Truly Organized Crime – Hitting below the Border

I once wrote that Mexico should build a northern border wall and make the United States pay for it. The flood of assault rifles and automatic handguns into a nation with very strict gun control laws seemed almost exclusively to emanate from guns legally purchased in the U.S. and smuggled south across the border. This tsunami of guns has enabled the massive network of drug cartels to execute and bribe their way to control drug trafficking from South and Central America, through and within Mexico (and points north), ultimately to feed the consumer-demand that seems to defy containment in the United States. The ultra-violence has in turn motivated the flood of desperate immigrants poised on the border, plagued by fear and desperation, to enter the country whose demand for drugs caused it all.

The staggering wealth of the cartels has driven violence to a level that many view as civil wars in the Hispanic nations south of our border. Criminal syndicates often have such tight relationships with local and national police and elected officials from bottom to the highest elected office in the land that criminal prosecution of drug cartels is often a joke. Money flows. Officials cooperate with officials, who sometimes even participate, in narco-trafficking. While in some of the smaller states in Central America, the ties are strongest at the top, in the and deeply populated (127 million people) Mexico, it is often more important for cartels to focus on local elections since it is local officials who can be most reached by threats or bribery… and who happen to control local police actions.

With a mid-term election looming in Mexico on June 6th, the question is whether the popular and often labeled as populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – who is not himself standing for reelection – can maintain his party’s majority in most Mexican states. For officials running in small states and cities, unable to afford the expensive protection considered advisable for all candidates for Mexican public office, they face intimidation and violence of unparalleled force.

Recently, at a hastily called campaign rally in town of Moroleón, mayoral candidate Rosa Alma Barragán faced a convoy of well-armed cartel soldiers who sprayed her assembly with bullets. Barragán did not survive. Patrick McDonnell, writing for the May 31st Los Angeles Times, expounds on this harsh violent reality caused by the egregious level of consumer demand, mostly from the United States: “Barragán was the 34th office seeker killed in the run-up to national midterm balloting on June 6, according to Etellekt Consultants, a risk analysis firm. On Friday [5/28], a city council candidate in the southern state of Chiapas was found slain, police said, bringing the total to 35.

“Hundreds of other candidates have been threatened, leading some to drop out. The violence has struck across party lines, but the most frequent targets have been those opposing incumbent parties [most likely already to be on the take].

“Campaigning and killing have long been entwined in a shadowy embrace in Mexico. The best-known case in recent history is the 1994 assassination of presidential aspirant Luis Donaldo Colosio at a rally in Tijuana — a slaying still shrouded in conspiracy theories and doubts about the official story that it was the work of a lone gunman.

“But most attacks target small-town candidates lacking extensive protection details… In many ways, organized crime has more interest in local politics than in national politics. Control of city halls swells gang coffers and provides a path to broader influence as ‘bought’ officeholders ascend the political ladder… ‘Municipalities are the easiest point for organized crime to penetrate, but the consequences go way beyond the local orbit,’ wrote columnist Sergio Sarmiento in the daily Reforma… The politicians killed during the current electoral cycle constitute ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ he wrote. ‘We don’t know how many more have been pressured or have had to accept demands from organized crime to keep on competing.’”

Corruption runs deep in so many regions in Mexico. Entire local police departments, operating as enforcement wings of local cartels, have been totally removed and replaced by federales (Mexican federal police, not always free from corruption either). Turf wars between rival cartels are often more brutal than massive conflicts between police and the cartels themselves. The problem is more than mirrored in the smaller nations in much of Central America, particularly El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where the heads of state are often implicated in the narco-wars. Even in Mexico, senior officials from heads of the entire federal police force to past presidents have been implicated in corruption scandals.

Which brings me back to that notion of desperate immigrants, waiting for a shot at asylum into the United States, who face cartel executions and economic ruin generated by drug wars in their home countries, all because of excessive American demand for illicit drugs and the unlawful export of sophisticated guns acquired legally in the United States to the criminals that threaten them in their corrupted nations. See anything wrong with this situation? 

Our money, generated by the sale of illegal drugs within the United States, funds the very criminal activity, the cartels’ purchase of the very weapons that outgun local police (those few that are uncorrupted), that creates the necessity for many locals to flee, seeking hope or rescue by the nation that is at the root of it all. The United States has never figured out how to stem demand for illegal drugs. The purported “war on drugs” started in the Reagan years (when the Iran Contra Scandal actually put our CIA into the chain of drug smugglers) and continued thereafter is, was and probably will be a total failure. Yet we refuse to rescue those whose lives have been decimated by our inability to control the problem.

I’m Peter Dekom, and American politicians from both sides of the aisle still refuse to accept responsibility for the U.S.-generated cause of the severe and extensive violence and poverty that drive immigrants from south of our border to seek asylum here.