by Jeremy Bigwood

Published in In These Times, May 13, 2009.

From the article: “Obama may not understand the dangerous waters his administration is drifting into by expanding “public safety” policing programs. If the history of the OPS and similar projects are any indication of what will come, U.S. policing initiatives in Latin America and elsewhere could result in violence and political repression.”
Read all of it, here.

Written by Kristin Bricker for Narconews. Published May 9, 2009

Is the Mexican government planning to incarcerate 100s of thousands of casual drug users? Or does it only want to use the threat of draconian sentences to frighten many individuals so as to control and deploy them?

Read the whole piece here.

When read together with Bill Conroy’s pieces exposing how the United States Government’s Direct Military Sales of lethal hardware and training are a key component of the supply-chain for the narco-cartels, this article offers a critical understanding of Plan Mexico.

Drug War Doublespeak

“Through late February and early March, a blitzkrieg of declarations from U.S. government and military officials and pundits hit the media, claiming that Mexico was alternately at risk of being a failed state, on the verge of civil war, losing control of its territory, and posing a threat to U.S. national security.”
<more>

Available in translation: Doble discurso en guerra contra la droga

Check out this excellent piece by Kristin Bricker, written especially for The Narco News Bulletin on May 7, 2009.

Read the entire story April 21, 2009 by Kristin Bricker via the Narcosphere here.

His well-documented thesis is that the cartels are obtaining their heavy fire power not from gun shows and straw buyers but from private sector arms exports authorized/licensed by the USG to the MOD. He writes: “Given Mexico’s strict gun laws with respect to private individuals, it is likely most of the DCS (Direct Commercial Sales) program defense hardware approved for export to that nation was directed toward the military or law enforcement agencies. But it is precisely that fact which should be raising some alarm in Washington.”

The corporate media narrative describes the scale of drug violence being due in large part because US gunshow sales and smugglers carrying guns easy-to-buy in the U.S. to Mexico. This is false. Read this to learn why.

Check out Mr. President: Calderón Is Not Mexico by Laura Carlsen, Director of the Americas Program at the Center For International Policy

Posted April 17, 2009

“On August 5, 2008 a group of 20 Mexican soldiers burst into the community of Santiago Lachivia, Oaxaca and fired into a crowd of residents preparing land for a community garden. Cecilio Vásquez Miguel and Venancio Olivera Ávila were killed. In the aftermath, when neither arms nor drugs turned up in the search, the anti-narcotics military unit moved on, leaving a stunned and traumatized community.

This is the war on drugs in Mexico; a “war” that abuses the civilian population, dramatically increases violence, and arguably has very little effect on the flow of illegal drugs to the largest market in the world, the United States.” <More>

To the Editor:
Op-Ed Columnist: Cocaine and White Teens (January 10, 2009)

In “Cocaine and White Teens” (column, Jan. 10), Charles M. Blow writes that white teenagers use more cocaine than black teenagers, and cites a ratio of 10 to 1 of white versus black teenagers entering drug treatment for crack and cocaine use.

A significant but missing statistic is white versus black teenagers entering the criminal justice system.

F.B.I. statistics for many years have shown more whites than blacks arrested for drugs, while more blacks than whites are incarcerated. We should not lose sight that our war on drugs has been a war on people of a certain color. Howard Josepher

New York, Jan. 16, 2009

The writer is president of Exponents, which helps people affected by drug addiction.

Here’s the original article.

http://www.newamerica.net/pressroom/2008/u_s_weapons_war

As the world marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this week, a new report from The New America Foundation finds that U.S. arms transfers are undermining human rights, weakening democracy and fueling conflict around the world.

“While it is critical to commemorate this historic occasion, we must use this moment to stress that the United States cannot demand respect for human rights and arm human rights abusers at the same time,” notes William D. Hartung, the lead author of the ground-breaking new report, U.S. Weapons at War 2008: Beyond the Bush Legacy, which will be released at an event in Washington, DC on Wednesday, December 10, 2008.