TALE OF TWO WARS ON DRUGS: PHILIPPINES GETS SCOLDED, MEXICO GETS SUPPORT
U.S. Embassy, Manila Philippines, I don't care if you will blacklist me (you don't know me anyway), but dear lord, stop using "human rights" as a pretext to destabilise a country that no longer wants to have a foreign policy under US Control.
Anti-Duterte forces celebrated the concerns expressed by top US officials regarding the killings that coincided with the government’s aggressive campaign against the illegal drug trade.
All of them were blamed on Duterte. These forces sympathised with Obama when Duterte lashed back at him; their egos shaped by a cultish anti-Duterte narrative were inflated when Samantha Power tweeted this on August 30: “Alarming reports of ongoing extrajudicial killings in #Philippines; government must respect human rights & rule of law.”
Samantha Power is the US Ambassador to the United Nations. If there’s anyone in the world you would like to react on what’s going on in your country, she’s one of them. Power, wjo is very influential in US Foreign Policy, has advocated military intervention to topple regimes deemed to be committing crimes against humanity. For example, she urged for US military intervention in Libya. Obama called Libya the ‘worst mistake” of his presidency. Basing on Power’s proclivity for military internvetion, her tweet doesn’t augur well for Duterte.
Power hasn’t tweeted anything about the devastating war on drugs happening in its neighbor, Mexico. From 2007 to 2014, there were 164,345 victims of homicide, coinciding with the war on drugs (PBS, http://to.pbs.org/1SwbcMC). Though this number doesn’t indicate how many were indeed drug-related, just like the Inquirer’s “Kill List,” it is being popularly tagged as casualties of Mexico’s drug war (National Catholic Reporter, http://bit.ly/2dhVpUM).
Yet despite the carnage in Mexico, “since April 2014, the U.S. State Department has approved sales of 21 Blackhawk helicopters to the Mexican military for $790 million, to support Mexican troops engaged in counter-drug operations. The helicopters are produced by Sikorsky, based in Connecticut, and General Electric, in Massachusetts, both vendors at DSEI (Sikorsky through its new parent company, Lockheed). The United States will also reportedly supply six M134 7.62mm machine guns for the helicopters, which fire up to 6,000 rounds a minute” (John Lindsay-Poland, http://huff.to/1MNKr9g). Meanwhile, the US cancelled an arms deal with the Philippines (http://tinyurl.com/z98ybln).
Despite the toll in human lives of Mexico’s war on drugs, US foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mexico didn’t abate. From 2007 to 2013, US FDI in Mexico ranges from 85,599 million USD to 101,454. million USD (Congressional Research Service, http://bit.ly/2d7lEAv). In 2015, FDI’s to Mexico was 2.7 billion USD more than in 2014; and 53% of this amount came from the United States (Wilson Center, http://bit.ly/2d4sBEO).
The United States supported Mexico’s battle against drug cartels rather than lectured President Peña Nieto about human rights (USA Today, http://usat.ly/2dq2IyH). Why?