Al Grito de Guerra: the Second Mexican Revolution
- Thread starter Roberto El Rey
- Start date
Narrative Interlude #5
February 6, 1992
Atlacomulco, State of México
Atlacomulco, State of México
The sun shimmered vermilion as it sank below the mountainous horizon, sheathing first the distant metropolis and then the growing countryside in despondent blue twilight. As the caravan of black SUVs trudged through the warm winter air, the sky went from red to pink to blue to grey to black, so that by the time it reached the appointed spot the evening’s eye had closed and the world was bat-blind to the deeds of men below. When twenty-four Army troops, sixteen DFS agents and one President saw the isolated, crumbling shack by the harsh glare of twelve pairs of headlights, they were alone in the night.
The rotting structure which they beheld had first been built in 1954 as a civic center. However, like most twentieth-century Mexican public works projects, its true purpose had been to funnel taxpayer money into the private pockets of senior government officials. Then-Governor Salvador Sánchez had contracted the job out to one of his own construction companies, which had cut every possible corner, eventually resulting in a crooked concrete hut that was so far away from the nearest settlement that barely anyone had given it a moment’s thought in years. That this forsaken structure hadn’t collapsed during the quake of ’85, but the General Hospital of Mexico had, seemed to imply that God had a morbid sense of humor when it came to his natural disasters.
Still, the isolation made this the perfect spot for tonight. Obsessed with secrecy, President Bartlett had personally sought out the most isolated hovel within one hundred kilometers of the Federal District, then summoned the crême de la crême of the country’s narcotic aristocracy to pile themselves into it in anticipation of his arrival. As he exited his Range Rover, Bartlett saw that three luxury cars were already parked outside the front door to the shack, chauffeurs languishing anxiously within. This irritated the President as he was escorted toward the waiting door (he had asked the traffickers to come as inconspicuously as possible), but he quickly remembered that these men’s line of work forced them to make constant, gaudy shows of their personal wealth and power. The international drug trade was a vicious, vicious game, and the slightest sign of weakness could invite internal coups from underlings or assassination attempts from alleged allies. Only a great fool, Bartlett realized as he pushed open the door, would show up to a meeting with his most prominent business rivals in anything less than his finest suit and most expensive sports car.
As Bartlett entered the dingy room and came face-to-face with three grimacing drug dons, he suddenly remembered the meeting he had attended seven years earlier to plan the murder of Kiki Camarena. So much had changed since then: the country was in turmoil, Bartlett himself was President, and three of the meeting’s attendees—Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo—had been imprisoned for their involvement in Camarena’s death. The incarcerated men’s families had scattered to the winds, destroying the old Guadalajara Cartel and replacing it with several lesser organizations spread out across the northern border states, all operating within the fragile bounds of several easily-broken truces. Already, Félix Gallardo’s progeny in Tijuana were at war with Joaquín Guzmán’s forces in Sinaloa; Bartlett hadn’t invited either cartel to this meeting for fear that they would be at each other’s throats.
Returning to the moment, Bartlett took a seat and surveyed his distinguished guests across the table: Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Fonseca Carrillo’s nephew and founder of the Juárez Cartel; Miguel Caro Quintero, Rafael’s brother and leader of the Sonora Cartel; and Manuel Salcido Uzueta, the most prominent remaining trafficker still based in Guadalajara and a man most preferred to call El Cochiloco, or “The Crazy Pig”. No one else. The meeting in 1985 had been packed—the Secretary of Defense, DFS Chief, Governor of Jalisco, military officials, and police chiefs, attended by armed bodyguards and servants bearing cocaine cigarettes on silver platters, had all squeezed themselves into a lavish suite at the Las Americas Hotel in Guadalajara to do their business. Someone had squealed, and everyone had suffered for it. Bartlett couldn’t afford that kind of risk tonight—if the world found out what he was about to do, his head would be the first one to roll.
Clearing his senses, the President of the Republic finally spoke. “Respected comrades and associates,” he began as he took his seat, “may I offer regards of the sincerest profundity on my administration’s behalf, and gratitudes of the highest solemnity for your concurrence with the purposes of this conclave.”
