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Mexican Government Goes ‘All In’ on Drug War
Mexico's president is in it to win it.
The paradox of Mexico is that it is, at once, a country yearning for modernity and yet inextricably tied to ancient superstitions.
Curiously, you’ll find traces of both the modern and the mystical in the government’s response to an increasingly vicious drug war. Since it began in January 2007, Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s valiant battle against drug cartels has cost nearly 8,000 lives, caused U.S. military analysts to label Mexico a “failed state,” and produced a backlash against Calderon’s National Action Party (PAN) while breathing new life into the down-and-out Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
The modern piece of this puzzle is that Calderon’s army is reportedly receiving world-class training at the hands of U.S. Special Forces, who are schooling Mexican soldiers in counter-insurgency strategies. The results so far have been encouraging. The government has announced a series of high-profile arrests of major drug suspects — three last month, in fact.
One of the latest narcos to fall was Vicente Carrillo Leyva, one of Mexico’s most-wanted criminals and allegedly the second-in-command of the powerful Juarez cartel. The Attorney General’s Office of Mexico had named Carrillo Leyva to a list of the country’s most-wanted narcotics suspects and offered a reward of 30 million pesos ($2.1 million) for his capture.
Clearly, the Calderon government is all in on the drug war, and — whether the skeptics believe it or not – it’s in it to win it.
There is even evidence that the cartels are running scared and getting desperate. When they’re not throwing grenades into crowds, they’re staging mock protests against the military and plotting to manipulate the political process in the hopes of dealing the PAN a major blow in the July midterm elections.
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Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union Tribune, a nationally syndicated columnist, a frequent lecturer, and a regular contributor to CNN.com.
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18 Comments
1. njcommuter:The drug cartels are trying to “influence” the elections? Our greatest fear–and Mexico’s–should be that they are learning from our Democratic Party.
May 7, 2009 - 4:54 am 2. ddc:Closing the borders tightly will both stop the flow of drugs to the US and by doing that lessen the usage by Americans that are destroying OUR families.
Mexico is a failed country. It has been for decades. It is to America what a 30 year old loafer, still living with his parents and still receiving an allowance. Except the the child has now become schizophrenic and dangerous.
May 7, 2009 - 6:50 am 3. Bill:“As long as Americans consume drugs and supply weapons,”
Will you stop repeating this myth? It’s a leftoid/Omabanaut gungrabber shibboleth. The bulk of the narco-weapons are full-military gear coming up from Central and South America, or obtained through corrupt Mexican officers from Army and police stocks.
You can’t buy 60mm mortars at Wal-Mart. Not even in Texas.
May 7, 2009 - 7:30 am 4. anton:Bill, note this line;
“….and a regular contributor to CNN.com.”
Pretty much explains that objectionable quote, CNN only employs people that “stay on the ranch”.
May 7, 2009 - 9:10 am 5. savage24:I imagine that those Special Forces trained Mexicans will soon be working for the cartels. Corruption runs rampant down there. Money buys respectability there as well as here. If you are so worried about drug use here, why don’t you enforce the drug laws? Too much money that’s why! I’ve heard as much as 20 billion dollars in drug money goes through US banks.
May 7, 2009 - 9:16 am 6. Doc:How ’bout we do something that actually works? Remember when it was that organized crime gained a strong financial foothold in the US? That was during Prohibition. The demand for alcohol, a demand that no amount of legislation or enforcement is going to change, combined with its scarcity, a scarcity that CAN be driven by legislation and enforcement, resulted in huge profits for those willing to supply the product. Is any of this ringing a bell?
Ring the schoolyard with police, shoot anyone who gives it to kids. Otherwise, if one American wants to make/produce/import any substance and another American wants to buy it from him, the gov’t should have exactly zero to say about it. I resent my tax money being used to try to protect adults from their own self-destructive behavior. We don’t arrest drunks and distillers anymore. Why arrest junkies and their suppliers? We have destroyed communities, corrupted police, imprisoned generations, spent gazillions, and ruined Central and South American nations. Lets spend our enforcement money on other things, like murder, theft, illegal immigration, etc. Watch the narco-terrorists dry up and blow away as their funding disappears.
May 7, 2009 - 9:32 am 7. AlanABQ:Well, that sure sonds nice & all, but the notion that Mexico is “getting tough” on anything makes me chuckle. This is a country that for decades has encouraged its citizenry to flee to the north to get what they can while the getting’s good, which is always.
This attitude is relfected in the Mexican gov’t by the copious amounts of money they have “borrowed” from the US…it’s pretty much become a dumb situation in the same way that I might “borrow” a cigarrette from a neighbor (one I know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend); It’s not as though I’m going to return the butt & ashes to him, and to be honest, I could care less if I ever see him again…that is, until the next time I’m out of smokes. When that happens, we’ll be like old friends – so long as he has the goods.
Meanwhile, I’d be encouraging my kids to invade his yard & home, help themselves to his food, steal his money, piss on his porch as they leave (if they will), and then call him a racist “guero” (derogatory term meaning “white boy”) while referring to him as a racist if he gets uppity about it…and then he’ll owe me some smokes for my insulted feelings.
Sure, that’s a silly allegory, but so is the situation in reality. Two years ago, the unemployment rate was around 4%. That roughly translates to 11 – 12 million Americans having trouble finding work. Meanwhile, there are between 12 to perhaps 20 million illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom are Mexican, allegedly “doing the jobs Americans don’t want to do”. Today, the unemployment rate is twice what it was two years ago…yet it doesn’t seem to affect the illegal’s job status.
Sound crazy? It is. If an American father has skills, no matter how rudimentary, why shouldn’t he get preference in hiring for less-than-glamorous work? If he has children to look after, he’ll swallow his pride to do landscaping, roofing, flipping burgers, or anything else that he can take more pride in doing rather than standing in the unemployment line or resorting to crime.
