Heath Haussamen
To address the growing problem of Mexican drug cartels, the United States has to seriously consider two ideas policymakers in Washington don’t want to touch.
Neither is popular in Washington, and I’m not endorsing either – but I am urging serious consideration of both.
The United States must consider legalizing, regulating and taxing some drugs that are currently illegal. And it must consider offering military aid to Mexico’s president.
The second would definitely be more controversial in Mexico. So I’ll start there.
Military involvement
The War on Drugs, as several presidents before Barack Obama called it, has included controversial covert and open military campaigns that have produced, at best, mixed results and damaged the United States’ image in Latin America.
Imagine the Great Empire sending troops across the New Mexico and Texas borders into Ciudad Juárez, live on cable news. Not the sort of images that are going to boost America’s standing in the world.
On the flip side, however, is this reality: Mexico isn’t winning its war against the cartels. It’s turning into a narco-state whose politicians are under the influence of drug bosses. And the Mexican military may be only evenly matched, at best, against the military might of the cartels.
I’m not suggesting that the United States consider invading Mexico. But our leaders need to have a serious discussion about whether to offer military aid to Mexican President Felipe Calderón.
I doubt Calderón would have the political ability to accept American military intervention in his country even if he wanted it. That means the effort would have to be covert. But with the 24-hour news cycle and Wikileaks, it’s nearly impossible to fight a war that’s truly secret.
American military intervention might be so unpopular in Mexico that it could destabilize the nation even further.
This possibility has serious drawbacks. Which means I move on to consideration of legalizing drugs.
Drug legalization
For starters, I’m not advocating that the most serious drugs – most notably, methamphetamine – be legalized. I’ve seen what meth does to people. Nothing that so quickly destroys people’s lives and that can, in extreme circumstances, allow a person to continue to attack a cop even after being shot multiple times should be legal.
But on the other end of the spectrum is marijuana, which is arguably less serious than alcohol. We need to talk about whether it’s really worth the resources we expend trying to stop people from using this drug.
I argued last week that America’s addiction to drugs fuels the war in Mexico and that we must somehow deal with the issue of supply and demand. While military engagement might have some effect on the supply of drugs from Mexico, the demand will remain. Perhaps that’s why military interventions in the drug war have only produced mixed results in the past.
The only ways to address the demand issue are by legalizing drugs or somehow combatting America’s addiction.
How are we going to combat the addiction in our gluttonous, dependent society? To stop the bloodshed and terror, legalization of at least some drugs has to be on the table as a serious discussion item.
Gun laws
There are other steps the United States must take to combat the cartels. One problem is that, because it’s so difficult to legally obtain guns in Mexico, the cartels get most of their weapons from the United States.
The New York Times recently highlighted one loophole in American law that allows this:
“Congress, enthralled with the gun lobby, has done nothing about a legal loophole increasingly at the heart of the carnage — the dealers’ freedom to make multiple sales of AK-47s and other battlefield assault rifles without having to report to federal authorities, as the law requires for handgun sales.
“No wonder one dealer felt free to sell 14 AK-47s to one trafficker in a single day.”
That’s a loophole that should be closed, immediately. If drug traffickers are going to buy multiple assault rifles at once, U.S. law enforcement should know about it so they can limit the illegal flow of weapons into Mexico.
On the flip side, Mexico has some of the most complicated and restrictive gun laws in the world. There is a stark contrast between citizens’ right to own, train with and carry guns in America and the restrictions in Mexico.
As a result, many Mexican citizens aren’t armed, so the only people around them who are armed are the cartels, criminals, and law enforcement – which can sometimes be relied upon to defend citizens in Mexico, but sometimes can’t.
The United States should encourage, or perhaps even incentivize, an effort by the Mexican government to relax its gun laws. The cartels are going to continue to have weapons. Even if the United States makes it more difficult to illegally import them from the United States, the cartels will get them from somewhere else.
Mexican citizens should also be armed.
Immigration reform
Washington must get serious about immigration reform. Even if drugs are legalized, it has to be easier to bring them into the United States legally than illegally, or they won’t come in that way.
Especially if we’re going to regulate and tax drugs, there has to be strong border security to stop them from coming in illegally so paying taxes is preferable. That means continuing efforts to secure the border. But, equally important, it means making the legal immigration system much less cumbersome.
Partisan politics have killed all serious efforts at immigration reform in recent years. It’s time for Congress to act.
‘A strong strategy to repair the social fabric’
Last, dealing with the cartels requires remembering the vast economic woes that will exist south of the border even if the United States and Mexico address the problem of the drug cartels.
Osvaldo Rodríguez Borunda, publisher of the El Diario chain of newspapers in El Paso, Chihuahua and Juárez, summed up the issue well in a recent speech in El Paso:
“Even if the consumption of some drugs were to be legalized here and as a consequence in our country, we cannot forget that over there we have millions of young people who do not study and do not work, one hundred thousand of them in Ciudad Juárez alone. Therefore, the fight against drugs must be accompanied by a strong strategy to repair the social fabric and to rescue all of these young people from continuing to be the breeding ground for organized crime.”
The last thing we need, if we’re successful at destroying or at least minimizing the danger of the drug cartels, is no strategy for improving conditions in Mexico. I would hope we learned that lesson from Iraq, which wasn’t a hotbed of al-Qaida activity until after we took out Saddam Hussein without having a plan for rebuilding the country.