I really dislike crossing international borders. I've been doing a lot of it lately in the past few years, particularly since my partner and I got a summer place outside Nelson, BC. Even when I was spending a few weeks or months in Nelson, I was often off to the US—for a meth conference in Salt Lake, the NORML annual conference in San Francisco, to score cheap cigarettes on the Indian reservation in Washington state—or crossing into the US to get to the nearest big time airport to fly off to more exotic locales. And I'm tired of it, particularly along the US-Canadian border. The US border guards have a worldwide reputation for being hard asses, but I find that to be true only about half the time. The Canadians, on the other hand, have a reputation for politeness, but they are also an intensely bureaucratic nation, and they sometimes subject visitors to relentless questioning and truly bizarre questions: "Do you have a copy of the title to your home with you?" One wants to reply: "Ah, gee, I must have left it in my other jacket." I don't like dealing with these border cops because I like my freedom and I like my freedom to travel, and when I arrive at the border, I suddenly enter a "no rights" zone. Not only can I be stopped from crossing that invisible line, but I also get to be interrogated, searched, and possibly probed in the bargain. And have my belongings rummaged through, my notebooks read, my vehicle turned apart. We have this international system where money flows across the globe at the push of a button, massive amounts of commodities (licit and illicit) flow across borders through the channels of commerce, and jobs fly to wherever offers the lowest wage. Why can't we just flow like everything else? I guess I don't see any way of getting around borders short of the dreaded UN global government, but I'm starting to think North America should emulate Europe, where the European Union allows free movement among its member countries. Here's a link to the Wikipedia pages on North American Union, not because I think Wikipedia is the holy scripture on contentious topics, but because I think it shows the nature of some of the debate around the whole notion. I'm interested in borders as a drug policy issue, but also as a human rights issue, and I feel that very personally each time I have to deal with these uniformed agents of various national governments. I guess I feel especially cranky (if not crankish) about the issue today because I just had to recross the border back into the United States from Canada, then come back into Canada with certain papers they had never wanted before. That made it my second cross-border trip to deal with this particular issue, a grand total of four border crossings on Friday and Monday. Enough with those borders!

This ugly story provides a frightening example of the sordid relationships our government maintains when conducting international narcotics investigations.

DEA Special Agent in Charge Sandalio “Sandy” Gonzalez was shown the door after submitting a memo implicating a U.S. Government informant in several murders in Mexico.

From WFAA-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth, TX:

Gonzalez began in early 2004 to question the U.S. government's role in allowing an informant to commit possible crimes, even murder. Twelve bodies had been uncovered in a small duplex in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - a short drive from Gonzalez’s El Paso office. Gonzalez, however, became shocked when he began to review government reports, including a report saying a paid U.S. informant supervised and participated in at least one murder at the cartel-operated house.

I guess even a high-ranking DEA agent has to draw the line somewhere. But Gonzalez’s superiors in Washington, D.C. didn’t appreciate his principled stand:

Troubled by what he found, Gonzalez ultimately wrote a memo to his ICE counterpart in El Paso, and sent a copy to the Justice Department. That was the beginning of the end of his career. “It was a classic case of shooting the messenger,” Gonzalez said. Gonzalez got a bad job review from DEA Administrator Karen Tandy, his boss. And felt pressure to retire early.

A more detailed account available at The Narcosphere, is quite a read. Still, this mess has largely escaped the headlines, surely to the satisfaction of Karen Tandy and her colleagues.

It’s no secret that our government frequently hires criminals to do its dirty work in the drug war, but condoning murder is a questionable sacrifice even by the drug war’s flimsy moral standards.

Seeing Karen Tandy take a stand against whistle-blowing at DEA is alarming given her agency’s vulnerability to internal corruption. It makes you wonder what else these guys are up to when they’re not busy interfering with the democratic process.