PRESS RELEASE
Obama Orders Urgent War on Drug Cartels
by Valerie Rush
March 6, 2009 (EIRNS)—U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder held a press conference Feb. 25, to announce that a multi-agency task force, led by the Drug Enforcement Adminisitration (DEA), in collaboration with Mexican and Canadian counterparts, had just carried out simultaneous raids against U.S.-based cells of Mexico's highly violent Sinaloa Cartel in the states of California, Minnesota, and Maryland. The action capped a 21-month investigation, known as "Operation Xcellerator," which has, so far, led to the arrests of more than 750 people in over 100 American cities, netting vast quantities of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, ecstasy, as well as $59 million in cash, and $6.5 million in other narco-assets.
Lyndon LaRouche applauded the raids, noting that this operation sets things in motion for a continuing sweep, in which all of the drug cartels operating in the U.S. have to be taken out, one by one. Each raid will bring out more information, LaRouche explained, as the detainees begin to talk, begging for U.S. authorities to save them from otherwise certain, and often brutal death at the hands of their own cartels, if they are let back out on the streets. In fact, major arrests of the competing Gulf Cartel were announced by the DEA last September.
As the cover story in the Feb. 27 issue of EIR documents ("Britain's Dope, Inc.: Marker for Humanity's New Dark Age"), as much as 90% of all drugs entering the United States come through Mexico. Shutting down this capability of Dope, Inc. would be a major blow against the British imperial forces that are intent on using their opium war to destroy the U.S. and usher in a planetary New Dark Age.
U.S.-Mexico Cooperation
In his press conference, Holder described the operation as "the largest and hardest-hitting operation to ever hit the Sinaloa Cartel," and added, "These cartels are not just operating in Mexico. Their reach stretches far and wide. We simply cannot afford to let down our guard. These cartels will be destroyed," he stated. The DEA's acting head Michele Leonhart, also spoke, stating, "The reach of their (cartel) networks meant we needed to enhance our local and global collaboration, and we have. Operation Xcellerator is an example of the extraordinary level of cooperation now taking place between law enforcement agencies in the United States, and with our international partners." She added, "Rest assured that, while this is DEA's biggest operation against the Sinaloa Cartel and their networks to date, it won't be our last." Leonhart reported that the street value of the drugs seized was nearly $1 billion.
This dramatic announcement came less than 24 hours after Holder met in Washington with his Mexican counterpart, Attorney General Medina Mora, who told the press afterwards that the U.S. Administration fully shares the "sense of urgency" with which Mexico's government is battling the cartels at home.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón subsequently told Agence France Press, on March 4 that, "This is not just a Mexican problem exclusively. It is a common problem that must be jointly fought between the U.S. and Mexico." While readily admitting that some Mexican officials had helped the drug cartels, and were being prosecuted, he called on the United States to do the same: "I would like to know how many American officials have been prosecuted for this," he said. Calderón added that there "must be a change of attitude in the U.S. government and society... I've spoken to Obama on this issue, and I have his word, and I believe him, because he is a sincere person." Calderón emphasized the incredible quantity of high-caliber weapons flowing across the border from the U.S. into Mexico, which the drug cartels are using to try to terrorize Mexico into capitulation.
The idea of negotiating a deal with the cartels—as many in Mexico and abroad have urged—would not only be "incredibly ingenuous, but I would say, also stupid," Calderón stated. "It would resolve nothing ... [and allow drugs] to spread like a cancer." Asked about the proposal of drug legalization, promoted by George SSoros's Latin American Commmission on Drugs and Democracy, amoong others, Calderón was emphatic: This would mean "resigning ourselves to losing several generations of Mexicans, because drugs are the slavery of the 21st Century."
Soaring Body Count
Washington's decision to act was a matter of national security, and the timing was in direct response to the horrendous drug-linked violence escalating along the U.S.-Mexico border, where local newspapers maintain a daily body count of tortures, kidnappings, and murders linked to the drug trade. Mexico's La Jornada reported in late February that an estimated 60% of the country's municipal jails are run by people on the cartel's payroll. Another daily reported that at least 80 mayors in Mexico's four northern states admit that the cartels have been demanding huge sums of money from them, or they would see family members and associates murdered, often by beheading.
