Peruvian Cocaine

Artists: Immortal Technique, Pumpkinhead, Diabolic, Tonedeff, Poison Pen, Loucipher, C-Rayz Walz.

Actors: Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, Wesley Snipes, Mario Van Peebles, Ice-T  and others.

Movies: ScarFace, Blow, New Jack City and others.

(Intro: from the film "Scarface"):
Host: I've heard whispers about the financial support 
your government receives from the drug industry. 

Guest: Well, the irony of this, of course, is that 
this money, which is in the billions, is coming from 
your country. You see, you are the major purchaser of 
our national product, which is of course cocaine. 

Host: On one hand, you're saying the United States 
government is spending millions of dollars to 
eliminate the flow of drugs onto our streets. At the 
same time, we are doing business with the very same 
government that is flooding our streets with cocaine. 

Guest: Mmm-hmm, si, si. Let me show you a few other 
characters that are involved in this tragic comedy. 

(Two Men Speaking Spanish):
1st guy: Oye ustedes ahi, ustedes trabajando, sigue trabajando carajo
2nd guy: Oye luis cuando van a terminar?
1st guy: Ahorita
2nd guy: Pero que se apuren los burros, ahorita viene el camion apura dile
1st guy: Ahorita van a venir para recoger los productos, apurate!

(Immortal Technique - Worker):
I'm on the border of Bolivia, working for pennies 
Treated like a slave, the coca fields have to be ready 
The spirit of my people is starving, broken and sweaty 
Dreaming about revolution (REVOLUTION!) looking at my machete 
But the workload is too heavy to rise up in arms 
And if I ran away, I know they'd probably murder my moms 
So I pray to Jesucristo when I go to the mission 
Process the cocaine, paced and play my position 

(Pumpkinhead - Cocaine Field Boss):
Ok, listen while I'm out there, just give me my product 
Before we chop off ya hands for worker's misconduct 
I got the power to shoot a copper, and not get charged 
And it would be sad to see your family in front of a firing squad 
So to feed your kids, I need these bricks 
40 tons in total, let me test it, indeed I (*sniff*) 
Shit, this is good, pass me a tissue 
And don't worry about them, I paid off the officials 

(Diabolic - Peruvian Leader):
Yo, it don't come as a challenge, I'm the son of some of the foulest 
Elected by my people...the only one on the ballot 
Born and bred to consult with feds, I laugh at fate 
And assassinate my predecessor to have his place 
In a third-world fascist state, lock the nation 
With 90% of the wealth in 10% of the population 
The Central Intelligence Agency takes weight faithfully 
The finest type of China white and cocaine you'll see 

(Tonedeff - American Drug Distributor):
Honey I'm home, nevermind why our bank account's suddenly grown 
It's funny, we're so out of this debt from this money we owe 
Woulda ya...mind if I told you I had two governments overthrown 
To keep our son enrolled in a private school, and to keep ya tummy swollen 
C'mon, our fuckin' home was built on the foundation of bloody throats 
The hungry stolen of they souls, of course this country's runnin' coke 
I took a stunted oath to hush the one's who know 
But CIA conducts the flow of these young hustlers who lust for dough 

(Poison Pen - Drug Dealer):
I don't work in the hood (Hit my connect) 
Plus what's really good, they supply for the hood 
These dudes fucking crack me up, scrutinize like we inferior 
Petrified when we meet in my area (calm down) 
My dude's'll shoot until I say so, got the loot? 
Give me the YAY YAY like Ice Cube, so don't play with my yayo
We won't stop for you bastards 
Must choose (?), chop it and bag it 

(Loucipher - Undercover Police Officer):
Taking pictures and tapping phones 
Debating snitches and cracking codes 
Past a couple, blast the fo', 
Want any hustler stacking dough with probably crack or blow 
And my overtime is where your taxes go 
I gain your trust 
Get you to hand weight to us because we paid up front 
On the low with cameras taping ya 
Getting pop away? The prison sentence is going to 
Make the officer leave with two ki's out the evidence room 

(C-Rayz Walz - Prison Inmate):
Out the evidence room (*Said with Loucipher*) 
Went my fame, truck, boat or plane, they watching you 
You think you got work? They copping too 
We control blocks, they lock countries 
Ya own companies, we had nice cars and sneaker money 
Now there's players out there, talking 'bout the holding 
With bugs in they house like they down South with windows open 
Your dough ain't long, you wrong, you take shorts and soon 
Feds will be up in your mouth...like forks and spoons 
So enjoy the rush, live plush off Coke bread 
Soon you'll be in a cell with me, like Jenny Lopez 
In school, I was a bully, now life is fully a joke 
I keep a flow on a boat for Peruvian Coke 
Players do favors for governors and tax makers 
Fat Quakers smoke crack and sex acts with bad mayors 
The walls got ears, you big mouths probably scared 
Not prepared to do years like Javier 

(Immortal Technique Speaking):
The story just told is an example of the path that 
drugs take on their way to every neighborhood, in 
every state in this country. It's a lot deeper than 
the niggas on your block. So when they point the 
finger at you, brother men, this is what you've got to tell them: 

(Wesley Snipes - from "New Jack City"):
I'm not guilty. YOU'RE the one that's guilty. The 
lawmakers, the politicians, the Colombian drug lords, 
all you who lobby against making drugs legal. Just 
like you did with alcohol during the prohibition. 
You're the one who's guilty. I mean, c'mon, let's kick 
the ballistics here: Ain't no Uzi's made in Harlem. 
Not one of us in here owns a poppy field. This thing 
is bigger than (Immortal Technique). This is big 
business. This is the American way.

