A policeman piles packages of confiscated marijuana in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state, Mexico, on the border with the United States
(Raul Llamas/Getty)
Each year, millions of dollars of Mexican drug money pass through the hands of American Drug Enforcement Administration officials. Undercover American narcotics agents launched the money laundering operation in order to trace the drug cartels. This is not the first instance of a U.S. governmental agency using illegal means to fight the war against drugs in Mexico. While the effectiveness of either program stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S. remains unclear, their impact on Mexican citizens is less ambiguous.
Ioan Grillo is Mexico correspondent for Time magazine and author of "El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency."
Jorge Castañeda is global distinguished professor of political science and Latin American Studies at NYU and a former Mexican foreign minister.
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Comments [2]
The DEA follows the lead of the CIA who have trafficked drugs to groom assets since the beginning. Remember Air America helping the nationalist Chinese in Southeast Asia keep organized for a fight with Mao? Remember drug trafficking in the Afghan war against the Russians? How about Iran contra? Then helping the paramilitary groups in Columbia who protected the pipeline, unlike the FARC who only are responsible for 2% of trafficking. Here drugs are secondary to idealogical and corporate interests, so the blowback is the enormous drug problem we have today. History will reveal how much better the US could conduct foreign policy, if its policies coincided with its mythology.
Of course, no mention of the Attorney General or the President who appointed him regarding this issue.
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