Your drug connection

An online guide to the alien, if not totally foreign, world of narco-politics

A few years back, former Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano walked away from the world of the media disillusioned with the Disney-fied, corporate-mergered, bottom-line-driven, commercial monolith of phony consensus that he saw the free press becoming. After serving some serious incommunicado time in Latin America -- with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas and elsewhere -- he'd pop out of the woods, as it were, and offer the Phoenix an occasional report on Latin-American politics. (See "Clinton's Narco Pals" and "Borderline Behavior.")

Now Al's back in force as publisher of The Narco News Bulletin, a Web site that promises to digest, interpret, and critique published information from both sides of the Border on the failure of US drug policy, internal Latin American narco-politics, and, perhaps most important, the growing but under-reported drug-legalization movements in Mexico and other Latin countries.

The kick-off edition of narconews.com includes excerpts from a piece in the Mexican magazine Milenio and other commentary on US Ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow's inflamatory remarks about Mexican drug crime made during a speech at the University of Southern California; speculation on the CIA's involvement with the assassination of the police chief in Tijuana from the Mexican newsweekly La Crisis; and snippets from the Mexican press and the national Mexican daily El Universal covering the alleged narco connections of PRI presidential candidate Francisco Labastida Ochoa. (And this is all presented in English, by the way; the theory being that Spanish-speaking Americans have already read it.)

The Narco News Bulletin also offers a "Narco of the Month" (for April, a high-ranking US anti-drug officer whose wife turned out to be a drug smuggler) and a "Hero of the Month" (a pair of environmental activists victimized by Mexican drug-enforcement efforts).

Gringo Web surfers may find narconews.com unfamiliar and disorienting. It's short on cyber-gimmicks, long on the strident rhetoric of crusaders, and full of things you probably didn't read about anywhere else. Just the sort of thing the Web promised to deliver.

-- Clif Garboden