Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 15:51:37 -0400 From: Chris Donald <[ai 256] at [ccn.cs.dal.ca]> To: Multiple recipients of list <[d r ctalk] at [drcnet.org]> Subject: REPOST ARTICLE San Diego CA Drugs? From Mexico? A real news flash (fwd) Subject: ARTICLE San Diego CA Drugs? From Mexico? A real news flash San Diego Union-Tribune [l--t--s] at [uniontrib.com] http:// www.uniontrib.com Doug Hope Managing Editor August 4, 1996, Sunday HEADLINE: The drug trade climbs aboard shipments of goods from Mexico BYLINE: Peter Andreas ANDREAS is a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and coauthor of " Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial," to be published this summer by the University of California Press. BODY: Mexico has long been enmeshed in the drug trade, but its involvement has been transformed in the last decade. Primarily, Mexico has emerged as the primary shipping point for Colombian cocaine into the United States. The State Department estimates that the percentage of the cocaine bound for the U.S. market entering through Mexico was negligible during the mid-1980s but increased to as much as 70 percent by 1995. Mexico also supplies up to 30 percent of the heroin consumed in the United States and up to 80 percent of the imported marijuana, according to a March 1996 State Department report. Mexico earns more than $7 billion a year from the illegal drug trade, the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates. Some Mexican estimates place the figure much higher. The prosecutor general's office estimates that drug traffickers operating in Mexico accumulated revenues of approximately $30 billion in 1994. Mexico's growing role in the drug trade has significantly increased the power and wealth of Mexico's trafficking organizations and that has, in turn, exacerbated well-entrenched political corruption. Corrupt officials sell an essential service to drug traffickers: the nonenforcement of the law. Not surprisingly, as Mexico's role in the illicit drug trade has grown, so too has the buying off of law enforcement -- not only within Mexico, but on the U.S. side as well. Not coincidentally, Mexico's expanding role in the drug trade parallels the opening of the Mexican economy and the deepening of U.S.-Mexican economic integration. Colombian cocaine traffickers began turning to Mexico as a major entry point to the U.S. market in the early 1980s after the United States cracked down on cocaine shipping through the Caribbean. By now a strategic alliance exists between Colombian and Mexican traffickers. The Colombians process the cocaine and ship it to Mexico, the Mexicans smuggle it into the United States. Mexican imports of legal goods from Colombia increased from $17 million in 1980 to $121 million in 1985. At the same time, Mexican imports from the rest of Latin America decreased from $768 million to $630 million. Legal exports from Mexico to the United States doubled between 1986 and 1993. Hiding drug shipments within the growing volume of goods exported from Mexico to the United States has become an increasingly favored method of smuggling cocaine. These trends thrive under the North American Free Trade Agreement. A report written by an intelligence officer at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City claims that cocaine traffickers established factories, warehouses and trucking companies as fronts in Mexico in anticipation of the cross-border commerce boom under NAFTA. "If NAFTA provides opportunity for legitimate businesses, it may clearly provide opportunities for illegitimate businessmen," Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn MacTaggart has said. Trucking provides the most concrete illustration of this trend. According to one senior customs official, to inspect every truck coming across the border would create a traffic jam as far as Mexico City. So only a small percentage of trucks are fully inspected. Under the NAFTA agreement, trucking into the United States from Mexico is increasing rapidly. In 1994, 2.8 million trucks crossed over from Mexico. In 1993, on the eve of NAFTA, the number was 1.9 million. The U.S. Southwest Border Capital Improvement Program will upgrade the road network so that it will be able to handle more than double today's traffic level -- as many as 8.4 million trucks annually. Mexican truckers will soon be allowed to operate throughout the border states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. They will eventually be able to travel anywhere in the United States and Canada. Trucks can carry illegal goods as easily as legal goods. One truck that was stopped near San Diego carried 8 tons of cocaine stuffed into cans of jalapeno peppers. Law enforcement officials believe that the cocaine belonged to a businessman who owns one of the biggest trucking companies in Mexico. As part of an effort to hide drugs within trans-border shipments of legal goods, some Mexican traffickers have reportedly hired trade consultants to determine which products move most quickly through border inspection under NAFTA guidelines. "They have very specific issues," notes Craig Chretien, the special agent in charge of the DEA's San Diego office. "Does a perishable get through quicker than a load of steel? What kind of cargoes go through faster than others?" Concerns about drug control were not discussed during the negotiations over NAFTA. "This was in the too hot to handle' category," says Gary Hufbauer, an economist at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. Reportedly, U.S. customs and drug enforcement personnel openly call NAFTA the "North American Drug Trade Agreement." Meanwhile, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the deregulation of the Mexican banking system facilitate the laundering of drug profits. And the cutting of government subsidies in Mexico's rural areas are increasing the incentive for peasant farmers to produce illegal crops such as marijuana. An internal DEA report -- obtained by the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act -- concludes that "increased illicit drug production will probably be a direct result of the discontinuation of subsistence crop subsidies." Drug production is expanding in Mexico's more remote rural regions. Efforts to cut the foreign drug supply into the United States have a long history of failure. And the likelihood of success diminishes further as market liberalization and economic integration propel ever more extensive cross-border exchange. Evaluations of free market reform are largely divorced and insulated from evaluations of drug market prohibition. Thus, congressional committees and government agencies endlessly debate how to attack the drug supply and gain greater cooperation from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Meanwhile, those concerned with the implementation of market-based reforms carefully monitor an assortment of economic indicators. The reports they publish rarely even mention the drug trade, let alone discuss its ties to the formal economy. It is as if drug trafficking were not an economic matter at all. But while such institutionalized denial may be politically convenient, it perpetuates both a fundamental misreading of the problem and unworkable strategies for dealing with it.