Is the United States filling the mass graves of Mexico?

Posted By David Rothkopf Monday, April 25, 2011 - 7:01 PM

If somehow we could quantify the brutality and horrors of war beyond mere death tolls and newspapers used those statistics to determine which stories went onto their front pages, most of the news of the Middle East would be so deeply buried as to never attract America's attention.

Instead we would be reading every day of places like San Fernando, Mexico where during the past several days a series of mass graves have revealed the corpses of 177, mostly innocents, perhaps as many as 122 snatched from buses taking them to the United States, scores bludgeoned to death by a sledge hammer. San Fernando is 90 miles from Texas border in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. It's an average Mexican town of 60,000 people that, thanks to the drug wars, has become known for grotesque violence that suggests it has been over-run not by mere criminals but by some kind of supernatural evil. In one instance, a man's son was kidnapped and $10,000 in ransom was sought. When the man raised every penny he could and sent the kidnappers $5,000, they sent him back just half of his son.

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has said his government is winning in the drug wars. But since he undertook to do so, 35,000 Mexicans have died and entire parts of the country have been rendered lawless. In part this is due to the brutality of the warring factions, like the Gulf Coast cartel and their former enforcers the Zetas who are now running wild in Tamaulipas. In part, it is due to the complicity of the local police. In San Fernando last week, the police chief was arrested for complicity and about two-thirds of his officers are now incarcerated.

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called what is happening in Mexico an insurgency, Calderon and other Mexican officials bristled. When the U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual offered criticisms of the Mexican government's approach to containing the drug war, the Mexicans complained bitterly to Washington and forced his ouster. Interestingly, Pascual was an unpopular choice from the get-go because he has specialized in failed states and Mexico didn't like the message. But rumors have him being replaced by Ambassador Anthony Wayne, recently stationed in another drug lord dominated failed state close to America's heart ... if not quite as close to its borders ... Afghanistan.

While the message of such an appointment would not be popular in the DF (Mexico City) if it were ultimately made, it's easy to understand the rationale behind it. Further, given the almost $2 billion in aid the United States has pumped into Mexico to help them fight these drug wars, you would think the Mexican government might be a little less brittle in its response to U.S. language and personnel choices. After all, not only has the Obama administration made assisting Mexico a top priority, recognizing that Mexican troubles translate quickly into U.S. immigration, border security and drug problems, but Secretary Clinton has been especially forthright in acknowledging America's degree of responsibility for many of these problems given that in the end, we are the consumers of the drugs that are being trafficked through Mexico, it's American cash that's fueling the animal greed of the feral gangs that are destabilizing our nearest Southern neighbor.

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EXPLORE:NORTH AMERICA, DRUGS & CRIME, MEXICO

No one will mess with 'Barry the Beanpole'

Posted By David Rothkopf Friday, January 21, 2011 - 5:36 PM

Given the events of the past week, it seems appropriate to devote some time to assessing the China-U.S. summit this week. It would be fascinating to explore why it turned out that in the end, the story was not so much how President Obama did, but rather was how President Hu did and how in noticeable strides he has helped elevate China's international game during his tenure in office. This recent meeting was in some respect the culmination of that fitful but striking process.

But it has been a long week. And if one focuses on the serious too long one misses the important … or, more to the point, the unintentionally hilarious. For example, it might not seem even remotely amusing that the U.S. federal government late this week rounded up 127 suspected mobsters. After all, it suggested that the mafia had not in fact gone the way of the Great Auk (extinct since 1844) -- an event which dates either to effective use of RICO statutes by prosecutors beginning in the early 1980s or to the June 10, 2007, airing of the last episode of The Sopranos.

That last episode was so bad, that ending was so ill-conceived and self-indulgent, that it had the effect of completing The Sopranos' ultimate mission in its last years, which was to make mob life seem so petty and boring that we lost interest. But now here comes this week's roundup, and suddenly the life is back. All you had to do was read through the list of names of the guys that got rounded up: Joseph "Jojo" Corozzo, Anthony "Big Tony" Moscatiello, Richard "Nerves" Fusco, Luigi "Baby Shanks" Manochchio, "Vinny Carwash," "Tony Bagels," "Johnny Pizza," "Lumpy," "The Bull," and "Meatball."

Maybe there is a lesson in this. Maybe if we want to recapture America's interest (and the world's) in foreign policy, maybe all it will take is coming up with colorful nicknames for world leaders. Nicknames that, like those of leading mobsters, tell you all you need to know in a word or two and would make any dull story on policy machinations that much more lively.

