What If There Are No Drug Cartels?...Then What?...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas | It's not exactly what everyone believes or has been told. Mexico's drug cartels are led by a bold criminal element, and both the U.S. and Mexico are fighting them. Uh, well, maybe not.

Journalist Rachel Nolan has written an eye-opening report and had it published in the current issue of well-respected Harper's Magazine (www.harpers.org). In it, she details a bit of the history associated with the arrival and rise in Mexico of the drug-pushing enterprises after the fall of drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia.

Nolan cuts nicely through some known and previously-unknown anecdotal happenings, such as the steady arrests of some of the country's governmental bigwigs in connection with bribes allegedly taken from the cartels. She also does some learned speculating.

This is a key, telling excerpt from the magazine article: [ The rumors and speculation have only become more baroque. So naturally I was interested to read a recent book that offered a new way of thinking about the open question of the drug wars: about who - or what - might be behind the screen. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, by Oswaldo Zavala, a Mexican journalist turned professor, asks us to consider what at first may seem an absurd proposition: What if there are no cartels? What if it’s all a lie, a cover-up? Behind the screen, Zavala proposes, is not a narco killer with gelled hair and a taste for expensive tequila - but the police, the army, and various arms of the state. ]

That's a Big Wow right there.

No drug cartels and the Mexican government as the actual cartel. Is that why Mexico's president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, this week said the U.S. was making too much of the size of the cartels? He seemed to laugh it off, yes.

Only, Journalist Nolan goes ahead and implicates the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). All are in some sort of cahoots, enjoying the generous fruits of the ranging enterprise. Also thrown out is this: Those cartel names were invented and promoted by the DEA.

I know. It sounds like a Benicio Del Toro movie.

But there is so much more the article brings us. The author tells us that there is a reason why AMLO, as the president of Mexico is best-known, has gone light on ridding his country of the cartels as most people know of them. She also notes that former Mexican President Felipe Calderon did wage bloody war against the so-called regional cartels, but is of the opinion that tricky Calderon was merely insuring the seating of his top and trusted military people atop the cartel hierarchy.

It's a lengthy, facts-filled report that would be too long for this Blog platform.

But check it out.

It's worth your time if the subject interests you...

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