Justice Isn't Blind, It's Biased

"The decision to not prosecute in this instance belies everything that the government has ever done with regard to drug prosecutions everywhere.  I mean, when you think about the way they behave toward ordinary people who get caught up in drug cases, where they seize all your property and they use absolutely the maximum sentences they can possibly avail themselves of, and in this case they catch a bank that launders billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels … for years on end, and they can’t find something to charge these people with?"

"If the law doesn’t apply equally to everybody, then you don’t really have a system of law.  And so you have a built-in defense for everybody in every drug case forever.  I mean, if you get caught with a stem of marijuana, how do you not stand up and say, ‘You’re going to send me to jail for this where a guy who laundered a billion dollars for a bunch of murderers gets nothing?’"

---

Matt writes:

I had the pleasure of appearing on Eliot Spitzer's Viewpoint last night to talk about the hideous Eric Holder Lanny Breuer HSBC settlement, in which the government elected not to push criminal prosecutions against bank officers who admitted to laundering billions of dollars in drug money. Spitzer was the first guy I thought of when I saw the softball settlement, so it was cool to hear the prosecutorial take on the deal. When I came home after the show, my wife laughed. "It's like you guys were fighting over who was more pissed off.

America’s Secret Deal With Mexican Drug Cartels

Tom Burghardt reports the following in "Dissident Voice",

In a story which should have made front page headlines, Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy revealed that:

A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member’s claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican ‘cartel’ appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks.

A series of some five million emails, The Global Intelligence Files, were obtained by the secret-spilling organization as a result of last year’s hack by Anonymous of the Texas-based “global intelligence” firm Stratfor.

Bad tradecraft aside, the Stratfor dump offers readers insight into a shadowy world where information is sold to the highest bidder through a “a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.”

One of those informants was a Mexican intelligence officer with the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or CISEN, Mexico’s equivalent to the CIA. Dubbed “MX1″ by Stratfor, he operates under diplomatic cover at the Mexican consulate in Phoenix, Arizona after a similar posting at the consulate in El Paso, Texas.

His cover was blown by the intelligence grifters when they identified him in their correspondence as Fernando de la Mora, described by Stratfor as “being molded to be the Mexican ‘tip of the spear’ in the U.S.”

In an earlier Narco News story, Conroy revealed that “US soldiers are operating inside Mexico as part of the drug war and the Mexican government provided critical intelligence to US agents in the now-discredited Fast and Furious gun-running operation,” the Mexican diplomat claimed in email correspondence.

Those emails disclosed “details of a secret meeting between US and Mexican officials held in 2010 at Fort Bliss, a US Army installation located near El Paso, Texas. The meeting was part of an effort to create better communications between US undercover operatives in Mexico and the Mexican federal police, the Mexican diplomat reveals.”

“However,” Conroy wrote, “the diplomat expresses concern that the Fort Bliss meeting was infiltrated by the ‘cartels,’ whom he contends have ‘penetrated both US and Mexican law enforcement’.”

Such misgivings are thoroughly justified given the fact, as Antifascist Callingreported last spring, that the Mexican government had arrested three high-ranking Army generals over their links to narcotrafficking organizations.

In Conroy’s latest piece the journalist disclosed that the “Mexican diplomat’s assessment of the US and Mexican strategy in the war on drugs, as revealed by the email trail, paints a picture of a ‘simulated war’ in which the Mexican and US governments are willing to show favor to a dominant narco-trafficking organization in order to minimize the violence and business disruption in the major drug plazas, or markets.”

A “simulated war”? Where have we heard that before? Like the bogus “War on Terror” which arms and unleashes throat-slitting terrorists from the CIA’s favorite all-purpose zombie army of “Islamist extremists,” Al Qaeda, similarly, America’s fraudulent “War on Drugs” has been a splendid means of managingthe global drug trade in the interest of securing geopolitical advantage over their rivals.

That major financial powerhouses in Europe and the U.S. (can you say Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, HSBC, ING and Wachovia) have been accused of reaping the lions’ share of profits derived from the grim trade, now a veritable Narco-Industrial Complex, the public continues to be regaled with tales that this ersatz war is being “won.”

While the Mexican body count continues to rise (nearly 120,000 dead since 2006 according to the latest estimates published by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, or INEGI, as reported by the Paris daily Le Monde in a recent editorial) the United States is escalating its not-so-covert military involvement in Mexico and putting proverbial boots on the ground as part of the $1.6 billion U.S.-financed Mérida Initiative.

But have such “initiatives” (in actuality, taxpayer-funded boondoggles forgiant military contractors), turned the corner in the drug war? Not if estimates published by the United Nations are accurate.

