Mexico’s illegal drug trade used to be relatively civilized, made up of small-time traffickers who smuggled marijuana and heroin into the United States and the corrupt officials who accepted their bribes to look the other way. Both sides followed certain unwritten rules: The officials forbade the traffickers from selling their wares inside Mexico and from arming themselves too extravagantly.
Kidnapping was out of bounds. If a drug trafficker felt compelled to eliminate a rival, Mexican officials encouraged him to do so discreetly — preferably north of the border, where the investigation would be a problem for law enforcement in the United States, not Mexico.
Such conditions seem almost quaint compared with the violence that wracks the country today. Mexico’s drug gangs have added South American cocaine and methamphetamine to their exports, and they earn as much as $39 billion a year from sales in the United States. They also peddle plenty of the drugs to Mexicans. To protect their profits, the cartels have taken advantage of openings in U.S. gun-control laws to stock up on military-grade assault rifles, grenade launchers, bazookas and even heavy machine guns, smuggling them back into Mexico for fire-fights with government forces and rival gangs. The cartels also operate helicopters, jet planes and small submarines for use in smuggling.Since the beginning of 2007, the drug war has claimed the lives of about 7,500 people — almost double the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since 2003. The dead include more than 200 American citizens, some of whom were probably involved in the drug business but also others who were innocent bystanders caught in the cross-fire.
Using a combination of bribes and extreme cruelty that includes gruesome tortures and beheadings, the drug cartels have corrupted or intimidated police and magistrates, taking effective control over a growing number of towns and rural areas south of the border. The gangs also have moved north into Arizona and other states, where kidnappings, gun battles and executions among rival cartel members are becoming increasingly common.
With an approving nod from the United States, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has thrown his army into the fight against the cartels, but the well-armed gangs are fighting back. And according to some U.S. officials and experts, the drug barons are winning.
In Washington, where policy debates involving Mexico have been confined mostly to trade and immigration for the past two decades, sudden awareness of the drug war has produced some alarming assessments. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was the drug czar in the Clinton White House, warned recently that unless the Mexican government gains control of the drug gangs, the United States could, within a decade, be confronting on its southern border a “narco-state” — meaning an area controlled by drug cartels. The Pentagon envisions an even worse scenario: Mexico and Pakistan, it says, are the countries most at risk of swiftly collapsing into “failed states” — those whose central governments are so weak they have little practical control over most of their territory.
Beset as he is at home by the credit crisis and plunging economy, President Obama’s response to the chaos in Mexico has so far been to continue some George W. Bush administration policies while beginning a search for others. He is expected to focus on possible regional approaches when he attends a Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago next month.
Experts on the region, though, say the magnitude of the drug war in Mexico and its danger to the United States far exceed the reach of existing federal policies, perhaps even the policies the new administration is considering, such as stepped-up military aid and regional cooperation.
Uncontrolled drug violence in Mexico, these experts say, might result in tens of thousands of refugees surging across the border, adding to the estimated 12 million immigrants already in the country illegally. U.S. drug officials say that a narco-state in Mexico could turn the ungoverned territory along the border into a permanent springboard for Mexican drug traffickers smuggling their goods north into California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. And economic analysts say that should the Mexican government completely collapse, it would jeopardize oil exports from Mexico, from which the United States receives a third of its supply.
“Any descent by Mexico into chaos,” the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command wrote in November, “would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”
Scramble for Solutions
A more likely result than such a complete descent into chaos, some authorities on the region say, is that Mexico becomes an “informal” narco-state, where the current democratic government continues but the drug cartels wield great influence behind the scenes. Such a development would not increase the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, they say.
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