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.”