You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (61 page)

The cartel’s stance softened slightly when one of Escobar’s partners was shot down in a gun battle and the United States sent troops into Panama and seized its dictator, Manuel Noriega, for drug trafficking. In secret, the Extraditables began talks with the Colombian government. Colombian politicians who opposed the talks ceased to exist. The press was already scared into silence, except for Bogotá’s
El Espectador
, and they had paid heavily, losing a publisher, several executives, and half a dozen reporters.

In September of 1990 the Colombian president offered the traffickers a deal. If they turned themselves in they would be tried in Colombia, not the United States. Although Washington was shocked and dismayed, Colombians danced in the streets.

Although his partners, the Ochoa brothers, took the deal promptly, Escobar held out for a better one. The concessions were apparent when the press saw his specially made “prison.” His cell was a three-room suite. The compound had a soccer field, a disco, and a bar where at weekly parties the guards served drinks to hit men and prostitutes. America was enraged and the government was further embarrassed when it became apparent Escobar was still running the drug trade out of his prison.

The Colombian government’s tolerance broke when Escobar brought some former employees to his prison to be tortured and murdered. The Colombian army moved to relocate Escobar but he was tipped off and fled. He stayed on the lam for another year and a half before he was finally gunned down on a rooftop during a
shootout with police on December 3, 1993. The people of Colombia who were not on Escobar’s payroll celebrated and Bush was euphoric. The head of the DEA proclaimed, “No matter how powerful they are . . . they are not immune.”
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Although Escobar’s videotaped death made a great television clip, like most drug war “victories” it was ridiculously and painfully futile. After thousands of deaths and billions of dollars were spent to break the Medellín Cartel, cocaine was cheaper and more available in America than before.
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In addition, it is questionable how much of Escobar’s downfall was due to the Colombian government and the DEA. Escobar’s trail of terror had left him with scores of enemies, such as the powerful Cali Cartel that quickly replaced him.

Like his idol, Al Capone, Escobar became a global celebrity with his brazen and bloody exploits. However, just like Capone, he was not a clever drug dealer. Clever drug dealers avoid headlines, they do not make them. The best ones are never heard of at all. If Escobar did not embarrass the Colombian government with his ostentatious “prison,” he might be free now, like the Ochoa brothers who only served five years.

After the decade-long battle with the Medellín Cartel, Colombians no longer had the desire to continue to fight despite the verbal and financial exhortations from the United States. And cartels are not reserved to Colombia. When Bush shut down massive importation into Florida by the Colombians, the cocaine flow switched to the Mexican border and gave rise to Mexican cartels. Like Cali, the Mexican traffickers under the leadership of the “Godfather” Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo knew to lay low; however the top popped on May 24, 1993.

That day a cardinal arrived as an ambassador of the Pope to soothe relations with President Carlos Salinas. After His Eminence entered a car at the airport, a young man blew him away with fourteen bullets. Other gunmen lit up the area, killing the cardinal’s driver and five other bystanders, including an elderly woman and her nephew.

The gunmen proceeded into the terminal flashing police badges and boarded an airplane headed for Tijuana that was supposed to have left twenty minutes earlier. Not only did the plane patiently wait for the gunmen but upon arrival in
Tijuana, Mexican police gave them an escort to the American border, where they disappeared.

This stunning hit focused the world’s attention on Mexico and was likely a colossal error. The cardinal was supposed to arrive at the airport at the same time as a head of the Sinaloa Cartel. It appears the rival Tijuana Cartel mistakenly hit the cardinal, who was riding in a Mercury Grand Marquis, a popular car with drug lords.
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The Mexican government was negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement and to repair its reputation it desperately tried to arrest the Arellano Félix brothers of the Tijuana cartel. Just like Escobar, the Arellano Félix brothers refused to hide and would be seen out dining and shopping. This embarrassment led Mexico City to send an elite federal squad led by the incorruptible commander Alejandro Castañeda.

In March of 1994 the commander ordered a suspicious Chevy Suburban to the side of a busy road in Tijuana. The windows of the Suburban exploded as gunmen inside blasted away at the commander’s entourage. Amazingly, Castañeda escaped harm and after his men won the gun battle, he found that they had apprehended Javier Arellano Félix. Another carload of law enforcement soon arrived. They were local state police, but instead of assisting Castañeda’s men they shot Castañeda in the back with an AK-47, drove off his federal troops and took Arellano Félix back into hiding.

Several weeks later a presidential candidate, Luis Donald Colosio, was assassinated at a political rally. His death was followed by the deaths of a slew of top lawmen and prosecutors put on the case. One newly installed leader of the federal police found that most of his force did not even pick up their paychecks. Their official income was so negligible compared to the bribes they collected that it was not worth the effort. For these sorts of revelations the new leader was soon poisoned in his sleep. The poison did not kill him but left him totally paralyzed.

By the mid-1990s, Mexico was Colombia North. The violence between the Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels was evidence that the “Godfather,” Félix Gallardo, had lost his control of the Mexican drug traffic. (Tijuana was run by his nephews, while Sinaloa was run by his former lieutenants.) Another cartel—the Gulf Cartel—would also grow powerful under the protection of President Carlos Salinas’ brother, Raul. After leaving office in 1994 Carlos Salinas fled to Ireland to avoid questioning about how that cartel had gone relatively untouched.

Succeeding Mexican presidents fought the drug war tepidly. As Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000–2003 admitted in a more candid moment, “It is said that each administration in Mexico . . . will pick and choose which cartel to go after, to sort of offer them up as a sacrificial lamb to the Americans and, in a way, at least tolerate the other cartels that they don’t go after.”
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This middle course is understandable as it allowed Mexico to continue to receive American aid while avoiding turning the country into the bloody battleground seen during Colombia’s all-out drug war in the 1980s. However, President Felipe Calderón scorned this path when he was elected in 2006. Just ten days after taking office in December he sent over 4,000 army soldiers into the state of Michoacán to combat La Familia cartel.

