Hitting Below the Border

I’ve blogged about how in some Western U.S. states that border Mexico (like Texas and Arizona), it is still quite legal to buy guns – even semi-automatics and worse – at a gun show without a background check. I’ve noted how many guns have been purchased legally in the U.S. and then been smuggled illegally into Mexico to provide the unlimited weapons to support the drug cartel wars among themselves and against the government. With only 6,000 legally-registered guns in Mexico, the rest were all smuggled in, mostly from the U.S., according to both U.S. and Mexican authorities. The drug trade back the other way has not slowed, stalled or abated. There’s simply too much American demand, and a distribution network here in the states is just too well-funded and organized – controlled by malevolent organizations and operatives at every level right down to the gangbanger on the street with his stash of dope for sale.

I’ve screamed that half our inmates are incarcerated for drug-related crimes, and half of those for dealing. Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol, but we are slow to learn historical lessons in this country. Yale-educated, former Mexican President Vincente Fox has argued for years for controlled legalization of drugs to stem the violence and control the trade. Bottom line: as long as narcotics are not legally available, their price will remain high enough to attract the most sophisticated and well-armed criminal networks the world has ever seen. Instead of generating much-needed taxes on controlled dope, we spend billions on pursuing, prosecuting and incarcerating criminals in the heavy-handed world of narco-crime.

The violence is spreading back to Mexico City and spilling into the United States. The northern Mexican states bear the brunt of this murderous business. Take a real good look at the map above. That little black spot, appropriately colored, is the Mexican State of Chihuahua, right smack on the U.S. border. It is also the murder capital of Mexico, all stemming from the drug wars, a place that is a whole lot more dangerous than Afghanistan.

“Organized crime-related deaths in one Mexican border state during the first nine months of 2011 exceed the number of Afghan civilians killed in roughly the same period in all of war-torn Afganistan… Accoring to the Mexican government, from January through September 2011 2,276 deaths were recorded in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which borders Texas and New Mexico… A Nov. 2011 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report states that over nearly the same period – January through October 2011 – 2,177 civilians were killed in [all of] Afghanistan, where a U.S.-led war against the Taliban is underway. It did not provide a breakdown of responsibility for that period, but said that in 2010, 75 percent of civilian deaths were attributed to the Taliban and other ‘anti-government elements.’

“Per capita, a person was at least nine times more likely to be murdered in Chihuahua last year than in Afghanistan. (Chihuahua has 3,406,465 inhabitants, according to Mexico’s 2010 census; the CIA World Factbook reports that in July 2011 the estimated population of Afghanistan was 29,835,392.)” LBNelert, January 20^th. What we are going to stem drug use and drug trafficking simply has not worked and continues to be a fail policy at time when Americans really need to spend their tax dollars wisely. Continuing with the current patterns of enforcement and control is a fool’s errand.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s “high” time we wake up and face the world the way it really is.