Amado Carrillo Fuentes blinked. Miguel Caro Quintero squinted. The Crazy Pig just grunted. “What?”
Bartlett grumbled inaudibly. He’d forgotten just how thick these men were. “Thanks for coming,” he clarified in the condescending voice of an overworked primary school teacher.
“Why exactly have we come, el señor presidente?” Amado Carrillo Fuentes inquired with the indignant sneer of a man accustomed to choosing the time and place of his meetings. “You were so tight-lipped about it on the phone, I don’t have a clue what it is you intend to offer us.”
Suppressing his offense at the drug lord’s unprofessional manner, Bartlett cut to the chase: “Mexico is under attack. Our sacred institutions are being subverted by radicals of the most pernicious kind,” he claimed, incapable of diluting his rhetoric below a certain threshold. “If we are to defeat them, we must have a strong security apparatus, and for that we need money—lots of money—that doesn’t come out of Washington’s usury funds. That, my friends, is where you come in.”
There was a pause as the full significance of the offer sunk in. “You want us to fund your reign of terror?” Carrillo asked with an exotic mix of confusion and bemusement.
“The donations you provide would serve to streamline the functions of the Government Secretariat, allow for more incursions into the territory of the southern rebels—and, of course, triple the size of the Federal Security Directorate,” the President emphasized with a slight, tight smile.
This time there was no pause. “Why should we care about your security apparatus?” El Cochiloco interjected with a flippant wave of his hand. “What’s in this deal for us?”
Bartlett had expected that part to be obvious, but you could never be sure with these morons. He leaned forward in his seat. “The more federal agents I have to enforce my laws, the more you have to guard your operations. The DFS works for you as much as it does for me, and we all know it,” Bartlett noted, hiding his discomfort at the knowledge that the long-term security of his regime rested on an army of part-time smugglers. “The stronger the Directorate is, the stronger you are. An investment in the Directorate is an investment in yourselves.” Bartlett leaned back once again, hoping he’d dressed his sales pitch just well enough to make it a convincing argument.
By the looks of Carrillo’s prolonged smirk, it hadn’t been. “Oh no, el señor presidente,” he cockily insisted. “I’m no philanthropist. If I’m to contribute to this little slush fund of yours, then it’d better be more than worth my while. You take my money,” he slithered, “you become my employee.”
Beneath the table, Bartlett dug his fingernails into his palms. “What do you want from me?” he inquired evenly, carefully concealing his anger.
“I want control over all your new hires in my territory. No one in Chihuahua gets a DFS job without my say-so.” The smugness with which he laid out his terms suggesting he would be recommending several hundred of his own lieutenants as agents in the near future.
Bartlett recoiled. “What kind of imbecile are you?” he shouted with outward horror, secretly relishing the indignant pleasure of the insult. “The CIA and the DEA have agents everywhere, especially since I re-established the DFS. What do you think will happen when one of them finds out that I’m seeking out your approval on matters of security? Washington will go berserk, Bush will send his armies down and this time next year, we’ll be the 51st state!”
The President drew breath, cooling the embers of his anger but fanning the flames of his determination.
“Washington will tolerate—even expect—some corruption in the DFS, as long as I appear to be fighting it,” he continued. “But if they start to suspect that I am facilitating that corruption, America’s support will shrivel like a poblano in the sun. And if they find out that I am conspiring with international criminals—even if it’s for the ultimate good of the country—each of us will soon find himself five kilograms lighter and twenty-five centimeters shorter.” The finger Bartlett dragged across his neck left little ambiguity as to what he meant. The traffickers took the point: it would be foolish to cooperate so openly with the federal government.
Sensing that he had reclaimed the initiative, Bartlett pressed ahead with his own suggestion. “What if I used the DFS to dismantle the Tijuana Cartel?” the President proposed. “That would benefit us all: each of your organizations will profit from the reduced competition and greater market share, and I will be able to show Bush and his cronies what a fierce adversary of organized crime I am.” Several moments of silence ensued as the traffickers considered the offer. It would certainly help, but what assurance did the traffickers have that Bartlett would not then use his strength to go after them, too?
