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Cartels are as big a threat in U.S. as terrorism
Heath Haussamen
When I pause to think about it, it seems surreal that I live in the United States, and I also live 45 miles from one of the biggest war zones in the world.
And yet, it’s true.
That reality – the drug war that has plunged Mexico into chaos – is as big a threat in the United States as terrorism, one border security expert is arguing.
From a recent column by Sylvia Longmire for CNN:
“Mexican drug cartels are arguably as dangerous and deadly as terrorists, and they were operating far inside our borders well before 9/11.
“…According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center, members of Mexican cartels are operating in more than 270 U.S. cities and thousands of smaller communities. … This is the real and current major threat to our national security – tens of thousands of violent Mexican cartel members who are living and operating under our noses in our cities, communities and public lands.”
Longmire is a former special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations who also worked for years as an intelligence analyst and border security expert for the California Emergency Management Agency.
The evidence is all around us
You don’t have to take Longmire’s word for it, however. The evidence is all around us. I wrote earlier this year about cartel activity in New Mexico. A 2007 report to Congress on Mexico’s drug cartels cited the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in stating that the Juárez Cartel has a presence in Southern New Mexico. The report also cited the 2007 National Drug Threat Assessment as saying there is a cartel presence in Las Cruces.
A 2009 federal report tells the story of a teen who smuggled drugs into New Mexico on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel. The cartel had him killed in a “remote area of New Mexico” because he owed the cartel money.
In January 2009, according to the report, another drug trafficker was shot and killed “in a remote area of Silver City” for failing to pay a drug debt. A week later, the wife of another drug trafficker who owed money was found dead in the same location.
The report states that cartels “also engage in other crimes, including alien smuggling, auto theft, kidnapping, murder, and weapons smuggling to further their criminal enterprises and generate illicit proceeds.”
“Many of these violent traffickers obtain firearms by burglarizing businesses, private homes, and vehicles in the New Mexico (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) region,” the report states.
Have you considered the possibility that the burglary you recently read about in the newspaper might have been a cartel-related crime?
‘This is the new order’
The Mexican government has been unable to take control of the situation in its country despite the efforts of its current president and help from the United States. As a result, Ciudad Juárez is in chaos. From a recent article in The Nation:
“The conflict is usually described in shorthand as a war among narco-trafficking cartels for control of smuggling routes into the United States, and this was indeed one of its initial causes. But much of the killing in Juárez bears less resemblance to warfare between cartels than to criminal anarchy. The city has seen 2,926 murders so far this year, and about 7,303 since January 2008. During my most recent visit, in October, thirteen people were killed in a single day, and early the following morning a bus carrying workers to one of the hundreds of maquiladoras that encircle the city was attacked by gunmen. That same week two corpses were found decapitated in a car, their heads placed on the hood. On October 22, in a massacre that illustrated the senselessness of the violence here, thirteen teenagers with apparently nothing to do with the drug trade were summarily executed at a birthday party.”
Criminal elements are spreading that “Juárezification,” as some call it, to other areas of Mexico.
“This is not some breakdown of the social order,” The Nation quoted Charles Bowden’s new book on Juárez, Murder City, as stating. “This is the new order.”
The WikiLeaks cables reveal that the Mexican government has no control of its southern border, “where arms, drugs and immigrant smugglers appear to have free rein,” the El Paso Times is reporting.
In other areas, the situation is eerie. I can’t find the link now, but NPR reported a few months ago that some of the most peaceful areas of Mexico are regions where there is no battle because one cartel runs everyone’s lives. There’s no warring cartel competing for control, and, notably, there are no visible signs of any government.
In those areas, cartels really are the government.
What to do?
In the United States, the cartels try to operate below the radar. Cartels don’t like to draw the media’s attention – it would be bad for business – so a big “shootout in a San Diego shopping district or downtown Houston between dozens of heavily armed cartel gunmen and the U.S. Army isn’t going to happen any time soon,” CNN’s Longmire writes.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t cartel-related violence. Longmire points out some examples:
- “In 2009, five mutilated bodies were found outside a drug stash house in a well-to-do northern Alabama county.”