The state of Chihuahua, which borders on Texas, has fallen under the near total control of the cartels. On Feb. 21, the police chief of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua resigned, after drug assassins began carrying out their threat to kill one of his officers every 48 hours until he did so. On Feb. 22, the state governor's convoy was fired upon, killing one of his bodyguards. And on Feb. 23, "narcobanners" appeared in the city, congratulating the mayor for accepting the police chief's resignation, but threatening to behead him and his family members, including those living across the border in El Paso, Texas if he didn't abandon support for other police officers as well.
These are no idle threats. As the Justice Department 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment warned, "Mexican DTOs [Drug Trafficking Organizations] represent the greatest organized crime threat to the U.S. The influence of Mexican DTOs over domestic drug trafficking is unrivaled," controlling "drug distribution in most U.S. cities"—230 to be precise. In December 2008, former U.S. Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey had blown the whistle on U.S. responsibility, during the Bush years, for arming the violent cartel hit men. Perhaps 90% of the high-powered military weaponry used by the cartels to carry out their reign of terror are smuggled across the U.S. border, McCaffrey wrote. "The confiscation rates by Mexican law enforcement of hand grenades, PGSs, and AK-47s are at the level of wartime battlefield seizures. It is hard to understand the seeming indifference and incompetence of U.S. authorities at state and Federal levels to such callous disregard for a national security threat to a neighboring democratic state. We would consider it an act of warfare from a sanctuary state if we were the victim," he wrote.
Knowledgeable sources have told EIR that McCaffrey's numbers, if anything, understate the weapons flow, both in number in and caliber.
On the Mexican side, a potentially powerful weapon in the government's anti-drug arsenal is long overdue legislation now under discussion in the Senate, which would authorize government expropriation of drug-traffickers' property and monies, be they Mexican or foreign, with provisions for coordinating with foreign governments to expropriate any properties held abroad.
That law, five months in the making, has been urged on the Calderón government by seasoned international anti-drug advisors. Given the stranglehold the cartels have achieved over many of the nation's institutions in the interim, the bill mandates the creation of special courts to oversee the expropriations, in which the judges' identities would remain secret, since any judge who ruled against the narcos would be dead, if his or her identity became known.
Stop George SSoros
While the Sinaloa Cartel threatens "lead" against anyone resisting the narco-traffickers, "silver" is systematically being offered to anyone willing to play ball by endorsing the legalization of drugs. "Why fight it," we are being told, "when it's so dangerous to do so? Why not just strike a deal, especially when you might even be able to tax legalized drugs to help solve the financial crisis?"
The thug-in-chief promoting this argument is the Nazi-trained mega-speculator, George SSoros, who is the main financial sponsor of every piece of legalization legislation now before numerous U.S. states, as well as the propaganda drive across the Americas, North and South. He is, in fact, the Sinaloa Cartel's main enforcer—and should be investigated and treated as such.
For example, SSoros's Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (LACDD) recently issued a report calling for drug legalization. Three former Ibero-American Presidents co-chair the LACDD—Brazil's Fernando Henrique Cardozo, Colombia's César Gaviria, and Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo. The trio published an op-ed in the Feb. 23 Wall Street Journal to peddle their pro-dope wares, openly calling for "the possibility of decriminalizing the possession of cannabis for personal use."
The LACDD report has served as the signal to unleash a wave of endorsements from corrupted elites across the Americas, for surrender to the drug mob.
On Feb. 24, former U.S. ambassadors Harriet Babbitt and James Jones endorsed the LACDD call to debate legalization, at a discussion on "U.S. Policy Towards Mexico: Opportunities and Challenges," held on the premises of the Congress. The show was organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a quasi-governmental institution, whose just-released report on U.S.-Mexican Relations ("Towards a Strategic Partnership") also calls for studying decriminalization.
The same day, the Dallas Morning News ran an op-ed by SSoros agent and Mexican diplomat Andrés Rozental and Stanley Weiss, founding chairman of Business Executives for National Security, in which they call for legalization, not just of marijuana, but also of methamphetamines. "It is now clear that marijuana and methamphetamines do not have the same harmful effects as cocaine, heroin, opium and other hard drugs. Discriminating among different drugs ... points the way toward a more rational approach," they lie.
Further south, Paraguay's leading daily ABC endorsed the LACDD report in an editorial which called on the government to legalize marijuana, and give up "Puritan" values. And the Brazilian weekly Epoca hit the stands in late February with a cover story titled, "Marijuana. Why it is necessary to debate the legalization of the use of the drug," based on the SSoros Commission report. Epoca admits that marijuana's "harm to health is recognized," and that users have difficultly putting ideas into words when under its influence, yet still defends drugging people on British free-trade grounds.