According to the 2011 World Drug Report, published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC):

US authorities have estimated for the last couple of years that some 90% of the cocaine consumed in North America comes from Colombia, supplemented by some cocaine from Peru and limited amounts from the Plurinational State of Bolivia. For the year 2009, results of the US Cocaine Signature Program, based on an analysis of approximately 3,000 cocaine HCl samples, revealed that 95.5% originated in Colombia (down from 99% in 2002) and 1.7% in Peru; for the rest (2.8%), the origin could not be determined. The trafficking of cocaine into the United States is nowadays largely controlled by various Mexican drug cartels, while until the mid-1990s, large Colombian cartels dominated these operations.

Despite more than $8 billion lavished on programs such as Plan Colombia, and despite evidence that leading Colombian politicians, including former President Álvaro Uribe and his entourage, had documented links to major drug trafficking organizations that go back decades, the myth persists that pouring money into the drug war sinkhole will somehow turn the tide.

But drug seizures by U.S. agencies only partially tell the tale.

As UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov pointed out in the introduction to the agency’s 2011 report, Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and Other Transnational Crimes, “all criminal proceeds are likely to have amounted to some 3.6 per cent of GDP (2.3-5.5 per cent) or around US$2.1 trillion in 2009.”

UNODC analysts disclosed that illicit money flows related to “transnational organized crime, represent the equivalent of some 1.5 percent of global GDP, 70 percent of which would have been available for laundering through the financial system. The largest income for transnational organized crime seems to come from illicit drugs, accounting for a fifth of all crime proceeds.”

“If only flows related to drug trafficking and other transnational organized crime activities were considered,” UNODC asserted, “related proceeds would have been equivalent to around US$650 billion per year in the first decade of the new millennium, equivalent to 1.5% of global GDP or US$870 billion in 2009 assuming that the proportions remained unchanged. The funds available for laundering through the financial system would have been equivalent to some 1% of global GDP or US$580 billion in 2009.”

“The results,” according to UNODC, “also suggest that the ‘interception rate’ for anti-money-laundering efforts at the global level remains low. Globally, it appears that much less than 1% (probably around 0.2%) of the proceeds of crime laundered via the financial system are seized and frozen.”

Commenting on the nexus between global drug mafias and our capitalist overlords, former UNODC director Antonio Maria Costa told The Observer in 2009, “that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

Would there be an incentive then, for U.S. officials to dismantle a global business that benefits their real constituents, the blood-sucking gangsters at the apex of the capitalist financial pyramid? Hardly.

Nor would there be any incentive for American drug warriors to target organizations that inflate the balance sheets of the big banks. Wouldn’t they be more likely then, given the enormous flows of illicit cash flooding the system, to negotiate an “arrangement” with the biggest players, particularly the Sinaloa Cartel run by fugitive billionaire Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán?

In fact, as Narco News disclosed last December, a “quid-pro-quo arrangement is precisely what indicted narco-trafficker Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, who is slated to stand trial in Chicago this fall, alleges was agreed to by the US government and the leaders of the Sinaloa ‘Cartel’–the dominant narco-trafficking organization in Mexico. The US government, however, denies that any such arrangement exists.”

Narco News reported that according to “Zambada Niebla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through the US informant Loya Castro, negotiated an immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations.”

In court pleadings, Zambada Niebla’s attorneys argued that:

The United States government considered the arrangements with the Sinaloa Cartel an acceptable price to pay, because the principal objective was the destruction and dismantling of rival cartels by using the assistance of the Sinaloa Cartel–without regard for the fact that tons of illicit drugs continued to be smuggled into Chicago and other parts of the United States and consumption continued virtually unabated.

Those assertions seem to be borne out by emails released by WikiLeaks. Conroy disclosed: “In a Stratfor email dated April 19, 2010, MX1 lays out the Mexican government’s negotiating, or ‘signaling,’ strategy with respect to the major narco-trafficking organizations as follows:

The Mexican strategy is not to negotiate directly.

In any event, “negotiations” would take place as follows:

Assuming a non-disputed plaza [a major drug market, such as Ciudad Juarez]:

• [If] they [a big narco-trafficking group] bring [in] some drugs, transport some drugs, [and] they are discrete, they don’t bother anyone, [then] no one gets hurt;

• [And the] government turns the other way.

• [If] they [the narco-traffickers] kill someone or do something violent, [then the] government responds by taking down [the] drug network or making arrests.

(Now, assuming a disputed plaza:)

• [A narco-trafficking] group comes [into a plaza], [then the] government waits to see how dominant cartel responds.

• If [the] dominant cartel fights them [the new narco-trafficking group], [then the] government takes them down.

• If [the] dominant cartel is allied [with the new group], no problem.

• If [a new] group comes in and start[s] committing violence, they get taken down: first by the government letting the dominant cartel do their thing, then [by] punishing both cartels.

