Mexico's Other Export

Campus Report ^ | March 10, 2009 | Heather Latham

[bs9021]

Mexico’s Other Export

by: Heather Latham, March 10, 2009

Mexico has a major export that never gets discussed in free-trade agreements. “There has been an alarming spike in violence in Mexico in recent years, most of which is associated with the trafficking in illegal drugs and the efforts of the Mexican government to shut down that trade,” Ted Galen Carpenter writes in a recent CATO Institute Policy Analysis titled “Troubled Neighbor: Mexico’s Drug Violence Poses a Threat to the United States.” He continues, “The turf battles have been ferocious. In 2005, more than 1,300 people perished in drug-related violence. By 2007, the yearly total had soared to 2,673. And it continues to get worse. By early August 2008, the body count for that year already exceeded the number of fatalities in all of 2007. By mid-November, some estimates put the toll at more than 4,500.” He goes on to say, “Worst of all, the carnage associated with the black market trade in drugs does not respect national boundaries. The frightening violence now convulsing Mexico could become a routine feature of life in American communities, as the cartels begin to flex their muscles north of the border.”

“Even if it were possible to seal the land border, the trafficking organizations have ingenious ways of coping,” Carpenter argues. He mentions underground tunnels that have been found before, and he also points out “the lengthy coastline in the Gulf of Mexico or along the California coast.” “Decapitation strategies don’t work” in these cartels, Carpenter asserts, because there is a major “problem of corruption” in the law enforcement force, and the “robust consumer demand makes victory impossible.”....

[alloysteel]

Call the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a crisis of collapsing government right on our own southern border, on the order of the anarchy that was Afghanistan, which allowed the growth of a rogue organization that struck at the nerve centers of the US, or the danger that was posed to neighboring countries by the Saddam Hussein regime.

America has had to go into Mexico before, and now, we have greater call to intervene than ever in our troubled history with Mexico. There is a fallacy out there that the Mexican drug cartels are getting their arms (hand grenades, machine guns, land mines, all the contraband weapons of warfare) from US sources, and this is manifestly untrue. Such trade cannot, by law, be run from the US, and if there were such an entity in this country, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms would have long ago overrun them. The arms are coming in from China and North Korea, to be put at the disposal of the drug cartels.

The Mexican Federal police, and the Mexican Army, are hopelessly outgunned by the drug cartels, who operate with impunity widely across Mexico. Expect the call to come soon.

[Vaduz]

The night scopes are in the mail.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

[NewRomeTacitus]

I’m also offended by this lie that most of the weaponry is obtained from United States sources. When we see rare footage of cartel thugs running and gunning what do we see in their hands? Non-U.S. arms.

Even with such chaos moving up through our border with no consideration for innocent bystanders the liberals persist in their mass illusion that we’ll all be peachy keen if we’re all unarmed.

F***ing idiots would rather see us all slaughtered before admitting they’re wrong.