Ever-more disturbing news continues to surface regarding the belligerence and brutality of drug cartels in Mexico. Reports of whole heaps of decapitated bodies and teen assassins working for the Zetas on this side of the border are no longer shocking as we have heard them for years and have come to accept them as normal. But today’s blip regarding Mexican citizens now applying for refugee status in the US because they feel their lives are threatened by the drug cartels has prompted me to inform readers that if our politicians don’t pull their heads out of the sand regarding how our policies destabilize Mexico in the very near future – our neighbor to the south will fall into a devastating, multi-sided civil war that invariably spills over the border and has significant consequences for the US.

I have a vast knowledge of Mexican history and politics but for the purposes of this editorial, I will stick to the volatile current situation and its immediate causes. The US is a rich country that loves our drugs and pays top dollar for them, no matter how much money the Federal government dumps into laughable indoctrination programs like DARE. We also have a patchwork of divorced-from-reality laws that create a perpetual shortage of affordable labor. Hence, we have a very high demand for two commodities that we have regulated our economy to be unable to produce. The Mexican cartels – whose primary business is to smuggle drugs and people into this country as opposed to direct sales – are merely responding to the demands our legal system has created in our economy. Their brutality is a direct product of a third demand created by our belligerent legislators - the demand for importing these commodities across a closed and patrolled border. Anyone that claims any of these three sets of laws is enforceable is either ignorant or just plain lying. Nothing short of the creation of an Orwellian police state will force Americans to comply with drug prohibition or employers with labor laws, and the volume of demand associated with breaking these laws is large enough for the cartels to make the investment to overwhelm any amount of border enforcement we can ever hope to afford, and remain profitable.

 

            While the lifeblood of the cartels is hence north of the border, the root of the current violence is with political shifts within Mexico itself. The cartels grew large and powerful in Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s, around the same time that US politicians became infected with the psychosis of enforcing the three sets of laws outlined above. At that time, Mexico was an oligarchic, one-party state ruled by a small elite embodied by the Partido Revolucion Internacional, or PRI, and the rising cartels and their competition threatened the monopoly of this oligarchy as well as law and order in general. After several failed attempts to crack down on them using force, the bureaucrats charged with this task called a meeting with all the kingpins and facilitated a truce in which each cartel was assigned a portion of the country in which it could operate without competition or threat of prosecution, and an amount of its profit that would go to political bribes. The prospect of having to deal with Federal law enforcement unilaterally was an effective deterrent from breaking the truce in most cases, and moral and ethical considerations notwithstanding; that system gave Mexico 20 years of relative peace where the cartels prospered with minimal violence.

 

            But in the early 2000s the oligarchy collapsed giving way to Mexico’s first legitimately competitive political system, even though it is still burdened with high levels of fraud and corruption. PAN Presidents Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) each ran on agendas of cracking down on corruption and the infusion of organized crime into the political system. Both were moderately successful at accomplishing these objectives, but an unintended consequence was the erosion of the institutions that kept the cartels in peace with the government and with each other. The resulting cycle of competitive violence and failed attempts to rein it in by the government have escalated over the last decade, essentially turning Mexico into one giant turf war. Most drug use and minor sales were de-criminalized in Mexico nearly 10 years ago by Fox in an effort to break the cartels’ money supply and focus enforcement efforts on their primary operations; but their function is to violate the border and supply the US as opposed to Mexican demand, so this intervention was a drop in the bucket. By 2011, the government was down to full-on domestic military operations – a draconian and unpopular measure; but even these have failed completely to stem the violence. Most “successes” the media likes to celebrate such as the captures of cartel leaders and crackdowns on their operations have not in fact led to any sort of improvement of this situation; a good indicator these are orchestrated and manipulated by rival cartels to take down their competition and a dangerous sign of how deep the cartels have their hands in Mexican law enforcement.

 

            Current President Henrique Pena-Nieto – the first PRI President to be elected in the new system – actually ran on a ticket of re-establishing a peace agreement with the drug cartels rather than continuing to fight them by force. However, he has found in the last year that 10 years of violence have made the cartels far more difficult to control, especially in the absence of the unilateral and unaccountable power structure his party commanded up to the 1990s. The resulting developments have been ever-more disconcerting. In addition to refugee applications, Mexico has seen the formation of heavily armed citizen militias that have taken it upon themselves to maintain law and order in small towns and districts of large cities. On several occasions, these militias have arrested and forcibly exiled uniformed police and local politicians for fraternizing with drug cartels rather than keeping the citizens safe from violence.

 

            The reality is that the cartels’ resources in this conflict easily rival those of the Mexican government, and coupled with some lingering corruption they make a second, competing political structure that the government cannot establish dominance over. As a political scientist, I find this to be the logical outcome of decades of abysmal policy. The Mexican government cannot control the drug cartels because their market niche is to break ridiculous US laws that the Mexican government cannot influence nor enforce. Pena-Nieto’s idea regarding a new truce is based on out-dated evidence – Mexican citizens reasonably want accountable government and not the rampant corruption of the 20th century, and without the latter element an agreement with brutal criminal elements is difficult to reach. However, if the current trends continue, government-instituted law and order in Mexico are likely to break down completely, giving way to armed, violent, regional disputes between the makeshift militias, territorial cartels, and patchwork alliances between both. Unbeknownst to most Americans, Mexico’s geography and diversity are very conducive to such a conflict – their last civil war lasted 10 years.

 

            If having a new Iraq or Syria in our own backyard across a border we have never been able to effectively control does not sound like a desirable outcome – then as Americans we must force our own government to use its capacity to influence the situation. I realize Eric Holder has been hinting at relaxing the measures against cannabis as if that is some revolutionary concession to civil libertarians, but the reality is that at this point nothing short of an abrupt and across-the-board end to drug prohibition is the only thing that will stabilize our neighbor to the south. Immigration policy is an almost-as-important element – and we need immigration reform that is actually in touch with reality as opposed to dumping billions more into futile efforts to secure the border. As I stated earlier, we simply cannot feasibly raise the costs of breaking these laws high enough to force the cartels to close shop, and continuing to raise them higher without hitting that threshold elevates the prices on their goods and services and hence enables them and their brutal competition. Repealing prohibition and moving toward open borders, on the other hand, would bankrupt the cartels almost instantly - turning them into small bands of criminals with diminishing resources that their own government could then easily overpower. This is no longer merely an issue of human rights violations and belligerent disregard for foreign nationals – it is a matter of preserving the peace and stability of the geopolitical region that we, ourselves, live in.

 

By: Neurotoxin

 

 

 

About the Editor:

Neurotoxin holds a dual BA in Psychology and Political Science and an MSW with a specialization in Community Organizing. Politically, he is a “structural anarchist”; a school of thought that believes in treating all power structures as facts of nature that should be accounted for but not preserved. This school of thought dictates that policy ought to be driven solely by its empirically calculated outcomes.

Neurotoxin is the co-owner of Edge of Chaos – a political podcast and blog that can be found @ www.edgeofchaospodcast.com and http://www.facebook.com/theedgeofchaos.