The war against drugs is being waged full-throttle in Mexico, where three Mexican federal agents have been killed in the past month. The man who, until last year, oversaw that battle is former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief Thomas Constantine, now teaching at the University of New York at Albany. In an interview with the Tribune, the ex-DEA administrator addresses efforts to stem a problem that many describe as out of control along the U.S. border, as well as the annual controversy over possible `decertification’ of our neighbor to the south. Each year, the White House must declare which countries have “fully cooperated” in the drug war. Those who haven’t risk losing international loans and other financial aid. This year, U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Davidow caused a diplomatic flap by calling Mexico the world headquarters of drug trafficking. But Mexico was certified anyway. Now, Constantine gives his view.
Q: What do you make of the controversy surrounding Ambassador Davidow’s remarks?
A: Well, I think the first thing that everybody has to understand is that the control of the distribution of narcotics within the United States is directed by powerful drug mafias. The most powerful of those drug mafias in the world today, that impact the United States, are in Mexico, and they have supplanted the organizations from Colombia over the last four or five years. And I always said that they were, for the people of Mexico and the people of the United States, the most dangerous criminal organizations in the world. Obviously, I’d phrase it perhaps in a different fashion [than did Davidow], and I wasn’t there when he gave that interview. But I had been saying this for the last three or four years and the situation continues to deteriorate. In many places in Mexico, unfortunately, the drug traffickers are more powerful than the government.
Why do I say that? Because we know the people who run the organizations, we know their names, we know their crimes, we have gained evidence within the United States of their crimes within the United States, presented them to courts. They have been indicted and arrest warrants have been issued for them, dozens and dozens of them, and they are never located because we are told that they are too powerful for the police and the military to locate and they’re never arrested, so I draw a conclusion that they are able to exist in essence in a sanctuary.
Q: Why is that?
A: Well, I think, it’s [because] they’re organized crime systems, just like the American Mafia was, just like Colombia, just like Sicily. Organized crime can only exist if they have two assets available to them. The ability to corrupt the criminal justice system or the public sector, and if that doesn’t work, the ability to intimidate. Intimidation means killing witnesses, killing police officers, killing prosecutors. They have developed that skill of corruption and violence and intimidation to a level that I’ve never seen before in 40 years of police work.
Q: Some of your agents, some of your former agents at the DEA who monitor Mexico closely, tell me that corruption in Mexico goes pretty high up the food chain. How high does it go?
A: Well, it’s tough to say. I have to say in all honesty that people I dealt with and most of my dealings with high-level officials were with Atty. Gen. [Jorge] Madrazo. I found him to be an honorable, courageous man, and I thought that he did all the right things that had to occur. I mean it was very obvious that high-ranking police officials again and again were involved in corruption. We had the classic case of [Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the former Mexican drug czar convicted of working with the Juarez drug cartel], the other generals over in the Baja, prosecutors. We’ve received information again and again and again on every case of high-level police officials in some of the most sensitive units that we had been told could be trusted had been corrupted, failed polygraph tests. It’s unparalleled in any of my experience to have corruption at that breath and depth as the narcotics traffickers have been able to build in Mexico.
Can you imagine if you had two or three separate police chiefs from Los Angeles assassinated, allegedly by drug traffickers, three district attorneys, 10 judges, the head of the FBI and the head of the DEA in California all assassinated and nobody is ever arrested?
I feel sorry for the people of Mexico. Obviously, every time somebody says this, there’s this tremendous feeling of outrage and shame, but that doesn’t make it go away.
Q: Diplomats have to be careful in dealing with host countries, especially in the U.S.-Mexico relationship. I guess the question is, why does Mexico get so upset when someone of Davidow’s stature says “You guys have a big problem here.”
A: Well, you’re probably asking the wrong guy ’cause the former Mexican ambassador to the United States called me a cretin, publicly, to The New York Times. He’s running for mayor now, Jesus Silva-Herzog. He called me a cretin to The New York Times, and all I did was, I would be, in essence, subpoenaed by the Congress of the United States and asked to tell the truth about the conditions as they existed in Mexico, and I never really added to them or enhanced them or anything. I just laid out this picture of this enormous criminal conspiracy that had developed over the years and then what impact that they were having on the communities in the United States and how we knew who the leaders were but how they never seemed to be arrested. Corruption was at a very, very significant level. I mean I used to get beat up by officials from Mexico repeatedly. I was blamed for every statement. And I said only in Washington and in these types of diplomatic circles are you sanctioned for telling the truth and rewarded for not telling the truth.
Q: So would you support Davidow’s comments?
A: Yep, yep. Right now the epicenter of narcotics trafficking in the United States is being directed out of Mexico. When you add the cocaine, the methamphetamine, the heroin and the marijuana, they have even surpassed Colombia. And in Colombia, the police and the criminal justice system have progressed to the point where they constantly arrest the leaders of these criminal organizations. That does not happen in Mexico.
Q: Why does the Mexican government get so upset?
A: I don’t know. Look, you’re talking to a career cop who didn’t go to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Relations. My job was to protect the citizens of the United States, and if they were upset with what I said, so be it. I think the problem is, and I said this before, the thrust of certification whether you agree with it or don’t, the whole philosophy behind it is, you can’t be certified unless you’re fully cooperative. So I think public officials in the United States are now faced with this dilemma of certainly not wanting to decertify Mexico for a whole host of reasons that I’m sure are very important and I never really got into that argument.
Q: Which are what? Economic?
A: Well, I’m sure there are economic issues, trade issues, relations with our neighbors, cultural issues, that you don’t want a distasteful tiff with people that you share so much with.
Q: If you were the one making the decision, would you certify Mexico, with what you know?
A: I don’t think they’re fully cooperative. By the way, that’s the key word. Now, when people who do make that decision have to justify the decision, they have to come up with the rationale that says they’re fully cooperative, which flies in the face of a lot of the facts. And I think that’s why Ambassador Davidow said that. Now, it’s one thing to say it’s the epicenter. … The second part of that is, what has occurred to change that. Rather than improving over the last five years, it has deteriorated.
Q: What would it take for the United States to decertify Mexico?
A: I really don’t know. You’ll have to talk to people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do. How they make these decisions, or why they make these decisions. I just stay out of that. I said, “This is what it looks like.” And that got me in enough trouble as it was.
Q: So, you wouldn’t certify Mexico?
Q: You know, I’ve stayed out of that even when I was in government. What I could say is that they’re not fully cooperative and let people make their own decision.
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An edited transcript