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EXPLORE:CHINA, DRUGS & CRIME, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

Clinton's bluntness on Mexico was right

Posted By David Rothkopf Thursday, September 9, 2010 - 4:15 PM

In her well-received remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let slip a statement that immediately sent the inter-American affairs semantic fashion police scurrying. She referred to the on-going threat posed by Mexican drug cartels and their allies to Mexican society as an "insurgency."

This comment was immediately disputed by Mexican President Felipe Calderon's administration, which argued that they were not becoming another Colombia and that they were doing what was necessary to keep its political system from being co-opted, corrupted and battered into ineffectiveness or worse. It also made some in the State Department and in the -- very conventionally-minded and cautious -- U.S. Latin American policy community squirm.

All those reactions are reasons why Clinton's remarks are exactly on target. It is hard for Mexico to make the case that it has its arms around the problem, when news of its third mayor to be killed in the past several weeks is breaking. It is hard when, as quoted in an excellent Los Angeles Times story on the subject, one senior U.S. immigration and customs official cites the fact that the Mexicans have "lost an ‘astronomical' number of police officers and soldiers." In short, it is hard for them to argue that everything is under control when it is clearly not.

Sometimes diplomacy is the art of varnishing unpleasant truths. But sometimes it is the art of stripping away the varnish. In this case it is the latter, because while the Calderon administration has struggled valiantly with this issue, they are losing ground -- and the worse things get, the more they go from being primarily a Mexican problem to being a North American problem. President Calderon may not like it, but this is already a political issue in the U.S. Simply shifting troops to our southern border will not be enough if pockets of Mexico become even more lawless, and in turn even more dangerous staging grounds for threats to the U.S.

Whether the crises in Mexican provinces -- locked in struggles with brutal gangs of drug dealers -- technically fulfills the definition of an insurgency is immaterial. In fact, Clinton's language was actually quite nuanced: "We face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, a drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency."

Sometimes just a word can be a wake-up call. In this case, if it is not one for the Mexicans -- whether for reasons of pride or denial -- it must be for the Obama team, who have from the beginning recognized that instability in Mexico -- for whatever reason -- is among the most serious, complex, and difficult to tackle threats the U.S. faces today.

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EXPLORE:NORTH AMERICA, DRUGS & CRIME, MEXICO, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

And now, my nominee for story of the month...

Posted By David Rothkopf Tuesday, August 11, 2009 - 4:00 PM

Every so often a straight, reported story comes across the wires that is news, analysis, and commentary all at once. The best such stories are also metaphors and provide their own punch lines. The truly transcendent ones take big issues and reveal truths about them beyond the collective abilities of the billion monkeys at a billion keyboards that is the blogosphere.

An AP story released late Monday afternoon achieves all these things. As such, although it is only the 11th, it is already my nominee for story of the month. The headline says it all: "Drug cartels smuggle oil into the U.S."

It's not a long story. The facts are pretty straightforward. Mexican drug gangs have been stealing Mexican oil and selling it to U.S. distributors. The U.S. government has caught on to the scam and one oil exec in the U.S. has pleaded guilty. The Mexican government says it is part of a new wave of stealing the country's oil patrimony.

What the Mexican government doesn't say is that the drug cartels that are smuggling tankers full of oil into the United States are probably operating more efficiently than Pemex, the country's calcified national oil company.

What the story doesn't have to say is that it was only natural for drug lords to branch out from feeding one U.S. addiction to feeding another.

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EXPLORE:CORRUPTION, DRUGS & CRIME, MEDIA, OIL

A rabbi, a mayor, and a second-hand body parts salesman walk into a bar...

Posted By David Rothkopf Friday, July 24, 2009 - 7:06 PM

Take it from me, there is only one certain method for determining whether someone is from New Jersey or not: They will refer to a trip to the beach as going "down the shore." However, the handcuffs are another dead giveaway.

Once again, my home state has been thrust into the limelight in a massive corruption case that involves a failed philanthropist named Solomon Dwek who lived, appropriately enough in a town called Deal (which is, as any Jerseyite knows, "down the shore"), a guy from Brooklyn named Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum who could get you a slightly used pancreas for a good price, a bunch of rabbis who laundered money through charities they controlled, cash from Israel, bankers in Switzerland, the mayors of Hoboken and Jersey City (where it is fair to say this case is not the first to offer a whiff of scandal), a member of Governor Jon Corzine's cabinet and a host of other bit players who you might find milling around catching a smoke outside the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Dwek, (pronounced in much the same way Barbara Walters would pronounce "dreck" which is the Yiddish word for shit), is now somewhere in the witness protection system (hopefully for his sake in the custody of Marshall Mary Shannon as played in "In Plain Sight" by the irresistible Mary McCormack.) Seeking to save his own skin after getting caught floating a bad check for $25 million, our guy Solomon-the-wise...er...guy, started helping the Feds round up corrupt pols.

