Kate Doyle
Operation Intercept: The perils of unilateralism
Thu May 8 23:54:19 2003
208.152.73.132

Operation Intercept: The perils of unilateralism

by Kate Doyle - kadoyle@gwu.edu
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB86/

In the weeks before the Bush administration launched the war in Iraq, the Mexican press was brimming with speculation about the punishment the United States might inflict if the Fox government did not vote with the U.S. in the United Nations. That vote never came.

There are, of course, historical reasons for such anxiety. Mexico has been the target of U.S. reprisal in the past, during disputes over issues such as migration and the narcotics trade. American presidents have used the border, in particular, as a bargaining chip, holding it hostage during tricky or troublesome negotiations when the United States was determined to get its way.

A look back at one of those episodes - Operation Intercept - highlights a stark truth about US-Mexico relations in the 21st century. The size and economic significance of the trade flowing between the two countries today makes unilateral, punishing action by the United States against its neighbor impossible to sustain. The border no longer belongs only to the United States; it is a shared wall. That is a dramatic change, and should give Mexico a new sense of partnership with the United States.

Remember the drug war?

It began on the border between Mexico and the United States. The year was 1969. In Washington, a new president occupied the White House - the first Republican in eight years - determined to prove he could establish law and order in a nation that seemed to be spinning out of control. Richard M. Nixon had campaigned on the promise that he would wage a relentless fight against the narcotics trade. He chose Mexico as his first battleground.

At the time, U.S. concerns were focused not only on rising drug use at home but also among American soldiers in Vietnam. With drug treatment programs in their infancy, Washington turned its attention abroad - on the countries that produced, processed and exported narcotics.

Mexico wasn't the only target, but it was the first. As senior administration officials began to plot an assault on the flow of marihuana from its neighbor, they also prepared plans to attack the heroin trade in Turkey, where most of the world's opium was grown, and France, where organized crime rings smuggled the processed heroin into the United States. The plan led eventually to the destruction of the infamous French Connection.

The idea for a "war on drugs" grew out of a campaign pledge Nixon made in September 1968 in Anaheim, California. Anaheim, in the state's Orange County, was then - and remains today - a spawning ground for grassroots political conservatism. This was the home of Nixon's "silent majority," his deep political base among white, middle-class Americans who feared the political and social changes that were roiling U.S. society in the late 1960s. Before an audience of white-collar workers and suburban housewives, the Republican candidate promised that, if elected, he would "move against the source of drugs."

Two months after Nixon took office, he established the Special Presidential Task Force Relating to Narcotics, Marihuana and Dangerous Drugs, placing his hard-line attorney general, John Mitchell, and Secretary of the Treasury David Kennedy in charge. The narcotics task force based its work on the premise that one of the most serious challenges facing the United States was drug abuse. With representatives from ten different federal agencies, the group spent eight weeks assessing the dangers of marihuana, the flow of drugs over the Mexican border, and strategies to control drug smuggling and marihuana cultivation. When its report was released on June 6, it singled out Mexico as the primary supplier of marihuana and a source for a large amount of other dangerous drugs, including heroin. According to the task force, Mexican free-lance smugglers and organized traffickers were "largely responsible for the marihuana and drug abuse problem" that Nixon and his supporters so vehemently deplored.

The group's solution, as stated in the introduction to the report, was to launch "in the immediate future… a concerted frontal attack on the illegal importation into and subsequent illegal sale and use of marihuana, narcotics and dangerous drugs in the United States." In practical terms this meant a crack down on the border with Mexico, with or without Mexican cooperation.

As senior presidential aide John Erhlichman told Nixon in a memorandum on June 18, the task force recommended that the Mexican government "be forced into a program of defoliation of the marihuana plants." The weapon used to bludgeon Mexico into compliance would be a massive surprise attack on Mexico's border by U.S. law enforcement personnel, code named "Operation Intercept."

Intercept was plotted in secret to produce an unprecedented slow-down of all plane, truck, car and foot traffic - legitimate or not - flowing from Mexico into the southern United States. In order to achieve their goals, the president's top enforcement advisors deployed thousands of extra Border, Customs and Immigration agents along the 2,000 mile line that separates the countries, from just north of Tijuana to Brownsville, Texas. Once in place, the agents were charged with stopping and inspecting anything that moved. Where traditionally U.S. officials would wave nineteen out of twenty vehicles through the lines, now each and every cargo was subjected to a thorough search, creating an instant nightmare for millions of legal commuters and commercial traders.

