| | |  Editorials | Opinions | January 2009 
Americans Help Cause Stunning Violence in Mexico
 Mary Sanchez - Kansas City Star
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 |  | Our contribution will be a billion here or a billion there to help battle drug- and gunrunners. And we’ll keep on snorting the coke, smoking the meth, rolling the weed and selling the guns. |  | | |
Mexico is dripping with blood. You may have seen news coverage of the bold murders committed south of the border in the past couple of months. Your reaction might have been similar to that of other Americans:
What’s wrong with those people? But what you may not know is that we comfortable gringos north of the border are pretty intimately involved in the mayhem unfolding down there.
In one of the more recent outrages, a 45-year-old man was found shot dead in a vacant lot in Juarez, a town that shares the border with El Paso, Texas.
The man’s hands had been severed and laid atop his private parts. The taking of this man’s life was not newsworthy — dozens are murdered every week in Juarez. What put his name in the papers was the dismemberment, no doubt a message of some sort.
Mutilation is a mode of communication currently in vogue among Mexico’s drug lords. In Juarez more than 1,600 people died in drug-related killings last year. For all of Mexico, the tally was more than 5,000 dead — more than double the drug murders of 2007.
Most of the victims are found riddled with gunshots, rounds and rounds of ammunition that make the gang-related drive-by shootings of U.S. cities appear tame. Gory, Mafia-style “examples” are routine. People left with messages scrawled on their bodies, warnings from one drug cartel to the other.
And then there are the heads. Mexican drug lords are big on decapitating people and then rolling the heads into public places — a popular disco, the town square.
Americans’ love of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin is what keeps the drug trade bustling in Mexico. But now there’s a new way Mexican crime is bleeding across the border.
Small town farmers, some elderly and frail, being kidnapped and held for ransom. The goal is to have the ransoms paid by their U.S.-based relatives, migrants working here. The kidnappings are a sinister new criminal enterprise, but they also serve as a calling card from one drug gang to another to indicate who controls that particular area.
And the ultimate goal in this struggle for territory is land routes to the U.S. drug market.
If all of this is making you say, “Tsk, tsk, why can’t that country protect its own people?” consider the facts: While the drugs are flowing north of the border, guns are flowing south. Estimates are that more than 2,000 guns are smuggled from the U.S. into Mexico daily.
Here is the list of what U.S. immigration agents found at two El Paso homes raided in December: 11 AK-47 assault rifles, two military-style bayonets, ballistic body armor, 2,560 rounds of Russian ammunition, seven M-16 ammunition magazines and 20 rounds of armor piercing .223-caliber ammunition.
Unlike any previous administration, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has declared war on the drug cartels. They are fighting back (and among themselves for dominance).
High-level Mexican police and military, some with their own hands in the drug trade, are among the assassinated.
And, yes, the U.S. is working closely with the Mexican government in an attempt to break drug and gun trafficking rings. But the successes are dwarfed by the scale of the violence, which is exploding.
A U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats in January listed Mexico and Pakistan as the two counties that “bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse.” For Mexico, it wasn’t just the peso’s decline but the bloodshed that earned the dire warning.
And Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recently ordered 22 federal agencies to formulate plans to react if violence crosses the border. Many observers deem this crisis a sterling argument in favor of drug decriminalization.
Here’s news for them: As much as you may wish for that kind of “enlightenment,” it ain’t gonna happen. Our society, our government will never allow it.
So Mexicans will go on dying, until its army and police figure out how to get a handle on the drug cartels.
And our contribution will be a billion here or a billion there to help battle drug- and gunrunners. And we’ll keep on snorting the coke, smoking the meth, rolling the weed and selling the guns.
Mary Sanchez: msanchez(at)kcstar.com |
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