers who shake, dance, and sing to the deceptively cheerful narcocorridos.

(One typically upbeat song’s lyrics are: “With an AK-47 and a Bazooka on my shoulder, cross my path and I’ll chop your head off. We’re bloodthirsty, crazy, and we like to kill.” The music has been banned from the radio in Mexico.)

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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Sounder » Wed Nov 12, 2014 8:13 am



I'm not supportive of the place this came from (a click bait site) so will only link to the you-tube

still though, a good comment here....

Actually, Thoma Barnett, a major Pentagon insider, has written openly that this is the reason the US is enticing illegal immigrants to come to this country, in order to relieve revolutionary pressure on the Mexican elite and to gain concessions to expand corporate influence over Mexico. He is a neocon/neoliberal who thinks the US has a duty to stabilize other countries by allowing a certain degree of immigration. This guy worked for Rumsfeld and for Kerry, crossing party lines.
Both the big parties want cheap labor to flood the job market. That's why they keep coming.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 05, 2014 7:16 am

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/batt ... and-state/

Battling Cartel and State

by Antje Dieterich & Daniel Gutiérrez

The movement in Mexico is fighting for an alternative to both drug cartels and neoliberalism.

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On September 26, a group of students traveled to the city of Iguala in Guerrero, Mexico to protest against the corrupt and discriminatory government they planned to work for as elementary school teachers after finishing their studies. By the next day, three of them had been killed by the police, and forty-three had disappeared. The fate of those who vanished is still unknown but it seems likely that the police — who arrested a high number of protesters in a village close to Iguala called Ayotzinapa — gave the forty-three to one of the local cartels.

The disappearances of the students, who attended a college with a history of radical activism, have rocked Mexico. What began as an isolated incident in a rural town in one of the country’s poorest states has given birth to a nation-wide protest movement (and a stream of viral hashtags) that is strongest in the south-central region of the country.

A quick catalogue of this past month: on November 9, protesters burned the door of the National Palace in Mexico City. On November 11, protesters fought back riot police in Guerrero. On November 15, the same day that Supreme Court judges gave themselves a 6.5 percent raise, police shot a student in UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the same school of the 1968 massacred students). On November 16, the parents of the forty-three disappeared students held a remembrance with Zapatistas for the disappeared.

A few days later, on Revolution Day, thousands of riot police descended on protesters in Mexico City’s main plaza, tear-gassing them and detaining eleven students. “History does not repeat itself,” the prominent left publication Proceso remarked in response, “it worsens.”

From rural farmworkers, to students in Mexico City, to a teachers union in Oaxaca, a plurality of organizations and people are on the streets, all of them declaring “we are Ayoztinapa.” The truth behind this statement is that all of them live and suffer under the same oppressive network, built by a neoliberal government in coalition with the drug cartels.

There is no central organization, party, or current that is responsible for the demonstrations. Generally speaking, most mobilizations have been spurred by existing coalitions, including those built during the protests against election fraud in 2012 — such as the student movement #Yosoy132 — as well as social justice organizations like the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca.

These groups have placed the entire government structure on trial, rather than just a single figure. (A now-common hashtag is #FueElEstado — It was the state). Militant organizations such as the Frente Popular Revolucionario are also mobilizing in solidarity with the disappeared students and their families. (In various cities, friends and families of the disappeared are at the front of marches. Their calls for justice are generally of a less political stripe.)

Even in terms of class composition or political tendency, the movement is heterogeneous and varies by place. Those in Guerrero come from largely rural stock. In Oaxaca, conditions are similar but the social history is still distinct. In rural areas, the “middle class” or petit bourgeoisie is largely in favor of the government. In Mexico City, a wide array of actors make up the demonstrations: syndicalists and unions, students of varying class and racial backgrounds (we must not confuse educational access in Mexico with that of the US), left groups (from socialists to anarchists), social democratic parties, human rights organizations, and women’s rights organizations.

Hence, a “movement” made up of many movements. The one unifying demand is an end to the violence that has become a pervasive element of Mexico’s political landscape.

The protests today must be understood as part of a historical process that goes back to the creation of the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the formation of the contemporary Mexican state. From here, an understanding of the effects of neoliberalism help us understand how organized crime embedded itself within the Mexican state and was able to grow into an autonomous leviathan. Achieving this, we can then understand the interplay between anti-government resistance and state repression, and the possibilities for social transformation.

Decades of Repression

Lázaro Cárdenas, the famed Mexican general, created the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI) shortly after the country’s revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century. He is often remembered as a populist hero who nationalized Mexico’s oil reserves — expropriating them from Imperial Yankee interests — who also gave birth to the ejido, collectivized farms that were parceled to the peasant class. Cardenas presidency also ushered in a remarkable economic boom known as the Mexican Miracle, catalyzed by the developmentalist model of Import-Substitution Industrialization.

Often overlooked, however, is that Cárdenas set into motion the tactics and tendencies that defined the autocratic party for the next several decades. For one thing, the PRI dominated elections at national and local levels through implied or direct violence. Its dominance wasn’t achieved by pure coercion, however. By using a revolutionary discourse and initiating seemingly revolutionary programs, the party was able to present itself as a popular force for some time.

But by the 1960s, cracks and contradictions had become visible. The vast majority of fertile land was transferred to private hands, and the ejidos were located on arid plots while farmers were given little assistance. When industrialization kicked into full gear, many left the countryside in search for better opportunities in cities like Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico City. A student movement surged, born out of disillusionment with the supposedly revolutionary government and inspired by leftist movements blossoming throughout Latin America. With the Olympics around the corner, students seized the stage and began demonstrating in great numbers.

The PRI responded with violence. October 2, 1968 became synonymous with PRI-style repression. Undercover military forces in Mexico City gunned down hundreds of students, and their bodies disappeared, believed to have been thrown into the Gulf of Mexico. (Years later it was revealed that the CIA had played an active role in the massacre and that the president of Mexico himself was receiving money from the US government.)

So initiated the Dirty War in Mexico. The White Brigades, a right-wing paramilitary unit, was formed to help combat the surge of peasant and worker movements. The Federal Directory of Security, which carried out mass disappearances, was also created to put down the left uprisings. (Julian Slim Helu, brother of billionaire Carlos Slim Helu, helped carry out the purges as an FDS employee and would later become rich after the country’s neoliberal turn).

However, by the end of the century, neoliberal restructuring left the PRI government weakened, and the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) gained power. Over the next twelve years, the PRI made great effort to restore its image — and retook the presidency in 2012 — but the memory of repression stuck and has helped incite the current protests.

The Rise of the Cartels

It is impossible to analyze Mexico without discussing the emergence of drug cartels. And it would be a sin of omission to leave out the neoliberal repurposing of the state, a phenomenon that spurred and reinforced the growth of those same cartels. As the Mexican state relieved itself of social responsibilities in the 1980s and handed over the economy to international interests, the power of cartels mushroomed.

The vast unemployment and informalization that neoliberalism has wrought then spawned metastasizing cartels, who have offered an alternative to destitution. The cartels provide (criminalized) employment to the jobless in a booming market sector. The reasons to join a cartel should be obvious: social mobility for most Mexican people is highly limited. It is harder to imagine an assembly worker at a maquiladora becoming CEO of the enterprise (a position usually reserved to foreign nationals) than one becoming CEO of a cartel (who almost always come from working-class backgrounds).

In this social environment, narco organizations have grown enormously powerful, forming organizational structures and institutions that run parallel to the Mexican state. This in turn has allowed for the establishment of a certain counter-culture, to use South African sociologist Lucien van der Walt’s term, that promotes narco-culture. Best known are probably the narco-corridos, a sub-genre in which the singers praise the brutal activities of more or less famous cartel members. At the same time, they have been able to achieve a loose (if tenuous) safety within the state system by bribing sympathetic government officials at the local, state, and national levels.

The present relationship between the Mexican state and the insurgent narco cartels is thus complex. They both feed off each other (the Mexican state uses them to secure funds from the US government and at the same time grants protection for certain cartels at various levels of government), but the two forces are ultimately antagonistic because they seek control over the same territories and people.

