Week of September 1, 1996

by F.R. Duplantier

"The impact of NAFTA on the sale and distribution of narcotics within the U.S. was felt immediately [with] a sharp rise in marijuana, cocaine, and crack in the streets and schoolyards of our towns and cities."

Former Mexican president Carlos Salinas "joined Bill Clinton in bulldozing NAFTA through," recalls William Gill of the American Coalition for Competitive Trade. NAFTA made perfect sense to Salinas, who with his family was "deeply involved in the drug trade and other criminal activities. Salinas is now hiding in exile," reports Gill; "his brother, Raul Salinas, is in prison, and Raul's wife was arrested in Switzerland for attempting to withdraw some of their laundered money from a Swiss bank." In addition, "several of Mexico's most prominent businessmen were linked to the Salinas family's crime ring."

Gill charges that "the lucrative narcotics industry" has corrupted public officials south -- and north -- of the border. "Three former high U.S. Justice Department lawyers were indicted last year for helping the Cali drug cartel ship literally tons of cocaine into our country, most of it via Mexico," he reports. High officials in both the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were "allegedly involved in drug and immigrant smuggling from Mexico." Drug trafficking generates an estimated "$30 billion in income for our neighbors to the south," says Gill. "Drug money is financing all kinds of businesses in Mexico and, no doubt, in the United States as well."

The crime explosion NAFTA caused in Mexico is spilling over into the U.S. "Last year, there were 1000 slayings in the larger cities on the Mexican side of the border, most of them drug-related and unsolved," says Gill. "No one could possibly know how many murders in the United States are caused by the NAFTA-spurred increase in the drug trade. But they are bound to be in the hundreds, if not thousands, by now. Indeed, there is deep and growing interaction between the drug gangs in Los Angeles and other American cities and the drug lords and gangs in Mexico and Central America."

Gill argues that "free trade is the primary driving force behind the crime wave that is sweeping the globe." Calling this crime wave "a crisis that threatens the very foundations of all civilization," he predicts that "the chaos emanating from Mexico now will sweep in stronger from China tomorrow. Already we are getting a foretaste of what Communist China and others in the East have in store for the U.S.A.," says Gill. "In May, Customs officers seized 2000 AK-47 assault rifles in California." Chinese agents had sought to sell these weapons to L.A. street gangs.

"China is also exporting thousands of illegal aliens to this country," William Gill reports. "Many come into Central American mini-states and are smuggled into the U.S. via Mexico." Gill warns that "the invasion from China could easily surpass the present 1 million or so Mexican illegals entering each year."

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