Say, what you think of this conspiracy theory?
NAFTA: Magna Charta of Mexico's Cartels
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The Wanderer
May 29, 1997
Republicans investigating the Clinton scandals may be missing
one of the biggest of all.
According to ABC's May 7th Nightline, Mexico's drug cartels, in
anticipation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in
1993, bought up businesses all along the U. S. border. Our Drug
Enforcement Agency knew the cartels had plans to use these
companies as fronts to smuggle drugs into the United States, but
when the DEA informed the Clintonites, it was told to shut up.
ABC's source: Phil Jordan, recently retired DEA intelligence chief.
Post-NAFTA, Mexico quickly became the port of entry for 70% of
the cocaine entering the United States. No wonder the cartels are
as pro-free trade and open borders as The Wall Street Journal.
If the administration was indeed warned that this drug threat
existed, and kept Congress in the dark, the Clintonites bear a high
measure of moral responsibility for the ruin of the lives of
countless American children. For the cartels' use of legitimate
businesses and trucking firms to move their drugs is now
established fact.
"The reports are blowing the roof off claims that the NAFTA trade
deal is good for working families. . . . NAFTA has created a new
pipeline of drugs into our schools and communities," says
Teamsters President Ron Carey. Congress ought to stan an
investigation into who knew what, when, for Bill Clinton's NAFTA
partner was Mexican President Carlos Salinas, whose own family
allegedly profited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars
from connections to the cartels.
Did Salinas and his PR' party know the cartels planned to use their
new companies and trucks to run drugs? Did Salinas know his own
family would profit? Did the DEA know it? Did the Clintonites know
it? Were Republicans deliberately left ignorant, as they voted 3 to
1 to give Clinton his NAFTA victory?
Whatever the results of any investigation, Congress ought to
demand that the President put an immediate hold on plans to
throw open the U.S. southwest, and then the entire nation, to
Mexican trucks. This is the next scheduled step in the proposed
merger of the U.S. and Mexican economies. If the American
heartland is opened up to these trucks, we can forget about the
interdiction of Mexican drugs.
And there is a safety factor. Mexican trucks run twice the size of
U.S. trucks and average three times the age. U.S. border
inspections, in the rare cases they are done, disqualify half of
these trucks for American roads. Their brakes are often faulty,
their tires unsafe, and their emissions standards abysmal. Their
drivers lack the training and experience of U.S. drivers.
According to the Teamsters Union, some Mexican drivers are
paid as little as $7.00 a day.
As there is no shortage of U.S. trucks, why would we permit
vehicles like this in the United States? Why would we want them?
In a word: cheapness. By replacing American trucks and drivers
with Mexicans, U.S. big trucking firms could haul freight more
cheaply. Profits would soar; presumably, the consumer would
benefit. So, too, of course, would the drug cartels, which would
find the U.S. border even less of an impediment than it is today.
Who would lose? Americans who are today victims of the cartels.
Second, American families, motorists, and schoolchildren, tens of
thousands of whom die yearly on our highways, would face a new
menace. Third, our truck drivers would face competition from
Mexicans earning a tenth of their wages. Tens of thousands would
lose high-paying jobs to drivers who are not even U.S. citizens.
All of which raises a question: Whose country is this, anyway?
The attempted merger of the United States with a Third World
nation - ruled by an authoritarian one-party regime, shot through
with corruption - where wages are a tenth of those in the United
States, is a proven failure. Clinton will not admit it, but there are
signs he is backing away from extending NAFTA and from opening
mid-America to thousands of Mexican trucks. Indeed, when the
first one of these contraptions with an unqualified driver plows
into some family on an interstate or some school bus, political
heads will roll across America, as well they should.
In stepping out against the extension of prime trading privileges
to a Beijing regime caught smuggling AK-47s to U.S. street gangs,
New York Cong. Bill Paxon, a Republican, asks a good question:
Does the United States any longer believe "in something more
than the blind pursuit of trade"? It's a question his entire party
should begin to ask itself.
Meanwhile, on this issue of open borders and Mexican trucks
plying American highways, conservatives should stand with
Carey's Teamsters and let our foundation-fed scholars stand with
Clinton.
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