But neither the US nor Zedillo were being entirely forthright. Both had plenty of advance warning about the general. Indeed, Zedillo’s attorney general, Antonio Lozano, said that he had warned Zedillo personally about Gutierrez Rebollo’s ties to the Juárez cartel before the general was appointed to head Zedillo’s National Institute to Fight Drug Trafficking.
While the CIA prepared highly complimentary profiles of Gutierrez Rebollo, calling him a “soldier’s soldier,” the DEA had compiled a much different assessment of the general. It had amassed evidence showing that his drug suppression strikes had almost exclusively targeted small operators or Carillo Fuentes’s hated rival, the Tijuana-based Arellano-Félix gang.
From his jail cell in Mexico City, the imprisoned general had a few surprises of his own. He claimed to have evidence linking “government officials and their relations at the highest levels of Mexican politics” to the cocaine trade. Gutierrez said among those profiting from the drug trade were “former presidents, the current president’s family and top officials at the Ministry of Defense.” To back up his claim, the general produced tape-recorded phone calls purporting to link members of the Guadalajara cartel to Fernando Velazco Silva, the father of Ernesto Zedillo’s wife, Nilda Patricia Velazco.
The Drug War Hits Chiapas
Shortly after Thanksgiving 1996, the first twenty of a planned seventy-three Huey helicopters were shipped in cargo planes out of Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, headed for Mexico. The Hueys were part of a weapons and reconnaissance package worth $50 million, military equipment sold, loaned or given by the Clinton administration to the Mexican armed forces. The official pretext was that the arms were for use in the drug war and to combat illegal immigration.
The true purpose harked back to a famous recommendation made by Chase Bank in 1994 regarding threats posed by an uprising of Mayan Indians in southern Mexico. At that time a Chase vice president circulated an advisory to the bank’s clients saying that “the Zapatistas must be eliminated.” Though an embarrassed Chase Bank later disowned the very sentiment it had promulgated, the Clinton administration saw no need to back off that urgent imperative. Any threat to the ruling elites in Mexico was by extension a threat to US interests. Insurgency in Mexico is always of the most urgent concern to the US government.
Donald E. Schulz, a professor of national security at the US Army’s War College, put it this way: “A hostile government could put the US investments [in Mexico] in danger, jeopardize access to oil, produce a flood of political refugees, and economic migrants to the north. And under such circumstances the United States would feel obligated to militarize the southern border.”
In fact, throughout the last decade the southern border has been diligently militarized. Since 1988, six years before the Zapatistas rose up out of the Lacandón forest in Chiapas on New Year’s Day 1994, the Pentagon has been dispatching arms and reconnaissance aircraft south of the border, using the same excuse of drug interdiction, a rationale accompanying similar shipments to the Colombian military. The DEA has helped out in the operation, sending twelve agents to Chiapas, even though the region is not a major trafficking area.
During the Bush years, the US shipped $212 million worth of military supplies to Mexico, more US military aid than Mexico had received in the previous thirty years combined. This figure will be more than eclipsed by the end of the Clinton era. In addition to the seventy-three Huey helicopters, in the past seven years the US has given to Mexico four C-26 reconnaissance planes, 500 bullet-proof armored personnel transports, $10 million worth of night vision and C3 equipment (command, control and communications), global positioning satellite equipment, radar, spare parts for thirty-three helicopters, machine guns, semi-automatic rifles, grenades, ammunition, flame-throwers, gas masks, night sticks, uniforms, rations and two Knox-class attack boats.
Although the rationale is drug interdiction, the arms listed above have a wider purpose. A June 1996 report from the General Accounting Office titled “Drug Control: Counter-narcotics Efforts in Mexico” offers evidence that the Mexican government used the US arms officially designated for counter-narcotics operations to suppress insurgencies. “During the 1994 uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas,” the report says, “several US-provided helicopters were used to transport Mexican military personnel to the conflict, which was a violation of the transfer agreement.” More than 150 indigenous peasants were killed in those operations.
