WikiLeaks and the War on Drugs
Blanche Petrich Moreno
The Nation
July 25, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/article/169076/wikileaks-and-war-drugs

In September 2006, just days before Felipe Calderón was
declared president of Mexico in a disputed election
fraught with fraud and corruption, the US Embassy sent a
secret report to Washington titled "Strengthening
Calderon's weak hand." Mexico's new president would have
"virtually no `honeymoon,'" the cable stated, so "we
will begin vigorous transition planning across the board
with the Calderón team." Without aggressive involvement,
US diplomats warned that "we risk stagnation on our
highest-profile issues unless we can send a strong
signal of support, prompt the Calderón team into a
vigorous transition, and reinforce Calderón's agenda and
leadership."

Now, as he leaves office after yet another disputed
election, Calderón will go down in history as one of
Mexico's most discredited and unpopular presidents-in
part because of the revelations in the WikiLeaks cables
that exposed his "unprecedented cooperation" with
Washington. Indeed, as Mexicans know from the documents
published in my newspaper, La Jornada, Calderón's failed
agenda and leadership-particularly his top priority of
winning the war against the drug cartels and protecting
Mexican citizens from the gruesome, intolerable narco-
generated violence that has taken the lives of
thousands-is a failure he shares with the United States.

The cables struck Mexico like a windstorm, blowing back
the curtains of diplomacy and exposing what had not been
intended for public view. Through the 3,000 leaked
records-some secret, a few ultrasecret, but the majority
simply indiscreet, harsh and rude-readers of Mexican
newspapers learned the hidden details of our political,
military and economic relations with the United States.
For the first time, Mexicans could read the US Embassy's
critical judgments of the proud Mexican generals who
never open themselves up to public scrutiny, as well as
Washington's candid assessment of its erstwhile ally,
President Calderón, who is depicted as weak and
condescending, lacking in legitimacy from the start of
his tenure.

Beyond the undiplomatic opinions, however, the WikiLeaks
cables revealed the astonishing degree to which the
United States exercised its power and influence at the
highest levels of the Mexican government. In some cases
it appears that an essential part of the decision-making
process on matters of internal security is actually
designed not in Mexico City but in Washington. For
Mexicans, the cables have reinforced once again that
famous adage "Pobre Mexico: tan lejos de Dios, y tan
cerca de los Estados Unidos." Poor Mexico: so far from
God and so close to the United States.

* * *

WikiLeaks initially decided to disseminate the cables to
the Spanish-speaking world via Spain's internationally
recognized newspaper El País, one of four European media
outlets selected by Julian Assange for the first round
of releases on November 29, 2010. Then, starting in late
December, the cables were shared with journalists
throughout the entire world, country by country. In
Latin America, La Jornada became the first recipient of
the diplomatic documents in Spanish-speaking Latin
America.

My colleague Pedro Miguel Arce, a widely read columnist
at La Jornada, obtained the batch of cables related to
Mexico. His experience was similar to what other Latin
American journalists have described: an unexpected e-
mail, a quick trip to Britain, a mysterious contact, and
finally a meeting with Assange and his team. They
proposed an agreement for sharing and disseminating the
vast informational wealth related to Mexico from the
250,000 State Department records given to WikiLeaks.

La Jornada established a plan to take this on: two
reporters, two editors, liters of coffee and a stack of
English-Spanish dictionaries. We spent almost a month
reviewing the collection and starting our reporting.
Then, on February 10, 2011, La Jornada announced to its
readers that it would begin publishing news articles,
features and analyses from the contents of almost 8,000
pages of cable traffic between the US Embassy in Mexico
City and the State Department in Washington.

As La Jornada published revelations from specific
cables, WikiLeaks would upload the relevant documents to
its website. This provided a valuable shield for La
Jornada: as the stories generated scandal after scandal-
exposing corruption, deception, and other wrongdoing by
officials and public figures-angry attempts to deny our
disclosures proved difficult. The information came not
from anonymous sources, after all, but from cables
originating in the powerful and well-connected US
Embassy.

The Mexico cables spanned almost two decades, from the
end of the 1980s to the spring of 2010. But the majority
were contemporary, dated between 2008 and 2010. These
documents opened a window onto the private diplomatic
relationship between President Calderón and President
Barack Obama, at a time when Mexican security was
dramatically declining as the drug war violence
escalated. By June La Jornada had published more than
100 features, articles and reports based on the
WikiLeaks cables. Among the stories were "Hillary
Clinton Orders Reassessment of Effects of Stress on
Calderón's Capacity to Run the Country" (February 21,
2011); "US Insisted on Military Withdrawal From Anti-
Drug Fight; Cables Reveal Embassy Pressed to Let Federal
Police Lead Action" (March 15, 2011); "`The Army is
comfortable letting the cartels fight each other':
Consul McGrath in Ciudad Juárez" (March 16, 2011); "Fast
and Furious Scandal: Washington Blames Mexico" (March
28, 2011); "Peña Nieto `hardly appears to be cut from a
new cloth, different from the old PRI'" (May 23, 2011);
and "Mexico Offered US Free Access to Intelligence
System" (May 25, 2011).

* * *

As our team mined the massive quantity of information
through the spring of 2011, colleagues, friends and
critics would ask if the WikiLeaks cables really
revealed something that we Mexicans had not previously
known. After all, Washington's interventionism and
pressure on Mexico's internal affairs are a historical
constant-an understood part of our political culture.

