The Three Amigos Play A Brand New Theater

YESTERDAY, President Obama met with Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and México’s FeCal to make a show of talking about issues that affect the continent. It was a damn informal evening chillout and half a day of actual schedule the next day. Please. If we are to believe the press releases and quotes?

Then:

a) The torrent of human rights abuses that the Mexican military and army are perpetrating on citizens in the free-for-all atmosphere that descends when you set a massive gang against its own populace, some of which are very happy to live well on the backs of a criminalized drug war approach—is not occurring and

b) Even though the US backs the violence to this day—almost 900 dead last month and over 13,000 overall since 2006!!—and refuses anyone from México seeking asylum as they flee that violence, we are to believe that the rising number of sanctuary seekers being turned now from Canada’s border due to increased requirements just enacted are “fraudulent” cases and thus….

Who bears the brunt? Who owns up to this? I mean…México is waging WAR on itself. Or, actually, Felipe Calderón is waging the war. Midterm elections in México made clear that there was no visible support for the continuation of his outdated Drug War model.

Why would there be? Troops occupy the entire nation! Reported cases of human rights violations unleashed by the Army include “killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions.” [pdf report]. Terror.

In another example from August 2007, five soldiers detained a man, held him incommunicado in military installations for over 24 hours, beat and kicked him, placed a cloth bag on his head, tied his arms and feet, poured water on his face while they hit his abdomen, and applied electric shocks to his stomach. A federal prosecutor requested that a military prosecutor investigate the case. Despite the existence of medical exams documenting the torture, the military closed its investigation, determining it did not find evidence that the soldiers had committed a crime.

—Mexico: Hold Military to Account on Rights Abuses

And while we are talking about the corrupt forces whom the US GOVT (and our hard earned taxes!) are funding, I wonder who shot dead an attorney who was proving pretty good at defending drug traffickers?

People in México are running away from the poverty and violence unleashed in their beautiful country! They cannot escape it. The US believes in a wall to keep them there! Canada puts a host of paper walls up! This too, after the treaties created by these three nations have helped destroy the livelihoods of so many Mexicanos; a livelihood as ancient as many of the stone artifacts in her museums.

Where do the people go? And who looks at this morally?

Forget morals. It’s like a dirty word to people in politics, I’ve found. They start calling you “pious” and negating your words or trying. But you cannot negate the plain truth. Or you negate humanity. And thus you negate your own soul. If that’s “pious,” deal with it.

Let’s look at this practically, then. Unless I am mistaken, organized crime was given foothold and opportunity by Prohibition, no? Forget a link, this is common sense! If you make a product illegal that most people using are not going to give up, then YOU have created a HUGE market for that product. Period. A market for commerce and a market for violence.

Watch smart people do it right in Portugal: rather than press on like a nutso boar on a wild rampage and deaf and blind to all evidence, Portugal has decriminalized drugs, and there is simply no denying the success of that move.

Just as there is no denying the abject failure of the current model. The deaths and the loss of the Mexican people’s support should be enough to make that clear. The drug trade goes on, even in prisons, if one needs another sign. But of course it does. Jail sales of drugs and contraband are a sub-economy for a subculture. There is no way to eliminate drugs and the selling of drugs in a house of convicted criminals who are made every day to feel dangerous and shamed and deprived of mobility or self empowerment but in a few narrow ways! These remain, after all, human beings.

We know the Drug War model doesn’t work. We know that. We know 13,000 bodies are not worth the “successes” traded. For there are none that we see. Support even in the US mainstream has been faltering—it’s very hard to ignore over ten thousand corpses stacking up at such a rate. Yet, the President uses his charisma and pulpit to assure us all that everything’s goin’ just fine.

So what is the goal? Either the government is run by absolute idiots who don’t know how to interpret studies and history, or there is a different goal than what they claim out loud. (I’d choose this one.)

Senator Leahy puts on his own show, acknowledging the human rights abuses by putting a hold on $100 mil of the aid that the US gives to MX for the Mérida initiative for México’s onslaught of weaponry, surveillance, and terror. More theater. Mexican state officials claim they need listen to nobody about human rights, certainly not the US.

While American shops are arming the cartels, the lawmakers said, they have no right to judge the Mexican army for fighting back. “We can never agree with a foreign government unilaterally judging us in return for economic help to deal with a shared problem,” said Rep. Tomas Torres.

Obama admits in that article, too, that he cannot stem the tide of guns going South. Nope. Gun lobby is just too strong.

Our “solution” is more money for more violence, for “US trained death squads.” More prisons. Making the backward analogy that this massacre blooming every day in Mexico is akin to the fight against the mafia in the US. Backward because if the US hadn’t tried to outlaw people’s right to alter their consciousness (via alcohol in that instance), the mafia as such would not have existed! In the false analogy lies the very solution to the problem, and the suit fumbling with the analogy—Alan Bersin, the Homeland Security Department’s “border czar”—can’t even grasp that?

Lack of intelligence set loose up on the world. Lack of morality tossing money bags across borders. Lack of conscience the rule of the day. But we still get smiley photo ops and the assurance that next year immigration reform will be a priority. Meanwhile, the corrections and detention industry grows larger and is offered as a solution, and the entire transnational squeeze on the People while the prison corporations and the governments profit on our suffering is enabled by many a pundit today who won’t step back enough to peep the entire scene, or is unwilling to connect the dots.

What the hell happened to the human race up in here? What on Earth gave us the idea that life was so difficult and beyond our means the only answer was to wage war on our own people for each and every social fluctuation or challenge? And damn, just who are these ghouls who smile and tell us everything is going fine as they eat up our tax money and roll it into bullets and barbed wire?

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