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Chapter 3 The “Narc” in All of Us; Border Media and the War on Drugs
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three the “narc” in all of us border media and the war on drugs “No country in the world poses a more immediate narcotics threat to the United States than Mexico.” —u.s. department of state (1996) “Our borders constitute the first line of defense in protecting the American people from terrorists. Last July I met with border security agents and other federal and local officials during my visit to the border, and I promised them we would address this national security crisis. The Republican Congress has responded to the American people’s demand for a secure border by increasing the physical barriers and infrastructure along the border and by providing state of the art monitoring technology. I look forward to the President signing the Secure Fence Act tomorrow.” —speaker of the house j. dennis hastert (r-il) commenting on white house signing of the secure fence act (october 25, 2006) 109 gave the talk, “Drug Wars: The New Alliances against Traffickers and Terrorists,” before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. Abrams hoped to move the “drug problem” from the cultural realm of television news programs and Friday night dramas to the more serious domain of international policy as it comes to bear on national security and the “well-being of the American people.”1 He described the United O n February 10, 1986, just two months before Reagan signed a national security directive designating international drug trade a national security threat, Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary for interAmerican affairs and in 2005 appointed deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush, 110 c h a p t e r t h r e e States as the victim in the drug trafficking networks that lead northward and suggested that defending national security meant “defending ourselves against drugs.”2 Tracing use patterns of cocaine from the drug’s origins in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia to its destination in the United States, he cited a popular television show when he claimed, “Something of the traffic always stays behind: this is not a Miami vice alone.”3 He drew the association, then already commonplace, of the Colombian revolutionary forces, known as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and drug trafficking in order to promote the need, described in the title of the talk, for “new alliances against traffickers and terrorists.” The association of traffickers and terrorists since the mid-1980s has not lost any of its original force; rather, I argue, this association has achieved geometrically expanding proportions. In his speech, Abrams rallies for collaboration across the Americas, but ends with a stridently moral and nationalist assessment of the “drug problem”: “This is not just a health problem, not just a foreign aid problem, not just a police problem. It is a moral challenge and a national security matter. It threatens democracy in our hemisphere and children in our homes. Let us treat it with the seriousness it deserves .”4 This language and rhetoric about the messianic duties and moral obligation to protect the homeland and hearth captures exactly the same sentiment that enthralls audiences of Hollywood drug traf- ficking films, recalling, for instance, the dramatic scene in Traffic (2000) when drug czar Robert Wakefield, fresh from the Washington war on drugs, returns home to find his teenage daughter with a serious drug addiction . This reverberation of sentiments—that the drug war is waged across the hemisphere, on the streets, and in the home—resounds with what Abrams contends in his speech: “There is a bit of ‘narc’ in all of us now.”5 Though by “us” he is referring to all high-ranking officials in the hemisphere, he uses this inclusive term to indicate the pervasiveness of drug trade across local, national, and international political spheres. The term “narc” has many different meanings depending on its context of use: it generally refers to narcotics agents, but by the 1980s, it became a popular term for those who acted as cops by snitching on anyone deemed culpable of a narcotics offense. Here it carries both meanings ; it refers to the stretching of the jurisdiction of narcotics agents to all levels of state control and the imperative for all of “us” to take on the role of policing and enforcement and thus to take part in the war on drugs.6 [52.90.50.252] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:24 GMT) The “Narc” in All of...