Down With the “War on Drugs”!

U.S. Spy Drones over Mexico

The bourgeois press recently let out that, with Mexico’s permission, the Department of Homeland Security has been secretly flying Predator B drones across the border for the past two years—at times quite a distance into Mexican territory—to spy on Mexico’s drug cartels. Starting in February, these missions have expanded deeper into Mexico, with the Predators supplemented by the Pentagon’s Global Hawk drones, which fly at around 60,000 feet and scan almost 40,000 square miles. The Predators are unarmed versions of the killing machines used by the Pentagon in Pakistan, where they have killed hundreds of villagers in the name of attacking suspected “terrorists.”

The New York Times (15 March) reported that on March 3, Mexican president Felipe Calderón and U.S. president Barack Obama agreed to continue expanding the use of spy drones and to open a second counternarcotics “fusion” center in Mexico staffed with both Mexican and American agents. Citing unnamed Mexican and U.S. officials, the Times added, “The American assistance has been kept secret because of legal restrictions in Mexico and the heated political sensitivities there about sovereignty.” The U.S. has also been training thousands of Mexican troops and cops, upgrading Mexico’s security and intelligence technology and carrying out its own eavesdropping operations in Mexico.

The pretext for all this U.S. imperialist encroachment is the narcoviolencia in Mexico that has left over 34,000 dead over the past four years, as Mexican drug cartels and their police adjuncts battle over control of the lucrative trade (see “Mexico: Down With ‘Drug Wars’ Militarization!” WV No. 953, 26 February 2010). As with the “war on terrorism,” the “war on drugs” is wielded globally by Democrats and Republicans alike to extend U.S. imperialism’s bloody reach and to bolster the repressive forces of its dependent semicolonial regimes, especially those in its Latin American “backyard.” A Honduran newspaper recently announced that Washington is planning to open a new military base in Honduras, near the border with Nicaragua, to “fight drug trafficking,” while Texas Congressman Michael McCaul is pushing legislation that would designate seven Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

For Latin America as a whole, none of this is new. In 1989, George H.W. Bush sent over 20,000 U.S. troops to invade Panama, where they killed hundreds and arrested President Manuel Noriega on charges of running drugs. Through Plan Colombia, launched by Bill Clinton in 2000, billions of dollars have been funneled to the blood-drenched Colombian government, whose murderous campaign against leftist guerrillas has long been wrapped in the “anti-drugs” banner. Washington crows that, through Plan Colombia, that regime has been able to establish a police presence in each of the country’s 1,099 municipalities for the first time ever. Colombia has become the most dangerous country for trade unionists in the world, with 51 murdered last year alone, and is second only to the Sudan in the number of internal refugees.

In Mexico, the “war on drugs” has similarly meant an increase in state repression and the terrorization of workers and the poor, as seen by the massive military presence on urban streets. The U.S. has boosted its military aid to Mexico seven times over with the $1.4 billion “Plan Mérida,” initiated in 2007 by George W. Bush and extended by Obama last year. The program provides for the purchase of aircraft, surveillance software and other services provided by U.S. defense contractors. It has also allowed the Mexican state to modernize its police forces and expand maritime interdiction capabilities. Mexico now has Latin America’s third-largest military—one built for domestic, not foreign, deployment.

North of the border, the anti-drug witchhunt has meant a sharp buildup of local police forces, increasingly armed with high-tech weaponry and facing ever fewer legal restraints, and the mass incarceration of black people as well as of rising numbers of Latinos and immigrants. The narcoviolencia in Mexico has also become a rallying cry of the Republican Party for further clamping down on the border. The Democratic Obama White House has already surpassed the second Bush administration in deporting immigrants, with nearly 800,000 expelled in the past two years. As we pointed out in our article on the Mexican drug wars, the imposition of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) massively deepened the impoverishment of the Mexican countryside, driving the desperately poor either north of the border or into the drug trade in order to survive.

The Spartacist League/U.S. and the Grupo Espartaquista de México, sections of the International Communist League, oppose the military buildup and call for the decriminalization of drugs. By removing the super-profits from the illegal drug trade, decriminalization would also reduce the crime and other pathology that come with it. But such a simple, democratic measure is anathema to the U.S. rulers, for whom laws against drug use and other “crimes without victims,” such as prostitution, gambling and pornography, at bottom serve to maintain social order on behalf of the capitalist rulers. In the U.S., it is the duty of revolutionary Marxists to promote proletarian internationalism by opposing all American military aid to Mexico and Colombia and fighting for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Down with Plan Mérida! Down with Plan Colombia!