“MX1,” Narco News revealed, “then goes on to describe what he interprets as the US strategy in negotiating with the major narco-trafficking players in Ciudad Juarez–a major Mexican narco-trafficking ‘plaza’ located across the border from El Paso, Texas:”

… This is how “negotiations” take place with cartels, through signals. There are no meetings, etc. …

So, the MX [Mexican] strategy is not to negotiate. However, I think the US [recently] sent a signal that could be construed as follows:

“To the VCF [the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes] and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the] VCF. Also note that CDJ [Juarez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either VCF gets in line or we will mess you up.”

I don’t know what the US strategy is, but I can tell you that if the message was understood by Sinaloa and VCF as I described above, the Mexican government would not be opposed at all.

In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner [the Sinaloa Cartel], and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis. If there was no strategy behind this, and it was simply a leaked report, then I will be interested to see how it plays out in the coming months.

Keep in mind that this “analysis” is from a senior CISEN officer describing U.S. “strategy” for managing, not putting a stop to the flood of narcotics crossing the border.

“In a separate Stratfor email dated April 15, 2010,” Conroy wrote, “MX1′s views on the US strategy with respect to the drug organizations in Juarez, essentially favoring the Sinaloa ‘Cartel,’ is referenced yet again:”

We believe that when the US made an announcement that was corroborated by several federal spokespersons simultaneously (that Sinaloa controlled CDJ [Juarez]), it was a message that the DEA wanted to send to Sinaloa. The message was that the US recognized Sinaloa’s dominance in the area [Juarez], although it was not absolute. It was meant to be read by the cartels as a sort of ultimatum: negotiate and put your house in order once and for all.

One dissenting analyst thinks that the message is the opposite, telling Sinaloa to take what it had and to leave what remains of VCF. Regardless, the reports are saying that the US message to the cartels was to negotiate and stop the violence. It says that the US has never before pronounced that a cartel controls a particular plaza, so it is an unusual event.

“Unusual” perhaps, but not surprising given the secret state’s documented history of close collaboration with major drug trafficking networks that serve as unofficial, though highly-effective instruments, for advancing U.S. imperial strategies.

In a recent piece published by Global Research, analyst Peter Dale Scott observed that America’s two “self-generating wars” on “terror” and “drugs” have “in effect become one.”

“By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico,” Scott wrote, “America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last six years).”

And by “launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin and most of the world’s hashish.”

“Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily–Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then,” Scott noted. “(Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.) And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.”

“Both of America’s self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance,” Scott averred. “At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world.”

In this light, Narco News revelations make perfect sense. As the global financial crisis deepens, brought on in no small part by the massive frauds perpetrated by leading capitalist institutions, they have inflated their balance sheets with a veritable tsunami of hot cash generated by the Narco-Industrial Complex.

In turn, the American secret state, working to recapitalize financial markets beset by a seemingly insolvable liquidity crisis resulting from massive bank frauds, turn a blind eye as these same institutions become major centers of organized crime, monopoly enterprises which could not survive without the trillions of dollars of illicit funds parked in offshore accounts.

The US and Honduras

 US Financial Aid To A Police and Army Linked To A Campaign Of Extra-Judicial Killings

Honduras has become the newest front in the US war on drugs in Latin America. The US has provided financial support for both the police and the military there in spite of its deep corruption issues.

Furthermore, members of both institutions have been linked to a range of killings. Political dissidents, human rights workers and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community have all been killed at alarming rates.

In May, a mission in the Moskitia region, which was led by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), left four innocent civilians killed and four others wounded. It was followed by two more incidents where a US DEA agent shot and killed an alleged drug trafficker. Local communities have demanded a thorough investigation but so far nothing has been done.

The US has a long and controversial history in Honduras. In the 1980s, the US built a base there and trained an elite Honduran military unit. That unit went on to carry out tortures, kidnappings and killings.

Who is responsible? What should be the role of the US in Honduras? And what happened that night in the Moskitia when a US raid ended up leaving innocent people dead?

1997 Mapiripán Massacre: Coordinated In advance With Colombian Army

The massacre was “well-coordinated in advance” with the Colombian Army.

Colombia’s Mapiripán massacre was “well-coordinated in advance” with the Colombian Army, according to confidential paramilitary sources, one of which the U.S. Embassy believed had “participated directly in the planning” of the killings. The new disclosures are the first from a fresh set of declassified diplomatic cables on the Mapiripán case released at the end of last week by the State Department’s Appeals Review Panel on the15th anniversary of the massacre.

If this “blunt admission” of Army complicity in the Mapiripán massacre was correct, an Embassy official observed, “then both of the key paramilitary operations which most directly affected U.S.-assisted counter-narcotics operations in the Guaviare region in 1997 had been conducted with the foreknowledge and facilitation by members of the Colombian Army.” The other “operation” was the October 1997 massacre at Miraflores, which, like Mapiripán, was then an important narcotics trafficking hub in Colombia’s eastern plains.

It’s taken the State Department 15 years to declassify what it knew only 18 months after those dark days: that the Mapiripán massacre was likely the result of an Army-paramilitary conspiracy that went “well beyond” the units and individuals that have been implicated so far. The document suggests that the previous convictions in the case—which mostly involve junior officers and crimes of omission—are merely the tip of the iceberg.

