Today, the so-called President of the United States, Donald Trump, who is quickly getting accustomed to rule like a King by issuing an almost daily flurry of executive orders which do not have to go through Congress to get approval, signed what has to be one of his dumbest executive orders yet, presented to him by Jeff Sessions in his first official act as head of the Department of Justice (and of whom I have logged some some entries here in the past), a move that came after Jeff Sessions was sworn in as Attorney General. Although Trump signed not one but three new executive orders this day, one aimed at targeting drug cartels, and the other two aimed at creating a task force to reduce crime and stopping crimes against law enforcement officers, the dumb one we are talking about is the one targeting drug cartels.
“I'm signing three executive actions today designed to restore safety in America,” Trump said. “Very important. All very important”. The White House did not provide copies of the executive orders, nor was there any explanation given regarding what they would do. Trump only listed their titles: “Enforcing federal law with respect to the transnational criminal organizations and preventing international trafficking,” “Task force on crime reduction and public safety” and “Preventing violence against federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement officials.”
The reason of why the executive order targeting the drug cartels has to be perhaps the dumbest executive order issued by a US President while still in office has to do with the very purpose of the existence of both the DEA and the FBI. The “war on drugs” is nothing new, it has been around for a very long time ever since the days when President Richard Nixon proclaimed his War on Drugs in 1971, this after ordering two years back what is now known as Operation Intercept, which was conceived to stop once and for all the flow of all illegal drugs from Colombia through Mexico to the USA. Operation Intercept turned out to be a veritable economic catastrophe, it created very long lines at the international bridges with US Customs agents checking the soles of the shoes and the armpits of many travellers to make sure that not a single ounce of cocaine or heroin was being carried into the USA. And all for what? The flow of illegal drugs to the USA did not diminish at all, and the only visible end result was that the US border towns such as San Diego and El Paso began to go into a severe economic shock as a result of their Mexican customers no longer willing to spend three or four hours waiting in line at one of the international bridges in order to buy a shirt or a toaster at Sears or buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The owners of US businesses along the border began to complain very loudly, promising a severe defeat to the Republican party at the next federal elections (yes, it was a Republican President who declared the war on drugs), and before things got out of hand President Nixon ordered Operation Intercept temporarily suspended, which in effect was a termination of such operation but not called as such in order not to accept that the whole effort had been a miserable fiasco.
Switching gears, President Nixon later created the DEA the 1st of July 1973, with orders to do precisely the thing that Donald Trump wants the agency to do, i.e. “enforcing federal law with respect to the transnational criminal organizations and preventing international trafficking”. And ever since, the DEA, even with the help of the FBI and US Customs now under Homeland Security, have been fumbling without any concrete result that could justify the enormous amount of money thrown into the effort. At no time in recent US history since the seventies have the federal agencies interdicted more than five per cent of the drugs entering into the USA, and even the 5 per cent figure may be overly optimistic.
By issuing an executive order calling for “enforcing federal law with respect to the transnational criminal organizations and preventing international trafficking”, President Trump is really accusing both the FBI and the DEA of having been derelict in their duties and obligations, since for several decades it has been understood that the main purpose at least of the DEA is to enforce federal law with respect to the transnational criminal organizations and preventing international trafficking. That has been their obligation long before Donald Trump got into the presidency. If Trump as President truly believes he had to issue such executive order, then it stands to reason that he is convinced that neither the FBI nor the DEA have been doing their job, either by gross negligence, or worse, by internal corruption after having sold out to some of the main drug lords in the USA. This last possibility is not so unreal, considering the fact that since the DEA was created in 1973 not a single big time US drug lord has been detained or even accused in US territory, as if they did not exist. But they do exist, except that neither the FBI nor the DEA want to talk about them, and as a matter of fact they do not even have the guts to mention them by name. There are important drug lords now rotting in US jails, true, but most of them are either Colombian or Mexican or Peruvian drug lords, none of them have ever been drug lords born and raised in the USA. To date, the US federal government has never made a single arrest of someone as important as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. If he is now in prison in the USA, it is thanks to the Mexican Marines who nabbed him after his spectacular escape from a Mexican high-security prison. There is much more merit in the Mexican Army and the Mexican federal prosecutors -for whom Trump has no appreciation and in fact actually despises to the point of offering President Enrique Peña Nieto US military assistance to let US soldiers do the job that the Mexican Marines are supposedly not doing- than in the history of accomplishments of both the FBI and the DEA who have absolutely nothing to show and to flaunt. Just recently, February 10th 2017, an important drug lord known was “the H-2”, Juan Francisco Padrón Sánchez, was gunned down in the state of Nayarit by Mexican Marines from a helicopter together with seven of his accomplices in a violent confrontation that also claimed the lives of seven of his accomplices. And what does the US federal government, including the DEA, the FBI, US Customs, Homeland Security and even the US Army have to match this inside US territory? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And prominent figures such as John Gotti don't really count because someone like John Gotti does not even come close to the power wielded by other US drug lords who may be even more powerful than their Mexican counterpart “El Chapo”. As far as the US drug lords are concerned, US federal government agencies do no harm to them, and if they do no harm to them they do not exist as far as they are concerned. The ones taking all the heat are their counterparts in Mexico who are being detained and extradited to the USA or killed by the Mexican Army, but as far as the American drug lords are concerned, it is business as usual. The only lonely hero in this scenario was Enrique Camarena Salazar, but he perished not in the USA but in Mexico at the hands of Rafael Caro Quintero, and after that not a single DEA agent nor FBI agent has perished in fighting against US drug lords in US territory, perhaps because they are under strict orders not to mess with them nor to even attempt to arrest them or engage their well armed sicario thugs in a dog fight.
Signing an executive order demanding the FBI and the DEA do the job they were supposed to be doing to begin with is an exercise in futility. If they are doing the best they can, and their results in the overall panorama are no better than those that would be obtained by inexperienced clods, then the time as come to “clean the house” and start doing what Trump does best: “You're fired!”. Going from the bottom all the way to the top. But telling them to do what they are supposed to do because that's precisely what they are being paid for seems dumb at best.
If Trump believes he can do better than all the other US Presidents before him, what is he proposing? His executive order does not provide any clue or detail involving some brilliant new plan of action in the order to enforce federal law with respect to the transnational criminal organizations and preventing international trafficking. He is merely asking the federal agencies under his jurisdiction to do what they are already being paid to do. But so far he has failed to provide even a hint of how the new Trump plan is to be carried out. His executive order provides no specifics, perhaps because the Devil is in the details. It is easy for any buffoon in power to issue an order calling for “all the people to be happy and enjoy life”, but if he furnishes no specific course of action in order to accomplish such a thing, then the executive order is not an order; as a matter of fact, it does not even come close to being something in the wish list for Santa Claus, which is most disrespectful for the same legal vehicle that was used by Abraham Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation which is now considered as one of the most far reaching executive orders and documents issued by any other President in US history.
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