Thread: NJVoices:Obama Needs to Watch Mexico Carefully

NJVoices.com

Obama needs to watch Mexico carefully
Posted by The Star-Ledger Editorial Board
January 12, 2009 5:06AM

The foreign policy problems facing President-elect Barack Obama are many and daunting, but the most immediately dangerous is the one least distant from America's shores.

It's Mexico, a nation in danger of dissolving in a spectacularly bloody and seemingly losing war with heavily-armed drug cartels. Mexicans confront an almost daily diet of daylight gun battles, beheadings, torture and kidnapping matched in recent years only by news from Baghdad or Fallujah during the worst months in Iraq.

In the year just ended, more than 5,300 Mexicans died in drug-related violence, double the number the previous year and including soldiers, police, some journalists and ordinary citizens. In one weekend, 35 people were killed in Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego, and 58 more were murdered a day before Obama's election victory.

The escalating violence and the uncertainty about who'll prevail -- the government or the drug jefes -- is ultimately as deep a concern for Americans as for Mexicans.

A defeat for the government of President Felipe Calderon would leave perched on our southern doorstep a nation of 109 million people in thralldom to narco-terrorists eager to expand their already lethal reach in this country.

American border cities in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California would be particularly threatened. El Paso already has experienced an influx of upper middle income Mexicans fleeing violence in Juarez, just across the border.

Despite the proximity of the Mexican threat, it draws little attention from the foreign policy punditry. Leading foreign policy magazines are crammed full of learned pieces about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Islamist threat to nuclear-armed Pakistan and challenges from China and Russia.

But Mexico's mortal struggle goes mostly unnoticed.

The Calderon government has launched a full-scale war on the drug merchants, who have responded with a well-advertised campaign to terrorize government troops and police. In recent days, the bodies of nine soldiers -- all beheaded -- were discovered in a southern Mexican state, along with a note from a drug kingpin warning that "For every one of mine you kill, I will kill ten."

Nine corpses, showing similar signs of torture, turned up in a village just north of Acapulco, three others were left outside Mexico City, and several soldiers have vanished from a base near the capital.

A sign of how desperate the struggle has become is the recent recommendation by Ruben Aguilar, chief spokesman for Vicente Fox, Calderron's predecessor, that the government seek a truce with the drug lords. "The only way to win the war," he told a Mexican newspaper, "is negotiating" -- something Calderon rejected.

Calderon's fight is complicated by two cultural problems -- the corruption that historically has plagued Mexico's police and military and the prosperity that trickles down from the drug trade to ordinary campesinos in rural parts of the country. The latter is especially important as revenue from oil, U.S. tourism and remittances from kin in the U.S. has fallen off.

Frontline, the PBS investigative program, found that in Culiacan, a cartel-dominated town in northwest Mexico, souvenir shops routinely display items glorifying the traffickers. The drug bosses even boast a patron saint, one Jesus Malverde, a legendary thief who robbed the rich, gave to the poor and was hanged for his pains in 1909.

Recently, a well-known Mexican beauty queen was arrested traveling with seven men, including one identified as a leader of the Juarez cartel, in a car containing assault rifles, ammunition and $53,000 in cash.

The proximate reason for Mexico's emergence as a major route in the world's drug route atlas is the insatiable U.S. drug appetite, the world's largest. Untold riches await suppliers.

In the past, Mexican and American governments have taken turns criticizing each other for not doing enough to crack down on the drug trade. The perennial U.S. beef -- that Mexican authorities turn a blind eye to the drug lords -- has been more muted since Calderon's efforts to fight back.

Mexican officials, however, continue to complain that the illegal traffic doesn't flow just one way -- that the high-powered weaponry that death squads use to outgun police comes across the border from the U.S.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Obama's choice for Homeland Security chief, has called for stationing National Guard troops along the border permanently. And Michael Chertoff, current Homeland Security chief, says a "contingency plan for border violence" has been developed that would include use of U.S. military "assets." What priority Obama will give the problem is unclear; it was never addressed during the long presidential campaign.

Illegal immigration is the threat most Americans perceive from Mexico. But the growth in power of the drug cartels -- the threat they pose to the stability, even sovereignty of a nation with which we share a porous, 2000-mile border -- is a far greater menace to America.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2 ... co_ca.html

Reduce all government elected salaries in half until this mess is cleaned up.

Close the borders, fix the 14th Amendment of birthrights, I-9s need to be E-Verified, and make it a felony to hire undocumented immigrants.

Related Poll on Congress Salary:
Pension/Salary/Benefits CONGRESS; Poll/Vote-25K- JAN.2010
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-126464.html

Mexican officials, however, continue to complain that the illegal traffic doesn't flow just one way -- that the high-powered weaponry that death squads use to outgun police comes across the border from the U.S.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Obama's choice for Homeland Security chief, has called for stationing National Guard troops along the border permanently. And Michael Chertoff, current Homeland Security chief, says a "contingency plan for border violence" has been developed that would include use of U.S. military "assets." What priority Obama will give the problem is unclear; it was never addressed during the long presidential campaign.

Our troops should be on the border NOW and only because they were not put there a long time ago

WHAT are they waiting for? The violence is already here, the cartels are already here, the alleged "gangs", which, in reality, are enemy combatants, are already here.

Just how much worse, and just how far must this go, before our troops are sent to the border.......or are they waiting for some kind of massacre to avoid hurting Mexico's feelings?