A few days ago, we published a 2003 letter in which the State Department claimed—six years after the fact—that the Colombian military had tried to “cover up” the massacre, in which dozens were brutally killed by illegal paramilitary forces brought in from northern Colombia. These new documents, most of which are from 1997-1999, go a long way toward explaining how they arrived at that conclusion.

The Mapiripán case remains one of the most critical, and in many ways unresolved, massacre cases in recent Colombian history. In a country that has seen far too many human rights atrocities, no single case is as central the story of paramilitary expansion in Colombia as Mapiripán. The operation was the first major projection of paramilitary power outside of northern Colombia, where the rightist militia forces consolidated their hold on power in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Embassy report did not identify the two “public, well-known” individuals from the paramilitary stronghold of Montería, Córdoba, who provided the information, but said that “we have reason to believe that one of the two … has participated directly in the planning of AUC military operations – to include, based on a discussion with POLOFF [the Embassy’s Political Officer], Mapiripán.”

The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), led by Carlos Castaño, was the country’s top paramilitary organization at the time. Castaño, now deceased, admitted that the AUC was behind the massacre, warning that there would be “many more Mapiripáns.” Several other paramilitary members, including top commander Salvatore Mancuso, have also been convicted for plotting the massacre.

The Embassy judged the paramilitary interlocutors to be “most credible,” according to the cable, which was approved by U.S. Ambassador Curtis Kamman. “We know of no reason for them to deviate from their boasting of the AUC’s full-fledged independence,” the Embassy said, “other than their desire for the USG [U.S. government] to understand correctly what had transpired eighteen months ago.” The AUC, under Carlos Castaño, wanted “political legitimacy,” according to the cable, and “some degree of recognition from the USG—which they have consistently failed to get.” By raising the question of Mapiripán, the report continued, the Embassy official who interviewed the sources had “put the two in a position of either having to lie to us, or to come clean.”

Mapiripán “was quite different” from other paramilitary operations, the paras told the POLOFF—“a special case.” At least five different paramilitary fronts participated in the massacre with “full coordination” from the Army, including “travel, logistics, intelligence and security.” The conspiracy went “well beyond” the two sergeants who had been arrested for facilitating the paras’ arrival at a joint military/police airfield in San José del Guaviare.

Mapiripán was actually “a well-coordinated counter-narcotics operation,” the sources said, the goal of which was to strike “a coordinated blow” against the left-wing FARC guerrillas, “by targeting the key money-movers who buy and sell cocaine for the FARC.” The operation was a “success,” according to one of the paramilitary contacts, in that it had damaged “the FARC’s ability to move both money and cocaine in the region.”

The paramilitary sources also “did not contradict” the Embassy official’s suggestion that such a “well-coordinated” operation would have also involved the collaboration of Army elements from their point of departure in Urabá.

In recent years, the former commander of the Army brigade in Urabá at the time of the Mapiripán massacre, Gen. Rito Alejo del Río, has come under scrutiny for alleged “systematic” reliance on paramilitary forces to strike at guerrillas in northern Colombia. Now on trial in a separate human rights case, Del Río has never been charged in connection to Mapiripán, despite that fact that several former paramilitaries and at least one of the military officers convicted in the case have identified Del Río as one of the intellectual authors.

It’s notable enough that an Embassy official had direct, face-to-face contact with one of the presumed authors of the Mapiripán massacre, but the real news here is the paras’ “blunt admission” that they had the “full coordination” of the Army, from beginning to end. This suggests that the Mapiripán conspiracy was much wider and deeper than previously thought.

From the start, Mapiripán was unique as much for its sheer brutality as for what appeared to be the clear involvement of Colombian security forces. Most importantly, the massacre put the newly-formed AUC on the map and established the model by which AUC paramilitary forces, aided by elements of the security forces, would swoop into an important narcotics-producing area, assassinate scores of perceived guerrilla supporters and take over the drug trade.

Via: "Global Research"

Bringing The Battlefield To The Border

By Todd Miller and Tom Engelhardt,
June 09, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Drones are nothing new.  The first of them took to America’s skies before the Wright Brothers plane lifted off at Kitty Hawk in 1903.  In the years since, "unmanned air systems" (UAS) have played a relatively minor role in domestic aviation.  All that, however, is about to change in a major way.

"UAS have evolved from simple radio controlled model airplanes to sophisticated aircraft that today play a unique role in many public missions such as border surveillance, weather monitoring, military training, wildlife surveys and local law enforcement, and have the potential to do so for many civil missions as well." So reads part of a research and development "roadmap" put out earlier this year by the U.S. Joint Planning and Development Office (a multiagency initiative that includes the Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy).  "According to industry forecasts," the report notes, "UAS operations will increase exponentially in a variety of key military and civil areas. About 50 U.S. companies, universities, and government organizations… are developing over 150 different unmanned aircraft designs. Projections for 2010 to 2019 predict more than 20,000 UAS produced in the U.S."

In the process, count on one thing: increasing numbers of those drones will be patrolling U.S. borders.