The plan was put into effect with only a minimal level of consultation with the Mexicans. As Newsweek reporter Elaine Shannon described in her 1988 book on the drug war (Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win, Viking), Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst went to Mexico City in June of 1969 to try to convince the Díaz Ordaz government to go after the smugglers. "The Mexican officials were cordial but noncommittal. Kleindienst grew visibly annoyed as he realized that the sessions were, in the words of an aide, 'just an exercise in hospitality.'" (47) Other administration officials were less charitable. G. Gordon Liddy - a senior advisor in the Department of Treasury who would later be convicted for the Watergate break-in - also described the U.S. effort to prod the Mexicans in his autobiography (Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1998). "The Mexicans," wrote Liddy, "using diplomatic language of course, told us to go piss up a rope. The Nixon administration didn't believe in the United States' taking crap from any foreign government. Its reply was Operation Intercept." (185)

While his officials plotted the details of the operation, Nixon was getting ready to meet Díaz Ordaz in a ceremony dedicating the new Amistad ("Friendship") Dam, near Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila. It would be the first encounter between the outgoing Mexican chief of state and the new U.S. president, and carried great symbolic significance. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger pointed this out in his secret briefing paper to Nixon just days before the ceremony: "The meeting at Amistad Dam is important because it will demonstrate the continuation of the close and constructive relations which exist between the United States and Mexico. It will give you an opportunity to establish your personal interest in maintaining a special relationship with the Mexican President." (Emphasis in the original.) Choreographing the encounter, Kissinger went on:

You may wish to say
-- You value our cordial relations with Mexico as an essential element of our foreign policy.
-- The excellent relations between our countries rest on mutual respect for each other's sovereignty, as well as on our mutual interests.
-- You share President Díaz Ordaz' desire to maintain close personal relations, as your predecessors did.
-- You intend to consult with him from time to time on matters of mutual interest.

Nixon was also given comments to make to Díaz Ordaz about the narcotics issue, but although they hinted at what was to come they contained no specific warning about the operation, which was then in its final planning stages. "We are very much concerned about the problem of drug abuse in the United States," wrote Kissinger for the president. "We appreciate Mexico's continuing cooperation in trying to meet this problem…We are considering plans for major enforcement efforts… [We] hope that our enforcement officials can continue to work together closely."

Just days before Operation Intercept went into effect on September 21, the United States finally alerted Mexico to the planned crackdown when Ambassador Robert McBride met first with Foreign Secretary Antonio Carrillo Flores and then Interior Secretary Luis Echeverría to discuss what was about to happen. Although McBride carefully explained the task force findings, the significance of the drug problem to the new Nixon administration and the outlines of the imminent action, he left the meetings worried that the officials did not fully grasp the difficulties the crackdown might cause.

Mexico reacted with shock and horror when Operation Intercept was implemented. A flurry of phone calls and hastily called meetings ensued, with the Mexicans increasingly agitated over what they felt was a betrayal of an implicit understanding between the two nations to consult and cooperate with each other on matters of bilateral significance. As tempers frayed and the lines at the border grew longer, Carrillo Flores took the unusual step of writing a personal letter to Nixon in late September. Carrillo urged the president to correct the "excesses" of an action that had been "negligible in stopping the traffic of marihuana and drugs, but great in harming the economy on both sides of the border and in creating frictions and bad publicity for the United States."

"[I realize,"] Carrillo continued, ["that it is] totally unorthodox to address you. I will never do it again. But in this case I am convinced you have the opportunity of doing something for which all Mexicans will be grateful. (They simply can not understand that two weeks after you met with our President, the most drastic, and for many, unfriendly measure against Mexico was taken.)"