“Give us more governors,” Miguel Caro Quintero suddenly spoke.
“Give you what?” asked Bartlett, vaguely puzzled at the offer.
“Moving product from one end of a state to the other is ten times easier when you’ve got the governor on your side,” Caro explained. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to ship cocaine across Sonora after the DFS was first disbanded? Do you know how huge Sonora is?!!!” he exclaimed, Carrillo’s look of sympathy suggesting that this was a grievance shared by all international drug barons.
“…but,” Caro continued after calming down a tad, “since Manlio took office in Hermosillo everything has gotten so much easier. All of sudden, airstrips and rail hubs have opened up all over the state. Now my men travel with state police escorts, and I’m tipped off at least a week before every raid. If you can turn more of my associates into governors, and I know you can,” Caro proposed, “you can have all the money you need from me.”
President Bartlett massaged his shaven chin with a feeling of quiet vindication: he’d always suspected Governor Beltrones was corrupt, and now he had his confirmation. The offer wasn’t quite as reckless as it sounded, either; corrupt governors had been reigning in Mexico since independence, after all, and if one of these “associate” governors was found out, he, rather than Bartlett, would take the fall. Carefully watching the traffickers’ expressions, he sense that it was time to give in or risk losing his chance at a deal. “I accept your proposal,” he said with as little informality as he could muster.
The next half-hour was spent discussing payment methods. Thanks to the immense fiscal power afforded to the presidency, this would be surprisingly simple: unlike governors, the President had access to several secret, state-owned bank accounts which were well-hidden from prying eyes and which the President could use without reporting anything to anyone. The traffickers would honor their end of the bargain simply by transferring funds from their own clandestine bank accounts to the President’s, as they would with any other illicit transaction.
Discussion then switched to the governorships themselves. Names of states and cities were tossed around like hot potatoes as the traffickers bickered over territory, tracing invisible lines on the table as if it were a giant map. Various “associates” were named, such as Tomás Yárrington, a nobody Congressman from Matamoros who had no political ambitions beyond the fattening of his wallet, and who therefore would make a perfectly pliable Governor of Tamaulipas; Miguel Lerma Candelaria, a high-ranking bureaucrat from Juárez whose job had disappeared amid Carlos Salinas’s budget cuts, and who would do just about anything for a high-paying gig like that of Governor of Chihuahua; and Mario Villanueva Madrid, a PRI senator whose hardline credentials were strong enough that he could be trusted to execute the office of Governor of Quintana Roo unfaithfully and with exorbitant regard to his personal finances. Plans were also discussed to install an “associate” governor in Baja California (the incumbent panista, Ernesto Ruffo Appel, still had three years left in his term, but his removal on “corruption” charges would be easy enough to arrange, provided the PRI seized control of the State Congress in July’s elections).
Then, suddenly, the meeting began to outlast its fruitfulness. The chatter died away, leaving only the sound of flies pinging off fluorescent lights—a sound which reminded all four of the meeting’s attendees of just how much luxury had been lost between the Las Americas Hotel and this godforsaken shack, and of how debasing it was for these men of power to appear before each other not surrounded by teams of servants. Bartlett, who had spent much of his federal career watching highbrow criminals bicker with each other in cabinet meetings, could tell when it was time for everyone to go home. “Well, gentlemen,” he announced, his voice cutting through the thick silence, “it would seem that we have reached an understanding. I will work to ensure that my responsibilities under it are met, just as I trust you all will do.” Taking the hint, Miguel Caro Quintero rose wordlessly from his seat, walked to the door and left the shack. He was followed in short order by the other two traffickers and then by Bartlett himself, who watched by the harsh blue glare of the shack lights as they each climbed into the backs of their Aston Martins and Rolls-Royces and sped off into the night. He then returned to his waiting SUV, flanked on each side by a stoic soldier.
Relaxing his neck on the headrest as the convoy started up again, Bartlett observed from the window as the artificial light was extinguished and the cabin vanished into the black. Barely noticing as his eyelids floated magnetically downward, he preoccupied himself with the thought of turning smugglers into governors. Might they become more loyal to the drug lords than to him?