Yet at this point, the Mexican state needs the cartels more than the cartels need the Mexican state. Indeed, the state’s constitutive feature — its monopoly on the “legitimate” use of violence — has been called into question by the autonomy of the cartels, who have their own police and military forces.

Long enmeshed with the cartels, the government has lost control of them. Since then-President Felipe Calderon announced his “war on drugs” in 2006, 93.8 percent of crimes have not even been investigated, 22,322 officially recognized disappearances have been recorded, and 10.7 million households have had at least one crime victim. In 2013 alone, 123,470 people were kidnapped.

While the narcos offer social mobility or at least financial security, they fail by their very nature to offer a peaceful togetherness or even safety for individuals living in their territories. Their revolution (if we see the establishment of an effective counter-power as a revolution) was never meant to better the living conditions of the society as a whole, but to build an absolutely unlimited market in which the winner takes all.

The disappearance of the forty-three students is therefore about more than forty-three lives. It seems to be the final nail in the coffin of a state that tried to solve its own failure by handing its society to the next available force — the cartels. Their alternative social system was capable of covering up the fast growing tensions in the Mexican society, but the violence, inherent to illegal markets, created new ones.

A Callous, Blundering State

The government’s shoddy investigation into the disappeared shows how stopping or at least limiting violence is of no concern to them. Even worse, the thin results of the investigation point to the fact that the government and cartels are working together to cover up each other’s crimes.

Time and again, the state has revealed itself as profoundly apathetic toward the constituents it claims to serve.

When the disappearances were first announced, President Enrique Peña Nieto decided to take a trip to China to talk about a high-speed train contract bid. The state attorney general, Julio Murillo Karam, tried to mend broken relations with the masses, but was caught saying during a press conference, “Ya me cansé” (“I’m already tired [of these questions]”). This instantly became one of the most popular hashtags of the movement, and the mothers of the disappeared students replied, “Nosotros también ya nos cansamos” (“We also are tired of this”).

Former PRI congresswoman Rocio Marili Olguín Cuevas announced on Twitter that “sometimes I, too, think I am Ayotzinapa but then Chicharrito [famed Mexican soccer player] makes a goal and I forget all about it! !!! I don’t know if I should laugh or if I should cry. . . [those protesting the disappearances] should be killed so they don’t reproduce!!!” At this point, one hears Marie Antoinette’s famed, “Let them eat cake” on the tip of each official’s tongue.

It was also recently discovered that Peña Nieto’s wife, Angélica Rivera Hurtado, lives in a multi-million-dollar house with a rather suspicious history of owners. The Wall Street Journal uncovered that the home was previously owned by Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú, head of a lucrative construction company that recently won multiple projects worth millions of dollars under Peña Nieto’s presidency and former governorship in Estado de Mexico.

The Wall Street Journal report is hardly the only media coverage that has emboldened protesters. Mexican media outfits such as Proceso and Jornada have been instrumental in distributing information and supporting social justice. Their constant fact checking of government statements has kept the PRI from rebuilding a system of power, like the one developed shortly after the revolution.

Aside from their critical analysis of the governments reaction to the protests, they have contributed to the search for solutions, to imagining a society beyond a corrupt government and violence-glorifying narcos. At a discursive level, these media outfits have been able to promote popular justice and demand social change. But despite the media frenzy and the uproar, little has changed in Guerrero or in Mexico since the protests began two months ago.

There is still no sign of the missing forty-three. The mothers of the missing have since moved to the Escuela Normal Rural “Raul Isidro Burgos,” where it all began, and the place they call “the cradle of social consciousness.” Throughout Guerrero, militant normalistas continue to be threatened by the Mexican military. In late November, ten bodies were found dumped on the side of a rural freeway. Following Peña Nieto’s national address in which he announced he would solve the problem by disbanding local police forces suspected of corruption and replacing them with federal ones, dissidents and normalistas stormed the gubernatorial palace of Guerrero.

What is incredible about the situation in Mexico is how sustained the agitation has been, unceasing for more than two months. The question now is whether the protests can bring about radical change. The current choice is between the plague and cholera — a government that does everything to stay in power or a system of cartels that is brutally repressive in its own way. Protesters are demanding something better.

Yet they will need a coherent political strategy and platform that aims to transform the state. Aside from the well-known Zapatistas, some autonomous left communities in Oaxaca, and some smaller revolutionary groups like the Frente Popular Revolucionario, most of the people on the streets just began to develop structures and are probably still searching for political cogency.

Large parts of the society are tired of the conditions they are living in, and only a radical movement that brings about structural change can end that suffering. But it remains to be seen whether protesters can form a force capable of making such systemic changes. After all, they’re not just fighting the government, but the cartels.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 16, 2015 11:07 am

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/mexi ... iberalism/

How the Cartels Were Born

What’s known as the “Mexican Drug War” was fueled by American free-market policies.

by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace


Image
A Mexican soldier walks in a poppy field in El Durazno, Guerrero state, Mexico, June 16, 2011.

Adapted from A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War,” out this spring from OR Books.

Ronald Reagan cast himself as a law and order man, ready to reverse the drug policies of Jimmy Carter, who indeed had pulled back from Nixonian fanaticism. Once in office, Reagan set up the South Florida Task Force to go nose-to-nose with the cocaine barons, whose airplanes had been dropping drug-bundles at sea, where they were picked up by fast boats and whisked ashore.

Headed by Vice President George H.W. Bush, the task force brought in the army and navy, and put Miami vice in its crosshairs. It worked. Surveillance planes and helicopter gunships throttled the hitherto wide-open Colombia–Florida connection. But the Colombians simply abandoned their direct shuttle service and increased the flow through their Mexican pipeline.

Soon, however, the Mexicans shifted from being simply a well-paid smuggling service to demanding and getting full partnership status. In short order kingpins Félix Gallardo, Fonseca Carrillo, and Caro Quintero were providing 90 percent of the cocaine pouring into the US market, and raking in an estimated $5 billion a year. In 1984, the DEA began referring to the triumvirate as the Guadalajara Cartel, echoing the by-then common reference to the Medellín and Cali Cartels.

In 1986, with the Iran–Contra scandal about to splash into public view and midterm elections approaching, Reagan turned up the volume of his drug war rhetoric. “My generation will remember how Americans swung into action when we were attacked in World War II,” he cried. “Now we’re in another war for our freedom.” He signed a National Security Decision Directive declaring drug trafficking a threat to national security. This permitted the US Department of Defense to get involved in a wide variety of anti-drug activities, especially on the Mexico-USA border.

Reagan also won passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which required the executive branch to annually certify that any country receiving US assistance was cooperating fully with US anti-narcotics efforts, or taking steps deemed sufficient on its own. (Thus did the US, the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs, set itself up as judge of other countries’ progress on solving a problem the US could not.) If the country in question failed to measure up — and Mexico was an obvious target — it would be struck off from all foreign aid programs. Worse (particularly for Mexico), the US would oppose any loan requests that country might make to multilateral development banks (like the International Monetary Fund).

President de la Madrid (1982–1988) fell in line, declaring drug trafficking a threat to Mexico’s national security, and authorizing an expanded military presence in anti-narcotics efforts. He had little choice. Mexico had tumbled into a full-blown economic crisis. Certification, hence access to credit, had now become essential. In the course of wrestling with it, de la Madrid would begin to engineer a profound transformation in the country’s economy and polity, a transformation that would have major consequences for the organization of the drug business.

In the mid–1970s the United States had added to its woes of recession those of inflation, due in considerable measure to OPEC’s success in raising oil prices. To “whip inflation now,” the Federal Reserve Bank helmed by Chairman Paul Volcker began to raise interest rates, eventually driving the prime rate from 12 percent to 21 percent. By 1980 this had precipitated a far deeper downturn, which did lower inflation, but only by driving up unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The recession Volcker engineered in the US had an even more devastating impact on Mexico, as the interest rate on rolling over its short term loans nearly doubled. By 1982, simply meeting interest payments would have required more than $8 billion per year. Worse, just as expenses soared, oil prices sagged.

