NAFTA And The Drug Cartels: "A Deal Made In Narco Heaven" -- Exclusive Excerpt and Live Chat at 3pm EST

This post is excerpted from Ryan Grim's "This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America", on sale this week. He was online on Monday for a live chat to discuss the book and other aspects of drug policy. For info on events and reviews, see the Facebook page or follow him on Twitter. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Join Ryan right here at 3 p.m. EST, when he will take questions on NAFTA and the drug cartles, and on anything else drug-related. You can submit your questions and comments for Ryan below.

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During the first year of his administration, President Bill Clinton made free trade a top priority, pushing for the passage of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement. It wasn't an easy task. Having helped Democrats take the White House for the first time in twelve years, organized labor was in no mood to see manufacturing jobs shipped to Mexico.

The debate was difficult enough without having to talk about the sprawling Mexican drug trade and its attendant corruption. And how the agreement would also end up benefiting the cartels.
So he ordered his people not to talk about it.

"We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking, yes." Phil Jordan, who had been one of the Drug Enforcement Administration's leading authorities on Mexican drug organizations, told ABC News reporter Brian Ross four years after the deal had gone through. "For the godfathers of the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico, this was a deal made in narco heaven."

The agreement squeaked through Congress in late 1993 and went into effect January 1, 1994, the same day that the Zapatistas rose up in southeast Mexico. With its passage, more than two million trucks began flowing northward across the border annually. Only a small fraction of them were inspected for cocaine, heroin, or meth.

The opening of the border came at an opportune time for Mexican drug runners, who had recently expanded their control of the cocaine trade and made major investments in large-scale meth production. Both were unintended consequences of U.S. policies in the seventies and eighties aimed at crushing meth and cocaine with a militarized, enforcement-heavy approach.

Now NAFTA had presented Mexican cartels with one more unintended opportunity springing from U.S. policy. In a 1999 report, the White House estimated that commercial vehicles brought roughly 100 tons of cocaine into the country across the Mexican border in 1993. With NAFTA in effect, 1994 saw the biggest jump in commercial-vehicle smuggling on record--a 25 percent increase. The number of meth-related emergency-room visits in the United States doubled between 1991 and 1994. In San Diego, America's meth capital, meth seizures climbed from 1,409 pounds in 1991 to 13,366 in 1994.

The return of meth across the Mexican border was one more sign that the get-tough policies of the eighties had backfired.

Meth production had been driven underground and pushed into Mexico in the late-sixties and seventies as a result of federal legislation. It fell into the waiting arms of a drug-smuggling establishment that itself had also been created by U.S. drug policy. The 1914 U.S. law that banned opium had created a situation in which the drug was illegal on one side of the border and legal on the other, where it had been grown since the 1800s. The Mexican government was in the midst of a revolution and unable to stop northward smuggling. Sociologist Luís Astorga, in his study "Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment," cites Los Angeles customs officials claiming that Baja California's then-governor, Esteban Cantú, a Mexican army colonel, was suspected of playing a major role in the drug trade by reselling product seized from other traffickers.

Mexican smugglers got another boost when the United States banned alcohol with passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. It took them decades, though, to get into the cocaine business. In the seventies, South American cocaine producers were running almost all of the cocaine imported into the United States through the Caribbean, into Miami, and then out to the rest of the nation. In the eighties, the feds brought the hammer down on the mound of coke that was Miami and the Caribbean smugglers. While the government focused on the powder that then began to waft across the country, Mexican meth smugglers seized a perfect opportunity.

The opening salvo of the U.S. war on coke might well have been a 1981 Time magazine cover story on Miami's burgeoning drug trade, which put an intolerable situation before the eyes of the whole American public. The report, titled "Trouble in Paradise," led directly to federal intervention, with Vice President George H. W. Bush repeatedly traveling to Miami to oversee the response personally.

Making life difficult for those involved in the multibillion-dollar drug trade, however, was no simple affair. With tighter enforcement in Florida and the Caribbean, producers increasingly moved their product by tuna boat or airplane to Mexico or another nearby nation and then overland across the U.S. border. Mexico had the infrastructure ready: By the late seventies, it was the world's largest heroin exporter, with thousands of acres of poppy fields. The late sixties and seventies had also seen a dramatic increase in demand for Mexican marijuana; by the mid-seventies, it was among the world's foremost pot exporters.