No, he assured himself. Not a chance. These men had built their entire careers within a system that worshipped obedience to the President, and no amount of bribes was going to change that. Carrillo could yammer on and on about buying politicians, but at the end of the day, his “associates” were loyal priístas through and through. And when push came to shove, they’d choose the President of the Republic over a gang of thugs whose only chance at the history books would be if they could find particularly interesting ways of dismembering each other’s corpses.
As he was enveloped by the tendrils of dreams and slumber, a grain of doubt germinated in the forefront of Bartlett’s mind. Could it be that the bonds of loyalty between the President and his governors were not as iron as he believed?
And then he fell back through time. A valve opened up in his mind and the memory came flooding in. Through closed eyes, he perceived the image of a former Governor of Tabasco long since swept away by the tide of mortality setting a telephone receiver down on its cradle. He suddenly became aware that it was 1955 again, and that he was once more a lanky nineteen-year-old sitting his in father’s office with a look of uncomprehending desperation on his face.
I’m resigning, Mani, the Governor said.
Mani was too far adrift to voice the question on his mind, and yet the phantom father answered it anyway.
I have to do it, Mani. The President asked me to.[1]
With that, Manuel’s doubt about the iron-bound loyalty of PRI governors dissolved. The rest of his thoughts went with it, and within seconds, he floated weightlessly into a lake of dreams.
__________
[1] In OTL as in TTL, Bartlett's father, Manuel Bartlett Bautista, served as Governor of Tabasco from 1953 to 1955, when he was compelled to resign by President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.
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Gian
Banned
Well Conglaturation Presidente Bartlett!
You're going to buttfumble Mexico's stability and future for the foolish cause of job security (for yourself and the PRI) before reality sets in and the drug cartels turn on each other and precipitate the Drug War a decade early.
May you be rewarded with a swift U.S. intervention that sees you sharing a bunk with Noriega in a few years.
You're going to buttfumble Mexico's stability and future for the foolish cause of job security (for yourself and the PRI) before reality sets in and the drug cartels turn on each other and precipitate the Drug War a decade early.
May you be rewarded with a swift U.S. intervention that sees you sharing a bunk with Noriega in a few years.
Damn, poor Mexico here.
Pretty enjoyable.
It made me wonder too, how is everything going at Puebla?
I don't remember if there was a mention to it or not, anyways, marvelous TL.
Hahaha, as someone from Puebla, I have to admit how fun reading that was.
Pretty enjoyable.
It made me wonder too, how is everything going at Puebla?
I don't remember if there was a mention to it or not, anyways, marvelous TL.
I would expect that Bartlett would keep any incriminating information on the new Governors and the various government appointees as an insurance policy.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Good lord. Putting literal criminals in charge of government is...like...asking for revolution/intervention by the Yankee imperialists.
Am I the only follower of this timeline who suspects the prevailing theme among others of its fans of "But surely the US government would never never stoop to or countenance this kind of gross corruption!" to be naive pearl-clutching, if not outright cynical bull?
I think if you take an honest look at the nature of scores of regimes that have had US tax dollars shoveled in their direction, both via open channels blessed as "military aid" or "assisting the police" and through blacker channels, you'd find that supporting a narco-kleptocracy in the name of anti-Communist order--or since 1991, order period, where democracy itself is grounds for suspicion of "disorder"--is just par for the course.
And this goes double or triple for Republican administrations. Objectively; look at the number of convictions of say the Reagan--or OTL historical Bush Sr administration--high officials for plain crimes, and compare to the number of Carter or Clinton admin officials convicted. Look at Bush Sr's pardons of people convicted specifically just in Iran/Contra fallout, where a major issue was the US government conniving in drug trafficking, and then come back with a straight face still claiming that there are moral and ethical standards that the people in Washington are just too moral to knowingly tolerate.
Of course it would hardly do to openly and frankly admit much of this--though there are plausibly deniable ways to wink at it even on the record. But it seems fair to me to say that Bartlett would fit just fine into any gathering of US "allies" of the period. And that he is amazingly naive if he thinks the "grownups" running El Norte will not see what he is doing, partially from informants within the drug cartels...and the ones in the know back in the various bureaus in Washington, nod and approve. After all the alternative is a bunch of socialists taking over in Mexico, isn't it? As long as Bartlett and the cartels can keep from openly boasting, they are golden as far as Bush's policies are concerned.