- “Dozens of law enforcement officers have been shot at and many severely injured by heavily armed men who work for Mexican cartels defending marijuana crops in states like Oregon, Tennessee and North Carolina.”
- “Closer to the border, last year, gang members from ‘Los Palillos’ were indicted in the kidnapping, torture and murder of nine people in San Diego County. Two of those victims were dissolved in vats of acid after they were killed.”
What to do? I’m going to explore some ideas in a future column, but for now, I’ll leave you with this thought from Longmire:
“We’ve spent more than $365 billion on the war in Afghanistan since 2001, and about 1,400 military members have lost their lives in the process. We’ve committed only $1.6 billion to the drug war in Mexico – only a few hundred million of which has actually been spent since 2007 – and our military isn’t allowed to step one foot in-country unless it’s for training purposes.”
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I hope and pray that this nation does side with constitutional freedom.
Unfortunately, the Drug War has historically been used to bring our nation to a more authoritarian state. There is money to be made from human misery and what better way to generate misery than to use human nature against the people.
I agree with Pinkie that repressive gun control by the government will not slow gun running one single bit. You can bet that the arms dealers and war profiteers at licking their chops at an all out escalation of the Drug War.
Escalation was a George Bush maneuver whose massive funding of the Drug War kicked in just after he left office. We see the result with Mexican government Death Squads (Sun News) and Cartel desperation creating a irreversible chaos for war profit. The corporatist, Obama, would do nothing to back off a single Bush era policy when the war profiteers and mercenary corporations pay large campaign donations, as well as, have our media by the huevos.
llag, with all due respect, their is not a “definitive link” between violence in Mexico and weapons from America. Their is a “definitive link” between the weapons used in Mexico and weapons from America. The violence however would exist whether the weapons came from America or not. When/if we clamp down on gun control here, the Mexican cartels will just get their firearms from Russia, Al Queda, South America, etc. It may cost them a little more, but the violence would not be curtailed at all.
A more reasonable policy would be to address the legalization of marijuana. Obviously Pfizer, United Health and company (the folks responsible for Obamacare), as well as the prison system, are going to lobby against that effort hard on the national government, but national government is a failed entity at this point anyway. The states can still protect themselves to a large degree by taking such steps, Fed be damned.
I recall a day after Prop19 failed in California that Rasmussen polled the nation on their support of legalizing marijuana. National voter sentiment was the same as the California voter sentiment at 46%. We only need a leader willing to support legislation EXPANDING freedom, something very few politicians are willing to do unless it benefits themselves (see Glass-Steagall).
Legalizing marijuana would not end such issues completely, but it would address a large chunk of it. Marijuana is the cash cow of “illegal” drugs and such action would take away their opportunity to make ANY money off of their current best seller. It is likely what keeps them in business. Plus, it would give hundreds of thousands of American citizens their freedom back (of which 92% are colored) from an arbitrary “crime” that that did not infringe on the rights of anyone else.
Have you seen the reports that definitively link the violence by Mexican drug cartels to the ease of obtaining weapons in the United States? It is shocking how many of the guns used by Mexican cartels are obtained in America, especially Texas.
Here’s an idea…let’s get control over our guns and maybe the drug cartels’ capacity for violence will be diminished.
This is the article that the Washington Post came out with this week…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/12/AR2010121202663.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010121203267
This is a worthy topic of investigative journalism Heath, so I wish you well in your attempt to suggest what can be done to change the cloud of evil gripping Mexico, and settling in over our area as well. It seems to me that with the billions of dollars being generated by drug trade and other crime, that it is inevitable criminals will simply use those funds to expand their power.
Not to say I despair of a solution, but not only is the problem entrenched on the US side of the border now, but for all the reality of the descent into anarchy in Mexico, so little is even proposed to turn the tide…much less actually implemented. It seems like there is a failure of leadership of epic proportions at the federal and state levels in the US, and worse in Mexico.
I don’t have the polling numbers, but my guess is that most residents of El Paso and Dona Ana county take the threat seriously, and are increasingly fed up, and angry, at the status quo.
This much is certain, we cannot stand by and let things get even worse, because it will get worse, and “failed states” or “narco states” show us how much worse it can get.
The war on drugs is soooooo last century. Plus it does not produce enough government contracts to make it popular on the hill.