The extensive South and Central American smuggling network was built at a time when the United States' primary foreign-policy goals were to oppose communism and to support enemies of communism--regardless of whether they were also drug traffickers. When relations with the Soviet Union began to thaw, in the mid-eighties, the United States was left with a superpower-sized military that had no obvious enemy. Drugs would have to do.

"Two words sum up my entire approach," President George H. W. Bush's drug czar, William Bennett, announced in 1989: "'consequences' and 'confrontation.'" He and Bush doubled annual drug-war spending to $12 billion and pressed fighter planes, submarines, and other military hardware into service for the cause. In 1989, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney secured $450 million to go after Caribbean smugglers; billions more were spent in the source countries of South America.

In the early nineties, a White House report notes, more than 250 tons of coke were smuggled into the United States through Florida in a year, while only about 100 tons flowed across the southwestern border. By the end of the decade, just under 200 tons each came across both boundaries. In subsequent years, the amount coming through the Caribbean steadily fell, and by 2004, the Interagency Assessment of Cocaine Movement determined that the route accounted for less than 10 percent of all coke smuggling into the United States.

Spreading the market out didn't have a noticeable effect on supply north of the border. But it had an important impact south of it: it solidified the strength of Mexican drug-running organizations, which quickly realized that they could make a nice extra profit by packing another drug with their shipments of cocaine. U.S. restrictions on pharmaceutical companies, which had lowered domestic meth production, had also created a thriving Mexican meth industry. The Mexican cocaine cartels were flush with capital, having taken over major portions of the business from the Colombians--thanks, in large measure, to successful U.S. efforts to decapitate Colombian drug organizations. These two circumstances led directly to the industrialization of the meth trade.

The Mexican traffickers renegotiated their deals with the Colombians, taking an ownership stake rather than a flat fee for transport, and then reinvested some of this capital in building meth factories. Their product was then shipped northward in unprecedented volumes.
The return of meth--or, more precisely, the evolution of meth--was a throw-your-hands-up moment for drug warriors. Federal surveys show a long and slow decline in the use of amphetamines in the United States from 1981 to the early nineties. But between 1994 and 1995, meth use climbed in the United States. Among nineteen- to twenty-eight-year-olds in the Michigan survey, annual use ticked up by a third. (It remained lower, however, than the American media would have you believe: Even after the jump in meth use, only 1.2 percent of the survey's total respondents admitted to using it.)

The shift of meth from localized production in California to big-time assembly lines in Mexico didn't go unnoticed by enforcement agents in the United States. But the eventual crackdown brought another unforeseen consequence: as California tightened its border in response to both drug smuggling and illegal immigration in the nineties, the drug runners gradually moved east - making access to the Midwest much easier.

"The eastward expansion of the drug took a particular toll on central states such as Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska," noted the government's 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment. The Midwestern methedemic, as it came to be dubbed, was soon on full display.

[Note: With occasional exceptions, no single policy action is the sole cause of any drug trend. This excerpt on NAFTA only highlights one cause of the rise of meth use in the '90s, a misunderstood phenomenon that is explored with greater depth in the book, available here -- or here, if you'd rather buy from an independent books store. I'll be back here at 3 p.m. to take questions on this or anything else drug-related.]

 

Comments

[Darlen]

Bush Sr., Clintons (2), Bush Jr. -- all of a continuum. And what do we have now with grads from the Clinton kindergarten -- the same cast of characters in the pockets of the corporate lobbyists. Was it Joseph Stieglitz or Simon Johnson who said we should recognize that we have "government by corporation". We do. I recommend Matt Taibbi's article on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone. Goldman -- that firm that got such largesse from bailouts and from which we have all the same-old same-old economic advisors of past and current administrations -- Rubin, Summers, Paulson, etc. etc. (And to whom Geithner seems so beholden.) We are all royally screwed. What we got from NAFTA besides a malignancy of a meth market, was a vastly expanding Rust Belt; and the "service economy" that was to be the replacement job utopia was quickly outsourced to other distant countries like India. Bottom line - rampant joblessness, a vanished manufacturing base, and creeps like Clinton sayiing "Don't blame me for the this economic mess" (And, also, don't forget Clinton and Rubin's role in wiping out the financial regulatory benefits of Glass Steagall in the waning years of that administration -- opening the floodgates to the swine of Wall Street to gorge on the financial swill of derivatives and mortgage-backed securities.)."