And yes, that covers killing off the occasional Yanqui agent too.
Until it becomes convenient to take them down a peg or three at which point all of a sudden it would be about avenging the honor of the fallen.
That's the nature of the code of honor in such systems. It is discretionary. If it is expedient for the fallen not to be remembered, then no one talks about it to get anyone's dander up.
For a concrete and extended example, spanning eight Presidential administrations from Truman through Bush Sr, we have the airmen who were ordered to intrude into Soviet airspace all through the Cold War--there were a lot more of them than a handful of U-2 pilots late in the Eisenhower administration. Typically the aircraft involved were much bigger and easier to detect and intercept too--B-36 bombers on at least one occasion in the late 1940s crossed right over the Soviet heartland in a diagonal swathe to get intelligence in a big trawl. The Soviets just didn't have much luck stopping them.
But sometimes they did get lucky; some planes were shot down, others landed rather than doom the crews to immediate death. Airmen the Soviets captured were held in captivity in rather miserable conditions until the USSR collapsed.
Had the US government been willing to acknowledge this was even happening, most at least of these captives could and would have been traded back to US custody; we did with spies all the time. But it was official, announced US policy, that of course the US government never ever ever violated Soviet airspace and any claims by the Russians that they caught us doing it were of course just a pack of Commie lies.
It is clear to me the aircrews involved knew they were doing something serious and under deep black cover, but not so clear they understood there would be zero attempt to extract them; I suppose they ought to have figured it out for themselves and factored that in to their decisions to accept the missions, but given the naiveté some here express in their faith in the band of brothers moral code of the US government I have to wonder about that.
Anyway since the US government never ever would order something so immoral and provocative as sending recon missions over Russia, there could be no deals made and the men were left to rot in Siberia.
Note that at the same time, the Nixon administration also made a great hue and cry during negotiations to end US involvement in Vietnam about "Missing In Action" US troops we alleged the various Communist regimes were holding prisoner while lying about it, over and above the prisoners they boasted of holding. In fact the administration had plenty of evidence that actually these alleged secret prisoners were probably dead just as the other side's negotiators claimed, and that the foe had every interest in accurately disclosing whom they held and were negotiating in good faith to return them in a settlement--but it suited Nixon's purposes to draw out these negotiations so the responsible officials the public was supposed to rely on to be truthful were instructed to lie; the myth of the "MIAs" has been a factor poisoning our domestic politics ever since.
Meanwhile real MIAs the administrations also knew of got precisely the kind of cold shoulder and neglect Nixon baited his domestic opponents for mistreating imaginary ones with.
Honor for brothers in service then is a tap that can be turned on and off at discretion; narratives of "leave no man behind" are just that; stories made up to manipulate.
If it suits the US President's purposes, a thousand DEA agents can be tortured, drawn and quartered publicly in the plazas of Mexico, and if El Norte were to decide that the time had come to send in the Marines, another thousand as fictitious as the newborn babies it was alleged Saddam Hussein's troops invading Kuwait had massacred brutally, or just one, under the banner of "Death before Dishonor!" will cover their mobilization.
There are no lines of honor compelling or even motivating the Bush administration to act, only the top level calculation of interest and political expedience. The truth can always be discredited and plausibly denied, a lie presented as incontrovertible fact.
"No honor among thieves" hardly stops at the Rio Grande!
I think if you take an honest look at the nature of scores of regimes that have had US tax dollars shoveled in their direction, both via open channels blessed as "military aid" or "assisting the police" and through blacker channels, you'd find that supporting a narco-kleptocracy in the name of anti-Communist order--or since 1991, order period, where democracy itself is grounds for suspicion of "disorder"--is just par for the course.
And this goes double or triple for Republican administrations. Objectively; look at the number of convictions of say the Reagan--or OTL historical Bush Sr administration--high officials for plain crimes, and compare to the number of Carter or Clinton admin officials convicted. Look at Bush Sr's pardons of people convicted specifically just in Iran/Contra fallout, where a major issue was the US government conniving in drug trafficking, and then come back with a straight face still claiming that there are moral and ethical standards that the people in Washington are just too moral to knowingly tolerate.