Mexico made clear it could no longer make its interest payments. US banks were terrified. Thirteen of the biggest stood to collectively lose $60 billion if Mexico went under — 48 percent of their combined capital. And if Mexico fell, most of Latin America would come tumbling down behind it, likely triggering a collapse of the entire international financial system. The United States, accordingly, put together a multi-billion-dollar package of loans and credits, and worked out an unofficial debt moratorium.

The World Bank and IMF were wheeled in to provide Mexico with emergency loans with which to resume paying the US banks, rescuing them from their own recklessness. These institutions in turn — following the model first worked out in New York’s fiscal crisis in 1975 — now imposed “structural adjustment” on Mexico. The creditors demanded privatization of public services, cuts in government social programs, a wider opening to foreign investment, and a ruthless concentration on paying back loans and interest. This arm-twisting was given an ideological gloss, reviving hoary shibboleths about the inherent superiority of market over state, repackaged as “neoliberalism.”

Executing these demands fell first to President de la Madrid and then to his successor Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994). Both believed the state apparatus was a burden upon Mexican business that should be thrown off, along with much else in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) inherited project and ideology. Structural adjustment prompted privatization, the opening of the country to foreign investment, and the reorientation of the agricultural sector towards exports.

The 1980s were known as la Década Perdida, or “lost decade,” wherein 800,000 jobs evaporated and dispossessed farmers streamed into urban centers. Salinas continued the policies, selling off large public enterprises at bargain basement prices. The process created a new class of Mexican tycoons. In 1987 there was one Mexican on the Forbes billionaire list. When Salinas left office in 1994 there were twenty-four.

Labor, conversely, was battered. When public enterprises were privatized their collective agreements were scrapped, benefits removed, “flexible” work rules imposed. Salinas also distanced the party from its long-affiliated labor unions, and ordered a series of attacks on more militant entities. At the same time, state subsidies that had kept the price of basic foodstuffs low were suddenly removed. The price of milk, tortillas, petrol, electricity and public transport shot up at the same time wages were being slashed. The provision of basic social services was similarly cut so that fewer people had access to free health care and education.

The neoliberal offensive was particularly devastating to farm labor, partly as a consequence of the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (which Salinas negotiated with George H.W. Bush, and which went into effect under Bill Clinton). A principal US condition for entering the agreement was that Mexico undo the agrarian reforms embedded in Article 27 of the Constitution, a principal legacy of the Revolution. Communal (ejido) land could now be divided and converted into private property. Price regulation of staple crops was scrapped. Tariffs and quotas on agricultural imports were removed. Subsidies that had supported small-scale farmers were deleted.

The results of establishing a putatively equal trade between grossly unequal partners was that US agribusiness pushed thousands of Mexican farmers out of their own markets. The price of corn dropped by around 50 percent after the NAFTA agreement, and the number of farmers living in poverty rose by a third. In the six years following the introduction of NAFTA, two million farmers abandoned their land. They flocked from country shacks to the burgeoning barrios of Mexico City; to the spreading slums of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez to work in maquiladoras (assembly plants just across the border); and to the United States.

The crisis transformed the narcotics industry. Indeed it is impossible to understand the tremendous changes in the drug business during the combined sexenios of Salinas and Zedillo (1989–2000) without taking into account the massive political, economic, and ideological transformations wrought during that decade and the previous one by the PRI–governed state.

Farmers, unable to sustain themselves due to the removal of subsidies and the arrival of competition from US agri–corporations, found the burgeoning market for marijuana and poppies their only avenue to surviving on the land. The army of the urban unemployed gave the cartels a deep pool from which to recruit foot soldiers, and the miserably paid (and eminently corruptible) police and military provided the muscle with which to protect their interests.

The spread of everyday crime — aided by the rapid declension and corruption of local police forces — demoralized civil society, and provided a climate within which grander forms of criminality would flourish.

The adoption of free trade, and the deeper integration of the Mexican economy with that of the United States, dramatically increased cross-border traffic, making it far easier to insert narcotics into the stream of northward–bound commodities. Some NAFTA rules were of particular help: because maquiladoras were exempt from tariffs and subject to only minimal inspections, Mexican smugglers began buying up such factories to use as fronts for shipping cocaine.

Narcotrafficking had formerly been integrated into the PRI corporatist state, an under-the-table equivalent of labor, peasant, and business organizations. As such it was subject to a certain degree of regulatory control, and to unofficial taxation, in return for the de facto licensing of smuggling (the plaza system). The state’s abandonment of this form of corporatist inclusion contributed to the independent growth and power of organized crime syndicates.

The glorification of wealth and entrepreneurialism provided a cultural environment that boosted the social standing of narco businessmen. As in the former Soviet Union and other post-communist regimes, a neoliberal shock treatment simultaneously produced millionaires and gangsters, a twinning that Forbes registered by including them on the same list.

The weakening of the state and the glorification of “free enterprise” conferred authority and legitimacy on the private sector in which drug traffickers were now key players. As Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda have argued, neoliberals prioritized accumulation of profit over social welfare, ruthless competition over cooperation, and the sanctification of private property and wealth over community and civic responsibility. These propositions — the cornerstones and guiding principles of free-market ideology — also formed the dominant ideology of crime syndicates.

Lead or Silver

Seven months after taking office in 1989, veteran drug warrior George H.W. Bush declared in his first televised address to the nation that “All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs.” He proposed spending billions on a militarized response. Salinas signed on. He approved a binational Northern Border Response Force to monitor the border, created the National Institute to Combat Drugs (INCD) modeled on the DEA, and permitted US Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes to fly over Mexican airspace to track drug-trafficking activity.

Bush had a specific request as well: Salinas was to (metaphorically) bring him the head of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, chief of the Guadalajara Cartel. The kingpin was duly reeled in, and Bush certified that Mexico had cooperated fully in drug control efforts, praising in particular the arrest of Félix Gallardo.

But the decapitation of the Guadalajara Cartel — a centralized regulatory gangster regime supported by the PRI state — gave the “free market” its head. The consequences for the criminal sector would be even more disastrous than the havoc wrought in the legitimate economy by the larger neoliberal project.

At first, the lieutenants of the original cartel attempted to establish some ground rules. Following Félix Gallardo’s arrest in 1989, the sub-capos held a gangster summit in the resort city of Acapulco. The attendees were almost all members of the old Sinaloan narco tribe, long intertwined by ties of marriage, friendship, or business. They proceeded to parcel out production territories and smuggling routes to the US market, awarding themselves the plazas that had once been assigned by the now-defunct DFS.

The resulting organizations were called cartels, misleadingly, as they were in fact fragments of an exploded cartel — the byproducts of de-cartelization — and most were manned by descendants or associates of the original Guadalajaran trio.

As the 1990s unfolded, all these Mexican traffickers flourished as it proved impossible to resurrect the old relationship between subservient crook and dominant state. With the ascendancy of the cocaine trade, cartel profits had soared into the empyrean, and the amount of money they could now budget for bribery allowed the narcos to make irresistible offers — unrefusable when accompanied by threats of violence, as in the formulation plomo o plata (“lead or silver”): take the money or die. As neoliberal doctrine dictated, state regulation had been thrown off and replaced by a privatized regime, in which public officials were suborned on a piecemeal basis.

President Ernesto Zedillo, only too aware of the party’s peril, opted during his term (1994–2000) for some efforts at reform. The military increased its role, a policy strongly promoted by Bill Clinton’s appointed drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, a recently retired four-star general whose previous position had been as head of the United States Southern Command. Given the need to stay in US good graces, Zedillo followed suit. He established a five-year plan (the National Program for the Control of Drugs) that significantly widened the involvement of the (reluctant) armed forces beyond its sporadic participation in eradication programs.

Just as the PRI state was opting for militarization, so was the Gulf Cartel, the dominant traffickers in the northeast. In 1998, after a period of intra–cartel battling, one Osiel Cárdenas Guillén had murdered his way to the top. Cárdenas Guillén set out to create a Praetorian Guard. He turned for assistance to Arturo Guzmán Decena, a commander in the army’s elite Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), Mexico’s equivalent of the Green Berets. GAFE had been given counter-insurgency training, and dispatched by President Salinas to crush the Zapatistas. Guzmán Decena left the barracks altogether, and signed up with Cárdenas Guillén.