To be sure, among the thousands of pages of WikiLeaks
material, there was a great deal of gossip, trivial
detail and innuendo. But there was much more than that.
There was the evaluation of American political
officers-"Poloffs"-regarding Enrique Peña Nieto, then
governor of the state of Mexico and today president-
elect of the country. Peña was seen as the protégé of
the disgraced former President Carlos Salinas de
Gortari. "The PRI bills Pena Nieto as representing a
younger, fresher, and more modern party adapted to the
new political realities of a democratic Mexico," stated
one cable titled "A LOOK AT MEXICO STATE, POTEMKIN
VILLAGE STYLE." "Nevertheless, the governor hardly
appears to be cut from a new cloth." Indeed, the embassy
accused him of protecting a former governor from
prosecution on corruption charges. "Made from the
entrenched Mexico State PRI political mold," the cable
noted, "Pena Nieto is not known for transparency when it
comes to his friends and allies."

At the same time we learned that, despite the campaign
of hatred unleashed by the Mexican right against the
progressive candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador-who
was robbed of the presidency by Calderón in 2006 and is
now contesting his July 1 loss to Peña Nieto-the US
Embassy did not perceive his potential victory as a
disaster. "APOCALYPSE NOT," one cable was titled.
Another, sent before the July 2, 2006, election by then-
Ambassador Anthony Garza, recommended that the United
States "embrace" the winner "early and often" and that
"this is all the more important if the winner turns out
to be Andres Manuel López Obrador."

The cables also shed considerable light on the inner
deliberations of the Mexican government, particularly
relating to the drug war. In a dispatch to Washington on
October 28, 2009, and classified "Secret," Chargé
d'Affaires John Feeley reported that the Mexican defense
secretary had "raised recently the possibility of
[declaring] a state of exception in certain areas of the
country that would provide more solid legal grounds for
the military's role in the domestic counternarcotics
(CN) fight." The embassy opposed the proposal: "Our
analysis suggests that the legal benefits to invoking a
state of exception are uncertain at best, and the
political costs appear high." And as it turned out, even
as Calderón militarized the fight against the cartels, a
state of emergency was never declared.

The level of US influence and involvement in Mexico's
counternarcotics and security policies is, without a
doubt, the most important revelation from the cables.
From another report sent by Feeley in early 2010,
Mexicans learned that the Calderón government had
established a special committee of ministry deputies
that met with US officials "every two weeks, and usually
more often," according to the cable, which added: "We
have working groups on each of our strategic goals." The
US National Security Council and Mexican officials also
created a joint "Policy Coordination Group" to implement
counternarcotics and security operations. US diplomats
referred to the "unprecedented cooperation" between
American and Mexican officers-and from the cables
Mexican citizens learned the costs of that
collaboration. Another cable revealed a previously
untold toll from the counternarcotics operations:
between 2007 and 2009, at least 120 Mexicans working as
informants or undercover agents for the US Drug
Enforcement Administration and the FBI were murdered in
Mexico. Ten DEA liaisons, fifty-one close contacts of
the FBI and sixty police officers, trained by the United
States and answering to senior American officers, were
all assassinated.

Revelations of such high-level US involvement in Mexico
would come back to haunt both Calderón and Obama. As I
wrote in La Jornada on March 4, 2011, the "contaminated
cables" poisoned the well of Mexican-US relations. In
secret messages to Washington, Ambassador Garza
expressed a lack of confidence in Calderón's ability to
defeat the drug cartels. His successor, Carlos Pascual,
had written what I called a "brutal critique" of the
Mexican military's "risk aversion" when it came to
acting on intelligence provided by the United States on
the location of a major drug kingpin. The candid
statements revealed by the cables embarrassed the
generals and infuriated Calderón. The leaked opinions of
these officials did "serious damage" to bilateral
relations, Mexico's president told the Washington Post.
On March 19, 2011, Ambassador Pascual was forced to
resign, becoming the highest-profile political casualty
of the WikiLeaks experience in Latin America.

Looking back more than a year later, it is clear that
the WikiLeaks phenomenon had a significant impact in
Mexico-in the media as well as in the public mind.
Publishing the documents enhanced the presence and
authority of La Jornada in national and international
media circles. But it also revealed how isolating it can
be for an independent newspaper to publish information
critical of the powers that be. Few other media outlets
picked up the stories. There was not much of an echo
chamber to advance public awareness, debate or action in
response to the cables' revelations about the Mexican
government-and the ongoing role of the United States in
our sovereign affairs.

Even so, the cables revealed Mexico not only as a
country that is being controlled but as a country that
has surrendered. The dispatches sent by the diplomats
behind the large windows of the imposing US Embassy
building at 305 Paseo de la Reforma illustrated, beyond
a shadow of a doubt, the degree to which the Mexican
state has relinquished sovereign decisions and defined
who we are today: a polarized country in the throes of a
crisis that, for the moment, appears unending.

But at least after WikiLeaks, we have a better
understanding of the eternally asymmetric relationship
between Mexico and the United States. And most
important, we understand that we Mexicans, and perhaps
Latin Americans in general, need new visions and new
tools so as to achieve a more dignified and equitable
dialogue with Washington.

___________________________________________

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