Narco-Politics: `Absolutely Fab!'

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 15, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

President Clinton avoids gloating by tripping off to Mexico to spin a cover story for Mexican drug certification despite increasing signs that Mexico has become a narco-state.

When it comes to fighting drugs, superlatives trip easily off officials' tongues. Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- the outgoing drug czar who's presided over an epidemic of drug abuse by the nation's kids and now will turn his attention to the American Red Cross as the organization's new president -- is the master at throwing up a blinding storm of extravagant claims, praise and pledges.

His advisers always are the most dedicated, always the very best, always doing absolutely extraordinary work. Any accomplishment in interdiction or law enforcement always is a substantial breakthrough. As a drafter of strategies and objectives he is second to none. It all sounds so good when you hear "Gen. Superlative" outlining his characteristic five-part plans and 10-point goals in the crisp style of West Point. The general seems to believe that a problem is solved when he is armed with a plan to solve it. Alas, art may copy life to a degree but they aren't one and the same.

Sometimes even for a fitfully attentive media the grandiloquent West Pointer's prose falls fiat and Gen. Superlative turns into "Gen. Foot-in-the-Mouth": as happened back in 1997 when a few days after eulogizing his newly-appointed Mexican counterpart, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, as a "no-nonsense field commander" and an "absolutely brilliant, patriotic, dedicated" drug warrior, it emerged that Gutierrez was none of those things but was in fact a top paid informant of the late narcotrafficker Amado Carillo Fuentes.

Of course, Gen. Superlative isn't alone in practicing hucksterism when it comes to America's losing war against drugs. Freed from the strains of impeachment and delighted to be on the world stage again without Monica Lewinsky worries, President Clinton basked for 30 hours in the Mexican sun in mid-February and conferred with Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo about drug trafficking among other things. The president, who doesn't like to rock the North American Free Trade Agreement boat, hadn't come to criticize but to praise -- his habitual stance when it comes to Mexico and drugs.

According to Clinton, Zedillo is doing a great job in rooting out narcocorruption. Without even a nod to intrepid investigative journalists, such as Zeta magazine's Jesus Blancornelas, who unearth the facts about corruption the Mexican government would prefer to ignore, Clinton announced: "What we know in America [about drug-related graft] comes largely from Mexico's brave efforts to get to the truth and air it." The president, hinting heavily that he will again this year, as in previous years, certify America's southern neighbor as a reliable ally in the war on drugs, the president argued that Mexico shouldn't be penalized for having the courage to confront its problems, and he maintained the fundamental question is whether the two countries are better off fighting against drugs together or separately. No, that question wasn't rhetorical.

Gen. Superlative was on hand to boost the message and back the president ahead of what is likely to be a rough squabble with Congress at the end of this month over the recertification of Mexico. For McCaffrey "it's a much changed atmosphere" from four years ago. "This is a new world we're dealing with, in my view.... All in all, we think we are on track in the coming two years to turn over a drug-cooperation enterprise that is significantly better than the one we found."

For front-line U.S. lawmen, what's changed in the last year isn't any improvement in cooperation but a further backing off by trade-obsessed administration officials from criticizing Mexico or going public on what ails the relationship: the endemic narco-related corruption of Mexican law enforcement, politics and the judiciary. Standing alongside Attorney General Janet Reno and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during a press briefing on the trip, McCaffrey could only point to two things as the basis for his optimism: 1) the Mexicans are eradicating more marijuana and poppy fields than ever before, and 2) the successful conclusion to the yearlong negotiating effort to agree on 82 variables to be used in tracking the performance of cross-border cooperation. Oh, the general was especially excited about that last one.

The eradication figures are indeed good news, but as Mexican drug lords have expanded significantly the hectares under drug cultivation, the achievement will mean nothing in terms of reducing the amount of narcotics flooding across the Southwest border. Indeed, the streets of the U.S.-- and the school yards of America's suburbs -- tell their own stories. Cocaine and heroin can be had cheaply and in abundance.

And the monitoring variables are beside the point -- front-line U.S. lawmen do not need them to know cooperation hasn't improved and that Mexico's slide into narco-statehood is continuing apace. The American warriors who actually wage the war can't but conclude otherwise.