Plan Mexico: The Right Name for the Wrong Idea
Architects of a new plan to subsidize Mexico's brutal drug war with U.S. tax dollars are trying to avoid the name Plan Mexico. Obviously they don't want to invite the comparison to our disastrous Plan Colombia, even though a few desperate drug warriors are still calling it a success. The refusal to name anything after it might be the closest they'll come to admitting that Plan Colombia is widely â and justly â viewed as an utter failure.
As Pete Guither notes, journalists and bloggers alike have already named the program Plan Mexico. So while the details remain to be announced, the stigma of our previous and continuing failures in this area will inevitably haunt any effort to expand our destructive drug war diplomacy.
Although Plan Mexico will surely prioritize scorched-earth drug war demolition tactics, The New Republic notes the bizarre possibility that some funding will be directed towards drug prevention:
One element of that aid package is likely to be funding for drug-use prevention, according to Luis Astorga, a drug policy expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. This is a strange new twist in the complex partnership between the U.S. and Mexico to fight drugs. And the U.S. isn't in much of a position to tell anyone how to prevent drug use.
Damn straight. Gosh, if we knew anything about drug prevention, these bloody wars over who gets to sell drugs to us wouldnât be such a mind-bending crisis in the first place. The irony is just staggering:
When the U.S. cracked down on domestic meth production early this decade, Mexican cartels adept in trafficking cocaine and marijuana jumped at the chance to supply a new product.
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The drug has traveled south, and is now available in every major city.
"Mexico's market is not big, but it has grown, mostly in urban zones," said Jorge Chabat, a crime and security expert at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. "Availability has certainly contributed to consumption now that meth is produced in Mexico."
Let me get this straight. The U.S. banned pseudo-ephedrine-based cold medicines, and domestic meth production declined. Mexican cartels stepped in to fill the void, resulting in increased availability and use of meth in Mexico. Now the U.S. is poised to give drug prevention funding to Mexico due in part to a meth problem that didnât even exist before we essentially exported our meth manufacturing problem to that country. Wow. Just wow.
At the end of the day, it is and always has been the massive drug consumption of U.S. citizens that fuels violence and instability throughout Mexico, Colombia, and beyond. We could spend every dollar we have bribing foreigners to stop selling us drugs and it wouldnât make a difference. We could hire every man woman and child in these countries to help stop us from getting high, and they would just laugh all the way to the bank.
Too many American drug users are already sending their paychecks to Mexico. It is sheer idiocy to suggest that we send our tax-dollars there as well.