BORDER WATCH - In a stunning development, President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party, who won control of Mexico’s government on July 1, moved to dissolve the Agencia Federal de Investigación. Modeled after the United States’ FBI, the AFI was founded in 2001 to crack down on Mexico’s pervasive government corruption and drug trafficking.
With rival drug cartels murdering between 47,500 to 67,000 Mexicans over the last six years, the move by the PRI represents the total surrender of Mexico’s sovereignty back to the money and violence of Mexico’s two main drug cartels, the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas. Coupled with the Obama Administration’s “Dreamer” Executive Order curtailing deportations of illegal aliens, a hands-off policy on both sides of the border foreshadows a huge increase in “narco-trafficking” violence and corruption flooding into the United States.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled Mexico with an iron fist for 71 years between 1929 and 2000. Although the PRI claimed they were the socialist peasants’ party, they operated as a corrupt political organization that siphoned off wealth from Mexico’s nationalized oil industry with extracted bribes for protecting the drug cartels that trafficked in marijuana and narcotics distribution into the United States. As a glaring example of the level of official PRI corruption, in 1982 the oil workers’ union donated a $2 million house as a “gift” to President López Portillo. Mexicans often joke: “Our Presidents are elected as millionaires, but they leave office as billionaires.”
But on December 1, 2000, Vicente Fox, the former Chief Executive of Coca-Cola in Mexico and founder of the Partido Acción Nacional, was elected president of Mexico. Fox ran on a platform of reforming Mexico’s pervasive police corruption and his first move as President was to form the AFI.
Under the leadership of Fox and his party’s successor, President Felipe Calderón, the AFI grew over the next 11 years into a 5,000-member force with an international reputation as a premier drug enforcement agency. The U.S. provided extensive equipment and training to the AFI. The AFI reciprocated by capturing numerous drug kingpins and extraditing them to face criminal prosecution for murder and drug distribution in the United States.
Over the first six months of 2012, the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas carried out a vicious war across Mexico to expand their areas of operations and intimidate the local population. Both cartels engaged in “information operations campaigns” by displaying large numbers of dismembered bodies in public places. The shock value of body dumps was designed to broadcast that the cartels are the dominant authority in Mexico.
The AFI under the Calderón retaliated against the major drug cartel kingpins’ horrific bloodshed by partnering with the United States and Guatemala to capture Horst Walther Overdick in Guatemala, followed by the capture of Francisco Trevino and Carlos Alejandro “El Fabiruchis” Gutierrez Escobedo and the killing of Gerardo “El Guerra” Guerra Valdez in Mexico, along with the capture of Jose Trevino in the United States.
Two days after the election, Pena came to the U.S. to announce that he would “welcome debate on the issue of drug legalization and regulation in Mexico.” In an interview by PBS News Hour, Pena clearly stated:
”I’m in favor of opening a new debate in the strategy in the way we fight drug trafficking. It is quite clear that, after several years of this fight against drug trafficking, we have more drug consumption, drug use and drug trafficking. That means we are not moving in the right direction. Things are not working.”
These are “code words” to signal the PRI intends to cut a profitable deal with the cartels to legalize drugs in exchange for collecting tax revenue on drug sales. The month before, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., had called a congressional hearing to accuse Pena of advocating “a reversion” back to the old PRI policies of “turning a blind eye to the cartels” as long as they weren’t perpetrating grisly violence.
Pena’s announcement of the PRI’s new cozy relationship with the drug cartels directly followed President Obama’s announcement of his “Dreamer” Executive Order curtailing deportations of “undocumented” aliens. These actions have caused major alarm among rank-and-file border agents that the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas are now unrestrained to flood into the United States with drugs and violence.
In a joint union press conference by the customs agents and the border patrol unions, Chris Crane, president of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, warned:
“It‘s impossible to understand the full scope of the administration’s changes, but what we are seeing so far concerns us greatly.… There is no burden for the alien to prove anything.”
(Chriss Street is nationally recognized financial writer. His latest book, “The Third Way,” now is available on www.amazon.com. Read more of Chriss Street and reach him at chrissstreetandcompany.com)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 62
Pub: Aug 3, 2012