It was only in the 1990s that the U.S. Border Patrol first began considering the use of remotely piloted aircraft.  After the attacks of 9/11, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the funding bonanza that followed, the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection Office began experimenting with unmanned planes.  In 2005, it settled on using General Atomics’ Reaper and today a fleet of nine of these drones patrol the northern and southern U.S. borders.  Their brethren in America’s war zones have tended to crash at an alarming rate due to weather, mechanical failures, and computer glitches, have proven vulnerable compared to manned jets, and are susceptible to all manner of electronic attack.  The domestic drones, too, have failed to impress.  As a recent Los Angeles Times article noted: "The border drones require an hour of maintenance for every hour they fly, cost more to operate than anticipated, and are frequently grounded by rain or other bad weather, according to a draft audit of the program last month by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general."

But don’t expect such hard truths to have much impact.  After all, as Todd Miller demonstrates in his inaugural TomDispatch post, border security is an arena for true believers.  And despite every indication of their crash-and-burn future, expect ever more overhead, up north and down south and in-between, in the years ahead. Nick Turse

The Wild World of Border Security and Boundary Building in Arizona
By Todd Miller

William "Drew" Dodds, the salesperson for StrongWatch, a Tucson-based company, is at the top of his game when he describes developments on the southern border of the United States in football terms. In his telling, that boundary is the line of scrimmage, and the technology his company is trying to sell — a mobile surveillance system named Freedom-On-The-Move, a camera set atop a retractable mast outfitted in the bed of a truck and maneuvered with an Xbox controller — acts like a "roving linebacker."

As Dodds describes it, unauthorized migrants and drug traffickers often cross the line of scrimmage undetected. At best, they are seldom caught until the "last mile," far from the boundary line.  His surveillance system, he claims, will cover a lot more of that ground in very little time and from multiple angles.  It will become the border-enforcement equivalent of New York Giants’ linebacking great, Lawrence Taylor.

To listen to Dodds, an ex-Marine — Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001-2004 — with the hulking physique of a linebacker himself, is to experience a new worldview being constructed on the run.  Even a decade or so ago, it might have seemed like a mad dream from the American fringe.  These days, his all-the-world’s-a-football-field vision seemed perfectly mainstream inside the brightly-lit convention hall in Phoenix, Arizona, where the seventh annual Border Security Expo took place this March. Dodds was just one of hundreds of salespeople peddling their border-enforcement products and national security wares, and StrongWatch but one of more than 100 companies scrambling for a profitable edge in an exploding market.

Vivid as he is, Dodds is speaking a new corporate language embedded in an ever-more powerful universe in which the need to build up "boundary enforcement" is accepted, even celebrated, rather than debated. It’s a world where billions of dollars are potentially at stake, and one in which nothing is more important than creating, testing, and even flaunting increasingly sophisticated and expensive technologies meant for border patrol and social control, without serious thought as to what they might really portend.

The War on Terror on the Border

Phoenix was an especially appropriate place for Border Security Expo. 

After all, the Arizona-Mexico border region is Ground Zero for the development of an immigration enforcement apparatus which soon enough may travel from the southern border to a neighborhood near you.

The sold-out convention hall was abuzz with energy befitting an industry whose time has come.  Wandering its aisles, you could sense the excitement, the sound of money being spent, the cacophony of hundreds of voices boosting product, the synergy of a burgeoning marketplace of ideas and dreams. General Dynamics, FLIR thermal imaging, and Raytheon banners hung from the vast ceiling, competing for eyeballs with the latest in mini-surveillance blimps. NEANY Inc.’s unmanned aerial drones and their water-borne equivalents sat on a thick red carpet next to desert-camouflaged trailer headquarters.

At various exhibits, mannequins dressed in camo and sporting guns with surveillance gizmos hanging off their helmets seemed as if they might walk right out of the exhibition hall and take over the sprawling city of Phoenix with brute force. Little imaginable for your futuristic fortressed border was missing from the hall.  There were even ready-to-eat pocket sandwiches (with a three-year shelf life), and Brief Relief plastic urine bags. A stream of uniformed Border Patrol, military, and police officials moved from booth to booth alongside men in suits in what the sole protester outside the convention center called a "mall of death."

If there was anything that caught the control mania at the heart of this expo, it was a sign behind the DRS Technologies booth, which offered this promise: "You Draw the Line and We’ll Help You Secure It." And what better place to express such a sentiment than Phoenix, the seat of Maricopa County, where "America’s toughest sheriff," Joe Arpaio (now being sued by the Justice Department), regularly swept through neighborhoods on a search for poor people of color who looked like they might have just slipped across the line dividing the United States from Mexico.

Dodds and I stood a little more than 100 miles from that border, which has seen a staggering enforcement build-up over the last 20 years. It’s distinctly a seller’s market.  StrongWatch is typical.  The company, Dodds told me, was hoping for a fat contract for its border technology.  After all, everyone knew that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was about to issue a new request for proposals to build its latest version of a "virtual wall" along that border — not actual fencing, but a barrier made up of the latest in surveillance technology, including towers, cameras, sensors, and radar.

In January 2011, DHS had cancelled its previous attempt, known as SBInet, and the multi-billion dollar contract to the Boeing Company that went with it.  Complaints were that the costly and often-delayed technological barrier was not properly tailored to the rugged terrain of the borderlands, and that it had trouble distinguishing animals from humans.