He brought with him thirty or so GAFE colleagues and an arsenal of the army’s most sophisticated weaponry and surveillance equipment. Soon they had expanded beyond bodyguard duties to become the Gulf Cartel’s mercenary military arm, and dubbed themselves Los Zetas.

Meanwhile, in the western and central states, the fragmented organizations that had emerged after the breakup of the Guadalajara Cartel — the Sinaloa, Juárez, and Arellano Félix cartels — had fallen out and launched assaults and counter-assaults against one another. Now the streets ran red, with hundreds killed, tortured, and disappeared. At first Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana were the principal battlegrounds, but then the fighting expanded to adjoining states.

At the very same time that a centralized regulatory regime gave way to chaotic competition in the criminal underworld, the centralized one-party regime gave way to a competitive party system in the world of politics.

In 2000, Mexican voters were looking for a fresh face, and the National Action Party (PAN) provided one. Vicente Fox was put forward by a right-wing party, but he was not a hardline ideologue or a Catholic militant. Raised on the family ranch, he had earned a BA in business administration, buffed his credentials at Harvard Business School, and worked his way up to the presidency of Coca–Cola for Mexico and Latin America. Fox was forthright and folksy. His personality promised change. On July 2, 2000, he won the presidency with the support of a center-left coalition.

President Vicente Fox’s administration began on December 1, 2000. Three weeks later, on December 22, he went to Tijuana and declared war on the Arellano Félix Organization. Fox put the Arellano Félix brothers at the top of his hit list because they were the drug lords “most wanted” by the USA Eight months earlier, the Brothers had captured Pepe Patiño, an anti-drug prosecutor who had been working closely with the DEA and FBI. They tortured him by breaking virtually every bone in his body before slowly finishing him off by crushing his skull in a pneumatic vise. This galvanized US law enforcement.

Fox was eager to oblige, especially since his old friend George W. Bush — another cowboy-booted, plainspoken, rich rancher and former governor — had agreed to make the first foreign trip of his presidency (2001–2009) to Mexico. Fox had an agenda stuffed with asks — notably opening up the border, and winning legal status for the 3.5 million undocumented Mexicans working in the States — and he wanted to have his anti-crime credentials in order. But embarassingly, barely a week later and on the eve of Fox’s tête–à–tête with Bush, El Chapo Guzmán of the Sinaloa Cartel escaped from jail.

Within a week, Fox went to Culiacán, heart of El Chapo’s Sinaloan domain, and repeated his Tijuana in–your–face challenge, escalating it to countrywide status. Announcing a “Cruzada Nacional contra el Narcotráfico y el Crimen Organizado,” he declared “a war without quarter against the drug traffickers and the pernicious criminal mafias.”

The tough talk was enough to meet the immediate need. When Bush arrived in February, he expressed confidence that Fox was committed to fighting traffickers, and even admitted, with an unusual degree of candor, the obvious but uncomfortable fact that Mexicans were selling drugs north of the border because Americans were buying them.

Mexico Seguro and America’s Iron River

But when Fox visited the White House in September 2001 — Bush’s first state visit — he was welcomed with open arms but empty hands. The dot com bubble had burst, and the US had sunk into a recession that dragged Mexico’s NAFTA–manacled economy down with it. Then, five days after Fox addressed a joint session of Congress, the Twin Towers came down, and his plea for a more open border became an instant nonstarter.

Worse, as Fox loyally pledged support for Bush’s global war on terror, a crackdown ensued on illegal crossings along the 2,000–mile–long frontier. This in turn exacerbated the crisis of the Mexican countryside, making it ever harder to get a cross-border job and send south the remittances that were the life support on which many devastated communities so depended.

Cooperation in the war on drugs became ever more central to Mexican-US relations. Fox quickly backed off a pre-election vow to withdraw the military from the drug war in order to avoid deepening the corruption of its general staff, and to comply with Mexico’s constitutional prohibition on using the military for anything but national defense. The US made clear it considered Mexico’s army its most reliable force, despite Fox’s 2001 arrest of generals who had been protecting gangsters.

The US backed strategy seemed to produce rapid results. On February 10, 2002, Ramón Arellano Félix was killed, and a month later, Benjamín Arellano Felix was captured. But the Tijuanos’ distress was duly noted by other drug lords, particularly the Sinaloans. In October 2001 they had held a summit meeting in Cuernavaca. Newly restyled The Federation, they debated plans for expansion into the far eastern plaza, centered in Nuevo Laredo (in the state of Tamaulipas), a lucrative and newly vulnerable border crossing, theretofore the exclusive domain of the Gulf Cartel. The daily, NAFTA–supercharged flow of freight cars and cargo trucks provided great cover for funneling narcotics into the US rail network and onto Interstate 35, the highway to San Antonio and points north.

The Federation decided to invade.

From the first skirmishes in 2003, the firefights on the streets of Nuevo Laredo grew steadily until by 2005 spectacular battles, deploying ever more sophisticated and deadly weaponry, had become commonplace. In July, after the rivals had wheeled out machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, American officials shut down the US Consulate.

The new levels of lethality appalled the Americans, but should not have surprised them as the iron river of armaments had been flowing more briskly, courtesy of the US arms industry and the Republican Party’s powerful right wing. Back during the Clinton Administration, an impediment to the southward flow had been put in place, when in 1994 Congress slapped a ban on the manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons. Though scheduled to sunset in 2004, two thirds of Americans (among them President Bush) supported extending the ban. Fierce opposition by the National Rifle Association and right-wing Texas Congressman Tom DeLay blocked this renewal. A grateful NRA invited DeLay to keynote its annual meeting in 2005 and, as he took the podium, he choked up slightly as he proclaimed the tribute “the highlight of my career.”

Lifting the ban facilitated a growing cascade of powerful weaponry south, just at the time powerful weaponry began showing up in Nuevo Laredo — including such narco favorites as the AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle (known affectionately as the cuerno de chivo or “goat horn” rifle), the AR-15 assault rifle (a civilian version of the M16, built by Colt), and the Barrett .50 caliber armor–piercing sniper rifle preferred by all the best professional assassins, along with machine guns, fragmentation grenades, shotguns, cop-killer pistols, and the like.

Not only did the ability to shoot a massive number of bullets lead to hundreds of civilian bystander deaths, but the massive buildup of firepower — rivaling that of the Mexican Army — fostered an increasing willingness to tackle state authorities. In 2005, seven police commanders were ambushed and killed, seriatim, in Nuevo Laredo. The position remained vacant until a printing-shop owner accepted the post on the morning of June 8, 2005. Within six hours, Zetas toting AR-15 assault rifles had riddled him with bullets.

This latest slaying, coupled with pressure from the US ambassador who was worried about murders and kidnapping of American citizens, spurred countermeasures from the Fox regime. Fox created a combined military and police strike force, the muscle behind a program entitled México Seguro (Safe Mexico). On June 11, 2005, Fox sent 600 members of the Federal Investigations Agency and the Federal Preventive Police, together with members of GAFE (the special forces of the Mexican Army) parading into Nuevo Laredo. They were met with gunfire from local police officers in the pay of the Gulf Cartel. Federal authorities removed almost one-third of municipal police officers for alleged ties to drug traffickers, suspended the rest, and replaced them with federal forces. This was widely perceived as having all but no effect on the ongoing slugfest.

More to the point, the big cartels were having a big impact on the federal forces sent against them. Some soldiers were deserting out of fear, others were lured away by better offers. The success of Los Zetas underscored the benefits that awaited those who took their military skills over to the dark side, especially given the notoriously poor salaries, harsh living conditions, and humiliation by officers that were their daily fare in the barracks.

Between 2000 and 2006, 123,218 had deserted, two-thirds of the 185,143 Fox had started with, though most were replaced by new recruits. And it was in these dispiriting circumstances that the Fox sexenio sputtered to an end.

Two Mexicos Face Off

The PAN, much to most people’s surprise, nominated a little known lawyer, Felipe Calderón, who in addition to his Mexican MA in economics had a degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (2000. His chief opponent was Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As the PRD candidate, his campaign slogan was “For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First,” referring to his advocacy of increasing taxes on the rich and extending resources to the poor.

