Picture a nation with such a significant segment of its population dependent on pleasure, pain avoidance and escape based on a litany of narcotics, where military grade assault weapons are readily available in the open market and where money flows like wine at a Bacchanal. Even if those desperate and at the bottom of that country’s economic ladder can find a way, often criminal, to get enough to get enough. Visualize the facile export of those assault weapons across a porous border into the hands of brutal and immoral criminal machines of such size and scope that the not only rival governments but often are able to coopt them to protect, grow and enable their toxic trade in narcotics.
Witness the narco-states that result, when hundreds of thousands of innocent “civilians” are slaughtered, often caught up in turf wars between massive criminal enterprises, where each “owns” the fealty, if not outright participation, of the local government, most definitely including the police… as every level. Accept that young men who refuse to aid or join the local narco-enterprise are executed. Where families are held hostage pending their sons’ performance. Where inquiring, muck-raking journalists are routinely murdered. Where anyone raising a voice in protest is terminated. And often where that narco-power finds its way to the highest governmental officials in the land. All to cater to that big nation’s insatiable demand. All able to maintain their narco-terror stranglehold because of the arms they obtained from that big nation.
The big state is, of course, the United States. We’ve fought and failed to win the much-touted Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden “war on drugs.” We did not end this “scourge.” We did not “Just say no.” We did not stop the ability for just about anybody to buy any weapon of choice and the export of hundreds of thousands of those weapons south of our border. The cartels laughed at the notion of a border wall; they would always get through and would have a justification simply to increase their prices. During the Reagan era, in what we call the Iran Contra Scandal, CIA-manned aircraft (“Air America”) even flew aircraft filled with drugs into the US to generate off-the-books cash from cartels to fund our nefarious activities around the world.
And when the local Latin American victims, whose jobs and lives were decimated in a lawless cartel controlled narco-state, tried to escape into the United States – the nation that enabled and continues to fund the flow of guns and drugs leading to such massive cruel and dysfunctional corruption – attempting to escape into the relative safety within our country, we treat them like criminal savages, detain them in disease-spreading facilities or force them to remain in severely toxic waiting camps, and turn them away. Our demand for narcotics, our bizarre ethos that allows guns of every make and kind to be freely traded, created their hell. But we continue to refuse to take responsibility for our actions. It is clearly our fault.
We seem to have accepted a stasis in the level of corruption and violence in Mexico. We tolerate the cartels there, every once and a while joining Mexico in an effort to kill or capture cartel kingpins… which generally foments a murderous turf war to replace those we have taken out with Mexican help. We know about Mexican corruption. From top to bottom. But they are our purported allies, and they are directly on our southern border. A barrier to narco-traffickers and asylum-seekers from lands to the south. But as Vice President Harris’ trip to the toxic narco-triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras points out, if somehow life in those drug-cartel-decimated nations could be made more acceptable and safer to their own citizens, perhaps we could stem the tide of asylum-seekers from this most dangerous region of Central America.
But there is a huge catch. As bad as Mexico’s corruption might be, these triangle nations are dramatically and directly controlled by some of the most villainous cartels on earth. And connection to the highest officials in those countries, literally on the cartel payrolls all the way up to the top, pretty much guarantees that any US effort to work through those federal governments will fail. The mega-rich heads-of-state dismiss American arrogance, literally double downing to make their resistance to our efforts know. El Salvador even went so far to recognize cryptocurrencies – the cartels’ favored financial system – as an official tender.
Since we continue to fail to take responsibility for the lives we have destroyed, stopping most legitimate asylum-seekers from entering the US, and since we are unable to make any headway with the leadership of so many corrupted narco-states, we are trying yet another tact: refusing to deal with the corrupt leadership to better life in those triangle states, naming individuals who face US sanctions within that leadership, and trying to work through NGOs to reach the local people. Will this effort finally generate movement toward containment of this toxic narco-traffic and resultant massive effort to migrate into the United States? Unfortunately, most probably not. It’s just the sound and fury of American politicians simply looking as if they are doing something.
But what are “we” doing? This excerpt from a piece from the Associated Press (July 3rd) describes the effort: “The U.S. State Department has named more than 50 officials, including former presidents and active lawmakers, who are suspected of being corrupt or of undermining democracy in three Central American countries… Many of the cases were known in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, but the inclusion of the names on the U.S. list buoyed the hopes of anti-corruption crusaders.
“The list was provided to Congress in compliance with the U.S.-Northern Triangle Enhanced Engagement Act. Its release comes as the Biden administration highlights corruption in the region as one of the factors driving Central Americans to migrate to the United States… Congress’ call for the report reflects growing concern ‘about the level of systemic corruption in the countries of the Northern Triangle,’ said Adriana Beltrán, director for citizen security at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nongovernmental organization focused on human rights issues. It also reflects “the significant backsliding that we’ve seen across the region in the last several years” and the need to ‘ensure that our assistance is not ending up in the pockets of corrupt officials or their allies,’ she said… The report is known as the Engel list, named for former Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), who pushed for it last year.
“Among the most prominent figures on the list are former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo and his wife, Rosa Elena Bonilla de Lobo. The State Department report says Lobo took bribes from a drug cartel, and his wife was involved in fraud and misappropriation of funds. Both deny the allegations. Bonilla’s conviction on related charges was invalidated by the Supreme Court last year, and she is awaiting a new trial.
“Perhaps as significant as Lobo’s inclusion on the list, or that of more than a dozen current lawmakers, is the omission of current Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández [pictured above]… U.S. prosecutors in New York have signaled suspicion that Hernández funded his political ascent with bribes from drug traffickers, but he has not been formally charged. He has denied any wrongdoing. His brother, former federal lawmaker Juan Antonio ‘Tony’ Hernández, was sentenced in March in New York to life in prison… Honduran analyst and former lawmaker Raúl Pineda Alvarado said there had been high expectations for the list, but its omission of top perpetrators had left him underwhelmed.
“‘If this is the way the United States Congress wants to battle corruption in Honduras, it’s like wanting to cure cancer with aspirin,’ he said. Instead of naming those who call the shots and control resources, most of the people on the list are “secondary perpetrators,” he added… ‘This Engel list, in a way, was very inspiring; you thought it would be a devastating blow to the real corruption heavyweights,’ Pineda said. ‘But unfortunately, those hopes have been frustrated.’”
But this is war, where American consumers continue to finance the enemy. Civil wars in corrupted nations. Wars between the United States and such corrupted narco-states. What is the likely result? NOTHING. We buy drugs at unprecedented levels. The guns that kill, maim and lend control to the cartels are and will continue to be from the United States. And people who get in the way of the drug trade will continue to be slaughtered. If the US makes it tough on the corrupt leadership protecting the cartels, I suspect the bribes will simply have to grow fatter.
I’m Peter Dekom, and there hasn’t been a single viable plan to crush the drug trade and stem the tide of desperate escapees seeking asylum into the US yet, and there is nothing on the horizon suggesting otherwise.
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