But the continued fortification of the border (and the profits that accompany it) caught only one aspect of the convention’s reality. After all, the Arizona portion of the U.S.-Mexican border has not only become Ground Zero for every experiment in immigration enforcement and drug interdiction, but also the incubator, testing site, showcase, and staging ground for ever newer versions of border-enforcement technology that, sooner or later, are sure to be applied globally.

As that buzzing convention floor made clear, the anything-goes approach to immigration enforcement found in Arizona — home to SB1070, the infamous anti-immigrant law now before the Supreme Court – has generated interest from boundary-militarizers elsewhere in the country and the world. An urge for zero-tolerance-style Arizona borders is spreading fast, as evidenced by the convention’s clientele. In addition to U.S. Border Patrol types, attendees came from law enforcement outfits and agencies nationwide, and from 18 countries around the world, including Israel and Russia.

In theory, the Expo had nothing to do with SB1070, but the organizers’ choice of controversial Arizona governor Jan Brewer as keynote speaker could be seen as an endorsement of the laissez-faire climate in the state.  It is, in other words, the perfect place to develop and even test future technology on real people.

Brewer first assured convention-goers that the "immigration issue isn’t about hate or skin color… it’s about securing the border and keeping Americans safe."  That out of the way, she promptly launched into one of her usual tirades, blasting the federal government for not securing the border. "America’s failure to understand this problem at a national level and to deal with it," she insisted, "has haunted borders like mine for decades."

In fact, as Brewer well knows, the very opposite is the case. Arizona’s rise to immigration importance has gone hand in hand with the creation of a border version of the very homeland security state she criticizes.  In reality, federal resources and Department of Homeland Security dollars have been pouring into Arizona as part of a tripartite war on "illegals," drugs, and terrorism.  Her continual complaints about a "porous border,"enhanced by exaggerated tales of "decapitated bodies," only ups the pressure for ever more building blocks to Fortress USA.  Brewer’s are sweet words to the companies who hope to profit, including DRS Technologies, StrongWatch, and Boeing.

The governor is hardly alone.  Politicians from both parties are loath to acknowledge (as is the much of the mainstream media) how drastically the enforcement landscape along the U.S.-Mexican borderlands has been altered in recent years.  As geographer and border scholar Joseph Nevins sums the matter up: "The very existence of lines of control over the movement of people is a very recent development in human history."

Al-Qaedizing Immigrants

Anybody revisiting Nogales, El Paso, San Ysidro, or Brownsville today would quickly realize that they look nothing like they did two decades ago. In 1993, there were only 4,000 Border Patrol agents covering 6,000 miles of Canadian and Mexican boundarylands, and only flimsy chain-link fences along the most urbanized stretches of the southern border separated communities on either side.

Now, 16-foot walls cut through these towns. An array of cameras peer over them into Mexico sending a constant flow of images to dark monitoring rooms in Border Patrol stations along the 2,000 mile southern border, where bored agents watch mostly pedestrian traffic. Stadium-style lighting rises over the walls and shines into Mexico, turning night into day as if we were indeed in salesman Dodds’s football game.  For residents whose homes abut the border sleep is a challenge.

Border Patrol forces, still growing, have more than doubled in the years since 9/11.  As the new uniformed soldiers of the Department of Homeland Security, close to 20,000 Border Patrol agents now occupy the U.S. Southwest.  Predator drones and mini-surveillance blimps regularly patrol the skies. Nevins says that it is a "highly significant development" that we have come to accept this version of "boundaries" and the institutions that enforce them without question.

The Border Patrol became part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and was placed under the wing of Customs and Border Protection, now the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country with 60,000 employees.  In the process, its "priority mission" became "keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S." Since then the Border Patrol has not netted a single person affiliated with a terrorist organization nor a single weapon of mass destruction.

It has, however, apprehended millions of Latin American migrants coming north, including a historic number of Mexicans who were essentially victims of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  No terrorists, they were often small farmers who could no longer compete with subsidized U.S. grain giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland for whom NAFTA proved a free pass into Mexico. U.S. officials were well aware that the trade agreement would lead to an increase in migration, and called for the enforcement build-up. In the post-9/11 world, under the rubric of "protecting" the country from terrorism, the DHS, with the help of state governments and local police, has enforced what is really a line of exclusion, guaranteeing eternal inequality between those who have and those who do not.

These lines of division have not only undergone a rapid build-up, but have fast become the accepted norm.  According to anthropologist Josiah Heyman, the muscling up of an ever more massive border enforcement, interdiction, and surveillance apparatus "has militarized border society, where more and more people either work for the watchers, or are watched by the state." Heyman’s words may prove prophetic, and not just along our borders either.

As any migrant, protester, or activist in the United States knows, the "watchers" and the "watched" are proliferating nationwide. Geographer Matthew Coleman says that the "most significant yet largely ignored fallout of the so-called war on terrorism… [is] the extension of interior immigration policing practices away from the southwest border."

