Mexico’s Claims that the US Narcotics Trade is Our Fault

  

“Today is a day that signals a win for law-abiding citizens in Tennessee. 

It also signals a win for preserving the Second Amendment in our state.”

Tennessee Gov Bill Lee in June of 2021 as he signed a permitless guy-carry law at a local Berretta gun manufacturing plant.

We know that well over 90% of the firearms used by cartels were purchased in the United States and smuggled south across our border. Without those guns, those criminal organizations would be powerless. With only one gun store in the entire country – a Mexican constitutional right to own a gun is accompanied deep background and psychological tests and mandatory training, with a process that is repeated every few years – only a very small fraction of firearms in Mexico are actually legal.

We also know that most of the money funding those cartels is generated from the United States… a vast pool cash from drug-buyers where much of that flow finds its way into the hands of corrupt politicians and law enforcement agencies south of that border. Mexican “Federales” have even taken to wearing balaclavas (pictured above) to avoid being identified and executed by cartels when they are off duty, at least those who are not on a cartel payroll. Entire police departments in Mexico and south have been arrested and replaced. It is Mexico’s horrific pandemic of ultra-violence.

A rather significant segment of the asylum seekers at our southern border are fleeing regions, even entire countries, where drug lords are dramatically in control. These narco-criminals are murdering anyone who stands in their way, killing innocent bystanders in cartel wars without any remorse or concern. Holding a job, working a farm, or just living has become close to impossible in these lands. Pre-teen and teen males are often force-recruited by the cartels as well. We blame Mexico and many of the Central American nations to the south. Increasingly, they are turning around and pointing an accusatory finger at us.

Perhaps they need that border wall much more than we do… except unlike drugs which are consumed, whetting an appetite for more, well, guns last a very, very, long time. Which makes the notion of stopping southward bound gun smuggling much less relevant. Is there American fault here? Does putting engravings of Mexican folk-hero bandits on guns suggest that US gunmakers know their weapons will be smuggled and sold south of the border? Are our super-lax gun laws, a red state standard upheld by a 6-3 ultra-rightwing Supreme Court, why cartels have so much power?

Indeed, Republican legislators at every level have embraced the MAGA mantra that it all their fault (Latin American nations), and we have to stop those asylum seekers at our southern border as the responsible miscreants or victims of their own governments not taking responsibility for the cartels’ violence. Remember Trump’s “rapists and murderers” speech in 2015? The last significant immigration reform bill was passed in the 1980s, and every reform effort since, even when led by Republican George W Bush, has been stopped by Congressional Republicans.

OK, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a nasty populist leader who, oddly, is cut from Donald Trump’s autocratic cloth. Despite the mutual economic dependence between the United States and Mexico, Obrador is pulling his country closer to China, making sure that he places the blame on cartel power squarely on the shoulders of American lawmakers and drug users. The Associated Press (April 5th) shows this overt shift in Mexico’s efforts:

“Mexico’s president on Tuesday [5/4] asked China for help in halting chemicals used by Mexican drug dealers to illegally produce fentanyl, while also complaining of U.S. pressure to curb the drug trade… President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has previously said that fentanyl is the United States’ problem, caused by ‘a lack of hugs’ in families. On Tuesday, he went further, venting in a letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping about ‘rude threats’ from U.S. legislators over the drug trade.

“López Obrador complained about calls in the United States to designate Mexican drug gangs as terrorist organizations… Some Republicans have said they favor using the U.S. military to crack down on the Mexican cartels… ‘Unjustly, they are blaming us for problems that in large measure have to do with their loss of values, their welfare crisis,’ López Obrador wrote to Xi in the letter, which was published Tuesday. ‘These positions are in themselves a lack of respect and a threat to our sovereignty, and moreover they are based on an absurd, manipulative, propagandistic and demagogic attitude.’…

“López Obrador on Tuesday reiterated his advice to strengthen what he called family values in the U.S. He claims Mexico’s close-knit families have allowed it to avoid a fentanyl crisis — though the country has a huge problem with domestic methamphetamine use… ‘I would tell them, for example, to keep their children at home longer, don’t kick them out of the house, keep them [at home] for two or three years more,’ López Obrador said during a news conference… Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid trafficked by Mexican cartels that has been blamed for about 70,000 overdose deaths a year in the United States.”

So how do you respond to the rising demand for illicit drugs from America users? What is the answer to the increasing ease of purchasing firearms of every description in the United States and the sophisticated smugglers who take those weapons south? Republicans have become the party of blame and deflection. They hide under the mantra of culture wars and bringing the nation back to deep religious fundamentalism, from abortion to education. Nothing is their fault.

Everything wrong is laid at the doorstep of Democrats or foreign powers. Democrats have opposed the free flow of guns, particularly assault weapons, against the “Second Amendment” distortion that the GOP relies on to increase gun ownership. Democrats have tried for years to get immigration reform, but Republicans have refused to consider that alternative. Republicans have mounted economic reforms that cost the increasing numbers of lower classes to reduce taxes for the rich, causing an escalation of poverty, hopelessness and desperation where drugs offer an escape. The fault is very obvious.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Obrador just might be right in his accusations; the party of “blame others” is the primary cause of the very malignancy they are railing against.