El Pais did an interview with representative Dan Crenshaw, an advocate of branding Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and using military force against them - which would amount to fighting a new war of terror against traffickers, with or without Mexico’s support. What are the arguments that Crenshaw offers for this position? First is the threat posed by the cartels because they control parts of Mexico and use fentanyl to poison Americans. The point of getting authorization for the use of military force is for the U.S. military to collaborate with the Mexican military. Wasn’t this the Merida initiative about, albeit in a more indirect manner - providing training and weapons to Mexican security forces so that they could engage in a “courageous war” (I think according to Hillary Clinton) against the cartels. “We’re going to stop the cartels, just as we did in Colombia and Panama,” says Crenshaw. This is a historical analogy that does not stand up to scrutiny, at least in the case of Colombia. Cocaine is gushing out of Colombia at greater levels than at any point in its history, in spite of U.S. interdiction efforts associated with Plan Colombia. It is also odd that Crenshaw does not reference - as William Barr has - Felipe Calderon’s mobilization of the Mexican military to fight narco-trafficking, but in light of the conviction of Genaro Garcia Luna in a U.S. federal court, that would be problematic, to say the least. At any rate, naturally, Mexico and the U.S. are allies and so naturally they should be collaborating in this fight against a common enemy - the cartels. The term “allies” does quite a bit of work here too, creating a relationship of equals from a relationship that, historically, has been characterized by the exercise of U.S. hegemony. Fighting the cartels is just common sense. But common sense is blocked by AMLO’s unwillingness to recognize the problem.
"Mexico has the most dangerous cartels in the world. They are big armies. They have more money than ISIS and Al Qaeda. The Mexicans are our neighbors and we have no cooperation with them. Why? Because AMLO doesn’t want to cooperate. I don’t understand. He talks about campaigning against me in the next election — which is illegal, by the way, and makes me laugh a little. It’s not how somebody should speak to an ally. Mexico and the United States are allies. Mexico and Texas, especially, are very close allies. We have a close culture and history. We’re all on the same team."
It is also the case that critics of Crenshaw’s policies are “full of shit” because the Authorization for the Use of Force would initiate military cooperation between Mexico and the United States. But in fact, other advocates of the policy - Trump, Graham, Barr, and DeSantis, among others - insist that the U.S. will act unilaterally if it must. It seems like Crenshaw is trying to play the good cop in this interview.
The next key claim that Crenshaw makes is that drug abuse is human nature and there is nothing that can be done about the demand for drugs - aside from attacking the supply because supply creates demand.
"This is true because these are highly addictive drugs. There’s a lot that’s being done to treat addictions. If anyone has the solution to solve this problem, bravo. But right now, we don’t have it. It’s very difficult. What’s easier is to focus on the supply, on the cartels that manufacture the drugs. We have to do everything. But the problem is that many people talk about consumption, but that’s just an excuse to do nothing. They want to focus on a problem that’s impossible to fix because we’re dealing with human nature."
This erases the history of opioid addiction in the United States as well as the societal conditions that lead to addictions. It also suggests, contrary to logic, that even though progress is being made in addiction treatment, there is no cure. The term “cure” is doing a lot of work here. This is a kind of magical thinking where you have some sort of intervention that leads to a cure, but because no such silver bullet exists, supply interdiction is the only plausible response to the problem. Underpinning this response to the issue is the idea that America is a corrupted space that is vulnerable to addiction, and which must be protected by fighting a war on the cartels. Americans can’t help it if they become addicted to synthetic opioids. Nor could anyone else. So militarized interdiction and the killing of narcos is the only alternative.
The protection is not only going to involve going after kingpins but getting at all the major actors in the narco-trafficking business. This would be a rather uncertain and bloody business given the decentralized character of organized crime and narco-trafficking. Crenshaw suggests that we just go after these people as if it is obvious who the targets are. The targets would be, in many cases, the very military forces with which Crenshaw proposes to ally the U.S. military. Of course, there would also be a lot of collateral damage in a war that broadly targets narco-trafficking groups. If the past is any guide, narco-traffickers would reconstitute themselves in response to interdiction efforts, as they had in other cases - Colombia and Afghanistan, most notably. This is particularly the case because the production of fentanyl is decentralized, hard to identify, and easy to traffic. But the probability of success is not addressed at all in this interview, what matters is that Crenshaw has proposed doing something, which, he thinks, mechanically and wrongly, will work because military force always solves problems by means of destroying adversaries. As a veteran of U.S. deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, shouldn't he know better?
The interview ends with Crenshaw commenting on the morality of Texas Governor Greg Abbot deploying drowning buoys along the Rio Grande. This is not inhumane, he insists.
"What’s inhumane is to cross into our country without documents and demand that we take care of them. I can’t travel to Mexico without a passport. Why can they? If the law isn’t enforced, then nothing matters. It’s not inhumane. It makes me very angry when people say that. If there are a lot of people in your house and they want to eat your food, is it inhumane to not let them eat it? One person, yeah, okay. But why not two, three or four? What’s the limit? There are limits and that’s because we have laws. We have to enforce the laws."
America’s sacred border must not be transgressed. To think otherwise would imply a duty to assume responsibility for the lives of people who are not Americans. We would have to take care of them. They would be in our house and they would be eating our food. This suggests that there is a vast welfare state into which undocumented migrants could tap. It conflates the national territory with the home - an interesting example of what Waters has termed domopolitics. I have heard this elsewhere. National space is familiar space and reserved for familiars and for anyone else to enter this space would be a grave violation of the sanctity of this space. Note how this builds on the conception of the nation as a form of fictive kinship based upon legal habitation of the national territory - the key benefit that citizenship conveys. Another key aspect of this formulation is that the problem of undocumented migration is hyper-focused on the figure of the migrant, who must be blocked by any means necessary. Hence drawing buoys are ok as a means of self-defense. Of course, out of the question, is any discussion of the political, economic, and environmental forces that set migrants into motion because consideration of such factors would diminish their willful and criminal agency in crossing the border.
One idea about this post would be to develop a discussion of how this interview illustrates a familial conception of the nation as a nation space, which serves as the common world that members of a particular national community inherit and which extends to the inviolability of its territory because toe how national subjects have taken possession of this territory and regard it as an extension of themselves, in much the same way that property serves as an extension of the Lockean self, only the nation is a kind of collective inheritance, which can generate patterns of affective contagion among people who regard themselves as both the beneficiaries and guardians of this inheritance. The relevant perspectives to consider here would be Grosby - Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction, Canovan - Nations and Nationalism, and Connolly - Aspirational Fascism.
Comments
Post a Comment