Merida Initiative, or Mierda Initiative?
Michelle and now even Rush are talking about the new $1.4 billion Merida Initiative, a foreign aid plan designed to build up Mexico's law enforcement and judicial infrastructure. I see some good stuff and bad stuff going on here, and I can't quite get worked up to outrage about this, though I can muster some suspicion: the plan has some problems and I think it's going to bear closer scrutiny.
THE GOOD: "Let's fight them over there instead of on our soil" is a good strategy for counterterrorism, one that many conservatives will agree with and have endorsed with regard to the Middle East. Why shouldn't we equip the Mexican government to fight the narcoterrorists? There are Islamic terrorists in South America, and Chavista gunrunners and spies as well. Having a stronger Mexico, one actually equipped to fight these threats, as a buffer between the United States and the more noxious exports of South America sounds like it would be in the U.S. interest.
What's more, you need order and justice in Mexico to get their own economy working and some prosperity there. Right now the drug gangs are so powerful they're a huge threat to the state and that isn't helping Mexico's economy. Michelle calls the Initiative a "stimulus package" which I don't think it is directly intended to be—but if they can restore the rule of law in Mexico an economic benefit may result.
Mexico needs guns and high tech gizmos to fight their drug-cartel enemies. Just as we're building up the Iraqi army, it makes sense to equip and train Mexico to get their own problems under control.
THE BAD: Yeah, nice neocon theory, See-Dub. But in practice, why do we expect that this money will go to the intended recipients and not just disappear into some corrupt official's bank account—or worse still, that the equipment will be diverted to the cartels instead of the government?
There's a precedent for these fears. Have y'all heard of Los Zetas? Bad Dudes. They're to the Osiel Cardenas cartel what Murder, Inc. was to the New York Mafia. Thing is, a lot of the Zetas started out as federal counternarcotics agents or military special forces, some of them supposedly trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. (I'm not certain how true that is; there's a lot of lefty propaganda about the SOA. But I'm pretty sure about the part where the founders were a Mexican counterdrug task force.) Anyway, whoopsie.
On the other hand, the Mexican people are by and large fed up with the gangs and cartels, and would really like them to get gunned down. And Calderon has shown every intention of making a good fight of this. He busted the massive Ye Gon meth operation, which included a seizure of $205 million in cash and tons of meth precursors coming in from China.
Speed kills. And apparently causes horrendous facial disfigurement.
Iraq, by the way, is another example of this phenomenon. They're still massively corrupt and I don't doubt that many of the police and military we're training and equipping won't end up doing a little freelancing for the Mahdi Army or even Al Qaeda. Yet we've poured in a load of cash and seen some results there. It is, people agree, getting better. We've killed a lot of the bad guys and created functioning institutions where there was chaos. It's not pretty or efficient and the whole system's pretty fragile, but there's some order where there didn't use to be.
So there's a good chance that Mexico is ready for this new initiative. But we'd be idiots to give them $1.4 BILLION--seven times as much money as in that picture up there--without a certain amount of oversight as to where our money is going, and to make sure it's actually being spent on maintaining equipment and paying policemen decently and not going into some bureaucrat's numbered account in the Netherlands Antilles.
Which brings us to---
THE UGLY: Calderon is pitching a walleyed fit over the idea that there may strings and conditions that come with this ONE POINT FOUR BILLION DOLLAR GIFT HORSE he's looking in the mouth. (Who does he think we are, the World Bank?) Mexico, he claims, is a proud country, a sovereign country...and if they blow this deal because of their pride, well, I'm sorry, but they're a dumb country.
But even dumber is the political timing of this blowup. The Bush administration apparently hammered this out without congressional involvement to avoid comparisons to Plan Colombia, apparently anticipating an attack from the left. But Michelle points out why this is so galling to the American right as well:
We can’t finish our own border fence, properly supply our immigration agents and border patrol with all the equipment and resources they need, or get our house in order. Yet, the Bush administration wants to fork over $1.4 billion to Mexico and Central America–with much of it going into the hands of corrupt law enforcement officials and government bureaucrats who have worked tirelessly to undermine our immigration laws.
It's kind of hard to argue with that. The Bush administration and Congress see clearly the need for border security abroad, but are so pettifogged by our open-borders advocates and cheap labor business that they've closed their eyes to the need for it at home.
It's kind of sad: our politicians concentrate on the security threats to Mexican border and leave our own border undefended. Meanwhile they work to prevent this political threat from the left of a comparison to Plan Colombia--but then walk right into a punch from the border security crowd that they should have seen coming from a long way out--like, say, this summer, when the White House freely admits they "underestimated the skepticism".
Me, I think strong fences make good neighbors, and border security makes sense in Mexico just like it does in the United States. If we can convince Calderon to quit his macho posturing and take the deal with oversight included, I think it's probably in our interest. It's just a shame that Congress and the Bush Administration's--and especially that putz McCain's--delusions of amnesty have made this a whole lot more complicated than it has to be. I hope the burden of the anger this generates gets poured into political consequences for McCain and Graham, and not into sinking this bill. Watching it, yes, and making sure it does what it's supposed to do, yes, but I'm not ready to scuttle it when there are more pressing uses for our political capital. Like fixing Congress.