As The Calderon Boils

In ancient times, powerful warlords massacred opponents, raped, pillaged and looted hapless villages, extorted locals, extracted “protection money” and engaged in willful criminal enterprise unless they were big enough and successful enough to get wildly rich, force all opponents from their lands and establish sufficient military presence to protect what they had. They became dukes (or the equivalent) and if they controlled enough land, kings, emperors, tsars or whatever the title du jure might be. Whether the lands were ancient Europe or ancient China, the story was the same. Some criminal enterprises – like the Mafia which was born in old Sicily – were simply locals trying to instill governance in their communities, because the officials charged with that task could not. Extortion and protection money were relabeled “taxation” when the brutal dictators firmed their hold on the necessary tracts of land.

In modern times – from Liberia to Cambodia, from Afghanistan to Serbia – we’ve seen a repeat of these ancient trends, as warlords continue to ply their trades, occasionally assuming “legitimacy” as the reward for their violent excess. Most of these cruel transitions to power have been separated from the modern United States by either vast periods of time or great distances. But this is changing, and perhaps the Arizona immigration effort – recently set aside by a federal district court – is merely a sign of a “spillover” nascent criminal takeover effort of an entire country – Mexico.

The two most likely “takeover” warlord groups – the Zetas in the north and La Familia in the west – today have large, well-organized militias that have directly challenged Mexican federal troops in the open. The areas of Mexico where they are strongest are virtually devoid of any countervailing official governmental control. In their strongholds, the Zetas and La Familia rule without opposition; in some areas, they have even replaced the local tax collectors with their own operatives. Smaller groups vie for recognition by these powerful cartels by strutting like criminal peacocks trying to outdo each other with violence and bold attacks against the established government. The 80,000 Mexican federal troops arrayed against the cartels – an effort to sidestep the local police who are as often as not on the cartel payrolls – have bee n singularly ineffective in stopping this crimson tide. “Since [Mexican President Felipe] Calderon announced the offensive when he took office in December 2006, more than 28,000 people have been killed. Most of them have been traffickers, dealers and associates. But innocent civilians account for a growing portion…

“The Zetas and La Familia have grown into trafficking powerhouses since Calderon became president. They have altered the playing field by employing methods once unthinkable, such as beheading or dismembering rivals and then displaying the remains in squares, on street corners and in other public places…. Trafficking groups flex their muscles by hanging threatening banners from bridges, stringing up corpses or parking buses across key streets to paralyze traffic, actions that appear increasingly aimed at cowing the populace.” Los Angeles Times (August 7^th). These intimidation tactics have been very successful.

These cartels control the drug routes into the United States with an iron hand; they are wealthy… like small nations with vast natural resources. “The groups also are expanding their ambitions far beyond the drug trade, transforming themselves into broad criminal empires deeply involved in migrant smuggling, extortion, kidnapping and trafficking in contraband such as pirated DVDs.” The LA Times. Drug trafficking into the U.S. has increased, the death toll has skyrocketed, and governmental efforts to defeat what has become a genuine civil war for control of the entire country – despite billions of dollars in support from both the Bush and the Obama administrations – appear to be falling increasingly behind. Guns and military-grade weapons – some left over from U.S.-backed military campaigns in Central Am erica and others secured through both legal and illegal means from U.S. border states, where “gun control” is really a four letter word – have poured illegally to the criminals in the south, making them better armed than the government soldiers that are paid to attack them.

Former politicos – like Mexico’s ex-President Vicente Fox – believe that the only solution is to legalize drugs; the August 10^th AOLNews.com explains: “‘We should consider legalizing the production, distribution and sale of drugs,’ Fox wrote. ‘Legalizing in this sense doesn't mean that drugs are good or don't hurt those who consume. Rather, we have to see it as a strategy to strike and break the economic structure that allows the mafias to generate huge profits in their business.’” Maybe he has a point, however unpopular such laws might be in the States. After all, decriminalization of major addictive drugs has in fact worked before. Take Portugal’s recent laws for example: “[A]bout 45 percent of the 100,000 heroin addicts Portugal’s Health Ministry recorded in 2000 had by 2008 decided to at least try to quit the habit, without the threat of jail time. And the number of new HIV cases among users fell from 2,508 in the year 2000 to 220 cases in 2008, Alun Jones, a spokesman for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told AOL News. ‘This was a major success,’ he said.” AOLNews (August 14^th). Meanwhile, the armed conflict rages below the border, and as time passes, the federal government slides farther behind.

What would be like to have a rogue nation – run by criminal dictators – controlling the entire nation on our southern border… hell-bent on selling drugs in the U.S. and using Mexico as a base to extend the entire panoply of their criminal enterprise to the vast, mega-wealthy north? The threat is very real: “Calderon himself acknowledged the threat [recently] in comments at a national security conference: ‘This criminal behavior is what has changed, and become a challenge to the state, an attempt to replace the state.’ … Mexican traffickers have increased their shipments of several types of narcotics north across the border, becoming titans of an industry that by some estimates earns $39 billion a year, equivalent to almost 20% of the government's annual budget…

“An assessment of the drug threat issued early this year by the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center said Mexican drug-trafficking organizations, or DTOs, ‘continue to represent the single greatest threat to the United States.’…Mexican cartels, with operations in more than 2,500 U.S. cities, are the only ones working in every part of the United States, it said. They have largely displaced Colombian and Italian traffickers…‘The influence of Mexican DTOs, already the dominant wholesale drug traffickers in the United States, is still expanding,’ said the report, known formally as the National Drug Threat Assessment.” The LA Times.

As debate continues over the constitutionality of the Arizona immigration enforcement policies, a much bigger question remains: Is attempting to impose a tight seal on our border and expel undocumented aliens (many of whom are running for their lives) even remotely relevant or sufficient given the magnitude of the explosion and civil war erupting in Mexico itself? Shouldn’t the efforts be directed to destroy the threats to the south?

I’m Peter Dekom, and trying to put a band aid on a tumor won’t get you very far.