Of course it would hardly do to openly and frankly admit much of this--though there are plausibly deniable ways to wink at it even on the record. But it seems fair to me to say that Bartlett would fit just fine into any gathering of US "allies" of the period. And that he is amazingly naive if he thinks the "grownups" running El Norte will not see what he is doing, partially from informants within the drug cartels...and the ones in the know back in the various bureaus in Washington, nod and approve. After all the alternative is a bunch of socialists taking over in Mexico, isn't it? As long as Bartlett and the cartels can keep from openly boasting, they are golden as far as Bush's policies are concerned.
And yes, that covers killing off the occasional Yanqui agent too.
Until it becomes convenient to take them down a peg or three at which point all of a sudden it would be about avenging the honor of the fallen.
That's the nature of the code of honor in such systems. It is discretionary. If it is expedient for the fallen not to be remembered, then no one talks about it to get anyone's dander up.
For a concrete and extended example, spanning eight Presidential administrations from Truman through Bush Sr, we have the airmen who were ordered to intrude into Soviet airspace all through the Cold War--there were a lot more of them than a handful of U-2 pilots late in the Eisenhower administration. Typically the aircraft involved were much bigger and easier to detect and intercept too--B-36 bombers on at least one occasion in the late 1940s crossed right over the Soviet heartland in a diagonal swathe to get intelligence in a big trawl. The Soviets just didn't have much luck stopping them.
But sometimes they did get lucky; some planes were shot down, others landed rather than doom the crews to immediate death. Airmen the Soviets captured were held in captivity in rather miserable conditions until the USSR collapsed.
Had the US government been willing to acknowledge this was even happening, most at least of these captives could and would have been traded back to US custody; we did with spies all the time. But it was official, announced US policy, that of course the US government never ever ever violated Soviet airspace and any claims by the Russians that they caught us doing it were of course just a pack of Commie lies.
It is clear to me the aircrews involved knew they were doing something serious and under deep black cover, but not so clear they understood there would be zero attempt to extract them; I suppose they ought to have figured it out for themselves and factored that in to their decisions to accept the missions, but given the naiveté some here express in their faith in the band of brothers moral code of the US government I have to wonder about that.
Anyway since the US government never ever would order something so immoral and provocative as sending recon missions over Russia, there could be no deals made and the men were left to rot in Siberia.
Note that at the same time, the Nixon administration also made a great hue and cry during negotiations to end US involvement in Vietnam about "Missing In Action" US troops we alleged the various Communist regimes were holding prisoner while lying about it, over and above the prisoners they boasted of holding. In fact the administration had plenty of evidence that actually these alleged secret prisoners were probably dead just as the other side's negotiators claimed, and that the foe had every interest in accurately disclosing whom they held and were negotiating in good faith to return them in a settlement--but it suited Nixon's purposes to draw out these negotiations so the responsible officials the public was supposed to rely on to be truthful were instructed to lie; the myth of the "MIAs" has been a factor poisoning our domestic politics ever since.
Meanwhile real MIAs the administrations also knew of got precisely the kind of cold shoulder and neglect Nixon baited his domestic opponents for mistreating imaginary ones with.
Honor for brothers in service then is a tap that can be turned on and off at discretion; narratives of "leave no man behind" are just that; stories made up to manipulate.
If it suits the US President's purposes, a thousand DEA agents can be tortured, drawn and quartered publicly in the plazas of Mexico, and if El Norte were to decide that the time had come to send in the Marines, another thousand as fictitious as the newborn babies it was alleged Saddam Hussein's troops invading Kuwait had massacred brutally, or just one, under the banner of "Death before Dishonor!" will cover their mobilization.
There are no lines of honor compelling or even motivating the Bush administration to act, only the top level calculation of interest and political expedience. The truth can always be discredited and plausibly denied, a lie presented as incontrovertible fact.
"No honor among thieves" hardly stops at the Rio Grande!