And is anyone’s buying the notion that it’s only the low-level type of work being farmed out to non-Americans, here’s an example to disabuse you of that idea: The city of Santa Fe – the NM state capital – was recently considering hiring illegals for the city’s police force. One would assume that you’d need some fairly advanced skills to do a job like that…
May 7, 2009 - 9:39 am 8. WestWright:Ruben (even though it seems obvious that the former Border Patrol agents are guilty as sin) Naverrete is far, far from an unbiased opiner on the problems of our enemies North or South of the US/Mex border. Take whatever this shill says with a grain of salt…note how Ruben refuses to place any blame on the corrupt Mexican Gov, the murderous Drug Cartels or the oppressed & communist 3rd world Mexican population. His is the never ending refrain, every problem is blamed on the Gringos in Norte America.
May 7, 2009 - 9:43 am 9. scott:Drugs are distributed more or less openly in every ghetto in America. All that is necessary to kill the drug trade is to pick up the suburban kids as they exit distribution points and fine their parents heavily on the first offense. Second offense = 1 year in the military cleaning latrines and digging ditches. Third offense = two years. Etc. For a bit this would be a big money maker. It would also cut costs in the military as there would be no pay for these offenders. Only food and housing.
So, kill the demand, end the problem. There is no drug problem in Singapore.
May 7, 2009 - 10:31 am 10. Juvenal:“Santa Muerte” is not a Catholic saint, not even a suppressed one, like St. Expeditus, say. This is something that’s been made up entirely outside of the Church’s traditions.
People belonging to her cult might dress up their devotion in Catholic-inspired piety (making the sign of the cross while praying to Santa Muerte, for example), but these folks have enough experience with Catholicism to know she’s got nothing to do with the Church.
So I really think you’re barking up the wrong tree when you say that Mexican authorities are “playing with fire” because their taking sledgehammers to la Santa Muerte’s shrines will offend die-hard Catholics. It’s really just the opposite.
May 7, 2009 - 11:27 am 11. BettyBlue:Naverette has made a career blaming America for all of Mexico’s problems.
May 7, 2009 - 1:24 pm 12. kabud:Cuban agents are very active in Mexico
So i remembered the sudden death of Mexican scientist(the Obama’s archeologist-guide) the next after he spent hours with Obama
It was a very strange thing.
Officially it was reported that scientist died out of pneumonia.
This is just impossible : one day he is fine , next day develops pneumonia and DIES right away!
It is known that soviet and Cuban intelligence
posses poisons that can cause similar symptoms and death
So the diseased Mexican archeologist could have been not very careful and may be he said something to Obama about things that Obama may not really wants others to know. Something about Obama Marxists connection.
It is a second body already after the `suicide` death of CFO of Freddy Mac
May 7, 2009 - 6:41 pm 13. Mike2:2. ddc:
Yes you are right. Closing border would at least come close to stopping the drug trade in its present form. Now you know why there has never been a serious attempt to do so.
6. Doc:
I agree. Legalize a bunch of the stuff and I have advocated for years that we should give heroin or some other opiate away for free. Talk about making a dent in the cartel’s profits!
10. Juvenal:
May 7, 2009 - 7:54 pm 14. Frank:Thank you for pointing out that “La Santa Muerte” is absolutely not a Catholic saint and has nothing to do with Catholicism.
Americans will never stop using drugs or owning guns. The only answer to get rid of the crime associated with them is to stop criminalizing them. Legalize drugs and the cartels, as well as the violence associated with them, will disappear. America has been fighting the war on drugs for years, along with the rest of the world, and they aren’t any closer to winning. They never will be. Prohibition was BS, we all saw that for what it was. Why can’t we do the same for the “WoD”?
May 7, 2009 - 10:16 pm 15. WhyamInotsurprised?:Reuben, you must think readers here are idiots. “Mexico is all in” my ass! All that means to me is that the Calderon admin. is feeling very threatened and is fighting for survival. Has nothing to do with fighting drugs. This is another side show orchestrated by The One to distract from the games being played at home. Interesting that this happens following BHO’s visit to Mexico. Why don’t you do some real investigation instead of spewing this crapola.
May 8, 2009 - 12:24 am 16. kabud:my friend, a journalist, met some mexican guy in South California years ago, some time in the 80s
the guy was a drug runner, with a gun on the kitchen table- that’s how he met my friend
interesting part was about that drug dealer/trafficker `political` views:
he was a violent marxist, who loved to talk about how nice would it be to poison American water reservoirs, rivers, so that millions of americans would die
This is all very serious stuff.
They do plan it and they have been working on routs to bring in poison here
For now they just test routs with tons of cocaine
May 8, 2009 - 4:33 pm 17. Jim Baker:Doc,
May 8, 2009 - 8:36 pm 18. Ken:Nice argument, except that adult Americans doing recreational drugs usually do harm to more than just themselves. Many times, the other people they harm are their own children. What you advocate was tried in Amsterdam and has been a miserable failure. The obvious choice, if Americans could be trained to think rationally, would be to stop buying drugs that feed terrorists and stop using them to detroy themselves. I suppose that I am arguing that Americans are too stupid to be taught to behave in their best self-interest and don’t, therefore, deserve what remnants of liberty they still enjoy.
Everyone seems to forget that the reason this WILL continue is all that MONEY. JUDGES,LAW ENFORCEMENT,DOCTORS, ETC are involved in this too. I have ILLEGALS 3 doors down who smuggle people and drugs but the COP across the street wont do anything about it and the CITY wont do anything to a SANTUARY person.
May 10, 2009 - 5:02 am