[research]

Who cares? Prohibition is good for business!

That's what NAFTA and the Clinton DLC conservative corporatist sellout are all about.

[shanedr]

The real problem with NAFTA was that it benefited corporations far more then it benefited the American People. Worse it benefited foreign companies less then it benefited American companies; even worse it actually harmed the Mexican people.

The problems all relate to the fact that American companies were not required to pay a wage higher then the local wage when they moved plants south of the border. Paying higher wages would have had a strong effect on increasing the Mexican standard of living. Not just because of American owned plants paying higher wages but because those higher wages would have resulted in more local purchasing by employees of those plants. The increased consumption of local products would have increased the number of local jobs.

In short NAFTA is a prime example of American "Me Firstism." America can no longer afford to benefit itself at the expense of the world.

NAFTA needs to be severely modified.

[dmillerfla]

I just wanted to say that almost everything bad that has happened to America got its kick off under Clinton. NAFTA, GAT, WTO, China Trade; the job and Industry export that has crippled our economy; import of foreign workers, import of foreign students...it just goes on and on and yes Bush loved and expanded it all, but without Clinton it would not have gotten passed.

[martinchill]

democrats weren't the majority under clinton.

not sure if that has any bearing on the deals you list, but it's a fact.

[isthatso]

that is true but it was Clinton's bill. It was not a good idea and now it is worse, something needs to be done about this mess.

[Jason Hollis]

None of which would be relevant if not for the travesty of justice that is the Drug War.

Legalize.
Regulate.
Tax.
Educate.

[JohnSawyer]

"Unintended" consequences?

[aahpat]

The proliferation of cheap and easy to get hand guns on the streets of America is a direct result of and is subsidized by the black market economy of the drug war. Remove the huge demand for guns that empower and enforce the distribution of "illegal" drugs from the illegal gun market and that market would be much smaller. More easily enforced against and thus higher risk. There would be fewer guns and those still on the market would cost much more than they do today.

The result would be far fewer would-be gangsters and criminals able to escalate their criminality with deadly force.

It is the war on drugs black market economy that is subsidizing the killing of cops and killed on American streets.

[Jason Hollis]

You hit the nail on the head.

And it has the added negative effect of causing ignorant reactionaries like the Brady anti-gun lobby to use those same statistics generated by those illegal weapons in their misguided attempts to restrict legal ownership.

[Biffmeister]

I agree. LEAP has it right. Sure there will be some problems and some abuse, but those problems exist now from the underground economy. It's time for reason to prevail. Legalize backyard growing for openers.
Something to consider is the huge pharmaceutical companies. They love the illegal drugs, because they profit enormously from testing.

[mulegino]

And it was none other than Al Gore who defended NAFTA with every ounce of passion he could muster against the hapless (but fundamentally correct) Ross Perot.
Free trade and "globalization" are, at their fundamental level, very easy to grasp:

Look for the place with the cheapest labor, the laxest labor laws (if any), and the most compliant regime. Undersell any and all competitors, especially those who really care about their communities and fellow human beings by providing them better paying jobs, respecting their rights to live and work not as wage slaves but as human beings with families and ties to their community.
Count on American consumers to close their eyes and pretend that the buying the cheap junk manufactured in the cheapest manner is not really contributing to the destruction of A: their local community and tax base, and of their nation as a whole.
Call this silent killer "globalization", "free trade", and pretend that it is "inevitable" and anything other than what it truly is: an orgy held, (at the expense of the middle and working classs) of greed, privilege, insider connections, and slow economic death. Demonize its opponents as "protectionists" and "isolationists". Voila! NAFTA

[steamboat]

YOU ARE 100% CORRECT ! Gore v. Perot on the Larry King Show. I remember it well.

mulegino, lets not forget, a Clinton staff member worked relentlessly twisting arms, cutting pork deals with politicians, in exchange for votes, etc. to get NAFTA passed. Oh, his name: Rahm Emanuel.