No, but that was back in the Cold War. Right now, that's not a factor. Add in the fact he's so open about it, and well, concealing it from the public doesn't work.
I imagine alot of people are gonna grow concerned regarding political parties with drug cartels in the USA. Additionally, I wonder how long before the joke is made between pharmeceutical cartels and US Politics
Bookmark1995
Banned
How long? When the corruption is Mexico goes from "the usual cash under the table" to "outright obscene." And in Latin America, there is always room for outrageous corruption.
TTL, it might involve a public official who hides tons of cocaine in his basement, or something like that.
Well...
The US obviously has done a lot of shady shit. With one hand, Reagan was signing into law "just say no acts", and with another hand, funding the cocaine traffickers just because they happened to fund commies.
But there are some people who are too deranged, even for the amoral CIA agents.
Pablo Escobar, for example, was tolerated by the authorities, up until he began to turn of Colombia into a giant gangster battlefield, and even tried to outright kill Colombia's President.
If you see narco-traffickers outright subverting government, that is going to create a security problem south of the border the US can't ignore.
Yeah, its one thing to fund cocaine traffickers because they're fighting communists (which is very shady, IMO); its another to have said traffickers blatantly subverting governments...
Plus, if any US allies get too blatantly corrupt (like, say, Ferdinand Marcos after his stealing the election from Corazon Aquino or, for an earlier example, Trujillo after the Mirabel sisters' murders (1)), the US tends to say that they have outlived their usefulness...
(1) Trujillo tried to make their deaths look like an accident, but not even the US government bought it, and US support for Trujillo basically ended...
Plus, if any US allies get too blatantly corrupt (like, say, Ferdinand Marcos after his stealing the election from Corazon Aquino or, for an earlier example, Trujillo after the Mirabel sisters' murders (1)), the US tends to say that they have outlived their usefulness...
(1) Trujillo tried to make their deaths look like an accident, but not even the US government bought it, and US support for Trujillo basically ended...
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I'm still saying, I think it is pretty naive to figure "we'll back our sons of bitches as long as they are not too nasty but there are limits." Limits have to do with pragmatics, not with ethics. In fact I think the key to every occasion where the USA turns on its former client thugs is when their usefulness wears out for quite some other reason than the degree of their outrages--and then the American public is suddenly regaled with anecdotes about how awful and naughty these guys have been.
This is not to say that Escobar, and Trujillo, and Marcos, and Noriega, were not awful, bad men. It is to say that I doubt they were in any respect worse men than others who did not have the plug pulled on them because it remained expedient to have them remain in power where they were, and that the above rouges gallery all of a sudden had Wanted posters put up because something, perhaps something they had zero control over or responsibility for, made them inexpedient.
Bartlett will last as long as he is expedient--or perhaps like the Shah of Iran will be overwhelmed and either driven out or killed off by Mexicans before Washington concludes they ought to wash their hands of him. He's not doing anything that forces Bush or any likely successor of Bush to flush him--except insofar as what he is doing tends to destabilize Mexico even more of course. If he goes down at Yankee hands, it will be for being an incompetent dictator, like Diem, not for crossing some moral line that simply does not consistently exist in the minds of American power brokers--save as an ad campaign for the rubes.
This is not to say that Escobar, and Trujillo, and Marcos, and Noriega, were not awful, bad men. It is to say that I doubt they were in any respect worse men than others who did not have the plug pulled on them because it remained expedient to have them remain in power where they were, and that the above rouges gallery all of a sudden had Wanted posters put up because something, perhaps something they had zero control over or responsibility for, made them inexpedient.
Bartlett will last as long as he is expedient--or perhaps like the Shah of Iran will be overwhelmed and either driven out or killed off by Mexicans before Washington concludes they ought to wash their hands of him. He's not doing anything that forces Bush or any likely successor of Bush to flush him--except insofar as what he is doing tends to destabilize Mexico even more of course. If he goes down at Yankee hands, it will be for being an incompetent dictator, like Diem, not for crossing some moral line that simply does not consistently exist in the minds of American power brokers--save as an ad campaign for the rubes.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Severe incompetence can push the pragmatists into getting rid of you.