In the end, two different but overlapping Mexicos faced off, one more socially conservative, the other more socially liberal; one more rooted in the industrial north, the other strongest in the central and southern states where most of the country’s poor lived; one favoring state action, the other preferring to let the market work its magic.

All the candidates were remarkably circumspect in their rhetoric, making no mention of particular cartels, lest they call down gangster wrath. Calderón talked vaguely about freeing “cities like Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo or Acapulco from this cancer before it eats away our society,” and advanced a series of specific reforms — changing the judicial system, centralizing the police forces, extraditing captured drug lords to the United States, and imposing life sentences on convicted kidnappers.

López Obrador argued that creating jobs and reducing poverty was the only real way to fight crime — “I don’t think you can make much progress with prisons or threats of heavy-handed approaches and tougher laws,” he said, though he also broke with the Left’s anti-military tradition by suggesting a bigger role for the army in fighting the drug trade, given how well-armed were the cartels.

On election day, July 2, the contending forces proved to be as sharply divided in votes as they were in views. Calderón received 35.89 percent of the vote. López Obrador got 35.33 percent. Madrazo of the PRI trailed in third place with 22 percent.

The López Obrador forces, pointing to a variety of irregularities, claimed that Calderón’s popular vote margin had been obtained by straight-out fraud and that López Obrador was the rightful president. During July and August, López Obrador’s followers blocked major thoroughfares like Avenida Reforma and set up a giant encampment in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s enormous central plaza. But after undertaking a partial recount of the ballots the Federal Electoral Tribunal declared Calderón the winner. The protests continued, and on December 1, when Calderón arrived at the Legislative Palace of San Lázaro to take the oath of office before a joint session of Congress, all was bedlam.

The circumstances surrounding Calderón’s inauguration were so chaotic that little attention was paid to a press conference Calderón had just held. In addition to announcing the members of his security cabinet, Calderón tossed a bombshell into the roiling national conversation. He was declaring, he said, a war on drugs, a “battle against drug trafficking and organized crime, which will take time, money, and even lives.”

The Narcoeconomy’s Silent Support

Ten days later, on December 11, 2006, 5,300 armed troops, assembled chiefly from various federal forces (the army, navy, and federal police), rolled into the State of Michoacán, due west of Mexico City — an initiative presumably worked up in closed-door consultations sometime between July and December. The latest iteration of the War on Drugs was underway.

Many Mexicans were stunned by this development. In Calderón’s campaign, there had been nary a whiff of war. But in November, at the White House, in his first face-to-face meeting with Bush, the president-elect pleaded for a major commitment of guns and money. He received the president’s energetic blessing — perhaps no surprise given that three years earlier Bush had initiated his own “war of choice.” Four months later, at a March 2007 presidential meeting in Merida, Mexico, the leaders finalized the terms of a billion-plus dollar US commitment to providing weapons, intelligence-gathering equipment, and training.

But while Calderón had taken steps to arrange for backup, he had not fully grappled with the weakness of the Mexican armed forces under his command, nor had he fully assayed the strengths of his enemy. An even weaker reed than the means of violence was the means of justice. The criminal justice system was a bad joke, corrupt beyond belief, wildly inefficient, its conviction rates infinitesimal, its prisons porous or controlled by inmates.

Then there was the strength of the enemy, which might have been better assessed. It was not just the cartels’ gringo-derived firepower — Calderón was very alive to that issue and would call on the US, repeatedly, publicly, and fruitlessly, to restore the assault-weapons ban, to sign CIFTA, to stem the flow of Kalashnikovs. Rather, it was that Calderón seemed not to comprehend that the drug business had taken deep root, with hundreds of thousands of campesinos having become dependent, for lack of better alternatives, on the narco economy. Perhaps it was hard for him to reckon with this silent support, because that would have required confronting the profound crisis of the countryside, and reconsidering the role of NAFTA and the whole neoliberal project in creating it.

Calderón and his party had run on a pro-NAFTA platform, receiving the support of the substantial number of Mexicans who were benefitting from the new order. Analysis of the 2006 voting statistics showed PAN’s support had come disproportionately from the industrial and service sectors of the north, from the middle– and upper–middle classes, and from self–identified Catholics. AMLO had done better with agrarian, southern, and poorer voters, though the PRI’s Madrazo had done better still in those sectors.

Calderón had talked of fighting poverty, but he believed the way to do so was by pressing ahead with the neoliberal project, opening the country still further to international capital, and expanding the industrial sector so it could absorb the growing number of farmers being driven from the land by unequal competition with US agribusiness. A New Mexico would thus peaceably replace the Old. He did not quite get that the drug business, whose illicit cargos rolled north from Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juárez alongside the trucks conveying automobiles and electronics, was itself part of the New Mexico. The impoverished peasants pouring into the narcoeconomy — getting jobs as growers, gunmen, packagers, drivers, guards, and peddlers — and the many rural villages being “modernized” through profits from the drug trade, had a stake in this new status quo, and would fight to defend it.

Nor was Calderón quite prepared to tackle the interdependency between Mexico’s narcoeconomy and the country’s financial, commercial, and industrial infrastructures. Though he did win passage of some (extremely modest and feebly enforced) money-laundering legislation, he never fully confronted the degree to which the banking system benefited from the billions of dollars repatriated each year from sales in the US, funds that in turn helped fertilize a host of “modern” sectors like transportation, hotels, security, cattle ranches, record labels, and movie companies.

In 2009, midway through his sexenio, the roughly $30 billion that annually flowed to Mexican gangsters, ran a close second to profits from oil exports ($36.1 billion), and exceeded remittances from migrant Mexican domestic workers and agricultural laborers ($21.1 billion), and foreign tourism ($11.3 billion). He did not quite grasp the degree to which his own constituents might be complicit in perpetuating the established narco–order he was now setting out to topple.

The ensuing US backed campaign to smash the cartels, coupled with the continuation of binational policies that allowed them to flourish, would now unleash the world-class calamity that has befallen the Mexican people. Though it has come to be known as the “Mexican Drug War,” the conflagration really had two parents.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 19, 2015 11:25 am

cptmarginal » Fri May 09, 2014 6:57 pm wrote:I'm wondering to what extent the "Santa Muerte" veneration accompanying some of the most horrific violence has some connection to the Tecos ("owls") fascist secret society in Mexico, described in the book Inside the League.

I was prompted to wonder this by noticing the owl symbolism often featured alongside Santa Muerte, such as on this tattoo seen in more than one place in that recent Anthony Bourdain episode:

Image

An off-shoot of Ordine Nuovo was the terrorist group, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (ARN), responsible for the 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station which killed 85 people. The notorious neo-fascist killer, Stefano delle Chiaie, the ARN architect of the Bologna massacre, attended the pivotal 1980 conference of the WACL-affiliated, Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL), held in Buenos Aires at the height of the "dirty war" against the Argentine left.

CAL was the organizational expression of a little-known group of Mexican neo-Nazis, the Tecos or "owls," centered at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. Founded by Third Reich collaborator Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the Tecos have created several anti-communist front groups which include the Mexican Anti-Communist Federation (FEMACO) and the Inter-American Confederation of Continental Defense (IACCD). These "men of action" were drawn from the ranks of the Mexican secret police, military officers, wealthy landowners and industrialists.

Tecos leader, Raimundo Guerrero, was recruited into the organization by Gallardo. According to Anderson and Anderson, the Tecos have close links with the remnants of the Romanian Iron Guard fascists of Horia Sima in Spain. The group publishes the anti-Semitic magazine, Replica. Serving as a liaison among right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, the Tecos joined WACL in 1972. But the Tecos are more than a collection of aging Nazis; investigative journalist Manuel Buendia, was assassinated in Mexico City after publishing a three-part series exposing "Los Tecos" in 1984. (ibid.)