The GAO placed most of the blame for this on the US government, which, it suggested, connived in the misuse. “The US embassy [in Mexico City] relies heavily on bi-weekly reports submitted by the Mexican government that typically consist of a map of specific operational records – US personnel have little way of knowing if the helicopters are being properly used for counter-narcotics purposes or are being misused. Embassy officials told us that helicopter operational records have been requested and received on only one occasion in the past eight months [that is, from November 1995 to June 1996].” US-built helicopters were also used to suppress peasant farmers in southern Mexico protesting low corn prices brought about by NAFTA.
According to a May 1996 story in the Mexico City paper La Jornada, the US State Department assured the Zedillo regime that the arms shipments did not have to be exclusively used in anti-drug operations. The State Department informed the Mexican government that its “aviation advisers” would only inspect the location and condition of the helicopters once a year and would always give prior notice of their trips.
Across the summer of 1996, the uprising by the Popular revolutionary Army (EPR) in Guerrero state prompted James Jones, the US ambassador to Mexico and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, to declare at a telecommunications conference in Cancún on September 9, 1996 that the US was willing to provide increased military aid, intelligence, and training to Mexico to fight the rebels. “Whatever they need,” Jones said, “we will certainly support.” Jones added a comparison: “The United States has much experience tracking right-wing militias, which could be of great use to Mexico. Like armed militias, [the ERP] has weapons and munitions capabilities. Terrorist groups operate much the same all over.”
Colonel Warren D. Hall, a top aide to General Barry McCaffery when he was head of the US Southern Command, spoke bluntly about the dual-use nature of US anti-drug aid. “It’s unrealistic to expect the military to limit its use of the equipment to operations against narco-traffickers,” Hall said. “The light infantry skills US Special Operations forces teach during counter-drug training deployments can be used for counterinsurgency as well.”
Cross-border collusion extended, naturally enough, to the CIA and FBI. In February 1995, the CIA boasted to its friends in the US press that it had lent important assistance to efforts to unmask Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista leader. The FBI maintains a huge border force and one of its largest foreign offices in Mexico City, where it trains Mexican police and intelligence forces.
The US military has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past five years in increased surveillance in Mexico with insubstantial results in terms of halting the flow of drugs, according to a recently released report written by the Inspector General for the Defense Department in 1994. “Although the Pentagon has significantly expanded US monitoring and detection of cocaine smugglers, this expanded capability has come with a hefty price tag and has yet to reduce the flow of cocaine onto American streets,” the report concluded. “The portion of the federal drug budget earmarked for military surveillance has quadrupled during the past five years, without measurable goals or results to show that the increases were warranted … the fact that cocaine remains affordable and readily available in the United States strongly suggests that surveillance is not producing results commensurate with its costs.”
But assuredly the US military is putting the surveillance information to use. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the Pentagon is readying itself for intervention in Mexico sometime in the near future, with
Department of Defense analysts drafting worst-case scenarios. In 1994, a year which ended with the collapse of the Mexican peso, a Pentagon briefing paper, declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, concluded that it was “conceivable that a deployment of US troops to Mexico would be received favorably if the Mexican government were to confront the threat of being overthrown as a result of widespread economic and social chaos. In such a scenario the intelligence and security services would probably cooperate with US intelligence forces to identify threats to Mexico’s internal stability.”
As Clinton’s former Defense Secretary William Perry put it in a speech in October 1995, “When it comes to stability and security our destinies are indissolubly linked.”
On December 22, 1997, Mexican paramilitary troops using US-made weapons executed a bestial raid on the Acteal refugee camp in Chiapas, massacring forty-five Tsotzil Indians, mostly women and children. The methodical butchery of the raid followed the same pattern by which the CIA-backed Guatemalan military and allied death squads, year after year, wiped out Indian villages suspected of rebel sympathies.
