Mexico on the brink?

Tracy Wilkinson of the Los Angeles has a rather detailed and thoroughly disturbing article about how emboldened the drug cartels have become in  Northern Mexico.

"In coordinated attacks, gunmen in armored cars and equipped with grenade launchers fought army troops this week and attempted to trap some of them in two military bases by cutting off access and blocking highways, a new tactic by Mexico's organized criminals."

Is this not reminiscent of scenes out of Mad Max or The Road Warrior on some level? Mind you this isn't some post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland; it is only miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Could you imagine a world where well-armed highway gangs are successfully going to toe-to-toe with large urban American police forces, or even the United States military without being utterly obliterated? For all of its virtue and splendor, Mexico remains a rather large experiment in Latin American dysfunction. The werewolf is concerned that if these problems aren't addressed and contained in short order, this problem will escalate into a severely malignant tumor along our border with Mexico with wide a wide ranging spectrum of negative repercussions. 

Towns being abandoned under order of death for the inhabitants, honest cops rarer than virgins in whorehouses, an impotent government hanging on by mere threads, with honest people terrorized and lives treated as mere pawns in the vicious games played by the drug cartels for profitable pipelines is becoming the norm in Mexico. This isn't the middle ages or Somalia, this is the Northern Hemisphere and the doorstep to the United States of America. Mexico City's claim to sovereignty grows weaker with each passing day. When will America step up -it will have to at some point- as we can't play the ostrich forever,  and find a General Pershing for the modern era (note it has been almost a century since his infamous foray's against Poncho Villa, who says history isn't cyclical?) and unleash a Marine Expeditionary Force on the repulsive cartels and put an put an end to their trade in misery, blood, and brutality? It's the clear the Mexicans are incapable of handling their own internal security, alas, this burden, like so many others will fall on our shoulders.

Along with waging a violent and brutal war on the cartels, -which honor and justice demand - what changes need to be wrought on this side of the border to undermine these cartels? Is legalization of hard drugs - which appeals to the werewolf's inner-libertarian, yet sits grotesquely uneasy with his moral compass and sense of right, a realistic solution? Whatever the US plan is, it needs to be multi-pronged, fast, a vicious. If this includes adjusting the demand in the states with regulation and legalization regime, along with destroying supply, (napalming cocoa fields), along with showing no mercy to the Cartels as we hunt them down, so be it. However, our chronic impotence on this issue speak to how poorly our society has evolved from days of yore. Like all festering wounds, this must be treating before gangrene sets in and limbs need to be amputated.