A La Jornada article of 16 May 1999 reports that an influential businessman who supports the future presidential candidacy of PRI figure Francisco Labastida was, in his youth, a militant of the University Anticommunist Front (Frente Universitario Anticomunista), reportedly a far-right group that operated in the state of Puebla in the 1960s and 1970s, and was linked to the Catholic Opus Dei, University Movement of Renewal Guidance (Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación, MURO) and the Tecos of the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (Autonomous University of Guadalajara, UAG) (La Jornada 16 May 1999).


(summary from here)



Great stuff. Here is Recluse's perspective on it all:

And "incidentally," the city of Guadalajara from which the cartel took its name just happened to be the base of operations for a bizarre secret society involved in founding one of the longest-standing Latin American branches of the WACL. Let us first consider the origins of this secret society, which is known as Los Tecos (also known as the Owls).

In these early days, the Tecos were not strictly a fascist organization; they were basically devout Catholics and traditionalists who took up arms to defend the old, established order. That changed, however, after World War II. Through the efforts of two men, a Mexican Nazi who spent World War II in Germany and an Argentine Jesuit priest who admired Hitler, the Tecos became the spiritual mentors for many of the continent's neo-Nazi movements and, eventually, the coordinators of death squads throughout Central America.

"Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the creator of the modern-day Tecos, spent World War II in Berlin. His exact roll or function there is unknown. Some say he was a secretary to Hitler; others say he was a confidant of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue who formulated the German anti-Jewish policy, and who was executed at Nuremburg. Whatever his role, Cuesta Gallardo was almost certainly used by the Germans in the hope of establishing a private Mexican army that would be sympathetic to Nazi goals on the United States's southern border. When Germany's plans for global conquest didn't work out, Cuesta Gallardo returned to Mexico but remained an ardent fascist and anti-Semite.

"Cuesta Gallardo settled in Guadalajara, the financial center of Mexico and its second-largest city...

"Cuesta Gallardo was not idle in his Guadalajara lair. He envisioned a renaissance of the Tecos, this time committed not only to fighting the anti-clerics in Mexico, but also to battling all enemies wherever they existed throughout the world. Those enemies included the United States, Jews, Freemasons, and most of the hierarchy of the Vatican church, for they were all, according to Cuesta Gallardo, conspirators in the Jewish- Freemason-Communist plot to take over the world.

"When Cuesta Gallardo embarked on this mission in the late 1940s, he could count among his allies the 'Nazi priest' whom he had met while he was in Germany. These Catholic clerics had collaborated with Germany and its allies during the war; many were not priest, but were regular war criminals who, with church assistance, had donned robes to facilitate their escape. They were now scattered throughout Western Europe and Latin America. The Tecos' present ties to the 'religious leaders' of the Croatian Ustasha and the Romanian Iron Guard most certainly date from the leader's tenure in Berlin."
(Inside the League, Scott Anderson & John Lee Anderson, pgs. 73-74)


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Carlos Cuesta Gallardo

The Tecos became involved with the League in the 1970s around the same time that the Tecos-dominated Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UAG, a college that was founded by Cuesta Gallardo in 1935) began to take off.

"By 1975, the Autonomous University of Guadalajara had a budget of ten million dollars, in what Vice-Dean Antonio Leano, a high-ranking Teco, called a 'miracle' of American and Mexican philanthropy. That miracle was the result of the funds provided by the U.S. government through the Agency for International Development (AID) and American philanthropic foundations. Between 1964 and1974, they had bestowed nearly twenty million dollars in grants to the Tecos' university.

"In all probability, some of the foundation and government officials responsible for clearing the grants to the university were not aware that it was dominated by the Tecos. Yet it is a rather glaring oversight. Within the various university departments could be found most of the Tecos' top leaders, men responsible for previously delivering scathing attacks on the Vatican, Judaism, and, in fact, the United States...

"With the influx of American financial assistance, the Tecos at the Guadalajara campus were able to finance their nonacademic programs. According to a Mexican political analyst who infiltrated the Tecos and attended their secret meetings, the grants and scholarship funds received from the United States were laundered through the university for Teco use...

"Their political activities were many. In addition to furthering their ties with neo-Nazis in Europe and South America and subsidizing the publication of their anti-Semitic magazine, Replica, the Tecos also now had the funds to establish political front groups, such as FEMACO (Mexican Anti-Communist Federation) and the IACCD (Inter-American Confederation of Continual Defense), to serve as liaisons to right-wing death squads; they became part of the World Anti-Communist League in 1972.

"Operating under the front group FEMACO, the Tecos' power within the League became enormous. Not only was Raimundo Guerrero made an executive board member, but the Mexicans proceeded to draw in their violent brethren from throughout Latin America, with little or no review by the League's Asian godfathers. Since they had created the entire Latin network, the Tecos naturally assumed leadership of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL)."
(ibid, pg. 78-79)


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the Autonomous University of Guadalajaral logo

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID, or simply AID) is long alleged to have had ties to the CIA and operated the notorious International Police Academy. AID was of course also linked to drug trafficking and Chiang Kai-Shek's KMT party.

"Puttaporn Khramkhruan, a Thai national, was arrested in 1973 for smuggling fifty-nine pounds of pure opium into the U.S. via JFK airport. Citing national security interests, the agency had the case squelched, and Khramkhruan was sent back home. However, the House subcommittee eventually established that he was a CIA operative in Thailand. In fact, he was on the payroll of a CIA proprietary using the Agency for International Development (AID) as a cover for training the corrupt Thai border police. Furthermore, Khramkhruan told a DEA investigator that he had been an officer in the KMT army and guarded opium mule caravans."
(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger, pg. 173)


Khramkhruan's ties to opium trafficking and the KMT (which was for years the ruling party in Taiwan) are most interesting as Kruger goes to allege that funding for FEMACO and CAL (the Mexican and Latin American branches of the WACL, respectively) in the 1970s came chiefly from Taiwan.

"Spearheading WACL's Latin American drive is the Confederacion Anti-comunista Latinoamericana (CAL), which is connected to the Federacion Mexicana Anticomunista (FEMACO). Financial support for these organizations is allegedly supplied through Shuen Shigh Kao, a Mexican-based agent for Taiwan intelligence..."
(ibid, pg. 196n)


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the KMT seal

Was AID being used to launder KMT drug money to regional branches of the WACL in the 1970s? The possibility is not as outlandish as it initially sounds when one considers that this was the period when the WACL first began to become internationally and publicly active after largely working in the shadows during its early years.

But back to the Tecos. So far I've established that their power base, the city of Guadalajara, was also the eventual base of operations for the Guadalajara cartel. Beyond this, the major architect of the modern-day Tecos, Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, seems to share a similar last name to Guadalajara cartel head Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. This researcher has been unable to determine whether the two were related in someway, however.

There is another curious link to the Tecos and the Guadalajara cartel that is even more compelling. It concerns the murder of journalist Manuel Buendia in 1984, whose death was eventually blamed on Federal Security Directorate (DFS) director Antonio Zorrilla Perez. The DFS is one of the most notorious institutions in Mexico's blood-soaked history.

"Formed after World War II, the DFS started out as Mexico's answer to the CIA and the counterintelligence division of the FBI. The internal security police force developed an unsavory reputation during civil unrest in the early 1970s, when DFS agents were accused of resorting to torture, assassination, and disappearances to crush urban guerrilla groups. In 1977, a secret police unit called the Brigada Blanca, the White Brigade, thought to be an offshoot of the DFS and extreme elements of the military, formed death squads to eliminate the violent left. Popular outcry forced Lopez Portillo to dismantle the White Brigade in 1980..."
(Desperados, Elaine Shannon, pgs. 203-204)


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the White Brigade in action

It has long be alleged that the White Brigade continued to function after their official disbandment on behalf of the DFS, which had long enjoyed a "special" relationship with the CIA.

But back to Buendia's murder. Unsurprisingly, the alleged master mind of the journalist's murder, former DFS director Zorrilla, was said to be in league with the Guadalajara cartel.

"Captured after two hundred policemen surrounded his hideout near Mexico City, Zorrilla was charged with being the intellectual author of the assassination of Manuel Buendia, a prominent Mexican journalist who had been gunned down on May 4, 1984. Buendia's colleagues had long contended that the murder was the work of a police death squad because Buendia died while investigating drug-related corruption within the DFS. Within minutes of the shooting in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, DFS agents cleaned out Buendia's files, and Zorrilla himself took charge of the murder case, which remain unsolved until Salinas acted.

