The Reality

Since the American government has been helpless in its attempts to deter its citizens from consuming, it has shifted the obligation to fight traffic to producing countries.

Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, commented a few days ago that Mexico is looking like the Colombia of 20 years ago. Mexicans were outraged. Colombians were outraged. Both are friends with denying reality. Hillary, who’s a gringa — high government officer and former First Lady — suffers from something else: She doesn’t know reality.

Her comparison is based on ignorance. According to her, today in Mexico, just like in Colombia 20 years ago, the drug cartels “start to look like insurgency.” What happened here was the opposite: The insurgent groups, which existed decades before drug trafficking appeared, started 20 years ago to charge overtones from the drug cartels. It wasn’t only them. The counter-insurgent groups followed — paramilitary, protected by the authorities and by many Colombians. It wasn’t the insurgence that corrupted drug trafficking. It was drug traffic that corrupted the insurgency and almost everything else.

This ignorance of reality would be simply ridiculous in a person who is in charge of the United States’ political and diplomatic relations with the rest of the world if it wasn’t also dangerous. Afterward, Clinton soothed her audience — members of the Foreign Relations Committee, the press and the whole planet — saying (with either ingenuity or cynicism) that there’s nothing to worry about because “they [the Mexicans] have been willing to listen to advice and we [the Americans] are ready to help them.”

So in that, yes, it is like the Colombia of 20 years ago. And predictably, with the same catastrophic results that advice and that help have had for Colombia, which are there for the world to see.

The advice (and something else: the orders) consisted of combating drugs by making it the best business in the world; this is precisely why insurgents and counter-insurgents were attracted to it, as well as many other people. Help has consisted of bringing war to our territory in order to not fight it on theirs. Since the American government has been helpless in its attempts to make its citizens abide by the laws and stop consuming illegal drugs, it has shifted the obligation to fight traffic to those countries that produce drugs. This is why, for example, they believe (or say they believe) it’s more efficient to control the exit of ships and planes loaded with marijuana and cocaine from the seven military bases loaned to them by the Colombian government than doing it from there, from the hundreds of military bases that the American government has available in its own territory, and by controlling the entrance of the same ships and planes. Aid, for Colombia, has been translated into ecological destruction, an escalation of violence and moral and political corruption.

However, from the U.S.’ perspective, both the advice and the help Hillary Clinton is talking about constitute an excellent deal. On one hand, most of the benefits generated from drug dealing — which is only profitable because it’s prohibited, and by whom is it forbidden? — are kept in their financial system. On the other hand, there are many issues of all kinds. The sale of weapons, for example: Both cartels and insurgent groups buy their weapons in the United States. Also, the incessant confiscation of the drug lords’ fortunes by the Treasury when these drug lords are extradited in exchange for immunity or as part of plea bargains. There are such things, which may appear foolish, as the constant destruction of suitcases by customs officers once they arrive in American airports and ports and their necessary replacement. Weapons, suitcases, bank accounts, glyphosate for fumigation, payments to mercenary pilots (which the Colombian press insists on calling, submissively, “contractors”), inputs to refine cocaine and bribes: You do the math. It’s a done-deal business.

Naïve or cynical, true or faked, the ignorance of reality or its falsification by the high American officer is interesting. That of the Colombian officers — and the Mexicans, if they now follow their example — is servile. They have the souls of servants.