Corruption

The SPIRIT of 1776 was the HOLY SPIRIT and is our TRUE NORTH! The American dream is, "for the power of love to overcome the love of power." We will overcome!

Having rested up from my abortive February trip to Mexico, where I was unable to get my pick-up truck past the frontier zone and into Mexico proper for obscure bureaucratic reasons, I am now about to return to Mexico for a couple of weeks of on-the-scene drug war reporting. I'll be in South Dakota Thursday morning and Mexico City in time for dinner Thursday evening. I will spend a week in Mexico City. Among other things, I will be meeting with a member of Congress who has introduced a marijuana decriminalization bill, along with a select group of Mexico City marijuana activists involved in the campaign. I think I will also be spending some time with folks working with hard drug users and drug-using street youth in the city, and I will be interviewing as many academic and other experts as I can about Mexico's vicious drug prohibition-related violence (the death toll this year must be at 900 by now), the Mexican government's resort to the military to try to suppress the drug trade, and the looming multi-billion US drug war aid package. After that, it gets a bit hazy. I have been making efforts to get out into the countryside in some of the conflictive zones, in particular, the mountains of Guerrero (between Mexico City and Acapulco) and the state of Sinaloa, a traditional drug trafficking hotbed, and home of one of the violently competitive so-called drug cartels. But in both places, I've been receiving strong signals that people don't want to talk; that they are scared. I don't know at this point how this will play out, but I strongly suspect I will be heading to Sinaloa at the end of the month, where on April 29 and 30 a local newsweekly is holding a conference on "Drug trafficking, the Merida Initiative and the experiences on depenalization," which will feature a number of high-powered speakers, including a former Mexican attorney general and the Drug Policy Alliance's Ethan Nadelmann. This should be interesting. Look for some blog posts starting this weekend and some feature articles in the Chronicle for the next couple of weeks (and perhaps beyond). I'm taking the DRCNet camera, too, so maybe I'll get some good pics. If I do, you'll see 'em here. Speaking of photos, check out the one accompanying this Associated Press story from Tuesday. That's right: It's a "help wanted" banner for the Zetas, the former military elite anti-drug unit members who switched sides, calling on current and former soldiers to call them if they're looking for more remunerative work. That's the country I'm headed to! Hasta la vista, baby.

One of the most widely ignored consequences of the drug war is its negative influence on the men and women who carry it out. Two disturbing stories from local papers illustrate the drug war's profound ability to criminalize our public servants.

First, a revealing story of police misconduct from The Journal Inquirer in North Central Connecticut:

A Hartford police detective arrested days after his retirement in 2004 on charges of falsifying an arrest warrant has been granted a special form of probation that could lead to his arrest record being expunged.

The decision came after a hearing in which [Sgt. Franco] Sanzo's lawyer, Jake Donovan of Middletown, called another retired officer who said that police frequently sign their names to warrants - and swear before judges - that they've seen things they haven't.

So basically Sanzo's defense was that this type of misconduct is a matter of routine at his department. And it worked! I don't know if I'm more shocked that a defense attorney would offer an argument so contemptuous towards the Fourth Amendment, or that a judge would actually be persuaded by an attempt to rationalize police misconduct.

Sam Smith's Progressive Review summarizes the beguiling story http://prorev.com/2006/10/fading-days-of-asa-hutchinson.htm of Barry Seal, a major cocaine smuggler who operated undisturbed in Mena, Arkansas while Asa Hutchinson was the Republican United States Attorney and Bill "Vacuum Cleaner Nose" Clinton was Governor.

UPDATE: Check out Phil's book review of De los Maras a los Zetas here. Despite the daily toll of arrests and busts in the United States, America's drug war is waged largely in other countries. Mexico, for example, is likely to see more police killed in a bad weekend than the US will see in an entire year. And in Colombia, the drug war is now part of a messy civil war/war on drugs/war on terrorism with casualties—police, soldiers, guerrillas, paramilitaries, civilians—on a daily basis.