The complex and savage actions of narcoterrorism that are now detected in almost all of America, mostly inspired by the approaches adopted by the Mexican drug cartels, managed to generate a very serious chain reaction of legislators and other participants in politics and the think of the United States.
The new proposals reflect the desire to militarize the efforts aimed at producing the real dismantling of the axes of the drug business that engendered the current Fentanyl Crisis (Fentanyl).
Among those who are at the forefront of this crusade are Senators Lindsey Graham (retired colonel), John Neely Kennedy, Michael McCaul and the former governor and former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, someone who is currently contesting, without much chance, the Republican candidacy for the presidency of his country.
The central objective of such proposals is to dismantle the incessant flow of drugs into United States territory, through the application of one or more of the following options: a) the systematic bombing of the movements of drug cartels based in Mexico;
b) evict, with the in-person use of troops or special forces such as those used against the Islamic State (ISIS), with or without the consent of the sovereign authorities of Mexico, the territorial positions currently occupied by these cartels;
c) declare the cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” as was done some time ago with Al Qaeda, ISIS and other groups with a global presence;
d) treat Fentanyl as a “chemical weapon”;
and e) add, hypothetically, as some sources explain, the possibility that the current President Joe Biden launches the notion of attacking the aforementioned cartels with a model similar to the one that the United States put into practice when carrying out the disbandment of the cartels. Islamic State (known by its acronym ISIS).
As far as is known, none of the protagonists of this sensitive theater of operations is unaware that such a fight is governed by the fear of the violent rules of the game imposed by the drug barons grouped in Cartels such as that of Sinaloa or that of Jalisco de Nueva Generation, whose areas of territorial prevalence are relatively known on both sides of the common border.
The activity of Mexican narcoterrorist organizations caused the violent deaths of some 351,000 people, as documented in videos, photographs and fearful eyewitnesses, a figure that only covers what happened between 2006 and 2021. The reader should keep in mind that such figures may underestimate the real scope of this genocide, since the traditional culture of the Mexican people encourages them to avoid any form of exaggeration.
At the same time, there are sectors of political and academic life in the United States that reject militarization, believing that the lack of dialogue and intergovernmental cooperation can cause, among other things, not only the permanence of the serious existing problems, but also migration. of new pockets of violence towards their own territory.
All this without forgetting that it is unthinkable to conceive of Mexico as a passive society in the face of the possible violation of its sovereign spaces.
Until the emergence of the aforementioned Fentanyl Crisis, there were continuous attempts at cooperation between Mexico and the United States conducted within the framework of the 2008 Mérida Understanding (which also included the Dominican Republic and the nations of Central America) and, since 2022 , the attempt to deploy the objectives defined in the Bicentennial Context (Bicentennial Framework).
These approaches gave life to several dialogues interrupted by strong and irritating disagreements.
Despite this, the bilateral route allowed discreet actions, both known and covert, of persistent supply of intelligence, weapons and trained American personnel, factors that allowed achieving successes of some value.
With ample reason, the Aztec government usually emphasizes that the United States never takes seriously the role played by the demand of its drug consumers, who are in the first and last instance those who finance the prosperous drug business, as recognized in repeated reports. from the CATO Institute.
Nor does it accept practical responsibility for the visible supply of weapons and cutting-edge technology displayed by the members of narcoterrorism that make up the sinister cartels.
Needless to say, the current president of Mexico, whose term ends at the end of the year, was enraged upon learning of these and other projects aimed at replacing bilateral actions against narcoterrorism with the preferential use of unilateral means.
In such a scenario, at the beginning of this year the Quincy Institute in Washington convened a group of academic specialists, whose approaches severely antagonized the thesis held by those who adhere to the unilateral and military path.
They gave life to a panel that discussed the useful paper prepared by Professor Aileen Teague, aimed at proposing the “Responsible Demilitarization of Security Relations between the United States and Mexico” (own translation).
The text of that academic work details many valuable inputs and alludes to the very tense circumstances that bilateral relations went through, which were punctuated by the arrest, separately, and perhaps well founded, of a couple of members of the Mexican national cabinet such as a former Secretary (Minister) of Security and a former Secretary of Defense of that country, both accused of corruption and other forms of collusion with the drug business.
The truth is that the desperation of the American political class is not without solid foundation either.
In 2022 (the latest annual data currently available), that country reported the death of some 109,680 people from opioid overdoses, mainly due to the abuse of cocaine and fentanyl (fentanyl).
That last is the drug that that year cut short the lives of 73,654 people who were seeking pleasure by buying, at a low price, pills that are in fashion, with which they chose and blessed the weapon that generated their own deaths.
Not in vain, the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (adopted in 1994 and in force from 1995 onwards), provides in its Article 5:4 the need to weigh the exceptional nature of trade policy measures. about the “human risks to which people voluntarily expose themselves” (emphasis made by the author of this column), a rule that confirms that nothing is totally new under the sun.
If one puts this pandemic modality that is narcoterrorism into perspective, one will understand that these drugs turned out to be in 2022 about 37 times more destructive than the blowing up of the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) or almost 27 times if only compared to the deaths caused only by fentanyl (own approaches and calculations).
It is worth remembering that as the tragic dust left by the act of terrorism carried out on September 11, 2001 settled, the authorities recognized 2,996 dead and some 25,000 injured of varying severity.
And although since then the world has been absorbing the pain caused by these events, another view of who is who was born and Washington received not only global solidarity, but a tacit carte blanche and help to search, judge, imprison and, if necessary, , execute the ringleaders of the criminal operation.
But that picture has more edges.
According to a note published by the British medical weekly The Lancet, between 2020 and 2029, some 1.22 million people could die in the United States due to overdoses of these opioids.
This gloomy vision is contrasted with the stupid ray of light provided by certain medical columnists who work on morning television in the United States, who allege that there is an overreacted exaggeration in the analysis of these problems.
One of them said that science made it feasible to mitigate the risks of death posed by fentanyl consumption, given that today there is a substance on the market called Nardorone, which can neutralize the lethal effects of an overdose.
He gave the impression of equating this medicine with the properties of vaccines against Covid-19.
Furthermore, this logic provides a great incentive for falopa enthusiasts to think and say “avanti bersagliere, che la vittoria e nostra” (accents are missing).
But before laughing or crying at such nonsense, let's look at the daily news from Rosario, the AMBA and other centers in the country.
In another vein, economists also do not ignore that investment and employment opportunities in Mexico are severely neutralized because there are not many capitals willing to put large masses of money into unexplored sectors such as new generation environmental products, intelligence artificial and those inherent in the rethinking of value chains, when one is faced with a market that stands out for its insecurity and the distrust caused by its peculiar institutional order.
Jorge Riaboi is a journalist and diplomat.