Immediately after the killings, the Mexican government reacted to a huge popular outcry across Mexico by deploring the massacre and by arresting some of the actual participants (though none of the “intellectual authors” of the crime). But with the New Year and a new minister of the interior, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, Mexican federal troops kept moving forward, ultimately surrounding Zapatista strongholds. The army troops threatened to disarm the rebels forcibly, though the latter had not used their guns since the cease-fire on January 12, 1994, less than two weeks after the rebellion began with the seizing of the town of San Cristóbal on New Year’s Day.
Labastida, the new man at the Interior Ministry, excused these troop movements against the Zapatistas by claiming that the plan was to demilitarize the state of Chiapas. But the troops did not move against the paramilitaries nor did they operate in the area where the massacre took place. Rather, they headed eight hours’ march away from the Acteal area toward the Zapatistas’ central base in the Lacandón forest.
There’s never been any doubt that the PRI government and its international advisers had from the start yearned to rid themselves of the Zapatistas, an impudent affront to the Mexican state and the PRI’s entire neoliberal economic program. (This same program spelled doom to the Indian farming communities in southern Mexico, which is why the Zapatistas rebelled in the first place.) From the first days the government was deterred from full-blown military attack only because of strong public concern in Mexico and throughout the world, where the Zapatistas have been seen as a bright spark of hope in a drear political landscape. This was why the Mexican government, with the encouragement of the US, opted for its low-intensity strategy of arming and training paramilitary groups who harried and occasionally killed Indian villagers seen as pro-Zapatista, to such a degree that places like Acteal became de facto refugee camps. The local elites in Chiapas, who had seen their power threatened and their land taken, were hoping that the massacre they helped to organize would survive, not as a horrible memory but as an agreeable lesson in how rural rebellion should be dealt with. It’s not an exercise in hyperbole to invoke the specter of a Guatemalan-style program of annihilation of Indians. After all, the Mayans on the Mexican side of the border are not that different from the Mayans on the Guatemalan side.
“US-provided helicopters have been used in the past by the Mexican military to attack unarmed populations,” said Cecelia Rodríguez, spokesperson for the Zapatistas in the US. “The Mexican armed forces have been accused by human rights monitors of murders, disappearances, kidnapping and rape. Nonetheless their requests for military equipment and expertise have been granted time and time again. Under the guise of fighting drug traffickers, the US government has bolstered an anti-democratic and corrupt Mexican government with a laundry list of high-tech military equipment that has been used to violate the basic human rights of the people of Mexico.”
This is what the drug war looks like on the ground. As the Indians of Chiapas well know, and as the poor of South Central Los Angeles also well know, “drug war” is a code phrase for social control and repression.
Sources
The reporting of the Mexican newspapers La Jornada and La reforma have been extraordinary and far superior to any coverage of Mexico/US relations in the States. The writings of Andrew Reding proved to be a useful guide to the treacherous and shifting waters of Mexican politics. Former DEA agent Michael Levine’s books, The Big White Lie and Deep Cover, provide an insider’s account of what it was like to work in Mexico against drug dealers, corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and the CIA. Frank Bardacke and Cecelia Rodríguez helped us more fully appreciate the forces behind the Zapatista rebellion and subsequent retaliation by the US-backed Mexican military in Chiapas. Andres Oppenheimer’s book, Bordering on Chaos, and his reporting for the Miami Herald were valuable sources. Several reporters for national papers have done fine work on Mexico. Particularly useful were the reporting of Sam Dillon at the New York Times, Douglas Farah at the Washington Post, and Laurie Hays at the Wall Street Journal. Tim Golden’s 1997 article in the New York Times on what the US intelligence agencies knew about the narco-penetration of the Salinas and Zedillo regimes contained a trove of new information, though Golden soft-pedals the CIA’s complicity in the corruption of the Mexican intelligence and security appartus. The DEA’s public affairs office must be thanked for supplying background information on the life and death of Enrique Camarena.
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