Thread: Cross-border blame trade

March 26, 2009, 1:24PM


As Hillary Clinton certified yesterday the topical meme that America's druggie appetites and gun trade were responsible for a large part of Mexico's blood-drenched "narco wars", there was some good news in the battleground border city of Juarez: Murders were down from 15 a day at the beginning of the year to around... two per 24 hours.

In a city transformed by gang-fueled violence into the bullet-pocked Beirut of the western hemisphere, any ray of light is precious, even though the presence of several thousand Mexican army troops was probably the biggest factor in the slaughter downturn.

Cllinton is visiting our troubled neighbor to the south this week in an attempt to pacify both that country and the restive border region:

"Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians," Mrs. Clinton said.

...Clinton's blunt remarks as she flew to Mexico Wednesday were the clearest by any senior US official in recent memory that American habits and government policies have stoked the drug trade and a spreading epidemic of criminal violence in northern Mexico. They are likely to be well received by top officials in the government of Mexican President Felipe Calderón, which is battling rising lawlessness and has called on the Obama administration to do more to stop the flow of guns and cash from the United States into Mexico.

Well... maybe not to stem the flow of cash. Mexico has long-depended on money streams from the north to stay financially afloat. One of the most reliable - money transfers sent back home from illegal immigrants in the United States - has been slowed by the global financial downturn, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year:

...The estimated $24 billion sent to Mexico last year was barely higher than in 2006, a sobering deceleration just a few years after growth had galloped. The news was even worse in Michoacan, where transfers fell in each quarter from 2006, ending down 6.4% overall, according to the Bank of Mexico.

Adding heat to the border pressure-cooker are drooping sales of cocaine - the cash-cow for the smugglers - since decaying affluence in the American drug market has boosted popularity of locally produced methamphetamine as a cheap substitute for pricey crack and nose candy. As the market constricts, competition has driven the always-volatile drug cartels into bloody turf wars.

The disclosure underlines the enormity of the challenge Mexico and the United States face as they struggle to contain what is increasingly looking like a civil war or an insurgency along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the past year, about 7,000 people have died - more than 1,000 in January alone. The conflict has become increasingly brutal, with victims beheaded and bodies dissolved in vats of acid.

The death toll dwarfs that in Afghanistan, where about 200 fatalities, including 29 U.S. troops, were reported in the first two months of 2009. About 400 people, including 31 U.S. military personnel, died in Iraq during the same period.

Yeah. You read that right: The death toll dwarfs that of Afghanistan.

The biggest and most violent combatants are the Sinaloa cartel, known by U.S. and Mexican federal law enforcement officials as the "Federation" or "Golden Triangle," and its main rival, "Los Zetas" or the Gulf Cartel, whose territory runs along the Laredo,Texas, borderlands.And, of course, in our age of porous borders and air travel, the cartels' reach isn't confined to the chain-link stretch of the American Southwest.

In fiscal year 2008, authorities confiscated about $70 million in drug-related cash in Atlanta, more than anywhere else in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. This year, that Georgia city continues to outpace all other U.S. regions in such seizures, with $30 million confiscated so far. Next are Los Angeles, California, with about $19 million, and Chicago, Illinois, with $18 million. And with the drugs come the violence, as CNN reports that discovery by one unlucky Atlantan into a Mexican cartel for $300 large:

Gunmen snatched Reynoso and locked him in the basement of a home to try to settle the drug debt. He was chained to a wall of the basement by his hands and ankles, gagged and beaten. His captors... held Reynoso for ransom, chained in the sweltering, dirty basement for six days without food.

He was lucky. Last year, in one incident in Juarez, police dug up more than 30 bodies in the backyard of a house; they were all victims of the ongoing gang violence. Last month, the mayor of Juarez announced the city's police chief was stepping down after receiving death threats from local drug cartels; after all, they'd killed his predecessor. In 2008, drug violence claimed the lives of more than 6,000 Mexicans and almost 80 Mexican soldiers.

If Juarez sounds familiar, it's because the city gained international infamy a few years ago, as almost 150 women were kidnapped and murdered over a 10-year span while a negligent law-enforcement sector did nothing. Some ugly, explosive rumors, reported by NPR, have linked the cartels and even corrupt members of the city elite to snuff-party orgies that featured murder as festive amusement.