If his incompetence poses a direct threat to American security, then the Bush administration will cut him off.
This is probably a good time to reveal that The West Wing will air several years earlier in TTL, but due to the name "President Bartlett" having some rather...unpleasant connotations, the in-show President will be named Charles "Chuck" Carroll, after this guy.
Manuel Bartlett Díaz has spent most of his life climbing the ranks of a political system which worships loyalty to the President from all levels. As a teenager, he watched his father resign from the position of Governor of Tabasco after being ordered to do so by President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. That experience helped shape Bartlett’s perception of PRI governors as being ultimately loyal to no one but the President, no matter whose payroll they're on. The men Bartlett intends to appoint as governors are also men of the system, and so he believes that their ties to him will always be stronger than their ties to the traffickers. And if not, well, that’s what the Oficina de Integridad Política will be for: rounding up and punishing disloyal PRI members, on whom Bartlett will have plenty of blackmail material as @traveller76 points out.
In fact, I’ll change the ending of this past update to reflect all of that (I honestly just wanted to get this post over and done with, so I didn't think too hard about the last couple of paragraphs when I wrote them).
What’s messed up is that three of the four politicians I mentioned in the post—Tomás Yárrington, Manlio Beltrones and Mario Villaneuva Madrid—also served as state governors in real life, and were almost as corrupt IOTL as they will be ITTL.
Bartlett can't hide the truth forever, but for the time being he will have an easier time concealing it than you might expect. As Bartlett himself mentioned during the meeting, it is no grand secret that the Mexican government has problems with corruption, and the "associate" governors he intends to appoint were not previously known to be connected to the drug cartels, so even if one of them is caught, Bartlett will be able to plausibly deny prior awareness.
That being said, if and when it becomes public knowledge that Bartlett himself is actively conspiring and making corrupt deals with criminals, he'll be up shit creek with about as many paddles as there are honest politicians in his party. Hence the obsession with secrecy: he holds his conference far away from civilization and keeps the number of men involved in the negotiations to an absolute minimum. That way, as long as nobody talks, he thinks that no one will find out about his personal involvement—or, at least, no one will be able to prove it. But there are certain people—particularly investigate journalists—who have a way of finding things out...
Hmmm...now there's an idea!
Well, it most certainly does pose a direct threat to American security to let the cartels run rampant, because that means more drugs flowing into the United States, which in turn means more crime in America's inner cities, more strain on the American criminal justice system and more high-profile corruption cases affecting American law enforcement agencies. If and when President Bush finds out that Bartlett is actively encouraging the flow of narcotics into the U.S., he'll pull the plug—or else get stuck watching liberals point to rising drug abuse rates as proof that twelve-plus years of Republican drug policy have been a failure.
I had peppers in mind when I wrote it, but the great thing about having readers who are actually from Mexico is that I get to learn all about how secretly witty I am!
Is there some kind of stereotype about poblanos not being able to handle sunlight? (What makes it better is that Manuel Bartlett himself is a poblano).I wish I was doing a better job of covering what's going on in each of Mexico's individual states, but there are a lot of them, and the resources I've used to research this timeline, thorough though they may be, didn't go too into depth about all of them. That being said, I can give a quick summary of what's been going on in the Free and Sovereign State of Puebla:
The short answer is "not much" (although Bartlett will not become governor as he did in OTL, so that's nice). During the initial formation period of the ELM in 1989, the city of Huejotzingo became a hub of underground student radicalism, and it saw several waves of public unrest during nationwide ELM uprisings in 1990 and 1991. Since then, however, the ELM's main benefactor, the Cuban government, has focused most of its resources on the Zapatistas (whom they seeing them as the best method of destabilizing Mexico), causing it to neglect most ELM cells outside of Chiapas and Oaxaca. By 1992, Puebla's ELM presence has mostly withered away, but there is still a fairly large groundswell of opposition support in the state. Ana Teresa Aranda is already scraping together the Puebla state PAN's meager resources in preparation to wage a spirited race for governor, where her PRI opponent will likely be another one of Bartlett's "associate" candidates. Can she pull out a narrow victory? Only time will tell...