US played role in blocking general from becoming Mexican defence minister

[Judi Lynn]

Source: New York Times

US played role in blocking general from becoming Mexican defence minister

A contender to be Mexico’s defence minister failed to get the job after Washington raised concerns about his links to drug traffickers

Wednesday, 06 February, 2013, 12:00am
The New York Times in Mexico City, Washington and New York

As Mexico's military staged its annual Independence Day parade in September, spectators filled the main square of Mexico City to cheer on the armed forces. Some 3,000 kilometres away in Washington, US officials were also paying attention.

But it was not the helicopters hovering overhead or the anti-aircraft weapons or the soldiers in camouflage that caught their attention. It was the man chosen to march at the head of the parade, General Moises Garcia Ochoa, who by tradition typically becomes the country's next minister of defence.

The Obama administration had many concerns about the general, from the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) suspicion that he had links to drug traffickers to the Pentagon's anxiety that he had misused military supplies and skimmed money from multimillion-dollar defence contracts.

In the days leading up to Mexico's presidential inauguration on December 1, the US ambassador to Mexico, Anthony Wayne, met senior aides to President Enrique Pena Nieto to express alarm at the general's possible promotion. That back-channel communication provides a rare glimpse into the US government's deep involvement in Mexican security affairs.

Read more: http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1143887/us-played-role-blocking-general-becoming-mexican-defence-minister

[Peace Patriot]

1. The Pentagon and the DEA are against him? He's probably a good guy, or....

...at the least has refused to be one of their bad guys.

The U.S. "war on drugs" is the most corrupt, horrible program that the U.S. government has ever enacted--lo, these many decades of bloodshed and mayhem and billions and billions of our tax dollars gone down that festering rat hole.

To say I'm skeptical of this back-channel crapola about the Mexican general is totally insufficient. I don't believe for a second that the Pentagon or the DEA give a rat's ass about drug trafficking that they don't control the profits of, OR about skimming money from yet another U.S. war profiteer boondoggle. I believe that these entities--or powerful cabals within these entities--are into illicit drug profits and war profiteer slush funds, up to their ears. So I just DON'T BELIEVE their stated objections to this Mexican general.

Re Obama*, I think two things, on this matter: 1) He's not as filthy as the Bush Junta, but 2) he's made some serious deals with some serious evildoers to get where he is, including sweeping the Bush Junta horrors and many crimes in Colombia under the rug, including their use of the U.S. "war on drugs" to clean up on cocaine profits; and Obama's general goal is legalization to the benefit of U.S.-based transglobal corporations (Monsanto, Pifzer, et al) who intend to GMO-ize marijuana and probably cocaine and monopolize these products and profits, post-legalization (and, to that end, Obama's DoJ has been busting small LEGAL marijuana businesses in the western states here, a parallel to the Bush Junta's brutal displacement of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands in Colombia, to consolidate the trillion+ cocaine trade into fewer hands and better direct its profits).

The U.S. "war on drugs" is HORSESHIT. A con job of epic proportions.

So, choose your poison: Monsanto GMO-ized medical and recreational drugs, which will be the only such products on the market because they own the seed, the land and our souls, or, endless war profiteer wars between the Pentagon/DEA and the drug lords who won't play their game--paid for by you and me and by all the "collateral damage" caught between their bullets.

You might say that the "Monsanto solution" will be less bloody, and it's probably true--but WHAT a choice, eh?

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*Obama--or rather his mentor, Leon Panetta (close ties to Bush Sr.), got rid of the obvious mafia don that the Bushwhacks had running Colombia (Alvaro Uribe), and installed a new rightwinger, Manuel Santos, who almost immediately declared his support for the legalization of all drugs (as have several other RIGHTWING LatAm presidents). Figure THAT one out! Monsanto, Pifzer, et al, are in there somewhere, biding their time.)