Pentagon Fingered as a Source of Narco-Firepower in Mexico

[Delirium]

“It’s unclear how cartels are getting military grade weapons,” the AP report states.
Narco News offered an answer to that question in March 2009, when it reported that the deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars.
Those exports are approved through the State Department, under a program known as Direct Commercial Sales. A sister program, called Foreign Military Sales, is overseen by the Pentagon and also taps U.S. contractors to manufacture weapons (such as machine guns and grenades) for export to foreign entities, including companies and governments.
Between 2005 and 2009, a total of $41 billion worth of U.S. defense articles were exported under the FMS program and a total of nearly $60 billion via the DCS program, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/GAO.DCS.2010.pdf). The bulk of those exports went to seven nations, including South Korea, but Mexico, too, was a receiving nation, with some $204 million in military arms shipments approved for export in fiscal year 2008 alone, according to the most recently available DCS report (http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/DCS.rpt655_FY08.pdf).
So, based on that evidence, it is clear that there is a grand river of military-grade munitions flowing out of major gun factories in the U.S. and being exported globally — completely bypassing the mom-and-pop gun store. That river of doom, however, does not bypass the drug war in Mexico.


Full article (http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2011/02/pentagon-fingered-source-narco-firepower-mexico)

[Robocommie]

If the Pentagon is aware of this, why would they be indirectly arming Mexican cartels? Not saying that it's somehow beneath them, but why?

[Kléber]

US imperialism has had a very tight relationship with international crime syndicates since the latter part of WWII, and this intensified during the Cold War period when drug lords and their paramilitary forces were a cornerstone of US foreign policy, serving as hitmen and thugs against revolutionaries around the world, and as CIA-controlled proxy armies against pro-Soviet regimes in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, Africa and Central America. Criminal enterprises continue to be a great ally of reactionary US imperialism because they consume the weapons produced by the US military-industrial complex, and their mode of production puts them in direct contradiction to the interests of the working class. The fact that these drugs are poison and the cartels screw up the countries they operate in is not a concern to those giant criminals in the Pentagon, who have no interest in developing the productive forces, but actually want to stop the rest of the world from developing. They want oppressed peoples to stay poor, doped up and killing each other with US-made weapons.

[bricolage]

The above.
As a part of Cold War strategy the the US, most notably through the CIA, allied itself with a number of drug cartels and syndicates;

At the end of WW2 the CIA allied itself with the Corsican underworld to fight the French Communist Party for control over Marseille, the Coriscans one and with CIA support would spend the next quarter century dominating heroin exports to the US

In 1951 the CIA support the formation of a Chinese Nationalist army for a covert invasion of southwestern China, when this failed they installed these troops along the Burma-China border to anticipate a Maoist invasion. Over the next decade these nationalist armies would turn Burma's Shan states in the worlds largest opium producer.

In Laos between 1960 and 1975 the CIA created an army of 30,000 Hmong tribesman to battle 'Communists' near the border with north Vietnam. The Hmong commander General Vang Pao was allowed to use CIA aircraft to collect opium from scattered highland villages

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 the CIA, working through Pakistani intelligence agencies, allied itself with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who used their resources to become the region's largest drug lord. Within a year this southern Asian heroin had captured more than 60% of the American market.

and so forth...