Not all U.S. agencies supported the tactics of Operation Intercept. Driven by Nixon's focus on crime, it was designed and executed by senior officials from key U.S. law enforcement agencies such as Justice and Treasury. The State Department - which represented the interests of diplomacy with Mexico - was essentially cut out of the process. Throughout the crackdown, the U.S. embassy in Mexico sharply opposed the policy, as the ambassador wrestled with breaking the news to the Mexicans and then managing their response. McBride warned of "catastrophic consequences" for relations between the countries, and at one point tried to convince administration officials to cancel the plan altogether. Leaks in early September about U.S. intent, he claimed, "have obviously alerted [the drug traffickers to the] need for caution in their nefarious operations, and doubtless those involved have taken precautions to ride out the storm. While I am aware of enormity of problem, I wonder if Operation Intercept in its present marred condition is really worth risking serious difficulties with Mexicans."

Another dissenting agency was the Bureau of the Budget - predecessor to the Office of Management and Budget, which assists in the preparation of the federal budget and monitors government spending. On September 29, as Week Two of the border crackdown was underway, the agency sent a scathing critique to the White House of the June report that had served as the catalyst for Operation Intercept, calling it a "grossly inadequate basis for Presidential decision" and warning that its recommendations were based on faulty or unproven assertions.

* The report asked the President to focus his policy on the fight against marihuana rather than hard drugs such as heroin or LSD, despite studies showing that resources aimed at hard drugs were "about 100 times as effective as equal resources used against marihuana."
* The report sought to punish Mexico for growing a crop - marihuana - that represented some 9 percent of its total exports, and offered individual farmers up to 40 times the income that any legitimate crop might provide. "The Government of Mexico may be most reluctant to commit itself to a program with such a potential for social unrest."
* The report did not address the potential political backlash from U.S. border communities.
* The policy had a "high risk of making the Administration appear inept by playing into the hands of organized crime and creating more hard drug addicts." (Emphasis in original.) As marihuana becomes scare, the Budget Bureau argued, harder drugs would be used as substitutes. "Even more seriously, the hard drugs lend themselves to manufacture and/or distribution by organized crime syndicates. It seems probable that the Mafia would be a strong supporter of a diversion of Federal resources to marihuana as opposed to hard drugs."

Despite a public relations campaign designed by Nixon aides to promote the operation, press coverage on both sides of the border was derisive. Statistics on the amount of drugs seized and smugglers captured were far lower than expected. But as Liddy pointed out in his autobiography, the goal of Operation Intercept was not, in fact, to freeze the flow of drugs. "For diplomatic reasons the true purpose of the exercise was never revealed. Operation Intercept, with its massive economic and social disruption, could be sustained far longer by the United States than by Mexico. It was an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will." (185-6)

Mexican objections eventually had the desired effect. By mid-October Intercept was called off, replaced by a new anti-drug agreement between Mexico and the United States called "Operation Cooperation," in which both countries collaborated on designing a shared strategy to reduce the production of narcotics inside Mexico and its movement across the border.

Operation Intercept served United States interests in several ways. It was the fulfillment of a campaign promise by a new Republican president to show that he could be tough on lawlessness, and thus earned Nixon domestic political points in his first year of office. It served as the opening shot in what would rapidly become a global war on drugs-a war that would far outlast the Nixon White House and would occupy successive administrations for decades to come. And finally, it was an exercise in the politics of coercion, whereby Washington used economic and political blackmail to pressure Mexico into moving on an issue that mattered to the United States.

In the end, the crisis did push Mexico into committing more resources to a concerted drug eradication and enforcement policy, and led to Operation Condor in the 1970s, which included a defoliation campaign using the toxic "Paraquat" herbicide. But whatever the intended outcome was, Intercept also led to a series of unintended consequences that undermined the lessons the U.S. longed to teach Mexico.

Combined with effects of the global war on drugs during the Nixon administration, Mexico's attack on marihuana growers and the end of the opium trade in Turkey resulted in a new and hungry heroin market in the United States, which incipient Mexican crime organizations were only too happy to fulfill. The introduction of Colombian cocaine in the mid-1970s helped transform Mexico's traffickers into a powerful mafia that could afford sophisticated technology to protect its interests, and the enormous drug profits that ensued threatened to destroy Mexican law enforcement with new levels of corruption.

Could Operation Intercept happen today? It might: in the name of counterterrorism, the new department of Homeland Security has the authority and the capability to close the border down. And clearly, Washington's penchant for unil

• Mexican Army and Law Enforcement Agencies make "incursions" — Rep. Tancredo, Fri May 9 00:57

• Stop Media Monopoly

  — Eli Pariser, Fri May 9 00:16