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WEEKEND EDITION JANUARY 17-19, 2014

Organized Crime: An American Tradition

The DEA and the Sinaloa Cartel

by NICK ALEXANDROV

El Universal, the Mexican newspaper, reported on January 6 that Washington and the
Sinaloa Cartel have cooperated for years. Sinaloa lawyer Humberto Loya-Castro stated
that [DEA] agents told him that, in exchange for information about rival drug trafficking
organizations, the United States government agreednot to interfere with his drug
trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel, published court documents reveal.
These disclosures should be considered together with those the intrepid journalist Anabel
Hernndez published in Los Seores del Narco, translated as Narcoland for last falls
English-language release. Her main argument, as she explained on Democracy Now! last
September, is that in Mexico there isnt really a war against the drug cartels. What exists
in the government of Felipe Caldern was a war between the cartels, and the government
took a side of that war, protecting the Sinaloa Cartel.
President Caldern, during his six-year term ending in 2012, presided over an
unprecedented slaughterperhaps 120,000 Mexicans were murdered while he held
office, Le Monde estimatedand the distribution of unprecedented U.S. fundingwell
over $1 billion by April 2013to the Mexican military, police, and judicial systems for
training and equipment, the Center for International Policys Laura Carlsen
summarized. When his term ended, he fled to an institution certain to ignore the blood on
his handsnamely Harvard, where he was a Mason Fellow at the Kennedy School of
Government.
Past recipients of this honor include Hctor Gramajo Morales, an architect of the
genocidal rampage that ripped through Guatemalas countryside in the 1980s, and a guest
speaker at the School of the Americas in December 1991, during its commencement
exercises. One wonders whether, to mark the occasion, he imparted his political
philosophy: You neednt kill everyone to complete the job. Massacring 30% of the
public was more reasonable, he stressed.
In her review of Washingtons Mexican policy, Carlsen noted that Thomas Shannon, U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, remarked in April 2007 that

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U.S. assistance for Mexican security forces was a means of armoring NAFTA, the
so-called free trade agreement that turned 20 years old as this month began. The
arrangement, DEA official Phil Jordan explained, was a deal made in narco heaven.
For Mexican drug cartels, U.S. Army War College professor Paul Rexton Kan writes,
the provisions of NAFTA came at an opportune time, when U.S. interdiction of
Colombian cocaine in the Caribbean was increasingly taxing Colombian groups while the
demand for methamphetamines in the United States skyrocketed, indicated in the
number of meth-related emergency room visits in the United States, which doubled
between 1991 and 1994. The result was that Mexican cartels were able to capitalize on
newly available overland routes to bring cocaine and meth to the U.S. market, and
commercial-vehicle smuggling shot up 25% in NAFTAs first yearthe biggest jump on
record, Kan concludes.
The connections between NAFTA, drug smuggling, and the ruin free tradeslang for
the U.S. dumping of government-subsidized corn into Mexicobrought to the Mexican
countryside are rarely examined. Dale Wiehoff, of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade
Policy, is one of the few writers reflecting upon these interwoven developments, and
argued last summer that the exploding numbers of unemployed and displaced young
Mexicans were vulnerable to the drug cartels[.] Displacement is fueled by the conversion
of subsistence lands to potential profit sources, with poor farming communities shattered
in the process. In the state of Sinaloa, where the cartel originated, NAFTA spurred these
processes of territorial transfer, as agribusinesses amassed plots that had once been
worked collectively.
Tracy Wilkinson reviewed current conditions there in the Los Angeles Times last autumn.
On the enormous farms, the planting, weeding, pruning, and picking of the vegetables
fall to armies of workers from Mexicos poorest states, like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and others
NAFTA devastated. Carmen Hernandez Ramos is 52 and looks 80, and is just one of the
many laborers there who feel trapped, Wilkinson explained, and are housed in fenced
compounds in desolate regions.
But not everyone suffers. The Guardian reported in July 2012 that HSBC, Europes largest
bank, had laundered billions of dollars for drug cartels, its subsidiaries permitting
Mexican drug lords to buy planes with money laundered through Cayman Islands
accounts. Leopoldo Barroso, a former bank official, voiced worries regarding allegations
of 60% to 70% of laundered proceeds in Mexico moving through HSBC, supposedly
tainted by these revelations, as if its money would have been clean otherwise. But the
differences between legitimate and illegitimate business activity are vague, if even
meaningful, as Roberto Saviano observes in his foreword to Hernndezs Narcoland: the
book demonstrates that it is not the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern

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capitalist enterprise, but instead capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia.
Others would say this assessment doesnt go far enoughthat organized crime is intrinsic
to capitalism, a phenomenon that complemented rather than conflicted with the
maturation of U.S. economic and political power structures, British historian Michael
Woodiwiss argues, pointing out that the United States can claim no legitimacy in its
alleged anti-crime initiatives. Pick any episode in the countrys history, whether the
frequently criminal exploitation of African American and other working peoples, the
enactment of prohibition laws that fostered corruption and criminal enterprise, or the
involvement of intelligence agencies in drug trafficking operations, and this fundamental
point is made. The recent DEA-Sinaloa revelations only drive it home.
Nick Alexandrov reports on the deteriorating political climate in Honduras in
the December issue of CounterPunch magazine. He lives in Washington, DC.

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