La Familia had made international news in September when it seized five men from a mechanic’s shop and killed them by hacking off their heads with bowie knives. Beheadings are common in Mexican drug violence, but these perpetrators proceeded to a crowded nightclub where they got everyone’s attention by waving machine guns and then tossed the five bloody heads onto the middle of the dance floor.
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La Familia had been aligned with the Gulf Cartel. Since the 2003 arrest of the Gulf Cartel’s leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, La Familia had been trying to establish itself independently. This would be prophetic for Calderón’s blitzkrieg. He would successfully capture cartel leaders but these victories would create power vacuums smaller groups would violently fight to fill. The result has been an explosion in drug-related deaths. Under six years of President Vicente Fox (2000–2006) there were roughly 23,000 drug-related homicides. Under Calderón (2006–2012) there were almost 50,000 in his first five years.
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Although receiving financial support and backing from the United States, Mexicans may be tiring of the carnage of the all-out drug war, just like the Colombians did in 1990. A 2010 poll found only twenty-one percent of Mexicans felt Calderón’s crusade had made the country safer and half felt it had heightened danger.
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Calderón may be tiring as well. In August of 2009 Calderón’s administration decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs in Mexico and he called for an international debate on the merits of complete legalization.

The world’s illegal cocaine market has matured, just as the domestic crack market has. Territories have been divvied and underground operations have been refined. The market is still brutally violent, but the carnage of the 1980s has subsided. Although the “war” rhetoric continues from American politicians and bureaucrats sitting safely on high, wise law enforcement in America’s inner-city trenches and governments abroad, whose entire countries are potential battlegrounds, know that a real war is not worth the casualties.
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The result is a political folly that allows America’s drug bureaucracies to receive their money,
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and allows worried mothers across America to be told the evil of drugs is being fought to the hilt. In Colombia the result is Plan Colombia. Started by President Bill Clinton, Plan Colombia is a billion-dollar program with three prongs. The first is that America gives money, weapons, and training to the Colombian army to fight narco-trafficking. However, the army is primarily used against the country’s leftist rebels and is complicit in horrific human rights violations. The army aids right-wing paramilitaries that slaughter, rape, and mutilate villagers accused of leftist sympathies.
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As of 2003 the country’s main paramilitary, which frequently fought alongside the army, controlled about forty percent of Colombia’s drug trafficking.
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Since 2003 figures are difficult to come by, as paramilitaries have been officially disbanded; however, they continue to operate.
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Another prong of Plan Colombia is that millions of tax dollars go into spraying rural peasants’ coca fields. This spraying, like the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, is indiscriminate. Although the planes target coca, the air-dropped chemicals kill all plant life. Despite what the U.S. State Department has asserted,
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this spraying has not been effective in lowering coca production.
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Like marijuana, coca is a hardy plant. It is a perennial shrub that can grow on steep slopes and infertile acidic soils that cannot support other crops.

Spraying also infuriates the peasants. It kills their sustenance crops and may cause long-term damage to their health and environment. This spraying has been a recruiting boon to the country’s leftist rebels who control areas of Colombia as large as Switzerland and continue Colombia’s civil war. In fact, it is likely the rebels would
have been rendered impotent years ago without Plan Colombia hectoring the rural population.
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The third prong of Plan Colombia has American money subsidizing peasants who grow alternatives to coca. This is exorbitantly expensive and still comically insufficient as coca growing can be four to ten times as profitable as other crops.
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Like their government, which takes America’s money and uses it to fight rebels, peasants take America’s money and continue to grow coca.

America’s international meddling goes beyond fighting narco-trafficking. Drug criminalization is a fragile proposition that does not hold up to informed criticism. It is therefore necessary to silence critics completely and that is what federal bureaucrats have done.

Since the First Amendment does not apply to foreigners, American bureaucrats can freely bully foreigners for merely thinking differently. United States ambassadors in Latin America have repeatedly demanded the dismissal of officials who oppose the war on drugs. Their ability to get foreign officers and politicians dismissed is openly acknowledged by foreign presidents.
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America’s power in this area stems from its immense wealth. It can deny financial aid to impoverished countries, and for more economically sound countries there is the threat of economic sanctions, such as prohibitive tariffs on exports to the United States. (Tariffs hurt American consumers and honest businesses abroad.) Since the mid-1980s each drug-producing country is reviewed annually for certification based on its participation in the war on drugs. If it is not compliant, the above sanctions are taken. When a special commission in Jamaica considered decriminalizing marijuana in 2001, a spokesman from the United States’ Jamaican embassy threatened to take any decriminalization into consideration when deciding whether Jamaica received certification.
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This micro-management was audacious considering some American states have decriminalized marijuana. Would our federal government have the gall to impose economic sanctions on California for its legalization of medical marijuana? Is it the United States’ business to be threatening economic sanctions because Jamaicans want to smoke marijuana
in their own country
?

Much of the coercion is done secretly to give the appearance that the world wholeheartedly supports America’s war on drugs. For example, at the end of April
2006 the Mexican legislature passed a bill decriminalizing possession of small amounts of any drug. Mexican president Vicente Fox had submitted it to allow Mexico’s overwhelmed police to focus on drug traffickers. Fox was set to sign the bill when American drug authorities became involved. One of the few American papers to give coverage was the
New York Times
, which briefly reported: “Officials from the State Department and the White House’s drug control office met with the Mexican ambassador in Washington Monday and expressed grave reservations about the law, saying it would draw tourists to Mexico who want to take drugs and would lead to more consumption . . .”
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