Mexico’s Drug War: Violence Too Close to Home
By Jonathan Broder, CQ Staff
Mexico’s illegal drug trade used to be relatively civilized, made up of small-time traffickers who smuggled marijuana and heroin into the United States and the corrupt officials who accepted their bribes to look the other way. Both sides followed certain unwritten rules: The officials forbade the traffickers from selling their wares inside Mexico and from arming themselves too extravagantly. Kidnapping was out of bounds. If a drug trafficker felt compelled to eliminate a rival, Mexican officials encouraged him to do so discreetly — preferably north of the border, where the investigation would be a problem for law enforcement in the United States, not Mexico.
Such conditions seem almost quaint compared with the violence that wracks the country today. Mexico’s drug gangs have added South American cocaine and methamphetamine to their exports, and they earn as much as $39 billion a year from sales in the United States. They also peddle plenty of the drugs to Mexicans. To protect their profits, the cartels have taken advantage of openings in U.S. gun-control laws to stock up on military-grade assault rifles, grenade launchers, bazookas and even heavy machine guns, smuggling them back into Mexico for fire-fights with government forces and rival gangs. The cartels also operate helicopters, jet planes and small submarines for use in smuggling.
FIGHTING BACK: Mexican Federal Police carry out an anti-drug operation in Ciudad Juarez last week. President Felipe Calderon says the drug war is tougher than he thought when he launched it in 2006. (GETTY IMAGES/AFP / RONALDO SCHEMIDT)
Since the beginning of 2007, the drug war has claimed the lives of about 7,500 people — almost double the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since 2003. The dead include more than 200 American citizens, some of whom were probably involved in the drug business but also others who were innocent bystanders caught in the cross-fire.
Using a combination of bribes and extreme cruelty that includes gruesome tortures and beheadings, the drug cartels have corrupted or intimidated police and magistrates, taking effective control over a growing number of towns and rural areas south of the border. The gangs also have moved north into Arizona and other states, where kidnappings, gun battles and executions among rival cartel members are becoming increasingly common.
With an approving nod from the United States, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has thrown his army into the fight against the cartels, but the well-armed gangs are fighting back. And according to some U.S. officials and experts, the drug barons are winning.
In Washington, where policy debates involving Mexico have been confined mostly to trade and immigration for the past two decades, sudden awareness of the drug war has produced some alarming assessments. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was the drug czar in the Clinton White House, warned recently that unless the Mexican government gains control of the drug gangs, the United States could, within a decade, be confronting on its southern border a “narco-state” — meaning an area controlled by drug cartels. The Pentagon envisions an even worse scenario: Mexico and Pakistan, it says, are the countries most at risk of swiftly collapsing into “failed states” — those whose central governments are so weak they have little practical control over most of their territory.
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http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=weeklyreport-000003069323
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