the mexican drug war
not so much an effort to stop the production and sale of illegal drugs, as much as a bid by the mexican government to prevent the mexican cartels from taking over the country. (it’s on wikipedia too…)
let’s lay this out pretty simply. we americans use cocaine and other illegal drugs, but we can’t get them in america because they’re illegal. so we outsource that, sending money overseas to drug suppliers, who smuggle the stuff in for us.
in the 80s, pablo escobar and the colombian cartels grew so powerful that they threatened the legitimacy of the columbian state, and so were crushed. this left a power vacuum that has been filled by the mexican cartels.
the mexican cartels have gained so much power and money that they are now operating under insurgency principles, laying waste to mexican police, civilians, and officials, to put the populace in fear, to scare off the government, and to convince the populace that the government cannot protect them. they are attempting to supplant the government.
it is working. the cartels effectively control many outlying areas of the country, and are fighting for control of key border towns with the us. the government has seen a heavy rise in targeted assassinations, chaos rains in the north, and the military is in open war with the cartels.
the reason this is working for them is that the cartels have so much of our money that they can buy military grade arms from the american black market, which puts them on par with the mexican army, and significantly overpowers the local police. they’ve recruited mexican special forces, which puts them tactically on par as well. which is why the drug cartels are doing targetted assassinations of mexican officials, and mexican government can’t really do anything about it.
before the economy evaporated, the gop was all set to have a big debate about illegal immigration, about building a wall across the border. which is great, but that’s only going to keep cheap laborers stuck down south. it won’t stop the flow of drugs into america, and it won’t stop the flow of weapons back out.
clinton asked for a study on cocaine policy, which concluded that cutting funds to the drug war and massively increasing funds to drug treatment would have a more benificial effect. the clinton drug czar refused to cut law enforcement spending, and the bush administration cut treatment spending.
fuck iraq. bring the troops home, because we need them here. just in case. if this gets much worse, we’ll have to start using our own military power to take down the cartels. we’re not going to bomb mexico into the stone age, after all. and if it does come to sending in us troops to rout the cartels, we’re talking about an iraq-scale conflict. and we’re not actually very good at that, as the last six years has proven.
