____________________________________________________________________ Close-Up on Reel Deal in 'Traffic' US GOVERNMENT'S ROLE NEEDS ITS OWN SEPIA TONES ____________________________________________________________________ THE BOSTON GLOBE Society & Pop Culture Sunday, March 18, 2001 By Dennis Bernstein and Larry Everest (Courtesy of Dennis Bernstein; according to the author the article was "disappeared" from the Globe's website shortly after it was posted). "Traffic," up for five Academy Awards including best picture, is being touted as the real deal on America's war on drugs. But how real is it? "Traffic" is slick. The performances are compelling, the action nonstop, and the cinematography riveting. It captures some narco-hypocrisies, like the fact that the war hasn't stopped the drug flow. "Traffic" doesn't discriminate against illegal drugs, but reminds us that legal ones like tobacco, alcohol, and tranquilizers are also drugs with devastating impacts. We certainly wouldn't argue with the movie's theme that, as screenwriter Stephen Gaghan put it, "drugs should be considered a health care issue rather than a criminal issue." And we can understand why so many, who have been so deeply harmed either by drugs or by the war against them, are glad that the official story is finally being questioned. But is it the real deal? Not by a long shot. For every drug truth "Traffic" portrays, it ignores, obscures, or distorts deeper ones. Two stand out: the role of the US government and banks in fueling and profiting from the drug trade, and the targeting of youth and communities of color in the domestic war on drugs. In the world of "Traffic," the sordid underbelly of the drug trade lies across the border in Mexico. There, a corrupt and ruthless general runs Mexico's war on drugs, cartels wage war on each other for market control, torture is routine, and bodies litter the streets. It's all shot in sepia tones, as if Mexico is dirty with drugs. Across the border in El Norte, however, life is lived in technicolor. The US antidrug war may be bumbling, inefficient, and hampered by interagency rivalries, but it's sincere - without a hint of corruption or complicity. America's drug czar, Judge Robert Wakefield (played by Michael Douglas), is a naive but ultimately honest and caring family man - in stunning contrast to his Mexican counterpart. A real-deal "Traffic" could have begun like this: Scene 1: Nancy Reagan in the White House introducing her Just Say No campaign against drugs. Scene 2: Cut to the nearby offices of Attorney General William French Smith, who is signing a memo assuring the CIA that it will not be held criminally liable for working with drug traffickers. Scene 3: Cut to CIA operatives working with traffickers in Central America to finance the illegal Contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Scene 4: Cut to South Central Los Angeles, where some of these same traffickers are selling cocaine. This may seem more fictional than "Traffic," but it's reality. Neither the media nor Congress ever took on the Contra drug connection in the 1980s, but it's well documented that the William Casey-Oliver North network included selling drugs to arm the Contras. (The late Casey was CIA director in the Reagan administration.) A July 1985 entry in North's notebook reads "$14 million in Contra money from drugs." And former DEA agent Michael Levine, who was working in Latin America at the time, says he had his own evidence of the CIA's drugs-for-arms dealing: a Drug Enforcement Administration report stating "the CIA stopped us from indicting the same people who were selling the Contras drugs." Levine adds, "If I was working North's case, I would have tracked him and the rest of them, from the time they got up in the morning until the time they went to bed at night." Levine, who worked as a drug enforcement agent for over 20 years, calls the Contra drug connection "small potatoes" compared with US actions in Mexico. Levine's real-life storyline goes like this: On assignment in Mexico in the late 1980s, he's part of a drug sting that leads to the highest levels of the Mexican government of Carlos Salinas de Gotari. Just when he and his fellow DEA agents were going to put the bite on Mexico's top drug dealers, the US attorney general, Edwin Meese, warned Mexico's attorney general of the DEA operation. The whole operation went up in smoke, so to speak, and the United States maintained close relations with the Salinas government. Salinas's brother Raul is now in prison for drug trafficking, and there is evidence that the former president himself amassed some $600 million in drug profits, stashed in some 60 banks around the world. Perhaps the US senators who made cameo appearances in "Traffic" - Orrin Hatch, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Grassley, Harry Reid, and Don Nickles - should have explained on