Mexico's Continual Implosion

Today's WSJ ran a frightful article, "Mexico Under Siege," by Nicholas Casey on the latest narco-terror conditions plaguing Mexico's wealthiest city, Monterrey, and threatening the near-term political and economic stability of the Mexican state. This is nothing new conceptually, yet with each passing day, Mexico takes one step closer to totally collapse and collapse and failure. Conditions on the ground level have deteriorated to the point where residents are communicating to the government via newspaper advertising!

"Residents opened their newspapers Wednesday morning to find the ads taken out by Mexican business leaders, begging the government to send more military into the city. "Enough already," said the notice that ran in national and local papers, criticizing what it said was a slow response of police against "criminal bands that in every act look to establish a new boundary of terror."

The Mexican government is either impotent, deaf, or incapable of dealing with the cartel pandemic. Taking out a newspaper ad is akin to sending smoke signals of distress in the days western frontier yore, it doesn't get an flipping' worse. Yet, policy makers in Washington, DC, and leading media analysts seem uninterested in these alarming trends at best and woefully ignorant at worst. Are they distracting, unaware, or just playing the role of the coy ostrich and hoping that embedding your head in the sand will to the problem magically evaporating. Today, we silently celebrated the withdrawal of our last combat brigade from Iraq, are floundering in a confused and ill-defined mission in Afghanistan, and are expressing total indifference to Iran's upcoming membership in the nuclear. All of the aforementioned, while important, is also half-a-globe away. The only news we regularly read about Mexico is how pissed off certain liberals and left-wing Mexicans are about Arizona's legislative experiment in legitimate border control and sovereignty preservation. (Mixed feelings on the Arizona law itself, but a deep appreciation for the spirit driving it on this end) It boggles the mind given what is at stake should Mexico descend into a state paralyzed anarchy, especially given the porous nature of the United States-Mexico border, the size of legitimate trade and commercial activity ob both sides of the border, and the potential for extensive spill-over into the United States proper should things go any further south, south of the border. When it comes to governmental authority and respect for the rule of law, here's what the drug cartels think.

"The body of Edelmiro Cavazos, mayor of the Monterrey suburb of Santiago, was found beside a highway. Mr. Cavazos had been abducted Sunday night, the latest in a string of attacks against politicians in Mexico's north."

These cartel goons are afraid of nothing. Whacking government officials like they are playing Grand Theft Auto with no sense of recourse is unreal. Does Calderon's authority not extend beyond the walls of the presidential residence? How long before madness like that infiltrates El Paso, Tucson, Phoenix, and San Diego? It has been roughly a century since the United States had to dispatch General Pershing to deal with Pancho Villa's cross-border incursions. As much as history repeats itself on some levels, the stakes are much different should we start playing games of cat-and-mouse with well-financed and utterly ruthless drug cartels who know no limits, decency, or honor. If the implications weren't so dire and threat so real, the foundation of this tragedy would actually be fascinating to watch and follow.

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.

Mexico's plight.

In a thoroughly disturbing article about the sorry state of Mexico, Phillip Caputo writes, "I have just been in Juárez and am relieved to not be going back to that industrialized border city—utterly charmless in the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Juárez’s main product now is the corpse. Last year, drug-related violence there claimed more than 1,600 lives, and the toll for the first nine months of this year soared beyond 1,800, and mounts daily. That makes Juárez, population 1.5 million, the most violent city in the world. Two lines of graffiti summed up a place where not only law and order but civilization itself has broken down: Mi ciudad pide clemencia en su dementia (“My city asks for mercy in its madness”), and Mi ciudad es un negro lamento un aullido infinito (“My city is a black lament, an eternal howl”)." Bleak.

Given that the United States shares over one-thousand miles of border with Mexico, a long mutually linked history, a series of important trade relationships, and has absorbed tens of millions of Mexicans, both legal and illegal, looking for hope, opportunity, and redemption, you'd think that this story would have some serious traction and be getting the attention of national policy makers across the board. I would be shocked if this story doesn't become part of the national dialog in the next several months. There's too much at stake for this story to dither on the vines of neglect.