There goes the neighborhood

Agence France-Press

(my snark in boldface)

The United States is sending new CIA operatives and retired military personnel to Mexico and may deploy private security contractors to fight drug cartels, The New York Times said.

“Private security operatives” = mercenaries. I said this was gonna happen, and I hate being right.

Small numbers of CIA operatives and civilian US military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, it said late Saturday.

So much for claims that foreign troops weren’t working in Mexico.

Security officials from both countries work there side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations, the report said.

Side by side, or Mexican under the thumb of U.S. spies “officials”?

Officials are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit, it said.

Blackwater? And, anyway, aren’t Zetas “contractors” too?

The new efforts have been devised to get around Mexican laws prohibiting foreign military and police from operating on its soil.

So much for the rule of law, and transparency and all those other changes were were promised by the present administrations…here and there.

They also aim to prevent advanced US surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption, the paper noted.

As opposed to… oh… “contractor” corruption, and does this involve the kind of surveillance that the U.S. government had over gun-runners. That went really, really well… NOT!!

More than 41,000 people have died in violence blamed on Mexico’s drug cartels since the end of 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed some 50,000 troops to tackle organized crime.

Blamed on the cartels, or on U.S. financing and arming of said cartels… or the Calderón administration’s deployment?

I guess this is what the U.S. “jobs for veterans” program comes down to… find yourself a new war.

You remember when Hillary Clinton referred to our criminal exporters as “insurgents”? Insurgents are usually people fighting to drive out foreign military forces… and the U.S. may just be creating some real insurgents (as well as support for them).

This is fuckin’ insane!