The Growing Mexican American Job Creator – Cartels

With massive demand for narcotics and millions of guns (including lots of assault weapons), all courtesy of the United States, it’s a business that is only growing. Jobs are plentiful south of the border, from Mexico and farther south, and job security is not threatened by the prospect of lay-offs or contractions from mergers and acquisitions by well-heeled capitalists. It is, simply, death or incarceration. We also conveniently ignore that a huge chunk of those immigrants streaming or attempting to stream across our southern border are escaping the cartel violence in their own countries, the impossibility of making a living in such destabilized areas… or the desertification caused by climate change, mostly stemming from rich industrialized nations, like the United States, pumping greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere for well over a century.

But then, these same cartels have lots of money… and need lots of “workers” to ply their toxic trade. Job opportunities… frequently involving involuntary recruitment. Other cartel leaders provide schools, medical clinics, housing and emergency aid to villagers in areas surrounding their narcotics processing facilities and/or leaders’ headquarters and homes. Insurance. Any governmental approach to any of these results in resistance, lack of cooperation and misdirection.

But job opportunities – er… “labor shortages” – are caused by “attrition.” According to Patrick McDonnell, writing for the September 22nd Los Angeles Times, citing several recent studies: “[Mexican c]artels must replace 350 to 370 workers arrested or slain each week… [R]esearchers have come up with an educated estimate: 175,000. That figure, which would make the cartels collectively the fifth-largest employer in Mexico, has steadily risen over the last decade, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science that relied on a variety of data to build a mathematical model of the workforce.

“‘It’s very important to understand the size of the problem,” said lead author Rafael Prieto-Curiel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. “It helps put the issue into perspective.’… But other researchers not involved in the study questioned the estimate, given the lack of precise data and the many ways the workforce might adapt to changes in the trade… ‘It’s really problematic where they get their data from,’ said Benjamin Smith, a history professor at the University of Warwick in England.

“Though cartels have been chronicled in television series, books and high-profile criminal cases, much about them remains unknown. Estimates of their annual profits start at $6 billion and spiral upward… And cartels long ago branched beyond drug trafficking into other lucrative rackets, including extortion, kidnapping, fuel theft and migrant smuggling. That implies a vast economy — and a huge labor force.

“The head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Anne Milgram, told Congress in July that Mexico’s two most powerful criminal organizations — the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel — had almost 45,000 members, associates, facilitators and brokers in more than 100 countries… Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a frequent skeptic of Washington’s drug policies, scoffed at those numbers.” Those numbers don’t include cartels from Central and South America or the affiliated local and regional gangs that control the retail trade at the grassroots level.

Tough-talking GOP presidential candidates, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have another solution: send US troops across our southern border to attack cartel strongholds in Mexico and points south. See also my August 13th A New GOP Platform – Standby to Attack Mexico blog. DeSantis, whose military experience was as a JAG lawyer with no serious combat training, steps over the realities that sending US troops into another country without their consent is considered an invasion, a unilateral attack which is tantamount to a declaration of war against a friendly nation. Not to mention our effort to pacify Afghanistan and stem the drug traffic there was an abysmal failure. As you can tell by the above response from Mexico’s President, US troops would not be treated well if they crossed the border.

The other side of this massive issue, with ramifications for the hordes of asylum seekers at our southern border (mostly from states south of Mexico), is generated by US policies within our own country. The estimated million plus guns smuggled from the United States, where just about anyone is able to buy guns legally (despite feeble laws attempting to limit the gun trade), have empowered cartels to where they are today. Mexico has only one gun store (on a military base in Mexico City) where background checks, psychological profiling and training often take years to complete for someone to buy a gun legally. There are probably no more than 20,000 legal guns in Mexico, and millions that are anything but legal. Most of the rest came from the US.

Likewise, it is America’s utter failure to control drug use within our own borders that creates the demand, hence the funding, that makes the illicit drug trade so lucrative. We caused the problem. We are not willing to do what it takes to limit gun ownership in our own land or exert sufficient efforts to stem our own addiction rates. But consistent with the MAGA policy of always find an “other” to blame for our own issues, we blame Mexico and points south for the problem without an iota of accepting our own massive role in fomenting the problem in the first place.

As noted, so many of those asylum-seekers are escaping ultra-violent narco-states where daily life has become increasingly intolerable. And some of those narco-gangs, like El Salvador’s MS-13, were founded and nurtured right here in the United States. Until we take assault weapons off our own streets, impose realistic gun control across the board, and deal realistically with America’s own addiction issues, seeking external solutions can only backfire.

I’m Peter Dekom, and given the “anti-woke” vector of MAGA Republicans, I wonder why MAGA cannot, under their own terms, “man-up” and accept responsibility for what they caused.