"After Zorrilla's arrest, Mexican journalist quoting government sources reported that the investigation has determined that the former DFS chief had doled out DFS credentials to Caro Quintero, Fonseca, Felix Gallardo, and other drug traffickers. This report confirmed assertions by DEA attaché Ed Heath that Zorrilla had personally signed Caro Quintero's DFS credentials."
(ibid, pgs. 520-521)


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Antonio Zorrilla Perez

It was initially thought, however, that Buendia's murder may have been ordered by the Tecos.

"Some observers suspect that the Tecos recently eliminated at least one well-known person for personal reasons. In April 1984, Manuel Buendia, Mexico's foremost investigative journalist, wrote a three-part series exposing 'Los Tecos,' their secret code of honor, and their control of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. A month later, leaving his Mexico City office, Buendia was assassinated with four close range shots to the back. His murder is not been solved."
(Inside the League, Scott & John Lee Anderson, pg. 138n)


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Manuel Buendia

Is it possible that both theories are correct and that Buendia was murdered because he had discovered that the Guadalajara cartel was controlled by the DFS, which in turn was under the thumb of the Tecos? At least one website seems to think so. Drug Wars [url]states[/url]:
"The DFS, the Federal Security Directorate, Mexico's CIA-trained combined CIA and FBI, was created as a subdivision of the Interior Ministry in the 1940's. In the mid-70's it organized Mexico's competing dealers and growers, centralizing all Mexican-based dope distribution. This operation was based in Guadalajara, home of the "Owl" death squads and the CIA's Autonomous University of Guadalajara, the Owl base, from which emanated the DFS's "White Brigade" death squads. The centralization enabled the DFS to rake off 25% of the cartel's gross - billions - and to protect its income more efficiently.

"The Owls were founded by Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, a Mexican Nazi who spent World War II in Germany. Hitler's plan was to use Cuesta as his Mexican Quisling. The co-founder of the Owls was Father Julio Meinveille, an Argentine Jesuit. Meinveille is the author of The Jew, The Cabal of Progressivism, Among the Church and the Reich and Conspiracy Against the Church. These are the Owls' bibles...

"When Manuel Buendia, a famous investigative journalist for Mexico City's daily Excelsior revealed these facts in 1984, he was shot dead. First on the murder scene was the Mexican DFS, whose agents immediately cleaned out Buendia's files, which were said to contain a videotape of high government officials meeting with Mexico's most powerful drug dealers. The engineer of the murder was the head of the DFS, Antonio Zorilla, whom Buendia had trusted as a source and confidant. Buendia was apparently unaware that the DFS shared operational control of the Owls."


Image

This researcher has not been able to definitively confirm the link between the Tecos and the DFS/White Brigade but the group's slogan (as well as its long alleged ties to right-wing death squads) seems to allude to such a vigilante group.

"In recent years, the slogan of the once-obscure Tecos, Contra la guerilla roja, la guerilla blanca ('Against the red gorilla, the white guerrilla), has been put into practice throughout the continent."
(Inside the League, Scott & John Lee Anderson, pg. 72)


Earlier in Inside the League the Andersons would also note that a source alleged to them that CAL members sometimes referred to themselves as White Brigades, among other things.

"CAL, it turned out, was the acronym for the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation. An intelligence informant in Mexico confirmed its existence and described it as a neo-Nazi splinter group formed after World War II.

"'CAL is also called the White Hand, the White Force, and the White Brigade,' the source explained. 'It got its name because it has the backing of powerful people who erase all evidence surrounding a murder.'"
(ibid, pg. xvi)


Again, I have not been able to confirm definitively that the CAL's White Brigade is the same as the one used by the DFS, but it surely seems more than mere coincidence.

Before wrapping things up, I should address something I'm sure readers are curious about: Yes, there are indications that the Tecos were some type of occult order. Tecos, as noted above, are also known as the Owls. This of course immediately brings to mind the notorious Bohemian Grove, but I've found nothing indicate that there was a connection to the Tecos (in general, the occult symbolism of the Grove is quite obscure).

Image


The Tecos had their origins in a radical traditionalist Catholic vigilante group called Los Cristeros that was founded in the 1910s. Much of the evidence seems to indicate that they stayed within this world view, having deeply embraced (and propagated throughout Latin America) the Freemasonic-Judaic-Communist world government conspiracy theories. And yet they themselves were a secret society with some type of bizarre initiation ceremony.

"In early April 1970, heavily armed police in the northern Mexico city of Hermosillo , sealed off a section of Calle 14 de Abril and, with guns drawn, stormed one of its buildings. In it's cluttered rooms, they discovered Nazi magazines and leaflets, piles of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and codebooks. Most intriguing of all were a half-dozen grotesque papier-mâché masks.

"The masks were props used at initiation ceremonies for one of Mexico's most violent and feared secret societies. The raid was a strike against the Tecos, a network of some three or four hundred neo-Nazis whose members were divided into cells and took oaths of blind obedience to their leaders."
(ibid, pg. 71)


In general there is very little information available about the rituals of the Tecos. They did have some type of relationship, however, with a mysterious organization also represented in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (which, as noted in part one, was one of the chief organizations behind the original founding of the WACL).

"In particular, the Tecos have close ties with the Romanian Iron Guard fascists of Horia Sima in Spain, and it could be more than coincidence that Teco 'cells' are composed of thirteen followers, the same number as in the Iron Guard 'nests.'
(ibid, pg. 74n)


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the Iron Guard seal

The Iron Guard, originally known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, was one of the most notorious Nazi Quisling groups. It was, publically, a fanatical far right Orthodox Christian movement that became a political party in Romania in 1927. It was dedicated to the purging of Romania of Jews, foreigners, communists and Freemasons and came to power in 1940 with ample backing from the Nazi regime. The Guard featured one of the most notorious clerical fascists ever, the Orthodox bishop Valerian Trifa.

And yet, despite it's radical Christian front, the Iron Guard also seemingly had occultic undertones. One of its chief backers was Baron Julius Evola, the legendary Italian fascist and esotericist who would have an enormous influence on post-WWII fascist occultism.

"Evola enthusiastically embraced the fanatically anti-Semitic Legion, and in 1938 wrote a series of articles in Guardia that were never reprinted in his lifetime. He praised Codreanu's struggle against 'the Judaic horde' and said that since his earliest days, 'Codreanu a clear idea of what a communist takeover of Romania would mean... the country's total enslavement... to the filthiest tyranny, the talmudic, Israelite tyranny...'
"Evola wrote his articles during a time of crisis. Codreanu's Legion had grown so powerful that Romania's King Carol II launched a series of savage attacks on it. In November 1938, 14 Legion men... were taken out of their prison cells, strangled with ropes, and then reported shot in the back while trying to escape. One Legion supporter who managed to avoid execution was Mircea Eliade, the world famous scholar of religion and one of Evola's closest Romanian friends. After being picked up during the 1938 crackdown, he managed to get himself released from jail and transferred to a sanitarium. His escaped from death was ironic given that there is evidence that he had helped develop the Legion's notorious ' Long Live Death!' ideology. Eliade first read Evola during his student days..."
(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 317-318)


Image

Image
Julius Evola (top) and Mircea Eliade (bottom)

Mircea Eliade would of course have an enormous influence on the modern occult and metaphysical scenes the world over in the wake of World War II. That the ideology of both Eliade and Evola had an influence on the supposedly fanatical Orthodox Iron Guard is highly probable. Nor was the Guard the only organization affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League with ties to Evola: the Baron had also been deeply involved with the post-WWII Italian fascist groups Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and the Ordine Nuovo. What's more, Evola (a former SD asset) would continue to have ties to former Guardists as well.

