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The Williamsburg Farce

In July, 1995, the U.S. government sponsored a conference of Latin American Ministers of Defense, in Williamsburg Virginia. The announced goal was to develop a co-ordinated plan to stop the flow of drugs through central America into the U.S. The strategy that the U.S. proposed was to employ the military of each country involved, under the direction - and pay -of the U.S. army.

Mexico, a fiercely independent sovereign nation, refused to send voting delegates (and thereby finessed being bound by any vote), opting instead to send an "observer group".

The Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN) have been organizing multilateral efforts against drugs for years. These efforts have been less than successful. Many Latinos (and many in the U.S.) believe that if the U.S. wants to stop the drug trade, it ought to do something about its citizens' hunger for euphoria. Others point to the growing corruption and violence which is destroying what little democracy still exists in Latinoamerica, and place the blame squarely on the CIA, the Cali cartel, and other large drug trafficking organizations that feed the hunger.

The law-and-order crowd in the U.S., headed by Jesse Helms, are pushing the notion of an integrated cross-national policing effort. The bottleneck is the exercise of sovereignty - the right of a nation to operate within its' borders as it sees fit. Dealing with civilian governments can be a slow, tricky, frustrating process. Often, the interface between the ministers and their bureaucrat functionaries is a dead letter office.

Armies, according to the Williamsburg idea, are much easier to deal with. The command structure is clear, they say: orders come down from the top, and those below obey or they are punished. Top officers, unlike ministers who come and go with the party faction in power, have been in place for years, and will remain so, barring coup de etat. Not being distracted by the craving to be re-elected, and the need for money to make it happen, army officers are believed to have a longer attention span.

The problem with the Williamsburg model is that it rests on false assumptions. It assumes that army officers are less corruptible than civilian drug enforcement organizations, thereby ignoring the recent shootouts in Tabasco, Campeche, and other states in which army units guarding drug shipments fired on judicial police units. It assumes that the Mexican military is a monolith run from the top, in which everyone has the same interests, thereby ignoring incidents in which two military units have clashed over control of drug smuggling transfer points on the Gulf coast. It ignores the fact that many of the large land owners that the army is trying to protect from landless campesino revolutionaries in Chiapas and Guerrero and elsewhere, are themselves growers of marijuana and poppies, and providers of landing strips for drugs flowing north. It assumes that army units made up of shoeless peasants conscripted into military service and sent in to the mountains to terrorize squatters can easily be induced to atta ck well-armed and well-trained drug smuggling crews. It assumes that, if mobilized, and if successful, these units will gladly turn over a fortune in drug spoils to someone else.

For some Mexicans, already fat from the labor of landless peasants and the ability to avoid toothless environmental and fiscal laws, drugs represent another opportunity to stuff their ever-growing hunger for money and power. The "Narco Democracy" that took decades to develop in Columbia has transformed Mexico in only a few years' time. The drug lords do not need to shoot the politicians, as in Columbia; they just bribe top officials to shoot each other.

The Jessie Helmses and the Newt Gingriches and the oh so very sanctimonious law-and-order demagogues may have a lot of people in the U.S. fooled, but nobody here is going for it. Having the U.S. government running an anti-drug effort in Mexico is like having a drunken father lecturing his kids about the evils of alcohol. In Mexico, as in the U.S., the little guys get jailed and blown away, and the big shots get their pictures in the paper shaking their heads about the sad state of other people's morals.

It's time for our politicians and drug czars to tell us the truth: Williamsburg is just another useless attempt to mask the fact that nothing will work to stop the flow of drugs until we stop demanding drugs; and nothing will stop the drug smugglers as long as there is profit in it. Drug profits arm secret CIA armies, buy heads of State in Colombia and Mexico, make prisons the fastest growing industry in the U.S., and take the attention of well-meaning U.S. citizens away from issues of health, welfare, education and environment. The Emperor is naked, Jessie, and so are you.

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