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Helping The Gangsters Next Door

Mexico’s biggest national security problem stems from its fight with drug cartels. Its domestic body count of nearly 6,000 people last year has sounded the…

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HOUSTON—Mexico’s biggest national security problem stems from its fight with drug cartels. Its domestic body count of nearly 6,000 people last year has sounded the alarm. Prominently listed among the grizzly assassinations were gangsters, police, and journalists, members of the military and government officials, plus a multitude of collateral victims.

Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, argues that the current violence is a blow-back following the squeeze that government has put on the drug cartels. The criminals are murdering each other over trade routes. The head of Mexico’s national defense commission of the Chamber of Deputies Jorge González Betancourt says his country wants the United States to share more information, stop arms trading, control money laundering and curtail consumer demand for drugs if his country is to gain the upper hand in the fight.

These expressions follow a U.S. State Department warning about travel in Mexico. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has called on the Department of Homeland Security to send a thousand troops to the Mexican border.

"I don't care whether they are military troops, or National Guard troops or whether they are customs agents," said the governor. His concern is that Mexico’s drug war may be spilling into U.S. territory. Some of the worry comes from a Homeland Security report that six drug cartel-related kidnappings have occurred in El Paso, Texas, across the border from Ciudad Juárez, where the infamous Sinaloa Cartel is fighting to maintain its franchise to supply this country.

The only problem is that when NewspaperTree.com reporter David Crowder checked, the El Paso police had no record of any such kidnappings, except possibly one.

Another story circulating has it that Cd. Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz has moved his family to El Paso. It’s true that the mayor owns a house in El Paso. So did the previous Juárez mayor.

Bad is bad enough without embellishments, and hysteria isn’t a good way to cope with the matter. Our own officials need to get a grip. Wasn’t it this kind of mentality that got us into, say, the Iraq debacle?

Some of the justification for our shimmies comes from a U.S. military preparedness report that included a “worst case” scenario on what could occur if Mexico’s or Pakistan’s governments failed and either or both became a “failed state.”...

In a parallel way, some bankers have argued that our current financial crisis happened because Wall Street never simulated a worst-case scenario. If we had, would that have meant that, by our own standards, the U.S. is a failed state?

Back in 2005 the Dominican Republic was declared a failed state in another report. Then the United States passed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which included that nation. So, by our own practice, the designation “failed state” could mean be a reason for “trading partner.”

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, from Texas, has stated that drug-related violence is turning some communities there back into “the Wild West.’” And Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut is calling for hearings later this month on border violence.

A better reason for hearings would be to address the recommendations in a November 2008 Brookings Institution report. Its study group, headed by former Mexico president Ernesto Zedillo and former U.S. Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering, asked us to ratify the United Nation’s protocol against the illicit manufacture and trafficking in firearms, gun parts and ammunition.

If we want to get hysterical over Mexico’s violence, we should crack down on the gunrunning, originating with us, that is abetting the gangsters next door.

(José de la Isla, author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (Archer Books, 2003) writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. He may be contacted by e-mail at [email protected].)
   © 2009

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