camera why the Senate has voted year after year to certify Mexico's compliance with the war on drugs. Such official collaboration with drug traffickers has been repeated in many other countries such as Peru and Colombia. Levine recalls being hot on the trail of heroin dealers in Thailand only to be told by US officials there that the United States had "other priorities" than stopping drugs. "Drugs are never a US priority," Levine concludes from his years working in Southeast Asia, South America, and Mexico. What are these "other priorities"? How about the stability of many US allies, not to mention the global financial system itself? As "Deep Throat" reputedly said during Watergate, "follow the money." And there's hundreds of billions of dollars of drug money to follow every year. It's an open secret that without drug money, the economies of many US allies such as Mexico, Peru, and Colombia would collapse and be unable to repay their billions in debt to Western banks and international lending agencies. And if developing countries defaulted on their loans, the ensuing panic would make the recent stock market plunge look positively bullish by comparison. The workings of the world market have also fueled the developing world's dependence on the drug trade. Market prices for the agricultural goods and raw materials these countries have traditionally depended on have declined. Meanwhile, competition from cheap food imports from the United States and other industrialized countries has ruined millions of peasant farmers in the developing world. It is estimated that some 500,000 farmers in Mexico will eventually be forced off the land because NAFTA opened Mexico up to US corn imports. To stay on the land, many will turn to the most lucrative cash crop around - illegal drugs. How much money is involved in the global drug trade? Last year a minority report from House Democrats on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations stated, "Despite increasing international attention and stronger anti-money laundering controls, some current estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through US banks." An estimated $250 billion of those criminal proceeds can be traced to the cocaine trade. Citibank has recently come under scrutiny for laundering an estimated $300 million in narco dollars from shell banks in the Cayman Islands. So much for "Traffic's" realism south of the border; what about in this country? In a movie whose theme is supposedly the decriminalization of drug use, why not show who is actually being criminalized in America's war on drugs, the hundreds of thousands of people, overwhelmingly of color, locked up for minor, nonviolent drug offenses? There are nearly as many people imprisoned on drug charges today - around 458,000 - as the entire US prison population in 1980. While the number of violent offenders in jail has doubled in the last 20 years, the numbers locked up for drug offenses has gone up 11 times! This incarceration boom has had undeniable racial dimensions. While there were twice as many whites in jail for drug offenses in 1996 as a decade earlier, there were five times more African-Americans, and six times more African-American youths. Last June, Human Rights Watch reported that the US war on drugs has been waged overwhelmingly against African-Americans. These racial disparities are well known, yet year after year lawmakers uphold discriminatory laws that punish crack possession - mainly found in impoverished inner cities - hundreds of times more severely than powdered cocaine - the drug of the white and affluent. This points to another ugly reality of the US war on drugs - urban counterinsurgency. Waves of downsizing, restructuring, and relocation have stripped many inner cities of the factory jobs that used to support more stable communities. Like Latin American peasants, many urban dwellers have been left with drugs as the best option for survival. What better way for the establishment to contain this explosive population - remember Los Angeles circa 1992 - than by locking away hundreds of thousands via the war on drugs? In a recent interview, Douglas remarks that the cooperation "Traffic" received from government officials demonstrated that even the government was willing to say, "Let's open this discussion up." Indeed, there are many in the establishment who want to modify the war on drugs, fearing it's hurting the United States more than helping. But such a revamping of official policy is a far cry from detailing the full impact, context, and motives for America's drug war. And that's something neither the powers-that-be nor "Traffic" are going to touch. Dennis Bernstein is host-producer of "Flashpoints," an investigative newsmagazine heard on listener-supported KPFA radio in Berkeley, CA, http://www.flashpoints.net. Larry Everest is a contributor to Pacific News Service.