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is another 20,000-strong agency sheltered under the expansive roof of the Department of Homeland Security.  It draws from a pool of 650,000 law enforcement officers across the country through deputization programs with innocuous names like 287(g) and Secure Communities. ICE effectively serves as a conduit bringing the borderlands and all they now imply into communities as distant as Utah, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

More than one million migrants have been deported from the country over the last 3½ years under the Obama administration, numbers that surpass those of the Bush years.  This should be a reminder that a significant, if overlooked, part of this country’s post 9/11 security iron fist has been aimed not at al-Qaeda but at the undocumented migrant. Indeed, as writer Roberto Lovato points out, there has been an "al-Qaedization of immigrants and immigration policy." And as in the Global War on Terror, military-industrial companies like Boeing and Halliburton are cashing in on this version of for-profit war.

Bringing Arizona to You

Surprisingly enough, in that vast, brightly-lit cathedral of science fiction in Phoenix it wasn’t the guns, drones, and robots, or the fixed surveillance towers and militarized mannequins that startled me most. It was the staggering energy and enthusiasm, so thick in the convention’s air that it enveloped you.

That day, I had no doubt, I was in the presence of a burgeoning new industry which has every intention of making not just the border, but this world of ours its own.  I could feel that sense of excitement and possibility from the moment Drew Dodds began explaining to me just how his company’s Freedom-On-The-Move system actually works.  He grabbed two water bottles close at hand and began painting a vivid picture of one as a "hill" obstructing "the line of sight to the target," and the other as that "target" — in fact, an exhausted migrant walking "the last mile" after three days in the desert, who might give anything for just such a bottle.

I have met many migrants in Dodd’s "last mile" — hurt, dehydrated, exhausted.  One man’s feet had swelled up so much, thanks to the unrelenting heat and the cactus spines he had stepped on, that he could no longer jam them in his shoes. He had, he told me, continued on anyway in excruciating pain, mile after mile, barefoot on the oven-hot desert floor. Considering the thousands of dead bodies recovered from the borderlands since the massive build-up of Border Patrol forces and technology, he was lucky to have made it through alive. And this was the man Dodds was so pumped about Freedom-On-The-Move’s "spot and stalk" technology nabbing; this was his football game. In the end, though, he abandoned football for reality, summing up his experience this way: "We are bringing the battlefield to the border."

That caught it all, offering a vision of what the military-industrial complex looks like once it’s transported, jobs and all, to the U.S.-Mexican border and turned into a consumer’s mall for the post-9/11 American era. You could sense it in the young woman from RoboteX, who looked like she had walked directly out of her college graduation and onto the floor of Border Security Expo 2012.  She loaned me her remote control for a few minutes and let me play with the micro-robot she was hawking.  It looked like a tiny tank and was already being used by the Oakland police and its SWAT team.

It was the breathless excitement of the University of Arizona graduate student describing to me the "deception detection" technology the university was developing, along with a "communication web" that would allow drones to communicate with each other without human intervention. Perhaps training students for this rising industry was part of the University of Arizona’s thought process in accepting a multi-million-dollar grant from DHS to create a Center of Excellence on Border Security which will work in tandem with its Tech Park on Science and Technology. That center, in turn, was to develop the newest border enforcement technologies, as part of a consortium of several other universities.

In the next three years, the homeland security market in the United States is expected to reach $113 billion, according to a report by Homeland Security Market Research, and a significant chunk of that money will be dedicated to boundary building. Pretty soon the idea of border security as part of a Fortress USA will be so entrenched in the system that no one will be able to shake it loose — and then, of course, like all such systems, it will proliferate.

It has been fashionable to treat the state of Arizona as an American fringe phenomenon, simply a bunch of lunatics hell-bent on passing bluntly racist anti-immigration laws. However, as Border Security Expo indicates, something far more sinister is at work.  There’s nothing fringe about the companies in the convention hall eager to build up the homeland security state, and funded by the federal government.

In Arizona, industry leaders are calling for the formation of the first "global cluster" of private companies on border security in the United States. Already 50 businesses, large and small, have been identified as possible participants. Bruce Wright, vice president of the University of Arizona Tech Park on Science and Technology, says that many of them have set up shop in the park, and that the university has the facilities to incubate both start-up companies and subsidiaries for more established military or aerospace corporations as they enter what he calls "the border tech realm."

"Here we are living on the border — turning lemons into lemonade. If we are to deal with the problem — what is the economic benefit from dealing with it?" Wright asks, referring to immigration enforcement, trade, drug interdiction, and the war on terror. "Well, we can build an industry around this problem that creates employment, wages, and wealth for this region… And this technology can be sold all over the world. So it becomes an industry cluster that is very beneficial to us in Southern Arizona."

Wright’s vision is likely to prove far more powerful than SB1070 will ever be. As Arizona defines the line of scrimmage for U.S. border security strategy, it is also preparing the way to export its products of social control not only abroad, but also to your hometown, or to wherever a boundary needs to be built between the rich and poor.

Todd Miller has researched and written about U.S.-Mexican border issues for more than 10 years. He has worked on both sides of the border for BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona, and Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. He now writes on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas and its blog "Border Wars," among other places. He is at work on his first book, Border Patrol Nation, for the Open Media Series of City Lights Books.

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Copyright 2012 Todd Miller