Hillary's Dark Drug War Legacy in Mexico: Overlooking human rights abuses

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Clinton’s State Department overlooked human rights abuses and corruption while keeping a lucrative flow of contracts moving to U.S. security firms working in Mexico.

But while sales have boomed for U.S.-based contractors, the situation in Mexico has badly deteriorated. The escalation of U.S. counter-drug assistance in the country has paralleled a drastic increase in violence, fueling a drug war that’s killed more than 100,000 people since 2006.
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High-profile human rights cases — such as the kidnapping and disappearance of the 43 students from the teacher-training college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero in September 2014 — sparked renewed attention to the devastating effects of the U.S.-funded drug war in Mexico. Yet, they didn’t come out of nowhere.

Forced disappearances like these were ballooning even as Clinton was pushing Mérida Initiative programs forward, with official records reaching upwards of 3,000 to 4,000 people a year in 2011 and 2012. According to the United Nations, these widespread kidnappings and disappearances often involve state authorities, and the problem is worsened by the government’s failure to investigate.

U.S. laws explicitly prohibit the delivery of aid to foreign individuals and units implicated in systematic human rights violations. But files released by WikiLeaks revealed that Clinton’s State Department regularly received information on widespread “official corruption“ in Mexico, even as they were bolstering the flow of equipment, assistance, and training that ended up in the hands of abusive and compromised security forces.

Indeed, in 2009 and 2010 — the middle years of Clinton’s tenure at State — U.S. embassy cables boasted that intelligence and military cooperation between the two countries had never been better. Such cables, and the full archival orbit of declassified and leaked U.S. and Mexican records, demonstrate that Clinton’s State Department repeatedly cleared the delivery of U.S. assistance training and equipment to security forces implicated in corruption or abuse.

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MORE: http://fpif.org/hillary-clintons-dark-drug-war-legacy-mexico/

by way of: http://nacla.org/news/2016/03/03/hillary-clinton%27s-dark-drug-war-legacy-mexico

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1. And then there's this: Bill Clinton Apologizes To Mexico For War On Drugs

Former President Bill Clinton apologized to Mexico during a speech there last week for a backfired U.S. war on drugs that has fueled spiraling violence.

“I wish you had no narco-trafficking, but it’s not really your fault,” Clinton told an audience of students and business leaders at the recent Laureate Summit on Youth and Productivity. “Basically, we did too good of a job of taking the transportation out of the air and water, and so we ran it over land.

“I apologize for that,” Clinton said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/13/bill-clinton-apology-drug-war-mexico_n_6680412.html

Anybody else seeing a pattern here?

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2. Clinton: U.S. Drug Policies Failed, Fueled Mexico's Drug War

MEXICO CITY, March 25 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to Mexico on Wednesday with a blunt mea culpa, saying that decades of U.S. anti-narcotics policies have been a failure and have contributed to the explosion of drug violence south of the border.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/25/AR2009032501034.html