The latest violence has added a new wrinkle - seemingly pushing Mexico to the brink of all-out war. As the Washingon Times story cited above reports:

"Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades," (an) advisory said... Independent analysts warn that narco-terrorists have infiltrated the Mexican government, creating a shadow regime that further complicates efforts to contain and destroy the cartels.

That kind of paramilitary escalation seems to contradict another new component of our troubled borderlands: Blaming cartel arms on American imports. They sell us drugs, expanding their business empire; we sell them guns, ramping up an already astonishing climate of violence. Even George Will has taken up this brief, ranting about greedy American gun dealers helping drown Mexico in rivers of blood.

But fully automatic assault rifles (the cartels seem to favor the ubiquitous AK-47) and grenades indicate suppliers with deeper check than strip-mall sporting goods stores. Only security personnel and the military can access large quantities of these types of high-casualty deathware. Supplies of actual battlefield munitions probably indicates corruption riddling Mexican - and American - government functionaries; shipping arms like grenades in any quatity, and any regularity, would require expensive blinders covering official eyes.

That Mexico is saddled with the kind of corruption that makes plausible police-military complicity in arming the cartels is no real surprise. It has long been a distant third-rate player on the North American continent, and compared with its northern neighbors, can forgiveably be viewed as backward, poverty-stricken, profoundly corrupt and oppressive - a virtual police state. The early years of the 20th century saw it rocked by a seemingly endless carousel of serial revolutions, so much so that Europe between world wars referred to any failed attempt or clumsy effort as "Mexican revolution".

American national security experts differ on determining this latest in Mexico's protracted crises as the last straw that snaps the nation into "failed state" status. That label usually is reserved for places like... Afghanistan. But Samuel Logan, who's long studied the powerful Central American gang MS-13, sees Mexico qualifying for "hollow state" rank:

The so-called "Hollow State Theory" evolved as analysts in South America watched how corruption and organized crime deteriorated the state of Paraguay from within. After years of this evolution, Paraguay became little more than a shell, one that looked like a relatively well functioning democracy from the outside, but was a machine of corruption, organized crime, terrorist financing, and the hub of South America's largest black market on the inside. The hope of taking back the Paraguayan state under the leadership of Fernando Lugo is in part why his election was such a cause for celebration.

Logan writes that the election of Mexican President Felipe Calderon has accelerated Mexico's slide to "hollow state", since his policy of directly confronting the massive Mexican drug industry has aggravated his relationship with corrupt army and police personnel. Since he cannot overcome these entrenched flaws alone, and the Mexican establishment is reluctant to institute balance-shifting projects like the Merida Initiative, in which the U.S., Mexico, and Central and South American nations, wed themselves to shared response contronting cross-border crime.

I was told that it was always like this in Mexico, until Calderon came into office, and many of Mexicans, it seems, would prefer if Calderon left the cartels alone. They've been there for nearly a hundred years, and will be there a hundred more.

The blame-sharing holds water, especially that outlined by Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora, as the U.S. has long been responsible for much of the world's drug consumption - thereby elevating the power and wealth of the drug trade. In this scenario, especially with the added component of cross-smuggled weapons, we are locked in deadly enterprise with a poorer, more vulnerable neighbor, letting it bleed for our sins. Any help we extend now has been crippled by our own financial palsy: Congress has approved $700 million in assistance to help Mexico fight drug traffickers and build more effective security forces, but lawmakers reduced the first installment of aid under the Merida Initiative from $450 million to $300 million. Some members of Congress and Mexican officials complain that promised equipment to fight the cartels is taking too long to arrive.

The most hopeful suggestions to stem the carnage include abandoning the failed, corrupt "war on drugs" entirely, perhaps (in the most radical suggestion) legalizing drugs altogether. Certainly, as has been argued for a long time, that would take the product out of the gangs' hands.

As always in American politics, goals become blurred by blinkered, dogmatic posturing. Gun control advocates see stemming the cross-border gun trade as a means of instituting more severe gun bans in general. Right wing pundits never tire of accusing Mexico of importing criminals along with illegal immigrants as the cartel infiltration on this side of the border becomes - unsurprisingly - more endemic.

It's always in-season for our cherished national sport of flinging empty rhetoric
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/ta ... ef=reccafe

arm the border and shut it down... 90% of the problem will go away