Jorge Mújica Murias
Mexicodelnorte@yahoo.com

It started about two years ago, and is called the “Intelligent Border Project,” a very commercial but full of sense initiative, so border merchants lose less money due to the long waiting lines at the border crossing. According to its organizers, merchants from both sides of the border lose each year around 8 billion 580 million dollar because their clients take hours to cross the line. More time waiting to cross means less time shopping, and as the saying goes, “time is Money”.

According to their numbers, at the Tijuana-San Diego crossing, the busiest in the world, with well over 10 million people, loses about 5 billion 100 million dollars a year. The close-by crossing at Mexicali-Imperial County loses 3 billion 300 millions every 12 months.

And let me repeat it, the “Intelligent Border” is a purely commercial project. To be a “partner” of the smart border you have to come down with 50 thousand dollars, which has not been an obstacle for a bunch of States and Counties. Another kind of “partner,” with less money but maybe more intelligence, are private companies serving as advisors to evaluate programs to shorten the waiting crossing times, and each one of them has to come up with 25 thousand dollars to have the right to speak their minds.

The last Partners of the venture are private companies with real state interests in both sides of the border, who lobby and advocate on both sides of the border. These are the real heavy weight guys, investing about 6 billion dollars a year, which they hope to recover implementing measures to reduce the famous waiting times.

Part of the business partners is being used to design and engineer triplelane crossing points, cashonly fast lines, community awareness programs about the “crisis in the border towns,” and to “educate and teach the community about the economic advantage of crossing rapidly and have an expedited commercial exchange between both nations.”

The Stupid Border

All that comes to mind because a few days ago the Obama regime finally, like the donkey in the fable, blew the right way and played the flute.

The boss of the so called Homeland Security offi ce, Janet Napolitano, announced in a low publicity way, that she’s cancelling the high tech border Project, the so called “virtual fence”, in which the US government had put about one billion of taxpayers money. It had been started in 2006, by congressional decision, and it barely covered 53 miles at the border.

The “Virtual Fence” has a network of cameras, movement sensors and radars that supposedly would detect undocumented immigrants crossing the border, and the Border Patrol would be notifi ed to immediately  stop them. Instead, theygot a bunch of “coyotes”, not the two-legged ones but the real four-legged animals, a ton of deer and rolling sagebrush, but few immigrants, at the cost of 15 million dollars a mile.

Those results lead us to the conclusion that the only intelligent guys in the project were the Presidents and CEO’s of Boeing, company who sold the government a ton of junk, making millions on the process. And they will keep making money, because they will continue “giving maintenance to the technology already installed.”

Of course, Republicans who approved the Project in the first place, are now complaining and criticizing Obama because he took “too long to cancel the Project”, and because he is “taking too long to decide what to do instead”. They want more personnel, new technology and equipment for the Border Patrol. I say the Money would  be better invested on the Intelligent Border Project. One billion dollars would suffi ce to put a bridge every mile across the border, or at least two in every border town and village, and maybe to triple thenumber of guys who ask ­you if you are a citizen at those bridges. That would promote business and improve social relations on both sides of the border, both badly needed in times of crisis and recession.

But I don’t think it will happen. A plan like that renders no profit to any congressman, the President or any executive. It would be viewed as a very farfetched idea, because no one in Washington is intelligent enough to appreciate it.

por José de la Isla
Hispanic Link News Service

MEXICO CITY — There was “victory” in Iraq and a pending one in Afghanistan. Now, we’re told, it’s time to turn our weapons to the war on drugs.

The need for an escalation and murky triumph at any price led U.S. Army Undersecretary Joseph W. Westphal to let out a horrifying peetoot. He has planted the thought in public discourse that Invading Mexico Is not out of the question.

We also don’t like losing wars. We fight only for the right side because our intent is for a happy ending. Just consult any public-education history book, if you’re in doubt. Given that, a mistake was made from the beginning with the misapplication of ”war” to the campaign to minimize illicit drug use and its distribution. Wars provoke resistance from the other side. We don’t like or understand that.

The Nixon administration gave the war on drugs a law-and-order spin in the early 1970s. Its concern was with out-of-control youth (mostly in college), the association of pot-smoking with draft-resistance, hippies, yippies, cultural drift and the Beatles. Drug use was considered the common denominator with what was causing disorderliness and threatening the upright, the straight-laced, the moral community and what made over-thetop youth go bonkers.

A law-enforcement, rehab, talk-and-treatment therapy, and a public relations industry grew up around legitimate concerns over distribution and illicit drug use. However, the application of drug laws today tends to serve other social-control purposes.

For example, low-level pot possession is the number one cause of arrest in New York City, 50,383 cases. Of those, 86 percent of the arrests last year were of blacks and Latinos despite consistent research showing young whites use marijuana at higher rates, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

In another theater of the war, a November 2008 report from the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington, D.C., co-chaired by Mexico’s former president Ernesto Zedillo, declared the U.S. war on drugs had failed. The report called for rethinking the “asymmetrical” U.S. policy which calls for countries like Mexico to stanch the fl ow of drugs without making a successful effort to stop the flow of guns going south and avoiding the public health issue that large-scale illegal-drug consumption presents. The drug fi ght will fail so long as law enforcement remains the policy’s emphasis. Neglect of the problem of consumption, despite all the health and brain-science evidence on addiction, shows how wrong-headed the policy is.

More than two years after the Brookings report, the Inter-American Dialogue also labels the policy a failure. It challenges the policy whose purpose is to fi ght on and spend into oblivion, with seeming disinterest on whether drug use and distribution is declining. Debate about the 40-year U.S. war on drugs,” said the Dialogue, “remains muted.” Inter-American Dialogue president emeritus Peter Hakim presented his case to “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske. He briefed staff at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and discussed the report with assistant secretary William Brownfi eld of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Who was Hahim trying to move? The very people whose careers and budgets depend on keeping the drug war going? Have we sat and watched this scenario before?

Try public education, where bad results get more money, which produces more bad results. Good money chasing good policy is the prescription. Not good money chasing bad policy. The “farreaching debate” Hakim wants is sound but unlikely because of war promoters.

Look long and hard into the public-policy syndicates that lie and have no serious public interest at heart. Reason demands something different.

­With drugs, even the law and justice theme rings phony — like documentaries for future TV episodes of Cops. Some days, the glowing reports about a bust or a capture look suspiciously like that banner “Mission Accomplished,” but eight long years before the Iraq war began winding down.

To make the Iraq war increasingly a thing of the past, it took some bold changes of policy, personnel and public attitude. Just as it will take in the war on drugs.

(José de la Isla, a nationally syndicated columnist for Hispanic Link and Scripps Howard news services, has been recognized for two consecutive years for his commentaries by New America Media. His forthcoming book is “Our Man on the Ground.” His previous books include “DAY NIGHT LIFE DEATH HOPE” (2009) and “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003).” Available at joseisla3@yahoo.com)