[LITU]

The truth laid bare by steamboat and mulegino.

[WritusMaximus]

So clear! All U.S. fault, no fault of Mexico!

[aahpat]

Yet another Independence Day with the War on Drugs

The War on Drugs does not aid the American effort to “..form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity..”

Drug War, what is it good for?

Absolutely nothing!

[LiberalBuzz]

Uh what happened to the live chat? did I miss it?

[norkas]

The drug business is brutal with it comes lots of murders , bribery, destruction of lives and perhaps a country.

We must start with pot and make it legal. Taxes will pay for health care and disrupt a large part of the drug trade in Mexico. Once we suceed we must look to improve treaments centers and others drugs to be made legal

[yogidad]

A virtual narcotic in the form of alcohol is sold in large volumes legally. It is well established that despite its dangers, legalizing its use is the best policy. Other drugs of choice are no different. The notion that Free Trade should be denied because it may allow for easier access to a drug is not sustainable under a cost benefit analysis. People either have the ability to control their drug use or they don't - regardless of the drug. When denied a drug of choice most people self-medicate as best they can.
If you want to reduce the impact of organized crime just legalize the drug and poof much of the problem disappears. The money spent on the "war on drugs," imprisonment and otherwise can then be put to good use on education and therapy - the only two things that have been none to reduce drug use. It would be much cheaper and create ligitimate, tax paying jobs that prodcue a benefit to society.

[desmo4]

You have hit the nail on the head squarely. Put mountains of heroin on street corners and see what happens. It was done in England. Use went up by 1% by the curious and sales dropped to by orders of magnitude. Turn some of the new Bush era prisons into schools and hospitals. Decriminalize drugs and put crooked politicians in jail

[outnow]

Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA through with the help of Kissinger and Bush 41 over the objections of organized labor. Hillary Clinton sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart, the poster child company for outsourcing.

Clinton also hired Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

Who needs a real job when you are allowed to steal so much money on Wall Street?

NAFTA opened the flood gates for drugs to come into our country and created conditions where all the workers who came north for border jobs (who were then unemployed when China came into the game). These Mexicans came across the border because they couldn't find jobs in Mexico and cannot return to subsistence farming because they cannot compete with subsidized corn from the U.S.

I'm sure that there was a very big payoff for the NAFTA deal. That's why Bush 41 and Bill Clinton are such good friends. They doomed American labor to slave wages. Mission accomplished!

[Oakland]

Looks like bill Clinton screwed everyone withhis NAFTA; and 20 years later, the stupid Dems are still bowing and scaping to Reagan's free markets, trade, and trickle down. Dems own the WH, have control of Congress, 60 votes in the Senate, and they still can't deliver squat to the people who need real health care and real jobs. Franken has exposed their lies and excuses - Harry Reid and the Dems have no place left to hide.

[cynara]

NAFTA also suppressed Mexican wages, helping to trigger the largest migration northward from Mexico to the US in modern history. A migration fueled by affects the labor and environmental policies of NAFTA on the Mexican people that continues to this day. If we have a "illegal immigration problem" it is because of NAFTA. NAFTA creates incentives for companies to create goods at the lowest possible price, regardless of labor or environmental conditions. The easiest way to lower the price of goods, is to lower the cost of labor, which translates into depressed salaries for workers. NAFTA actually outlawed environmental protections already in place by the Mexican government. And has given the Mexican government an incentive to not enforce labor and health regulations already on the books. The result - the average Mexican blue collar worker doesn't make enough to feed himself or his family and is forced to come north. Then we complain about illegal immigration .

If we want to stop undocumented immigration from Mexico, NAFTA needs to be repealed or changed to have strong labor and environmental protection included and incentives for salary improvements. We need to be pressuring Mexico to raise wages for its blue collar workers, not continually lower them... (Which when figured for inflation has happened ever since NAFTA was enacted...)

Also, if NAFTA didn't create incentives for companies to move to Mexico to take advantage of cheap labor, more blue collar jobs would stay in the US....