We hear today from Washington, DC, our state capitals, our county officials, our city officials, and our school board members that we are doing all that we can to combat the scourge of drugs affecting our children, our young people, and our
society. What are they really telling us?
They are certainly not listening to the former Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Intelligence Chief and if they are they don’t care.
“For the godfathers of the drug trade in Columbia and Mexico this was a deal made in narco heaven,” said Phil Jordan, who until his recent retirement was the DEA’s leading authority on Mexican drug organizations. He was speaking about the NAFTA or North
American Free Trade Agreement, on nationally televised ABC News Nightline on May 6,1997.
Phil Jordan said, “We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking, yes. I mean, it was a subject that we could not discuss.” The administration did not want the DEA spoiling its NAFTA deal by telling the
public and congress just how freely they thought the drugs would then flow.
On the same ABC Nightline broadcast the host Ted Koppel put investigative reporter Brian Ross on the air to address the call ABC News received from the Justice Department claiming, “it was not true that DEA officials had been silenced prior to the NAFTA
vote.” Brian Ross explained what transpired in their conversation, “Then they put on the line a DEA official who said he didn’t know what Phil Jordan was talking about it. And I asked him if he was an official at the time in Washington. He said he
wasn’t. So they produced another official and this one then confirmed essentially what Jordan said, that Jordan and others were told not to talk publicly about NAFTA but instead to refer all inquiries to Washington, which gave the official line that the
DEA didn’t know what effect, if any, NAFTA would have. But in fact Jordan says all along he and his colleagues knew that NAFTA would open the floodgates to more cocaine coming into the country.
“...Along the US Mexican border, some 12,000 trucks a day have freely come into this country from Mexico, largely uninspected for safety, many carrying along with televisions, computers, and fresh produce, massive amounts of cocaine and heroine,” said
Brian Ross. Ross then showed a videotape with an imprint date of 03/7/1997. He explained, “This truck loaded in Mexico made it all the way to New York City before agents discovered that deep inside a load of 60,000 pounds of carrots, a far more valuable
cargo of cocaine, —3,586 pounds of cocaine, the largest seizure in recent memory in New York an unintended but, it turns out, not unexpected byproduct of the NAFTA agreement.” “It’s wide open, it’s a wide open border,” said Phil Jordan.
Right now Mexican trucks crossing the border have to remain within the 20 miles restricted area. Yet this truck made it all the way to New York. George Weise, the Commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service, a political appointee, claimed 3.5 million trucks
crossed the borders from Mexico last year and that 900,000, or roughly one in four, get inspected. This contrasted sharply with State Attorney General of Texas, Dan Morales’ numbers. He said, “Ted, last year approximately 2.2 million trucks came across
the border. Of those, only two percent were stopped and inspected. The push from Washington now is not more customs agents or more inspections, but the elimination of the 20 mile limit.
There are so many other failures of NAFTA I could discuss, like the U.S. trade surplus with Mexico, which went from $1.7 billion trade surplus to a trade deficit of $16.3 at the end of 1996. And how according to Public Citizen, as of March 1997, the
approximate number of U.S. jobs lost due to NAFTA was 500,000. There was a $4,420 median annual pay drop for a worker hired after being laid off in the early 1990’s, and case after case where corporate executives of American companies said there would be
no U.S. jobs lost and now they have shut down whole plants in the U.S. These are just a few of the failures we have seen after just three years of NAFTA.
I said in an October 1993 article printed in our “HAVE YOU BEEN LIED TO?” (sm) flyer, ‘Tell your Congressman and Senators that if they vote for NAFTA that they are giving away the governing of our country and opening the borders to unimpeded drug
traffic. Now we are sadly seeing that. We have to ask the President and the Congress, “do you just say the words that you want to protect America from drugs or are you serious?” If they are serious then they must not expand NAFTA but restrict it and
inspect every truck crossing the border, for both drugs and safety.
If this is not bad enough, President Clinton is trying to ram through the Congress of the United States the expansion of NAFTA to include Chile, along with the U.S., Canada and Mexico. He is trying to do this under what is called “Fast Track Authority”,
which means that the U.S. Congress gives the responsibility to President Clinton and his administration to negotiate anything they want and the Congress then would then have to vote for or against the whole thing without any changes or amendments
whatsoever. Yet they will be held responsible for any additional damages these agreements do to our United States of America.
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