Tijuana Tell Me About It?

Demand drives supply, and nothing has greater demand these days, it seems, than illicit narcotics destined for delivery to American addicts, medical and recreational users. So the superhighway of illegal narcotics traffic – from South America, building and accelerating as it heads north, through Central America… then through the ten lane mega-super-highway we call Mexico –  finally makes it into the United States. Tunnels, submarines and a litany of traditional carriers – from cars, busses, trucks, ships and planes to individuals with stashes strapped to their bodies or perhaps temporarily “ingested” into their bodily cavities bring the haul northward – are part of a complex delivery system that has fueled gangsters that would make the Tommy-gun-wielding Mafiosi of the American Prohibition era look like pikers.

Mass killings, ISIS-like beheadings and governmental corruption beyond the specter of human experience have defined this incredibly complex economic system constructed to respond to the never-ceasing demand from American consumers. Creaking towards governmental control and taxation, the marijuana trade might eventually tail off, but there are plenty of other narcotics – from opiates and their derivatives to the abundance of products built around demon cocaine – that make gangsters rich and entire countries untenably dangerous.

Nothing has captivated the hearts, minds, abject terror and unbridled anger of the Mexican people like the unexplained September disappearance of 43 students, all training to become teachers, enroute to a protest in Iguala in the Pacific coastal state of Guerrero. Home to major tourist destinations like Ixtapa and Acapulco, Guerrero is one of the four supremely corrupt states (see below) – as opposed to those that boast merely ordinary levels of Mexican corruption.

Searches for the students have found dozens of recent burial sites – seemingly populated with the corpses of cartel-mandated killings (from turf battles to vendettas and gang enforcement) – but those 43 students have never been found. Iguala’s mayor, captured after a brief stint on the lam, was arrested with a lot of explaining to do. Accusations of a complete merger of cartel and Iguala’s government surfaced. ENOUGH cried the vast majority of peace-loving Mexicans. We don’t trust our own police, many of whom are foot soldiers for the regional cartels. We’re tired of the ever-expanding list of senior government officials who are will paid to allow those cartels to function without any fear of prosecution.

But is there a way to get an under-paid cadre of Mexican police – federal and local – and their elected bosses to stop the kind of vile corruption that supports murder and torture in exchange for some very substantial paychecks? Mexican President Pena Nieto went on television and told his constituency that “Mexico must change.” He announced a series of proposals, requiring constitutional changes, which would “allow the country's 1,800 municipal forces to be dissolved and taken over by state agencies… The reforms would also enable Congress to dissolve local governments infiltrated by drug cartels… The overhaul would begin in Mexico's four most violent states, he said - Tamaulipas, Jalisco, Michoacan and Guerrero.” BBC.com, November 27^th.

There has been talk about legalizing all narcotics in Mexico, and the Mexican leadership is watching the inevitable legalization of marijuana across the United States with rapt attention. But it seems as if the tolerance level for ultra-violent corruption has vaporized. It remains to be seen if the almost limitless cartel coffers can be contained in a government with deep historical links to, if not downright economic dependence upon, billions of cartel dollars liberally allocated to police and government officials as necessary, often recruiting the police themselves into becoming the murderous enforcement arms of the cartels.

But unlike the United States with its contracting middle class, Mexico is also a nation with a rapidly expanding middle class and a hopeful mainstream economy. Many regions are trying to reinvent themselves, notwithstanding the cartel mayhem, into the modern era. Tijuana, for example, is a city with a nasty reputation grappling with that image change.

“Tijuana is promoting itself as a city on the rise, shaking off years of drug violence and declines in foreign tourism wrought by tightened checks at the border since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11… It is possible to get artisanal beer on the tourist-tacky Avenida Revolución. Young tech entrepreneurs have taken over a fading old bus station as a hub for new businesses. A hot new restaurant opening here is as newsworthy as a sunrise.

“Much of this revival caters to the city’s young and affluent. But Tijuana has long been and remains a way station for the downtrodden heading for America or kicked out of it, and El Bordo [how the local refer to the border] represents the rougher edges yet to be smoothed down.

“About 100 to 150 deportees are passed through a gate in the fence here every day, into a city hardly capable of absorbing them… The number has surged in recent years under get-tough policies first by President George W. Bush and more recently by President Obama, who has deported more than two million people since he took office, even more than his predecessor. Roughly a third have been sent to Tijuana.

“Mr. Obama’s new plan on immigration calls for more security on the border and a heightened focus on deporting criminals, possibly resulting in more people here. Most move on, but the most desperate — drug addicted, alcoholic, mentally ill, criminal — end up in El Bordo sooner or later.” New York Times, November 27^th. What this boils down to is that Mexico is rapidly becoming a modern economy, struggling, as a developing nation, with the problems of massive corruption, inevitably motivated by the billions of dollars of narco-consumption dollars from its monolith to the north, exacerbated by American immigration policies. But Mexico will change, one way or another, perhaps quickly or perhaps with the expected bumps and grinds.

I’m Peter Dekom, but whatever else is said and done, we are blessed with two long expanses of borders with two of the most friendly nations we could ever have.