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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.