And these Guardists in turn were apparently in league with the Tecos, a fanatical traditionalist Catholic organization opposing the Freemasonic-Judaic-Communist conspiracy as a secret society with occult trappings. Stranger still is the fact that this is not the first time I've considered such a seemingly contradictory organization in league with far right wing elements. Regular readers of this blog should immediately be reminded of the Sovereign Order of Saint John, another traditionalist Catholic secret society that has long been accused of occult rituals. The Order was actively involved with the long-time WACL ally the American Security Council, as noted before here.



More at: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2013/10/s ... orism.html
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:26 am

http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/mayor-killed-after-less-than-a-day-in-office/

Mexico News Daily | Saturday,
January 2, 2016
Fifty-eight new mayors assumed office without incident in Oaxaca this week, but not so in Temixco, Morelos, where Gisela Mota Ocampo was assassinated this morning, a day within being sworn in.

....

PRD national president Agustín Basave condemned the killing and observed that Mota, 33, was a strong and courageous woman who had declared on taking office that her fight against crime would be “head-on and direct.”
"When I'm done ranting about elite power that rules the planet under a totalitarian government that uses the media in order to keep people stupid, my throat gets parched. That's why I drink Orange Drink!"
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 16, 2016 1:39 pm

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2546-os ... e-anderson

Óscar Martínez, Sala Negra, and El Salvador: an Introduction by Jon Lee Anderson

By Jon Lee Anderson / 09 March 2016

Jon Lee Anderson is a war correspondent and an investigative journalist for The New Yorker. The following is his introduction to Óscar Martínez's A History of Violence.


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In A History of Violence, Oscar Martínez befriends a contract killer living in a small Salvadoran town. The killer, the Hollywood Kid, has ratted out numerous former accomplices to police, but, sensing that the government doesn’t care enough to protect him, he fretfully awaits his execution at their hands. The Hollywood Kid has a shotgun to defend himself, but when the moment finally comes, he is defenseless, on his way home from his baby daughter’s baptism. At the burial, Óscar is accosted by his dead friend’s enemies, who appear in the cemetery to gloat and swagger.

One night, a swashbuckling Honduran police official nicknamed El Tigre—The Tiger—with a fearsome notoriety as the leader of a death squad that executes criminal suspects, and who tells Óscar, “Everyone knows not to fuck with me,” concedes defeat as the two drive along a lonely rural stretch of the border where the narcos are more powerful than any law he could hope to impose.

Another evening, as a group of terrified families pack up their homes in a slum in the Salvadoran capital to flee a threatened massacre at the hands of a drug gang, Óscar is on the scene. A police official arrives and pleads with the families to stay. But, instead of offering security guarantees, he asks them to put their faith in God, and invites them to join him in a prayer ceremony. One of the men, powerless to alter his family’s circumstances, weeps quietly and tells Óscar of the humiliation he feels.

As he prowls the back roads, bars and police precincts of Central America in a stubborn search for truth, Óscar Martínez exhibits the instincts of a detective and the soul of a poet. His sources are window washers, prostitutes, would-be migrants, killers—sicarios—good and bad cops, judges and prosecutors. Óscar is a Marlowe in a world that is long on injustice and short on much of anything else.

Óscar’s previous book, The Beast, was a gritty firsthand chronicle of the dramatic journeys undertaken by Central American migrants on their journey northwards through Mexico to the United States.

This book, a collection of fourteen investigative pieces written by Óscar over the past several years from Central America itself, is intended to explain to Americans why it is that Central Americans flee—they don’t migrate—from their homelands, due to the violence generated there, year after year, with a great deal of American participation.

Óscar is himself a Salvadoran, and what he sees when he looks at his country, and its immediate neighbors, is a war zone. It has been that way for most of his life. Martínez was born in 1983, three years into a brutal twelve-year civil war, which by the time it ended in an impunity-for-all 1992 peace deal had killed 75,000 people and wrecked the lives of many more. But, in a sense, the conflict, in which the US played a preponderant role, never really ended. Along with former guerrillas and ex-soldiers, the offspring of returned war refugees soon formed a crazy quilt of gangs–Maras–inspired by the ones in Los Angeles, where many of them had been raised. Today criminal violence has replaced the political violence with levels of bloodshed that comes, at times, chillingly close to those of wartime. Outside of the contemporary killing grounds of Syria and Iraq, in fact, few regions are as consistently murderous as is “peacetime” Central America.

One of the main reasons for the violence is the drug trade. Just as Central America’s geography once made it a strategic battleground of the Cold War, that same geography today has determined that the region is the ultimate corridor for narcotics shipments from Colombia to the US consumer market. That fact, together with Central America’s chronic poverty and its widespread lawlessness, has turned an astonishing number of people into gangsters. Policemen, judges, and politicians are as likely to be corrupt as to be honest. There are as many as 50,000 Salvadorans directly involved in gangs and up to half a million more, out of a population of 6 million, who are economically dependent on them.

Neighboring Honduras, too, has become the stomping ground for hyper-violent drug gangs and corrupt police—and, accordingly, for the past several years, the country has had the highest murder rates of any country in the world. With El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize close behind.

To give an idea of what this means, consider the fact that the United States, usually regarded as a violent country, has a current average of 4.5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras has 90. In 2015, El Salvador’s murder rate began to skyrocket, and, by the end of summer, with an average of one murder taking place every hour, and a tally of around 4,000 dead already for the year, it looked ready to edge Honduras out of first place. According to an August 2015 article in the Guardian, the latest murder statistics suggest that El Salvador is “twenty times more violent than the United States, ninety times more violent than Great Britain.”

Indignation over this state of affairs is partly what motivates Óscar, who runs Sala Negra, a crime investigations unit for El Faro, the groundbreaking investigative Central American online magazine based in El Salvador. A slow-burning outrage about the incapacity of the Central American states to provide protection and justice for its citizens pervades Óscar’s pieces assembled in this book.

Reporting on the flight of civilian families from the gang-threatened San Salvador slum, for instance, Óscar writes:

Breaking news this Tuesday, January 20, 2015. There is a live audience, watching as if it were a soccer game: people peeking out from their kitchen windows as they eat lunch. Live and direct: more than a dozen families fleeing their San Valentín condos in the city of Mejicanos. There are also film crews, cops directing traffic, and other idling spectators. The police are offering protection for families who have been threatened by the Barrio 18 gang. Gang members threatened to kill by tonight. The residents of San Valentín, taking the threat seriously, are now fleeing on live national television.


Óscar similarly laments the execution of the Hollywood Kid, but not because he thought he was a nice guy. He wasn’t. As he told Óscar, he’d personally killed fifty-four people, including several women. Óscar’s lamentation was over the inadequacy of the Salvadoran state, which had failed in its promise to protect its witness, who, despite his criminal past had helped bring numerous other killers to justice. “Without his help, thirty killers would be running loose in El Salvador,” writes Óscar.

In an article published in July 2015, Óscar and two of his Sala Negra colleagues, Daniel Valencia Caravantes and Roberto Valencia, reported the explosive results of their inquiry into a supposed March shootout between gangsters and police, in which eight Maras, including a young woman, were killed. They revealed that what the police had alleged was untrue, and that the Maras, as well as a couple of innocent bystanders, were murdered in cold blood. It had been a massacre, and there had been a cover-up. Even before this story broke, the Sala Negra team had received death threats, and on the day before publication, Óscar and his two coauthors left San Salvador, to be on the safe side.

On their return, the death threats continued. Óscar carried on with his reporting, but his daily routine now involved a host of new security precautions. In an email message he sent me on September 18, he promised, “I’ve taken the decision to leave the country for a period, to give my family a break from this, and some peace of mind. For me, it will be a pause in the combat.” The pause was shortlived, and it was not long before Óscar was back reporting on what for him, clearly, has become a kind of war of his own.
One senses that, in the end, what Óscar Martínez is fighting for is a reality where families like his, and those of the people he reports on, can finally live in peace, without fear of being murdered, a Central America where its citizens do not have to leave in order to survive.


This essay is the introduciton to Óscar Martínez's A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America.
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Re: War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

Postby Grizzly » Wed Mar 16, 2016 4:36 pm

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fast-and-fu ... ut-mexico/

Fast and Furious gun found at El Chapo hideout

This was reported a month ago, but CBS programimng found some reason to report on it today.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01 ... gram.html#
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