A Partnership Blind to Corruption

Recent events in Mexico illustrate U.S. intelligence lapses at the most important level: analysis.

Because of traditional Eurocentrism in the State Department, Mexico has not always received the attention it deserves. This is shortsighted. After all, when you add in illegal drugs, Mexico is our largest trading partner by about $70 billion.

Whatever the reasons, the U.S. repeatedly ignored warnings that drug war and free-trade policies were playing into the hands of powerful drug smuggling interests in Mexico.

There is compelling evidence that U.S. military intelligence anticipating the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas was deliberately ignored or “lost” in the cheerleading for the free-trade agreement.

Analysts have known for years that the Mexican drug business had to be abetted by the military; how else do you fly cargo planes into Mexican airspace? Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas commented casually in an early 1994 interview that the narcos and the military had easy commerce in Chiapas, and cited evidence of military bases and equipment used for drug smuggling. There was never any reason to expect the military to be morally superior to the federal police, who had been fired by the thousands during the Salinas presidency, only to get immediate employment as guards for the drug lords. The Mexican army, like armies all over the world, has been cashing in on both sides of the drug trade for at least six years. When he was sacked as President Ernesto Zedillo’s drug czar in February, Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo had just finished final negotiations for the transfer of U.S. Army helicopters to Mexico, lending credence to the Zapatista charge that U.S. equipment nominally given to the Mexicans for the drug war was used for drug smuggling and to attack the Indian rebels, who are known to have fired upon narcos in Chiapas.

In fact, as early as 1990, certain analysts publicly warned against the Colombianization of Mexico, meaning the takeover of critical aspects of the government, police and military by drug traffickers. Warnings once dismissed as fanciful, for example, that U.S. military aid and intelligence might be going directly to military authorities in Mexico in the pay of drug smugglers, now appear soberingly true.

How was the general of the U.S. drug war, Barry McCaffrey, bushwhacked into praising his Mexican counterpart, who was even then under investigation, and soon indicted, for being in the pocket of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes?

This critical failure of analysis alarms some experts.

“There is a tremendous struggle for power going on in Mexico,” says Harvard professor John Womack. “What puzzles me is why the press and the drug police don’t look at those who were in power when Mexico first became important in drug smuggling” (in the early 1980s). Womack says one reason may be that important Mexican military and intelligence figures have close ties to the U.S.; indeed, many received advanced training here.

The failure to properly vet Gutierrez was a failure of analysis, not of fact-gathering. The information was available; coherent interpretation, apparently, was not. This is a dismal prospect for U.S. intelligence.

If the problem were only that the U.S. officials actually relied upon the word of the Mexican military for Gutierrez’s recommendation and inquired no further, then they might be accused merely of egregious naivete. But if they accepted the recommendation as authoritative because the lines of real power are invisible to them, as they are to most Americans, and indeed to most Mexicans, then they are not accomplishing their jobs and should be replaced.

One thing might be said in favor of Gutierrez: He may very well have had no choice in the matter of corruption. The drug lords’ offer is plata o plombo--silver or lead--for you and your family. But if matters have actually deteriorated to the point that the “incorruptible” head of the Mexican drug effort (as Gutierrez was known in Washington) is corrupted by force or choice, then it is just about time to call in the Marines, or call off the war on drugs, which costs the U.S. aggregately in police, penal and legal expense about $120 billion a year. That is also about the size of the total illegal drug business in the U.S. When you add them together, they roughly equal our annual deficit.