The Only Enemies Are Internal

In 1995, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry visited the Mexican Ministry of Defense and said, "My goal, and the goal of my visit, is to help our nations forge closer security ties, because when it comes to stability and security, our destinies are inextricably linked." To promote these goals, and to help stem the northbound tide of narcotics across the border, the U.S. has sold or transferred $830 million in weapons to Mexico under President Clinton. Recent acquisitions include four Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk helicopters, 32 Bell Huey helicopters, two Knox-class frigates, and 133,695 rounds of 20 mm ammunition. For the most part, the U.S. justifies selling arms to Mexico under the pretext of fighting the war on drugs and promoting regional stability.

Mexico's army in combat at home	These alleged guerrillas were shot execution-style

Yet Mexico's history has been written in blood since Cortes burned his ships and marched inland to make war on Tenochtitlán. And although we would like to think of our southern NAFTA trading partner as a modern, stable, participatory democracy, Mexico remains marred by political violence and mired in a low-intensity civil war in Chiapas. Political assassinations took place as recently as 1994, and the victims typically have been opponents of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico's ruling party since 1929.

The Zapatistas took up arms in 1994 in an attempt to gain political equality for the (mostly Mayan) indigenous peoples of Mexico's southern states. Since that time, fighting has flared up sporadically in the region. The State Department's report on human rights in Mexico found that "several southern states, most notably Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, continued to suffer politically motivated violence." The report also noted that in Chiapas in 1996 "at least 500 peasants had been killed in the previous three years as a result of violence.... At least 2000 indigenous families had abandoned their lands for fear of violent attacks by the [PRI-affiliated] Peace and Justice Group." The State Department report also chronicles numerous other examples of government-sponsored or -affiliated murders, torture, and human-rights abuses.

U.S. arms sales in the Clinton years Direct government sales Government-approved sales (scale in millions of dollars)

Although we've sold and given arms to Mexico in order to fight the war on drugs, there is evidence that some of those weapons might be utilized in the Zapatista conflict. Reports by Global Exchange and Veterans for Peace claim to document the use of U.S. rifles, Humvees, and helicopters. "Every so often we came upon a truckload of soldiers, dressed in full battle gear; flak jackets, composition helmets, M-16s at the ready.... We noted two armored Humvees parked nearby, one mounted with a fifty-caliber machine gun. We knew the Mexican army had more than 7,000 such vehicles sold to them by the U.S. manufacturer [AM General Corporation] under license by our government," reads the Veterans for Peace report. (Sources at AM General, however, call the vehicles-sold figure high by a factor of two to three.)

The Global Exchange report, meanwhile, concludes that "the indigenous insurgents in Mexico are explicitly not suspected of involvement with drug trafficking" and "U.S. military and drug aid to Mexico is being significantly used against the poor (the so-called insurgents) in counterinsurgency operations, rather than in the war against drugs, in defiance of U.S. articulated intentions."

-- Mat Honan

Flags courtesy of World Flag Database
Photos by Alyx Kellington/Gamma Liaison