One big-time Fed anti-corruption prosecutor called New Jersey the most corrupt state in the nation. (Which is probably true since technically, the District of Columbia is not a state.) Jon Corzine, who has a tough election race later this year that just got tougher, said "Any corruption is unacceptable-anywhere, anytime, by anybody. The scale of corruption we're seeing as this unfolds is simply outrageous and cannot be tolerated."

Noble words. But has Mr. Corzine so quickly forgotten his roots either in Washington or at Goldman Sachs? While the colorful cast of slimeballs arrested yesterday has restored pride of place to my home state in the corruption league tables, let's face it, what was really shocking about the reported payoffs was that the prices were so low. This was penny ante stuff. Ten grand for a building permit. That kind of thing. It can't hold a candle to the millions that are pumped into the campaigns of federal politicians who guide laws subtly this way and that or turn bills into Christmas trees of goodies for key constituents or who simply look the other way when oversight is concerned...for example, in the case of the financial community. Just for example, Governor.

There are cultural and definitional hurdles we need to get over with regard to the corrosive effects of buying and selling influence in our society. Corruption is offensive when it involves $97,000 stuffed in a box of Apple Jacks cereal as in this latest New Jersey case...but dress it up in the finery of federal campaign finance laws designed to institutionalize the power of the few and its suitable for high society senatorial or presidential fundraisers in Hollywood, Houston, or the Hamptons.

I call this later phenomenon "corruption within the law." And it as many times more pernicious than payoffs in diners in Bergen County as it is more expensive ... even if it doesn't quite invoke the backroom at Bada Bing or Satriale's quite as evocatively. That's because the effects are so much more widely felt in society ... as in the case of Wall Street selling the view that it didn't need much regulation or that it needed cheap money bailouts or in the case of the oil and auto industries rental of the levers of U.S. energy policy for the past several decades.

But I guarantee you that tonight America's most trusted newsman (which according to a new TIME Magazine poll is Jon Stewart...who is neither a newsman nor does he actually represent himself as being trustworthy, quite the contrary) will devote time on his show to tape or pictures of the perp walk of the five dirty rabbis or the car loads of mayors and assemblyman as if they were the face of corruption in America. Which may be appropriate because they are as much about comedy and as far from the real story as is "The Daily Show."

Nonetheless, the real uncovered corruption aside, as a Jersey boy, there is something irresistible about this particularly tale. It's the bastard short story of Mario Puzo and Philip Roth (with a hint of Damon Runyon by way of Sholom Aleichem) and who can object to that. Further, we take pride in our scumbags in New Jersey.

In fact, that reminds me ... earlier this week I was having lunch with FP supremo Moises Naim at the Palm Restaurant in Washington.

While we lunched on rare tuna salads while Lord knows what kind of nasty deals were being cut in the booths nearby, we got into a discussion of just this subject of corruption. Moises, author of the book Illicit -- recently turned into an Emmy-nominated documentary -- and thus an expert on all things sleazoid and able to say the word "bagman" in 80 languages, argued that whatever flavor our corruption took in the U.S., the Venezuelas and Russias had us beat hands down. I muttered a few words about my theories about our sanitized versions of buying and selling politicos but he scoffed. He's from Caracas and he likes his violation of the public trust big and loud and ideally involving low-life political thugs of the type who rule his home country.

Well, look at the scoreboard, my friend! We are from New Jersey and we are loud and we are proud! We've got it all. The baby-faced golden boy of Hoboken politics, the new mayor, heading to the slammer practically before he is old enough to shave. An 87 year-old Syrian rabbi. A special lingo in which payments were "invitations" and approvals were "opportunities." We're slicing people open and selling freaking body parts for chrissakes (although due to Kashrut laws you couldn't get, say, a kidney and a pound of cheese from the same guy).

So Mr. Glamorous expert on the underbelly of globalization, who's corrupt now? Boo-ya, my friend! Fuggedaboutit.

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EXPLORE:CORRUPTION, DRUGS & CRIME, FUN STUFF, MEDIA