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Blowback: the Mexican drug crisis - 2 views

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blowback Mexican drug crisis

shared by megan lemmen on 15 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Calderon's continuing offensive has been underwritten by the United States in the form of the Merida Initiative, a security pact that funneled $830 million to Mexico in 2009 alone, making it the largest U.S. foreign aid program.
  • more than 26,000 people killed since 2007
  • U.S.-led attempts to contain drug trades in the 1980s and 1990s had two critical effects on Mexico, both unintended and unforeseen: first, to make drug commerce increasingly violent and menacing to U.S. interests, and second, to bring the center of dangerous trades closer and closer to its consumers and the prohibitionist apparatus within U.S. borders.
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  • As a result, 90% of the United States' cocaine supply now arrives across the long, intractable U.S.-Mexican border, handled by homegrown Mexican trafficker groups.
  • the main entry point for Colombian cocaine was Dade County, in south Florida, where some 80% of cocaine passed into the U.S. market.
  • By the mid-1980s, cocaine had some 22 million users in the United States.
  • SINCE THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, borderland towns like Tijuana, Nogales, and Juarez saw smuggling activities--first, banned patent drugs (including cocaine concoctions) and prohibited alcohol before World War II, then homegrown opiates and marijuana from the 1940s to the 1960s
  • By the 1970s, in this murky prehistory of Mexican drug organizations, the city of Culiacan, Sinaloa, emerged as the storied capital of Mexican drug trades, steeped in a vibrant regional outlaw and smuggling culture.
  • According to State Department estimates, a third of cocaine for the U.S. market entered through Mexico in 1989; by 1992, that figure reached one half, and by the late 1990s, 75% to 85%. (6) In the mid-1990s, the income generated by drug exporting in Mexico, led by this cocaine surge, ranged from $10 billion (according to U.S. officials) to $30 billion (Mexican figures)--either way exceeding Mexico's revenues from its largest legal commodity export, oil ($7.4 billion).
  • According to a 1994 study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, overall trafficker bribes rose from between $1.5 million and $3.2 million in 1983 to $460 million in 1993, larger than the Mexican attorney general's entire budget. (8) Thousands of federal agents became active in facilitating drug trades during this time.
  • The apogee of this state exposure, in 1997, was the highly embarrassing discovery that the military chief of Mexico's equivalent of the DEA, General Gutierrez Rebollo, was in cahoots with the Juarez cartel, an incident sampled in the Hollywood drama Traffic. The U.S. war on cocaine had come home to roost. (9)
  • megan lemmen on 15 Feb 11
     
    Research Question: How does the Mexican drug war affect the government and people of Mexico? Source: Gootenberg, Paul. "Blowback: the Mexican drug crisis." NACLA Report on the Americas 43.6 (2010): 7+. Academic OneFile. Web. 28 Jan. 2011. Summary: There is a lot of history behind the drug cartels in Mexico. It all started with the "blowback" which means that the longer war on drugs has "unintended consequences" like an "escalation of violence" (Gootenberg). Cocaine originally came to the US through Florida from the Columbians; however, after the government began stopping this trade, most of the cocaine came to the US through Mexico. The amount of drugs, specifically cocaine, that come through Mexico has increased drastically over the last 40 years. This industry takes in more money than Mexico's largest export, oil. In addition to the drug cartel increasing, government officials have also been pulled into this money making industry. In 1997, General Gutierrez Rebollo was found to be helping the Juarez cartel.
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